hey, i'm coley

I’m Coley and for as long as I can remember - I've been a creator. Design was in the fabric of who I was growing up, frequenting the San Rio store with my grandmother to get more Kero Keroppi stickers to plaster all over my room.

In high school, I had no direction in my life so I took the easy path of following in my mother's footsteps with Accounting and rode a 20-year career in Corporate Finance on the backing of just a high school diploma. I'm not gonna lie though, getting that piece of paper took blood, sweat and tears when I found out the summer before my senior year that I wasn't going to graduate. With dedication and persistence, I made it happen!

Can you remember a time when you were looking for something and couldn’t find it? Well, that’s how this whole thing got started…

In the summer of 2016, I had a personal experience with God that took me back to a poem I wrote in 2001 called “Dear God, Why Me?” Upon opening the chest drawer that housed the poems I wrote as a teenager, I sat there on my floor, crying uncontrollable as I read the lines of “Dear God, Why Me?” I realized what that poem was really all about.

A trigger went off in my mind and a memory flashed before my eyes of a traumatic event that I had experienced in high school. It’s amazing how the body and the mind can paralyze you from remembering certain things.

I knew that God had just opened up a deep wound within me. I knew that I needed help and so I turned to Google to find answers from someone that knew my pain. With the statistics of all those who have experienced trauma such as mine, there had to be someone out there talking about it.. I searched “Post Traumatic Stress Blogs”, “Journal Blogs”, “Diary Blogs”, “PTSD Blogs” and I could find nothing. In that moment, I knew I needed to create it.

where my journey started

I dove head first into creating my own blog to get my story out there and help others suffering with this same trauma. I downloaded freebies, signed up for webinars, purchased online courses and became a full time student at the University of YouTube - learning about all things design, content creation and marketing.

I taught myself to build websites, learned all about SEO (search engine optimization), tested out social media strategies and so much more.

In the process of learning, I realized that I lost the passion to share my traumatic story and fell head over heels in love with the world of marketing, all while still working my full-time job in Corporate Finance. As the years past, God kept dealing with me by sending repeated signs that I needed to give up my career in Finance for a future in Marketing and the rest has been history!

Did you resonate with this story and want to discover your passion like I did with mine?

what this is all about