Describe something you learned in high school.

If high school taught me anything, it wasn’t from a textbook. It didn’t come from the periodic table or diagramming sentences in English class. Nope. What I learned came in one of those hard, jarring, buckle-up-buttercup kind of ways:

Life turns on a dime.

When I was 14, my dad went to prison.

Not county jail. Not a weekend stint. Prison. And not for a year or two—he served 28 years. That alone should give you a pretty big clue about the kind of turn I’m talking about.

Before that moment, we were that family. The one people saw and probably whispered things like “must be nice.”

Big beautiful home? Yep. With a pool.

Farm? Yep.

Mercedes and Jaguar in the driveway? Naturally. My dad’s shiny new truck was the cherry on top.

We had a condo at the beach every summer, and money? Well, it flowed. Until it didn’t.

When the gavel dropped, it was like someone snapped their fingers and said, “New life. Figure it out.”

We didn’t lose everything, but enough to feel like the rug had been yanked right out from under us. We went from “Oh wow, the Aylsworths” to “Oh… those Aylsworths.”

I moved in with my maternal grandparents, which kept me on a somewhat steady course. Now—let’s be clear—“relatively normal” still meant my dad was in prison, my mother was a whole trainwreck, and my stepmother could’ve given Nurse Ratched a run for her money. But I survived. My little sister stayed with her mom (that’s a whole other messy novel I’ll save for later).

But back to high school—while other kids were worrying about prom dates or their GPA, I was learning that nothing, and I mean nothing, is guaranteed. One day, you’re just some teenage girl with the world at her feet (or so it seems), and the next… someone shakes the snow globe and you’re stuck watching the flakes fall in a completely different direction.

So yeah—life turns on a dime. And that lesson? It stuck.

Stay tuned—there’s more to this story. There’s always more.

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