07/11/2026
We need our community to rally for us small businesses more than ever! Behind each of our doors there is often times a story of struggle, heartbreak and tenacity that is unwavering! This is Kelsey’s story and If you ever wonder why businesses disappear downtown. Help a sista out! Shoot help all the sistas out!
I’m sharing this because I’ve spent years being strong in silence, and silence isn’t working anymore.
I used to believe that if I worked hard enough, life would eventually settle down, that effort was some kind of currency you could bank and eventually cash in for stability, and I held onto that belief a lot longer than I probably should have.
I earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, built academic programs from nothing, mentored students, and tried to actually show up for my community instead of just talking about wanting to. I never wanted an easy life, I just assumed that if I kept putting in the work, eventually it would add up to something solid underneath me.
It didn’t work that way.
When I had my first brain surgery, for a Chiari malformation, my daughter was six months old, and she’d already spent her first month of life in the NICU before I even knew what a Chiari malformation was or that it would eventually be my problem too. So there I was, six months into being her mother, still learning the difference between her cries, and now I was the one being wheeled back for surgery, telling myself this would be the hard part, that I’d get through it and it would be behind me for good.
It wasn’t behind me. Years later they found a brain tumor, and it came just two weeks after we found out about my daughter’s heart condition, so I barely had time to process one before the other landed on top of it. I spent months sitting with that word without knowing whether it meant another surgery or something worse. I genuinely thought I might be looking at a death sentence, though I didn’t say that out loud to many people. I mostly just said it to myself, quietly, over and over, the way you do when you’re trying to see if repeating something enough times will finally tell you whether it’s true. What scared me most wasn’t dying. It was the thought of not being there to watch Liv grow up, missing every version of her that hadn’t happened yet, having no say in any of it.
Somewhere in that same stretch of chaos I also had emergency surgery, which under any normal circumstances would have been its own major life event, the kind of thing you’d expect people to check in on for weeks, but it happened in the middle of everything else falling apart at once, so it barely registered, just one more surgery folded into a season that had too many of them, a footnote I never really got to feel the size of until much later.
It turned out the brain tumor was inoperable, and that word landed differently than I expected, not as relief, exactly, more like being told your house has a crack running through the foundation that nobody can fix, so you just keep living in it, walking past the crack every day, learning to stop staring at it.
On top of that, my body kept finding new ways to fail me, chronic pain and neurological symptoms nobody could name for a long time, autoimmune disease, celiac disease, my hair coming out before I understood why any of it was happening, MRI after MRI until I lost count, hundreds of appointments where I got poked, prodded, tested, and retested, and still walked away most of the time without a real answer.
And then, while I was still trying to find my footing under all of that, my daughter’s heart started doing things a heart isn’t supposed to do. She has Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, an extra electrical pathway that can send her heart into a rhythm it can’t get itself back out of, and I lost count of the ER trips a long time ago, watching her heart rate climb into the 300s while doctors worked to bring it back down, sometimes fast enough for my nerves to survive it and sometimes not, and there were moments they genuinely struggled to break the rhythm at all, which meant I just stood there, because that’s really the only thing you can do in that room when it’s not your body failing, you watch, and you wait, and you hope whatever they try next actually works this time.
Her first heart surgery was supposed to fix that pathway for good, but it left her instead with a paralyzed diaphragm and a collapsed lung, and I want to be clear that this wasn’t even her first hospital stay, that was her first month of life, so here we were again, back in a place I thought we’d already survived once.
I still don’t have good language for what it does to you, watching your child’s heart lose control over and over without ever knowing whether this particular ER visit is the one where the doctors finally run out of options, but I know it rewires something in you permanently, and you end up carrying it around in your body long after her rhythm goes back to normal, because some part of you never actually leaves that room.
The bills kept coming through all of it, the way they always do, and every time I managed to claw my way back to something resembling stable ground, something else would show up and knock it out from under me again, until at some point I just stopped trusting hope, it started feeling less like a good thing and more like a debt I’d end up paying for later, with interest.
And as if the brain tumor and the heart surgeries weren’t enough on their own, I also spent two years being stalked at work, in the exact place I’d built my whole career, poured everything I had into, mentored students in, and that place became somewhere I wasn’t safe anymore, so I filed reports and asked for help the way you’re supposed to, and in the end the only way I could actually protect myself was to walk away from a job that had become tangled up with my entire identity, because nobody else was going to make me safe, I had to do that myself, and the price of doing it was losing something I loved.
Chronic illness doesn’t show up on your face the way people expect suffering to look, and neither does being afraid of someone for two years straight, so you look fine, you show up, you do the job, and nobody watching has any real idea what it’s costing you just to stand there and keep functioning while your body and your nervous system are quietly falling apart underneath all of it.
I know now that some of what I’ve been carrying has an actual name, PTSD, and saying that out loud doesn’t make it any lighter, it just means I’ve finally stopped pretending I’m fine when I’m not.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I kept building anyway, not because I’m particularly brave, but because I genuinely didn’t know another way to survive what was happening to me.
I opened Aqua & Acre Market because I wanted a place to heal, somewhere to put what was left of me after all the hospitals and all the fighting, and because I wanted to find community again after so many years of feeling isolated by everything my body and my life had put me through. And I found it. I’ve met so many people through this market who have genuinely helped carry me through this journey, people who showed up, who believed in what we were building, who became part of my healing without ever fully knowing that’s what they were doing. For a while it held, it felt like proof that something good could still come out of everything else.
Then it started slipping, tourism dropped, the economy tightened up around all of us, and no matter what I tried, the numbers kept moving in the wrong direction month after month, and underneath all the spreadsheets there’s a question I’ve been sitting with quietly for months now, which is what it means that I built something meant to heal my community and I still couldn’t keep the doors open, and some days that feels like the biggest failure of my life, bigger than the tumor, bigger than any of the surgeries, because this was the one thing that was supposed to be mine to fix.
On top of everything else, I’m going through a divorce right now too, trying to build some kind of new life on my own for the first time in a long time, and I’m not going to pretend I’m doing it gracefully, some days I’m barely doing it at all, I’m struggling, plainly, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise just so I can look like I have it together.
I’m not telling you any of this for sympathy.
I’m telling you because trauma is a lot more common than people let on, and most of it doesn’t show, there are parents sitting in hospital hallways right now doing math they never wanted to learn, there are people standing three feet away from you who look completely fine and are barely holding on.
So here’s the honest truth. Aqua & Acre needs you right now, not someday, this month, and if this place has ever meant anything to you, if you’ve walked through that door, bought something, brought your kids, or just liked knowing it was there, this is me asking you to come back. Buy something. Bring a friend. Tell someone we’re still here.
I don’t know what happens next.
But I’m not ready to let this be the ending.
