Some stories don’t stay quiet because you’ve forgotten them. They stay quiet because saying them out loud makes them real.
There are moments in life that become dividing lines. You don’t recognize them when they’re happening, but years later you can trace your life back to them. You can point to a moment and quietly think, I was never quite the same after that.
Recently, I sat down with Tasha Plaza of Prime Legacy Security to talk about women’s personal safety. It was supposed to be a conversation about awareness, avoidance, and decision making. What I didn’t expect was that it would become the first time I publicly shared something I had spent years keeping to myself.
For the first time, I talked about being stalked.
Even writing those words feels strange.
Not because I don’t remember what happened. I remember more than I wish I did. I remember how my body stayed on alert long after the immediate danger was gone. I remember questioning ordinary moments, wondering if I was being watched, wondering if I was overreacting, wondering if anyone else would understand why I couldn’t simply “move on.”
Stalking doesn’t always leave visible bruises.
Sometimes it leaves something much harder to explain. It changes the way you walk to your car. It changes the routes you take home. It changes how often you look over your shoulder before unlocking your front door. It teaches your nervous system that ordinary places no longer feel ordinary.
People often imagine safety as the moment someone learns to fight back.
I don’t.
To me, safety begins much earlier. It begins with awareness. It begins with recognizing when something doesn’t feel right. It begins with trusting yourself before someone else convinces you not to.
That realization is one of the reasons ITAVFoundation is hosting Let’s Talk Women: Personal Safety.
Because conversations like these shouldn’t begin only after something terrible happens.
They should happen before.
During our conversation, we also talked about Vanessa Banks, a model and friend.
Many Philadelphians may have forgotten her name.
I haven’t.
Her story has stayed with me because behind every headline is a person whose life mattered to someone. A daughter. A friend. A woman with plans, routines, and people who expected her to come home. It’s easy for tragedies to become yesterday’s news, but the lessons they leave behind deserve our attention long after the cameras disappear.
And her story isn’t the only one.
I’ve lost friends in ways I never imagined. Each loss has become another reminder that conversations about women’s safety aren’t abstract. They’re deeply personal.
For years, I didn’t tell my story. At least not publicly.
Lately, I’ve found myself speaking about it more, but for a long time I carried it quietly.
It wasn’t because I believed my experience wasn’t important.
It was because I had changed.
Being stalked by both men and women altered the way I moved through the world. I stopped going out. I made myself smaller. I became a shut in, which feels almost impossible to reconcile with the work I do in the community today.
There were battles no one could see.
The fear of hosting a community event without knowing who might walk through the door.
The speaking engagements I declined because I didn’t want my location promoted or my face broadcasted.
The hesitation every time a stranger approached me for a hug.
The random text messages from unfamiliar numbers.
The harassment that followed me onto social media.
None of these moments made headlines.
But together, they slowly reshaped the person I had once been.
I stopped wearing my signature hair colors.
I deactivated my modeling page.
I quietly stepped away from parts of myself because disappearing felt safer than being seen.
Those decisions may seem small to someone else.
To me, they represented pieces of my identity that I slowly packed away in the hope that becoming less visible would somehow make me safer.
As I spoke during that interview, I realized something unexpected.
Silence protects no one.
For years, I believed that keeping my experience to myself was the easiest path forward. But silence doesn’t stop stalking. It doesn’t educate others. It doesn’t help the woman who is questioning whether she’s overreacting, or the one who has convinced herself that what she’s experiencing “isn’t that bad.”
If sharing my experience encourages even one woman to trust her instincts, ask for help, create a safety plan, or recognize warning signs she may have otherwise dismissed, then finally saying it aloud was worth it.
Women’s personal safety isn’t about teaching women to live in fear.
It’s about giving women the knowledge to move through the world with greater confidence.
Those are two very different things.
And maybe that’s why this conversation mattered so much to me.
It wasn’t just about what happened years ago.
It was about deciding that my experience no longer belongs to fear.
It belongs to purpose.
And if telling my story helps even one woman feel seen, trust her instincts, or realize that her safety is worth protecting, then breaking my silence was one of the most important conversations I’ve ever had.
The truth is, this wasn’t the first time I told my story. It was the first time I stopped whispering it.
