The Architect of Her Own Comeback
The Architect of Her Own Comeback
By J. Coz
When Erin talks about her past, she does so with the steady voice of someone who has done the hard work of reckoning. For nearly twenty years, she was incarcerated. For the last decade, she has been home. And for almost four years, she has been part of the Awake family as our Senior Data Architect, a mentor to colleagues, a financial guru to anyone who will listen, and, by her own proud admission, an avid dog mom.
But Erin is quick to clarify something important: her time away is not her identity. It is a chapter, not the book.
“I don’t want that to be the first thing people see when they look at me,” she says. “But I also won’t pretend it didn’t shape me. So much growth happened in those years. I came out a different person than the one who went in.”
That growth, she credits in large part to her father. He raised her on a simple philosophy, delivered through a story she still carries with her: perspective makes all the difference. It is a lesson she leaned on inside, and one she leans on now. Where others might see setbacks, Erin looks for the lesson. Where others might see a closed door, she looks for the window.
Her path to data architecture began in an unlikely place. While incarcerated, Erin took a job that taught her data entry. She dove in not knowing that the keystrokes she was learning would become the foundation of a career she now loves. “I had no idea where it would lead,” she says. “I just knew I wanted to keep learning.”
Erin’s childhood was, in her words, “normal, whatever that means.” She grew up with a brother she loves but also describes him as the proverbial golden child. Convinced she could never measure up; she went the other direction. She found the wrong crowd, made the wrong choices, and grew into an enabler and a people-pleaser, losing herself in the process.
It was during her years away that she finally sat with those patterns and decided, with clear eyes, that she was done. Done shrinking. Done pleasing. Done apologizing for taking up space.
Throughout it all, her parents stood by her. Relationships needed mending, years of hurt were not going to dissolve overnight. But healing came.
Today, Erin is firm in her boundaries. She knows what she wants and what it takes to get there. She’s a gamer. She travels. She loves her dogs with her whole heart. And she shows up at Awake every day as living proof that a person is never the worst thing they have done and that what comes next can be remarkable.