Jade laughs when she describes her life before Open Arms as “wild”—but not the good kind of wild. “There was no consistency, no peace. I was lonely as hell.” Years of ping-ponging between the Bay Area and Florida, dealing with messy family stuff, losing people she loved, struggling with substances—it all came to a head. She had two choices: keep fighting everything or learn to let go. “I picked surrender. I had to trust that I’d be okay.”
But surrender didn’t make the hard parts disappear. Jade had to say goodbye to people who couldn’t accept her as a trans woman. “I couldn’t keep living the same painful patterns over and over,” she says. “So it was like, ‘I love you, I’ll miss you, but I’ve got to move forward.'”
When she came back to California and ended up homeless, a friend literally walked her to a community clinic. They connected her to Volunteers of America’s Open Arms program on the spot. “They told me, ‘If you want a place to stay, you need to leave right now,'” Jade says, still laughing about it. “I didn’t even have time to pack. But that’s exactly what I needed—just pure faith.”
What makes Open Arms different? “People actually get it there.” Jade talks about the little things—eating dinner together, having real conversations, feeling understood by people walking the same path. And then there’s Anna Cornelius, a staff member who earned Jade’s trust fast. “She’s got this nurturing way about her, and when she says she’ll do something, she actually does it. You don’t find that everywhere.”
This was Jade’s third stay at Open Arms, but something clicked differently this time. “Usually the plan is just ‘get a job, find an apartment,'” she explains. “But I realized the real work was healing myself. A job and housing—that’s just paperwork. Healing is the hard part.”
She started paying attention to what she calls that “still, small voice” inside that tells her when she’s on the right track. She made a vision board, prayed for protection, then did the unglamorous daily work of getting stable. “Good things take time,” she says. “And I want the good stuff.”
At 48, Jade knows she doesn’t have time to waste. “How do I want the rest of my life to look? I’d rather have peace than drama.” Her favorite response to anything that might drag her backward? “I don’t have room for that in my life.”
Now Jade has her own place—complete with a pillow that says “In My Healing Era”—and a job. She still wants simple things: a home full of love, maybe someone special, the routine of cooking dinner after work. Most importantly, she wants her life to matter. “I’m a spiritual person. Everything that happens—good or terrible—there’s a reason for it.”
Her advice for anyone walking into Open Arms feeling lost? “Trust the process. Focus on healing yourself, and everything else will work out. We’re all connected, every single one of us.”
She pauses, then says with quiet strength, “Nothing can break me anymore. That’s why I can never go back to how things were.”