Ballast Charm Collection

A ballast is the weight placed deep within a ship to keep it upright when the sea becomes violent.

These charms were born from a time I needed something of the same to keep me steady. 

During the years my life unraveled through truth exposure, family betrayal, legal proceedings, and the collapse of nearly every structure we seek for protection, I eventually found a place I’d turn to when it became too much called The Cliffs in San Luis Obispo. I purchased my first charm necklace in the boutique there from a woman who would eventually tell me she went through something similar that I was experiencing then. The charm I selected was a heart in a box with 3 rays of light above and she told me, “that’s your heart in the box babe, you’re setting it free.”

I eventually passed it on to someone else who needed it and headed to New Zealand where I met my now husband. In the year that followed as he watched the external influences of chaos unravel into repetition heartache for me, he began getting me charms from a boutique shop in Montecito. We’d stop there on the way, amid the special occasions where we were able to head back to The Cliffs.

Each one marked a place in the journey where he didn’t want me to lose sight of who I was separate of the inflicted pain from others. 

They held me steady and became my own internal ballast. I can’t tell you how much it did for me many days to look to them or hold on to one. 

They became the physical markers that reminded me where I had been, what I had witnessed, and who I remained when everything around me was asking me to question myself.

The inaugural collections here, inside the Ballast Charm Studio, document a different chapter of that journey. They exist because sometimes from the very things that try to sink us we find a special something to be the weight that keeps us steady instead. I wanted to be able to give that experience to others in heavy struggle, as an emblem of hope to physically carry and hold onto when everything else feels unsteady… a reminder to hang on. 

Paper Vows 

Some promises are spoken over a child before they’re old enough to understand them.

At baptism in Catholic faith, your chosen godmother accepts a sacred responsibility as in essence, a spiritual mother of your path. In this tradition, a godparent promises to help guide this child’s spiritual life, protect their faith, and walk them in the name truth, no matter how hard facing it may be.

Those vows were meant to carry weight.

Yet years later, when the truth about the abuse I survived became known, I learned in a tragic way how quickly sacred promises can disappear when protecting appearances becomes more important than protecting the child.

Paper Vows traces that uncovering and collapse.

It is a collection about the painful irony of sacred symbols, family roles, professional identities, and institutional authority that promised protection while choosing their own stability instead.

Each charm reclaims one piece of that irony in betrayal story, not to reject faith of those who practice Catholicism, but to separate what was truly sacred from what merely wore its appearance.

In my case, the promises were paper but choosing to walk in the name of truth, even if completely alone, was not.

Paper Vows begins with broken promises made over you, but ends with The Sound of My Soul, a self reclamation in cleansing and finding your own music and voice in the record made only by you.

The Broken Baptismal Candle

A baptismal candle represents the promise that a child’s light will be protected and guided.

This charm marks the moment I realized those promises belonged to the ceremony, but not necessarily to the people who made them.

The Cracked Monstrance 

A monstrance exists to display what is considered holy and sacred.

Mine was split open, but in this charm, inside sat the record that held my own voice separate of false promise and hope.

For so many years, my story remained hidden inside symbols everyone else could see but no one was willing to truly witness. This charm marks the moment truth became louder than silence.

The Godmother

A godmother is meant to become a child’s spiritual mother, entrusted with their soul. This broken medal represents the collapse of that promise.

Not to suggest the loss of faith, but instead, the loss of the person entrusted to help carry it. A Godmother's promise is to lead that child toward truth, especially when the path becomes difficult.

This charm honors the painful realization that a title does not guarantee a promise be held sacred, and that some of the deepest betrayals come from those entrusted the most to walk beside us and hold our hands.

The Unholy Communion

Communion symbolizes belonging, innocence, and union with the sacred.

But after childhood sexual abuse, those meanings became fractured and impossible to separate from what my body had survived.

This charm reclaims the difference between what happened to my body and what remained untouched within my soul.

Purity had already been taken. So for me, this charm reclaims what never truly belonged to anyone else to take.

The ceremony felt fractured, though eventually my self worth was not.

The Weeping Eye of Envy Not Mine

External envy leaves an imprint. 

For years I mistook someone else’s envy for my own reflection. This eye does not represent her tears, it represents a time marked by the constant flow of mine.

The peridot holds the grief of finally seeing how deeply another person’s jealousy had shaped the way I viewed myself, and the freedom that came from the wailing of that imprint out of my own body. This charm marks the day I was finally able to stop carrying it.

The Bleeding Madonna Lily & Lucifer’s Dagger

The Madonna lily has long symbolized innocence, purity and the Virgin Mary. Throughout Catholic tradition, it represents what is sacred, protected, and untouched.

In my charm, the lily bleeds. Hidden beneath its petals coils the serpent, wrapped around the dagger that inflicted the wound while remaining concealed behind the appearance of virtue.

It was created to honor one of the hardest truths I have ever faced: that people can use positions of spiritual, professional, and moral authority to distort reality while appearing righteous to everyone around them.

The serpent represents deception cloaked in credibility, hiding beneath my petals where I couldn’t see the intentions she hid behind the years for which she remained so close. The bleeding lily represents the innocence that bore the cost of that deception. The dagger marks the moment truth finally pierced the lie, not by destroying innocence, but by revealing that it had been there all along.

This charm is ultimately about triumph. The wound never disappeared, but the lie no longer survives the light of truth.

Compass Correction

There comes a point when inherited maps and stories stop working.

Every child begins by navigating with someone else’s map. This charm marks the moment I stopped measuring myself by inherited stories, family systems, institutional approval, or someone else’s version of reality and began trusting the compass that survived inside me beneath it all. 

 

The Ballad of Truth

Purple Rain

This is about a storm that didn’t destroy, it cleansed instead. 

Purple Rain honors grief, departure, forgiveness without forgetting, and the quiet cleansing that followed choosing myself after generations of silence.

Sometimes healing arrives like sunlight, but this charm marks a time it arrived like rain.

The Sound of My Soul

A record holds vibration, memory and voice.

This charm is the record hidden in the monstrance before it was broken open at the collection’s beginnings. 

The heart pierced by the sword is no longer only a wound. It has become an instrument. The tears beneath it are everything that had to leave before I could finally hear myself.

Every charm before this one tells the story of what was broken. This one finally tells the story of what remained, in the name of truth. 

The Charmed Life Closing Creation

The charms created, I used to adorn the origin story’s foundations weaving them into the title as the pieces of me that did not break. 

 

 

There are more collections corresponding to more adventures inside the origin story to come, and most excitedly, you can request a personal charm, (or multiple,) creation here unique and made specific to your present situation or survived truth. I am honored to make it for you as a pendant of truth and an ode to your strength.