I studied late, took every honors class available. I entered essay contests, science fairs, summer programs.
I started saving up from babysitting jobs and lemonade stands just to buy my own art supplies.
I stopped asking for his approval. I stopped believing it would ever come.
Instead, I started building a version of myself I could be proud of. The girl who stayed after class, who worked through lunch, who showed up and never stopped showing up.
I told myself one day he’d have to notice. One day I would become so undeniable that even he wouldn’t be able to pretend I didn’t exist.
By the time I was 16, I had already stopped expecting my father to attend anything with my name on it.
He didn’t show up to the state science fair where I won second place. Didn’t clap when I gave the student speech at our junior honor society. Didn’t even come to my high school graduation.
When I told him I’d been accepted into Boise State on a partial scholarship, he barely looked up from the newspaper.
“That’s nice,” he muttered. “But make sure you study something useful.”
Useful? That was code for something he understood, something he could brag about.
So instead of studying art or creative writing, what I actually loved, I chose accounting. I told myself it was fine, that maybe if I played by the rules long enough, he’d finally let me in.
But of course, he didn’t.
While I was taking 18 credit hours and pulling shifts at the campus dining hall, Derek was flying to Colorado for ski trips his friends’ dads paid for.
While I was living in a run-down apartment above a laundromat, eating canned soup and budgeting down to the cent, Colton was living in the guest house at home, rent-free, figuring things out.
One summer, I overheard my father on the phone with a friend bragging about Derek’s internship with a real estate firm. He called him a born closer.
When the man asked about me, Dad just laughed.
“She’s still bouncing between hobbies.”
I think I had just started my third semester of accounting and was already interning with a firm downtown.
But that didn’t matter. Not to him. None of it ever did.
Still, I didn’t stop.
I graduated with honors. Got my CPA license. Took a job with a midsize firm in Boise.
I didn’t expect applause, but part of me thought maybe, just maybe, he’d finally say something.
Instead, the night I passed my licensing exam, I came home to find a voicemail from mom reminding me to RSVP for Derek’s engagement dinner.
No one even knew I’d taken the test.
I stopped going home much after that. The house always felt colder now, like the air had turned on me.
Still, I kept pushing forward quietly, relentlessly, saving every dollar, taking on side clients, learning software development at night just because I liked the logic of it.
I rented a room in a shared house with three roommates, ate pasta four nights a week, tracked every cent on a spreadsheet.
I told myself, “If he won’t clap for you, build a life that doesn’t need his hands at all.”
That was the seed.
I didn’t know it then, but that was when the idea first formed. Soft, fragile, still finding shape.
I wanted to create something of my own, something no one could take credit for but me.
And so, on a rainy Tuesday in September 2016, at 25 years old, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor with a used laptop and a secondhand desk lamp, I bought the domain name for Helix Frame.
And with it, I bought the first brick of a future that wouldn’t need his name to exist at all.
I didn’t quit my job right away. I worked full-time at the accounting firm during the day. And every night, I came home, peeled off my blazer, and opened my laptop like it was a doorway out of the life I didn’t choose.
I spent hours learning UX design, platform integration, automation, workflows, anything I could get my hands on.
I didn’t have investors. I didn’t have mentors. I didn’t even have furniture.
Just a mattress on the floor, a desk missing one leg, and a dream that felt bigger than the walls around it.
Helix Frame was supposed to be a side project, something small.
A lightweight platform to help small business owners automate tasks they didn’t have time for. Appointment scheduling, email responses, customer follow-ups.
Simple, scalable, and mine.
I called it my invisible machine, a system that worked quietly in the background, the way I always had.
The first version was buggy, crude.
I launched it to five local businesses in Boise. Three dropped it within a month. One ghosted me completely.
Only one stuck around, and they didn’t even pay. They just liked that I answered emails fast.
I didn’t let it stop me. I kept tweaking, improving.
By spring of 2017, I had a working prototype and a basic website. By fall, I had my first paying client, $1.35 a month.
That month, my dinner budget was $2 a day. I ate toast, drank instant coffee, sold half my closet on Facebook Marketplace to afford a newer used laptop, and still no one in my family knew.
They assumed I was still playing accountant. They never asked what I was working on. They never noticed I stopped coming to holidays.
That Christmas, I didn’t go home.
I stayed in my tiny apartment, ordered Chinese takeout, and wrote 20 pages of backend code through the night.
It didn’t feel lonely. It felt honest.
Mom left me a voicemail that said she missed me. Dad didn’t call.
Derek posted a picture on Instagram of a Rolex with the caption, “Thanks, Dad.” Colton got engaged.
I scrolled through their lives like they were part of some other timeline.
Meanwhile, mine was quietly taking shape.
By summer of 2018, I had four paying clients. By fall, I had 10.
I was still poor, still unknown. But I was no longer invisible to the people who mattered.
My clients, my users, the ones who depended on what I’d built.
I didn’t need a stage. I didn’t need a speech. I just needed to keep going.
Late one night, I sat at my desk, back aching, eyes burning, fingers trembling from hours of typing.
And I whispered to the room, to no one in particular, “If he never looks up, I’ll just build something so tall he’ll have no choice but to look up.”
And I meant it.
It had been nearly a year since I’d sat across from my father. I wasn’t planning to go home for Thanksgiving. Not really.