Healing is more than skin deep

I was born and raised in L.A.—I’m a Valley gal. 

I was working in film when I started modeling. My last "real" job was at Sundance, in the foreign film department. Modeling ended up being a bit more lucrative. I started acting a year or two later, and it’s definitely something that I’m more interested in. With modeling, you just don’t get that same feeling of creativity. I mean, it happens sometimes, but those aren’t usually the money jobs, I guess.

But I also wanted to start doing something else that was completely my own. As a kid, I was always crafting with my mom. She taught me how to knit and crochet, and on Passover four years ago, she taught me how to embroider on a matzah cover and I loved it.

I started thinking about interesting objects to embroider that weren’t so obvious, for lack of a better word. That’s how I landed on underwear. I bought a bunch of Hanes from Target and started embroidering them for friends. It was all very DIY, with some band merch or custom pieces for wedding parties and little things like that thrown in. Then about two years ago I decided to step it up and do it more officially, and that became Poppy Undies. We launched at the end of last year.

The act of embroidering is something that I love to do and it really helps with my anxiety—focusing on a tiny, very intricate thing where you can’t think about anything else is a great way to redirect those feelings. But it’s so time-consuming and labor-intensive. Now we manufacture our own underwear and I work with a factory downtown on the embroidery. But I still do custom pieces. You can order something custom and I’ll do it by hand.

I was in a car accident when I was 19. I was a passenger and we were getting on the freeway—one of those big cloverleaf turns—and the car flipped over because the driver lost control. It’s weird to think back on because it was such a surreal moment. It felt like a movie. Everything slowed down and I knew we were going down. Thankfully, I put my right arm up to protect my head. I’m sure this all happened very quickly, but it felt really slow. We crashed and I blacked out. 

When I woke up, it felt like my arm was waving above my head. So I was like, Okay, I probably broke a bone or two. My friend in the back had a skateboard and he used that to break open the sunroof. He pulled me out, and I remember his face when he looked at my arm. He said, "Don’t look." Then he took his shirt off and tied my arm up. My arm had no skin. My humerus bone had broken entirely in half and was sticking out of my arm. 

We called an ambulance—it felt like a million hours—and they took me to L.A. County Hospital. I was moved to U.C.L.A. hospital where I stayed for a month. I had 10 surgeries in 20 days. It was nuts. I was just not a person. I would wake up for a couple hours every day, but I was on so much morphine that I mostly just slept.