Hazel

Hazel Krebs
Speaker, Author

“Happiness exists inside of us, and it’s unlocked when the world knows who we are.”

When Hazel found happiness, she never wanted to go back to the dark days that preceded her discovery. The dark days were the first 40 years of her life, when she lived not knowing the true happiness she would feel when she found her name, transitioned, and became the woman she was meant to be. “I didn’t really experience happiness until I started to have the world see who I am. I feel like happiness is something we have inside us. It becomes real when we get to be ourselves.”

In her darkest days before realizing she is Hazel, a transgender woman with so much to offer the world, she was depressed. She struggled with substance abuse and suicidal thoughts.

“I used to hold stress in my chest, and it was painful. I hated existing the way I did.”

The stress, the hatred, the negativity went away as she became who she was meant to be.

“As I found happiness for who I am, I started to feel happiness in my chest instead.” She could look herself in the mirror and know she was seeing her true self, the self she was enthusiastic about sharing with the world. So enthusiastic that she wrote her book, “Enthusiastically Me,” as a memoir to the time between her darkest day and the unlocking of happiness that followed.

“I realized how strong I was. I survived. One of my objectives in writing a book was to have people know more about where I came from; I wanted people to know just how far I’ve come in a very short time.”

At a therapy session just days after finding her name, Hazel was given a choice of small rocks with words painted on them. She chose the courage rock. Amid all the difficulties, all the challenges she would face, “I knew at that time, I had courage for the first time.”

With an ever-growing audience, Hazel spreads her message: live enthusiastically and find what brings you happiness and allows you to spread it to others. As an author, as a social media star, as a speaker, as a mother to her two children, as a girlfiend – in all she does, “happiness is pursuing joy in the world. Happiness is finding all the parts of you that matter.”