A life I could create.

As a little girl, I would stare at my own hands, fascinated by everything they could do. As I grew older, I noticed other people’s hands, too. The shapes of their nails. The veins and bones that moved beneath their skin so flawlessly. It looked magical, and it caught my attention and sparked my interest.

Around second grade, I visited my childhood friend across the street. Her mother, Bertha, did acrylic nails. She had a clear box of white plastic tips, and I begged her to let me take enough to glue onto my own nails.

She said yes.

I was about seven, walking around wearing little plastic tips, and I felt different. More confident. Somehow more powerful. I couldn’t have explained it then, but I remember the feeling of excitement.

Whenever women came through our neighborhood selling beauty products from Avon catalogs, I flipped straight to the nail supplies. I stared at the polishes, decorations, tools, and all the little things I wished I could have.

Back then, I thought I wanted to be an artist or a scientist. I didn’t yet recognize that I was already finding my way toward the science of art.

In fifth grade, I left Mexico and moved in with my aunt Lupita in Elk Grove, California. Inside a closet in her home, she kept a box filled with nail polishes. To me, finding it felt like discovering an absolute treasure.

I lived with her for two years. I was learning a new language, learning to make friends, and finding my place in an unfamiliar country. Matching my nails to my outfit became one small way to feel ready for the day and take on any new challenges.

For my sixth-grade graduation, I got on my knees and begged my mom to let me wear square French-tip press-ons I had seen in a pharmacy. They were the final touch to complete my graduation outfit. She pushed back, but after I kept insisting, she finally said yes.

I wore a pink dress, little heeled sandals, and my classic white French tips. I remember feeling beautiful.

For seventh grade, I moved back to my hometown in Mexico. In middle school there, polished nails were against school rules. But I wore them anyway. They checked our hands and uniforms before allowing us to enter school. When they saw my baby blue, gold, or red nail polish, they sometimes sent me home. My mom never knew about this. When I was denied entry, I would just hang out with friends and walk around town.

Alongside that curiosity, there were things happening at home that I didn’t know how to understand.

By about ten, I had started noticing how unsafe and uncared for I felt. Basic needs were not always met. My father was verbally, emotionally, financially, and physically abusive. At eleven, after gathering the courage to speak up about what I saw at home, he physically beat me for the first time.

I was scared. I was also angry. I watched everyone stand there and accept what he did as normal.

I quickly learned that speaking up could mean being slapped, punished, ignored, or told there was something wrong with me. I was called stubborn, defiant, insolent, and disrespectful. I learned how confusing it could feel to know something was wrong and have the people around you insist otherwise.

Even then, I had a feeling I couldn’t quiet: life could be different. Life could be beautiful.

I didn’t know how to reach that life yet. So I kept my mind busy imagining and creating.

By high school, I was finding ways to provide for myself. Since school started at 7 a.m., I would wake up at four in the morning to prepare burritos and sandwiches to sell at school. That money helped me buy lunch, pay for school projects, and cover things I needed.

At fifteen, I took the bus downtown to look for my first job. I wanted to earn my own money and have more freedom to take care of myself.

My dad found me walking down the street and offered to drive me to my interviews. I hesitated, but it was so hot that day that I got in.

Then he started driving in the opposite direction, toward home.

When I asked where we were going, he told me I wasn’t getting a job.

At a stop sign, I opened the door to get out. He grabbed my hand so I couldn’t leave. I managed to pull free, and he came after me.

I ran and ran until a man on the street stopped me and asked if I was okay.

“No,” I told him.

My father kept yelling at him to leave me alone, that I was his daughter. But the man refused to leave me. He stayed with me and walked me to the bus stop so I could get to my interview.

I didn’t get the job. I can laugh about that part now.

But I remember how much it mattered to me to get there. I wanted the chance to try, to learn, to earn something for myself. Even that was something I had to fight for.

When I think about why I take so much pride in my work today, I think about that girl. I remember how little room she had to make decisions, and how badly she wanted to find out what she could do.

Through work, I began to see possibilities for myself. I could learn a skill, provide for my needs, and make choices that had once been out of reach. That feeling has stayed with me as my business has grown. There is a reason I care so deeply about what I create: I remember wanting the opportunity before I was allowed to have it.

That same year, I adopted a street puppy and named her Mali.

Caring for her brought a kind of responsibility I had never felt before. Her quality of life depended on me. I wanted her to be safe, loved, and cared for, and I couldn’t understand how anyone could look at something so small and innocent and choose otherwise.

I wanted to be able to give her the care I had wished for myself. That desire gave me another reason to keep finding a way forward. Taking care of her and seeing her enjoy her life made me realize that I could choose and create a better quality of life with my own two hands.

Then the pandemic came. I was sixteen, spending more time inside an abusive home.

I painted on the walls. I drew. I worked on my nails from early in the morning until late at night. There was always another color to try, another shape to practice, another detail I wanted to understand.

In the middle of the pandemic, I got a hotel job working with my mom and earned seventy-five dollars a week. Every Saturday, I wanted to take my entire paycheck straight to the nail supply store.

My mom thought spending all of it on supplies was irresponsible.

But slowly, I built my kit.

My first setup was a little table inside a trailer at home. My clients had cushioned seats; I sat on a piece of wood. I had a small box of polishes, brushes, a little UV lamp, and an eagerness to get better.

At seventeen, I left the hotel job and rented my first booth in downtown Ensenada.

I began building my name, my skills, and my clientele. Some days, I worked from six in the morning until ten at night. I loved practicing. I loved earning my own money. And I wanted somewhere to be other than home.

Across that table, I began hearing about lives I hadn’t known were possible.

Women told me about their adventures, their choices, and the things they had survived. Some had left abusive homes or relationships. And there they were, sitting in front of me, living lives beyond what had happened to them.

I paid attention and listened.

Those conversations helped me understand my own situation. They gave me hope that I could leave, too, and that there might be something waiting for me beyond the fear I knew.

At home, the violence was growing. So was the indifference around it.

When my high school graduation came, I wanted to celebrate. I remember painting my nails and toes burnt orange in a hurry, a shade I learned that day did me absolutely no favors. I was excited to go to my graduation party and spend time with my friends.

My parents told me no.

There was no explanation beyond the fact that they had said so. After years of struggling to get permission to do ordinary things, even to work, I was frustrated. I had been supporting myself for some time. I knew I could go somewhere, take care of myself, and come home without needing their help.

I told my mom I was going. I would tell her where I would be, who I would be with, and when I would return.

She begged me not to because my father would be upset.

She was afraid of him. I was afraid of him. We had been afraid for years. But I wanted to make a choice for myself. I wanted to enjoy myself.

When I came home from the party, my mother asked me to help with the household chores. I grabbed a broom and began sweeping the kitchen floor while my grandma and mom washed dishes. My father got home and began questioning who I thought I was to make decisions for myself. He kept demanding to know who I thought I was. My heart began pounding so strongly that I could feel it in my throat. He came close to me, and I used the broom to defend myself. He grabbed me by the neck and strangled me.

I remember everything seeming to move slowly. His hands on me. My mother watched without intervening. The realization that something so frightening could happen while the people around me treated it as normal. I don’t remember how I was able to get his hands off me. I just remember running to my bedroom and locking the door.

It is painful to look back and recognize that I was still a kid, afraid for my life in the presence of someone who was supposed to protect me.

That day made something painfully clear: staying could cost me my life.

I was scared of leaving. I had no complete plan. But staying had become scarier than everything I didn’t know.

As my mom tried to open my locked bedroom door with a knife and begged me to talk to her, I climbed out of my bedroom window with a backpack full of clothes, ran down the hill from our house, and stayed with a high school friend for some time.

I worked and saved relentlessly. I went to therapy and tried to understand what had happened while figuring out how to take care of myself at seventeen.

Eventually, being in the same hometown as my father still felt too frightening. In 2022, a month after turning eighteen, I moved to the United States on my own.

My nail supplies came with me.

I didn’t know exactly what would become of me. I knew I wanted the ability to choose where I lived, how I worked, and what I accepted in my life.

Starting over was exhausting.

I needed to afford somewhere to live and attend school for my manicuring license. I wanted to build my business correctly, even when I was impatient to begin.

I worked long hours at a casino while doing nails on the side. I went to clients’ homes and worked from a small setup in my apartment. I told people what I did, hoping my name would slowly find its way around.

At school, I kept planning my website, my services, and the business I wanted to create. I often got into trouble for it. I was tired and often lonely, but my mind was full of ideas and a burning desire to explore life.

My older sister remained my closest family connection through that time.

Leaving home hadn’t taught me everything I needed to know about protecting myself. I found myself in another abusive relationship and had to learn, again, how to set a boundary and start over.

Building a different life meant learning what safety felt like and trusting myself when something was wrong. I was learning those things while studying, working, and trying to build a clientele.

Little by little, clients returned. Appointments became relationships, and in 2023, I rented my first workspace in the United States. Some of the women I met in those early spaces are still my clients today.

Eventually, I had a beautiful salon space and a business that supported me. I could look around and see something I had once only imagined come to life.

Then, in 2024, I began feeling an itching desire to build beyond what my own two hands could do.

I filled pages with ideas about the space, the experience, the team, what I could teach, and what I could learn.

I was figuring out who I was while figuring out how to run a business. Writing and sitting down with my thoughts helped me give those possibilities a shape.

But growth brought more uncertainty.

In 2025, the salon space I had poured my heart into closed without notice. We had to leave. The next location was difficult, too, and I knew the conditions there didn’t fit the vision I was trying to bring to life.

In one year, I moved through three locations.

I was tired of rebuilding around decisions I couldn’t control. I was frustrated by inaction around problems that remained unresolved when I could see so much that could be done.

At the end of 2025, on my 22nd birthday, I got the keys to my own commercial location.

Taking that step was frightening. It also gave me the responsibility and room I had been asking for: a place where I could make decisions, improve the experience, and keep creating.

That is the salon you see today.

Today, Nails by Camila Borja is a salon and a place to learn. Our work centers on detailed manicures and pedicures, with the attention to detail that has absorbed me since I first began practicing.

I still love photographing a finished set. I love watching a client admire her hands. I love helping a team member understand something that had felt difficult to me a few years earlier.

And I’m still building.

I’m learning how to lead a team, share what I know, and create something that can grow beyond the appointments I personally take. I want a space where we can create, enjoy our work, ask questions, and take absolute pride in what we do.

I also want to experience the life I worked so hard to reach.

For years, much of my energy went toward finding somewhere safer to be. Now, I’m learning what it means to have room to choose, to stay curious, and to enjoy what I’m creating.

I don’t have every part figured out. There are difficult days, decisions that stretch me, and moments when I have to remind myself how much has changed.

But I know why I keep going.

I remember the little girl staring at her hands. The teenager buying supplies with what was left of her paycheck. The young woman carrying those supplies into a new country, hoping she could be safe and make a life there.

I recognize her in the woman I am becoming.

To our clients, students, team, and anyone discovering this space for the first time: thank you for taking the time to know the person behind it.

This place was created with love, obsession, determination, and a deep curiosity about what life could become.

It is a pleasure to welcome you into it.

With gratitude,
Camila Borja