Defining myself by my work hasn't gone so well for me throughout my life. While I'm proud of the things I've done and the paths I've carved, I'm acutely aware of my tendency towards burnout in a country that values production and profit over people. Hustling for my worth and trading hours of my life for not enough money has broken me more than once. I've learned lots of lessons about how I DON'T want to exist — about how I DON'T want to run an entrepreneurial venture. So I've taken my time with this one. I'm striving for sustainability and pleasure in my little corner of a very unsustainable world.
1982: I was born on December 10th. I'm a Sagittarius sun 🔥, Libra moon 🌬️, and Aries rising 🔥. My family of origin was keen on sweeping all things uncomfortable under the rug. I reject this mentality with fervor. I believe talking about challenging topics is akin to shining light in dark corners; it takes away the power of supposedly shameful topics and encourages others to share their stories. It's not lost on me that I'm now choosing to skip forward to college graduation. 😅
2007: I graduated from Carroll College in Helena, Montana with a double major in Psychologoy and Communication Studies. Oh hey — and I took a couple pottery classes in college! I was alright at it and always wanted to get into it more, but never felt like I had the time.
2008: I took a job working for Planned Parenthood of Montana in Billings. My job was to educate voters about the dangers of an anti-choice ballot measure, often while standing next to the anti-choice signature gatherers. I also got to shake Barack Obama's hand, and Chelsea Clinton handed me the floor to speak about Planned Parenthood. This was a superbly cool year.
2009: I worked for the SEIU Change that Works campaign on healthcare reform and employee free choice. My job was to meet with people one on one, listen to their healthcare horror stories, and urge them to write a letter to Montana's elected officials. As the highest producing organizer in the state, I was hired on to work for SEIU-UHW out of Seattle. I lived in a hotel in Oakland for three months during a big union fight. My job was to talk to CNAs during shift change about how the old leadership at SEIU began messing things up — not dealing with problems, letting contracts go — before they left, started another union, and asked members to join their union because of the problems at SEIU. The problems they actually caused. 🙄 The average length of employment as an SEIU organizer at the time was six months. I lasted exactly six months before I left due to complete burnout.
2010: I started my photography business back in Montana. I photographed weddings, families, babies, boudoir, and more! I had an ongoing gig taking marketing images for Great Harvest Bread Company.
2011/12/13/14: Photography and more photography. More burnout. Too much time on the computer. Super duper painful repetitive motion issue with my right hand/arm from holding my beautiful, but quite heavy, Canon 6D.
2014: I ran for an unwinnable, deeply red seat in the Montana House of Representatives.
2015: I helped a boyfriend move from Montana to Georgia, acquired Miles Dog, decided the relationship was not for me, and moved back to Montana.
2016: I moved to John Day, Oregon. My photography work shifted towards landscape and abstract nature imagery and I started selling prints and notecards around town and at farmer's market.
2018: I decided to take myself to yoga teacher training. Teaching yoga, taking more trainings, building a yoga community in John Day, and maintaining ties to my home studio became the overwhelming force in my life for the next five years.
I also bought a house with some help from my mom. 🏡
2019: Kevin and I got together. 🩷 He moved in around Thanksgiving, not long before the world turned upside down. Choosing the nice guy — and sticking with him when my programming screamed otherwise — was probably the best thing I've ever done.
2020: The time of Covid. Kevin and I found out we still really liked each other even though we were both working out of an 800 square foot house. I taught yoga online from our living room; often Kevin practiced in the background as my model. 🤸🏻♀️
A friend and I organized a Black Lives Matter event in John Day that summer; more people showed up in support of BLM per capita than in New York City. A false rumor circulated beforehand about how protesters would be bussed in from Portland — turns out this same rumor hit many small towns and originated from a white supremacist facebook group. Despite efforts to correct the misinformation and my public assertion that a yoga teacher (myself) and a school board member (my friend) weren't planning to ransack our one grocery store — the fear mongering worked. We ended up leading a group of 120 residents past heavily armed 'peacekeepers' intent on protecting the town... from the town.
2021: Beginning sometime in 2020 and continuing through 2022, I worked for my home yoga studio in Bend, OR. I wrote for social media and eventually took on more tasks like setting up workshops, constructucting the newsletter, software trouble shooting, and more. I was on the leadership team, was referred to as 'the voice of the studio,' and was courted for co-ownership — which really would have just meant giving them $10,000 for a fancy title.
2022: The year of miscarriage, marriage, and yoga cults. 😵💫
I began to miscarry my pregnancy in February at ten weeks. I ended up in the ER as I was bleeding too much too quickly, but I was not offered a D&C to clear it out. (That's an abortion; it's the same procedure.) I continued to bleed for 40 days. This was wildly traumatic for both Kevin and I, and it led to our eventual decision to not try again for a baby.
Kevin and I got married in beautiful Logan Valley amongst friends and family. 🩷
Also in 2022, the yoga studio I helped manage decided to deaffiliate from Baptiste yoga after allegations of Baptiste yoga being a cult came to light. Specifically, we're talkin' about narcissistic leadership, love bombing, manipulation, gaslighting, and use of sketchy pseudo therapy techniques. Those of us who wanted to be transparent about the problems were abruptly disappeared, as is the way of cults. I learned first hand that the problematic culty shit wasn't just at the tippy top of the Baptiste organization. It trickles down to affiliate studios and former affiliates who drop the association but fail in reforming their ways.
2023: The year we decided to move across the country to Athens, Ohio! Also the year I started making pottery!
Kevin was looking at a few job promotions he was up for in Oregon when he saw a listing for Recreation Manager on the Wayne National Forest. It was the last day the job was open. We talked about it, and he applied. Leaving John Day had been on our minds for a while, and Athens had everything we were looking for. He got the job, and we decided to make the move. We arrived in Athens on June 21st with a U-haul full of stuff and a CRV full of houseplants.
We sold our Oregon house with ease. Finding a house in Ohio was the opposite of ease. A little less than six months after we arrived we closed on our house.
2024: The year the house and yard took over our lives. 🫠
All the walls were the color of sour milk; now many of them are not. I painted and painted and painted. I got comfy switching out light fixtures. We figured out a solution to our heating/cooling challenges and had two heat pumps installed. We had problem trees taken down. We cleaned up a decade of yard waste. We also planned and built a fence. Kevin made plans for garden boxes, and I built them. We put up new gutters.
We discovered many 'wtf were they thinking' quick fixes and tended to our house with a more caring and thorough — albeit self righteous — touch.
2025: In January I set to work painting a mural in the little room we set aside for a pottery. In February we added shelving as well as my brand new wheel! And now here we are! 🥳
I question the timing of launching this adventure during a full-on constitutional crisis, but we don't get to choose our timeline.
And I suppose making these little treasures will help me persevere as I do my part in fighting for a country where free speech, due process, and voting access are secure, and attacks on public land, libraries, education, research, immigrants, trans, lgbtq, women, veterans, civil servants, medicaid, medicare, social security, abortion rights, title X funds, fema, and, ya know, democracy are shut the f*ck down.
