I used to think this different drum beat was a disadvantage.  I thought I was doing it all wrong because I couldn’t/wouldn’t conform to the norms of my Texas patriarchal upbringing.  And I was being raised in Austin, the blueberry in the strawberry patch of the misogynistic southern states!

The timeline felt soul-crushing and completely unmanageable.  Get good grades so you can get into the University of Texas, join a sorority, and marry well. Is this why I was always being told to sit up straight, cross my legs, and act like a lady?  To be a good little girl.  And why was I taught that if a boy pulled me to the ground by my ponytail at recess, it meant he liked me?   I can assure you it meant that, from that day forward, I hated him!  And why do all the men get to go to work and have dynamic careers while the wives stay home doing laundry and making casseroles?   And then why am I expected to go to college when I am not expected to do anything with my college degree?  Why does everyone want to be the same?  Why can't anyone color outside the lines? None of it made any sense to me.

Then I moved to New York City at nineteen, and my mind exploded.  Suddenly, I was immersed in club culture + music, street art + museums, a delightful explosion of ethnic diversity, freedom of expression in sexual preferences, international foods from far-away places I had only read about in books. Languages. Accents. And dialects.  It was a sort of Nirvana for my creative mind, and I vowed, as I walked down Fifth Ave listening to the Thompson Twins on my Walkman, that I would never look back.  I didn’t feel the pressure of the Patriarchy in the city.  There was no evidence of housewives or casseroles, or of just smiling and keeping your mouth shut like a lady.  Nope.  The swirl of imagination and creation and pure becoming was what this city was built on, and it fed the rabid animal in my hungry soul.  I wasn’t doing it wrong for all those years in Patriarchal Texas.  I was just on the wrong stage, acting in the wrong play.

I left the bright lights of New York City at 26, leaving behind my beloved club culture, its late-night jagged edge, bagels with whitefish, a black cat named Marty, and a declined marriage proposal, and headed for sunny Los Angeles.  I traded my winter coat for a string bikini, and my career transitioned from dressing windows and showrooms to dressing people for television commercials and magazine editorials.  LA was a fresh start. A new chapter.  I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and eager to get my sunshine on in the California sun.

However, in Los Angeles, the patriarchy reared its ugly head again. One of my earliest memories of LA was being in a pool with a guy I barely knew, wrapped in his arms, when he said to me, “I love you.”  Followed immediately by, “True or not true, it’s still nice to hear… isn't it?” This broke my brain, and I suppose, on some level, my heart. In Los Angeles, it was hard to tell up from down. Truth for lies.  I never felt thin enough, pretty enough, talented enough, or sexy enough for the LA audience. This not-enoughness naturally alchemized into numbness, with all the usual suspects. Eventually, the glitter in the snow globe settled to the bottom, and the real Los Angeles was revealed. And on that day, LA was a hard stop.  My soul knew it could not sustain the patriarchal demand for pretty people in Hollywood, and I was on the verge of being just another casualty. One week later, I rolled out of town in a U-Haul headed back to Austin.  It had been sixteen years, and I figured Austin and I had both done some growing up, so the timing felt agreeable. 

Back in Austin, the timeline went something like this.  I spent the first couple of years traveling back to LA to work.   Then a wedding happened.  I enrolled in a sixteen-month culinary program.  Had boy number one. Worked as an event planner and catering director.  Had boy number two.  When the boys were 2 and 4, I left my marriage, flying without a net.   My soul, which has never steered me wrong, went from a whisper to a deafening yell that could no longer be denied.  Admittedly, some of her nudges have seemed incredulous, but she was right… the writing was on the wall.   More freelance side hustle stuff, interior design, floral design, personal shopping, personal chefing.  As a Manifestor Generator, I was fully living my human design, buzzing from one creative project to the next.  Then one day my skincare brand Olive + M was born.  I would spend the next seven years pouring my heart and soul into her.  I pushed that rock all the way up the hill and into the doors of big-box retail, where, in my opinion, she went to die.  I had moved out of creativity and formulation and into chargebacks and spreadsheets, and I hated every minute.  Somewhere in there I got married for a second time.  

In September of 2021, I attended a Kundalini yoga retreat in the Texas Hill Country.  In a room full of strangers, emerging from a deep and profound meditation, I wrote in my journal, “Goddess, I cannot take it anymore.”  I am barely managing my marriage, my teenage boys, and my business.  I am failing at all three, and I have decided to burn it all down.  That afternoon, in an awkward eye-gazing meditation, the woman I was partnered with told me she saw burning phoenixes in my eyes.  You can’t make it up, and you can’t unring the bell.  In December that year, I met my soul mate and life partner, Kelly.  No one was more surprised than me that she was a she.  But the universe is delightfully magnificent when you roll with her blessings, and this one was my biggest one yet! 

Today I live in Joshua Tree with Kelly and our three poodles, making art and stringing words together under the star of the scribe.  My work is divinely guided by something outside of me that I pray will keep showing up each day.   I have come to understand that art is the revolution that has always lived inside of me.  That my feminine power is not something that I should learn to tamp down or dim in any way.  I am here to color outside the mother fucking lines.  Some days a win and some days a fail, but all of them have made who I am today.  Thank you for being here, and now, my friend, please join me in the Revolution and let us RISE.

Keep up with me and the poodles on Instagram!