My backstory
When I was in the first grade, I made my father email my teacher so that I could ask her, “a few questions about life.” Mrs. Simmons pulled me aside quite concerned, thinking that maybe I had accidentally discovered mortality. Instead, I asked her, “Why?” I couldn’t seem to figure out the purpose of life, the meaning, the reason it was all one big hullabaloo. At six years old, this haunted me.
All my life, I have been told I’m melodramatic, oversensitive, or too much. The world has always felt incredibly loud, existing at the edge of my skin, permeating my everyday thoughts. It wasn’t until college that I learned that there could be a way to exist when you were a person like me, and it didn’t have to hurt.
I learned a lot about self-validating of emotions, mindfulness and regulatory habits and behaviors, the ways that you could get lost in one thing at a time so that the great big world became more manageable.
I wrote this book about myself, I guess, as everyone seems to ask me. It’s a story about a little girl who got fed up with all the questions, sets out to find her answers herself, and ends up having to learn to let go.
My experience
I grew up in Columbus, Georgia, over yonder on the Chattahoochee. Being involved in the theatre community from a young age, I told everyone that I wanted to be a storyteller when I grew up. I loved acting for that lesson in empathy, to be able to experience what everyone’s thoughts inside of their private lives were.
The Springer Theatre Academy in Columbus is definitively the institution that has had the greatest impact on who I am and who I want to be as a person. They taught me that there is greatness in every child, and all you have to do is believe in them.
My portfolio
At Wesleyan University, I took full advantage of the liberal arts curriculum, and I majored in English (Creative Writing) while minoring in both Data Analysis and Integrated Design, Engineering, and Applied Sciences (IDEAS). All that boiled down to me having a million different ways to tell all the stories that were in my head. I could analyze the statistics that proved kids like me were being left behind, and I could design and create the products that I felt would help.
After spending college in the Northeast, I moved back down South in search of the community support and hospitality that I had grown up with. I knew that my passion and goals would need the support of my neighbors and friends and the local institutions. I quickly got involved in my new home in the North Carolina Triangle.
I spent this past summer working at Kidzu Children’s Museum in Chapel Hill, making art with children and being amazed at everything their mind can grasp. The most touching anecdote was when a little five-and-three-quarters-years-old girl told me that she loved to make art but it would get to be a lot as she got good at it because then everyone wanted something but then it made the art no longer fun. I do what I do so that the children with the worries and fears and anxieties feel seen, so that they know that they are not alone, and that there is a peaceful end in sight.
