My Story...

part one! how i started, how i got here, & where i'm going

Well, hello! I am so happy you’re here. With the birth of this new platform, I feel like it’s time to re-introduce myself. Even though I’ve basically transferred my same blog over from here to here (Substack), I feel like it’s time for a refresher. Not just for you guys, but also for me, if that makes sense.

I’m a new-ish mom in a brand new era of my life and I am getting to know myself again & on deeper levels than ever before—and I have always gotten to know myself best through writing. In fact, a dear teacher in my life once told me that I “think” through writing, and nothing has ever felt so poignant or true. So let’s peel back the layers of the onion together, shall we?

As always, I share from my heart in hopes to tap into something nestled within your heart and inspire you to feel deeply and contemplate these random (but important) life musings in your own lives & energy fields. It kinda feels like my purpose. In fact, it 100% feels like my purpose. If I lost every “skill” or gift overnight but was allowed to keep one thing & one thing only…I’d keep my ability to write. Writing is why I’m here. Without it, my life would just feel ‘blah.’ So, thank you infinitely for being here. It means everything.

Ok, now… let’s go back to the beginning. 2012!

Well even before that for a sec, childhood. I was a child with all sorts of sensitivities and stomach issues. My health prompted me to go gluten-free and vegetarian when I was 13 (in 2003… wow) which was wayyyy before there were healthier options or cute & trendy grocery stores with yummy health food brands. I was sick a lot as a kid and was always searching for a way to just feel better. I also had whooping cough & pneumonia for a whole year when I was 8, which left some permanent damage on my immune system, if that tells you anything about how ~unwell~ I have felt for a long, long time.

For all of adolescence and high school, I was the go-to girl for my family and friends when it came to healthy living. I brought quinoa & blueberry salads to school in my lunchbox and munched on 100% cacao nibs & homemade carob bars instead of candy. I was also a diehard yogi, and the yoga studio I grew up going to exposed me to the world of spirituality at a young age—and more importantly the overlap of spirituality and wellness. The yogis were eating vegetarian and shopping at the health food markets way back in the day, unlike literally anyone else I knew at that time!

When Whole Foods opened in my town, Sacramento, it felt like a gift from the GODS had landed in my lap. I went there every day. Funny to think about now, because I wouldn’t touch most of the food from their hot food bar with a 10 foot pole now, but times were different back then. It was the original crunchy granola lifestyle that my heart yeeeearned for & craved. You could say I was meant to be a 1970’s Woodstock hippie born in the wrong era.

Then came the winter of 2012. I was a senior in college in Los Angeles. My boyfriend of 2 years cheated on me very publicly on the bus back from my sorority formal with another girl IN MY SORORITY. Can you believe that? Honestly looking back on it I have more disgust toward the girl he cheated on me with than I do for him… because he was an idiot who should have broken up with me rather than cheating… but she was my “friend” / “sorority sister” and was the epitome of a NOT girl’s girl. Oy vey.

I will never forget stumbling off the bus into my best friend’s arms, hysterically crying harder than I have ever cried in my life (and I have never made such a public scene like that in my life since - OMG), screaming about what happened. All 6 of my roommates slept in my room with me that night. It actually warms my heart looking back to think about the girlhood of it all, and how my friends picked me up. But wow. It was a dark time.

Anyway, I can thank them both now (my ex and the girl he cheated with), because they gave me the best gift I could have ever been given. A NEW BEGINNING. At the time, I was loosely planning to move to London with that guy after graduation. I can’t even imagine what my life would have ended up looking like. We broke up immediately after that happened, and I did a 5-day vegan cleanse that a bunch of people from my yoga studio were trying out.

The cleanse included soups, broths, smoothies, and all fresh fruits and vegetables. My mom did it with me, too. I WAS HOOKED after two days, because I felt absolutely amazing. For the first time in my life, my digestion was working properly, I had so much energy, and my skin was glowing from the inside out—I felt like I was on top of the world. My lifelong love of all things ‘healthy’ was finally making me feel WELL as I was finally eating in a real healthy way as opposed to what I had thought healthy was before (think Clif bars full of 1981910 ingredients but touted as the healthiest snack on earth.)

I learned so much on that cleanse, and it really changed my life. It felt like the closing of a chapter, the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one. I started teaching yoga on the side (after completing my YTT that winter), stopped drinking for the most part, and stopped talking the Adderall and birth control pills I’d been taking for years. I just had this intuitive desire to purify my body and detox the meds from my system along with eating so clean.

That June, I started my Instagram account @theblondevegan. It was a place for recipes, food photography, and the elaborate “Jars of Yumminess” I would make with rainbow ingredients and would photograph out by the pool at my parent’s house. It was so much fun, and I immediately fell head over heels in love with doing it.

My account grew very quickly, and I put my WHOLE heart and all into it. This was back in the day where you could simply add tons of hashtags to your photos and comment back on people’s posts and grow 200+ followers an hour!!!! I actually would play a game with myself, “how many people can you comment back to in 30 minutes?” and see how much I could grow in a single day. I would go to bed each night with my thumbs aching but my heart happy—my soul was lit up by connecting with so many people and sharing what I loved most. In August, I started a blog to go along with the account and felt right at home spilling words onto the page every day.

I knew I’d always loved health and writing, but what I didn’t realize was how much of an entrepreneurial bug & gene I had inside of me. Both of my parents are entrepreneurs (and very successful ones at that), so it makes sense to me now that this was the lifestyle I was drawn to. At the time, I had no passion for business or practicality so the fact that I had pursued this path was out of the pure creative pursuits more than anything else. But I’d always said, “I will never sit at a desk or have a 9-5. No way. Not me. I wouldn’t last a day.” And it’s true… I KNOW I would not last a day, nor would I be a good employee for anyone but myself because I march to the beat of my own drum & my own drum only.

At the same time as launching my blog, I moved to New York to go to grad school to get my MFA in Creative Writing. I got into my dream school, The New School. Moved into an apartment in the West Village with my best friend since kindergarten, Katie. We were living the DREAM. I was blogging every day, taking food photos on our now infamous ledge on our 13th street walk-up apartment, and connecting with readers/followers from all over the world. Life was good.

I remember the first time I was recognized in public from my blog. Naturally, it was at a juice bar in the West Village. At the time I quite literally LIVED in juice bars (and I still do, lol). A sweet girl with blonde curly hair and her mom came up to me and asked for a picture, telling me how similar we were and how my talking about my stomach issues / love of health / pursuits to feel better made her feel less alone. I was SHOOK! I called my mom immediately, obviously! I felt like a star! 😂 And I still stay in touch with that reader of mine today, as I do with almost all of my longtime supporters. <3

As the year went on I found myself focusing less and less on grad school, and more and more on the blog. I created a cleanse program just like the one I’d done that turned me vegan, and sold it on the blog. We had thousands of participants (and I had us all on ONE LARGE GROUP EMAIL—WTF was I thinking!?!? Lol) and I made myself available to every single person, day or night. Suddenly, without even meaning to be, I was an entrepreneur.

This is when things began to get ~interesting~!! And wild.