Despite all the things you can learn about someone on the internet, you still probably don’t know much about me. Here are a dozen facts, beliefs and opinions you won’t find on my resumé or LinkedIn page:
Kindness and empathy will get you further than anything else in life.
I can recite the First Amendment (and do every Election Day to whomever is in ear shot) and the North Carolina State Toast by heart.
I’m the seventh generation of a North Carolina farming family that currently grows pumpkins and Fraser fir Christmas trees.
Failure, big and small, is the best way to learn, improve and progress.
Despite being born and raised in the Appalachian mountains, my heart belongs to the Low Country and to the space where the ocean meets the sky.
I’ve (so far) traveled to 18 countries and 5 continents. Top of my list for next adventures are New Zealand/Australia, India, Japan and South Africa.
Personality tests are not the be-all and end-all, but they do provide great insight. I’m a 2w3 on the Enneagram (“The Hostess”), and my Clifton Strengths are Woo, Input, Achiever, Communication, Responsibility. I don’t care for the Myers-Briggs or Astrology.
It’s always a GDTBATH.
You have to be able to “drink the Kool-aid” where you work if you’re going to do good work there.
I could listen to Louis Armstrong’s version of “La Vie en Rose” on repeat for the rest of my life and never grow tired of it.
Watermelon milkshakes from Cook Out are the best milkshakes ever. Full stop.
I used to read the following quote every morning. It’s my mantra.
“But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in the Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet