five questions from my community
I told my Instagram community that I’d pick five questions from them to answer here on the blog. The questions could be anything—mindset, relationship, art, family—I’m an open book. I’m sharing my answers alongside incredible film photos that Katch Silva shot at our wedding. I’ve been dying to share these and this seemed like the perfect pairing.
What is the core reason that keeps your relationship [with Perry] so loving and vibrant?
Thank you, @seapippilotte. I love this question so much. I can write a book on this alone, but I’ll try to keep it brief.
If I had to sum it up in one word, I’d say, acceptance.
Accept yourself. The kind of love we share starts in the heart, in the very depth of ourselves. You have to love yourself first before you can truly pour heart and soul into someone else. Perry and I both know our worth, we respect ourselves, and although we expect a lot out of our existence on this planet and are constantly pushing ourselves, we are kind to our hearts and give grace on the hard days. The relationship we’ve built is rooted in that strong inner-love and respect that we have for ourselves. Much like a tree, because our roots are strong, the branches that grow and spread into different parts of our relationship are sturdy and vibrant and full of life.
Accept each other. We love each other fully, without judgement and conditions, in our most raw forms—the love never wavers because we’ve built a strong foundation. Through the years of our relationship we’ve seen all the dark places that live in our heart and mind and we love anyway. Not in spite of, but because of. When you love someone, you don’t only accept the parts you like, you accept the parts you don’t—the parts that are struggling and thrashing. Those are the parts that need you the most. Having someone accept you so fully as you are, even the worst parts of yourself, allows you the grace to grow. Instead of coming from a place of defensiveness, you can see where growth is needed. I’ve grown so much through Perry’s unwavering love. Because of his grace, I have the strength to shine a gentle light into those dark parts of myself and brighten up the places I used to try so hard to keep hidden.
We see each other. We listen. We talk. We feel. We don’t look for what we want to see. We see each other as we are. That way we can be what the other one needs. We don’t hide our emotions and struggles from each other. We communicate them so that moods are transparent and understood. So that we can offer an extra limb for strength or stability on the days when our hearts feel weak or overwhelmed.
Support in all things—art, work, struggles, celebrations. Being there to offer that support is vital to the long-standing vibrance of our relationship. Life is hard and it’s important to lift each other up, to be that extra layer of warmth, and to champion each other through every single thing. We communicate our dreams and our goals and push each other to those accomplishments because we know it will not only fulfill the other, but fulfill our relationship. We celebrate often, as much as we can, tapping into the child-like mind of play and wonder. We don’t sweat the small stuff, because at the end of everything we know it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we found each other and we don’t want to waste a second of it fighting over trivial things.
Perspective. If I spend even a second thinking about what my life would look like without Perry, I’m overwhelmed with sorrow and am reminded of how grateful I am for his existence, for his love and support, and for what we have together. Which leads me to the importance of gratitude.
Gratitude. Being grateful every day, every moment for the one you love will add an unbreakable layer of strength to your relationship. It softens the heart so there is no room for resentment or anger. Only love. Count your blessings, and with Perry, I have a million.
What’s harder? Waiting for the inspiration to write or writing to inspire?
Writing questions speak to my soul, so thank you for this @pepepnkgdl.
When I first began taking myself serious as a writer I found it hard to write without Inspiration pushing me forward. I felt reliant on Inspiration to show up for me and I’d drag my feet to the page. But after almost two years of wrestling with it and letting it call the shots on my writing, I stopped waiting for Inspiration.
I started showing up for me, inspired or not. I’d come to the page every day regardless of how I felt. Some days went better than others and some days I could barely sit for five minutes without feeling completely inadequate and discouraged, like Inspiration had given up on me. But after cultivating this sort of discipline for a year or so, things have changed.
Now, Inspiration shows up for me because I’ve proven myself to it. I’ve shown it that I’m serious and that I respect it. I will sit in the chair all damn day if that’s what it takes and Inspiration now knows this about me. It knows I’m not going anywhere. My alarm goes off at 5 AM every morning and I peel myself out of bed to come to the page, and almost always, Inspiration is there waiting for me with an outstretched hand.
Do your part. Show up and Inspiration with meet you where you are.
There’s a wonderful quote from the book The War of Art that embodies this sentiment so perfectly.
“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”
To answer the second part of your question, I try not to think of what I’m writing as something that’s going to inspire because it adds this layer of outside pressure that I feel doesn’t serve me or the work that I’m trying to put out into the world. I try to strip outside voices and internal doubts away and write from the rawest place of my heart. If it inspires, wonderful. If it doesn’t, at least I wrote from a sincere, honest place and in that, I am left feeling fulfilled. And at the core of my being, I write because I have to. It’s in me and I have a responsibility to myself to honor that.
If you’re interested in cultivating a healthy relationship with Inspiration and taking yourself serious as an artist, I highly recommend these three books.
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
“The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Failure has a function. It asks you whether you really want to go on making things.”
And for the writers out there, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
“Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
I preordered your book. Do you have a release date yet?
Yes, @ysamarvel, thank you for asking. I’ll be shipping out From the Dust by March 21.
Thank you so much for your patience. We’ve gone through two rounds of test prints and I am excited to finally have something I can share with you, something you can hold in your hands.
This was such a fun project to work on. I’ve been working tirelessly on my memoir for three years now and haven’t been able to share much with the world. I’ll be looking for agents this spring, but going the route of traditional publishing is still a long road. But with this little book of short stories that I’ve self-published, I’m able to share some of my writing and glimpses of the stories in my memoir on a smaller scale and that feels both fulfilling and special, like we are creating this close-knit community where we can share memories and pieces of ourselves.
I feel like I’m building this bridge from inside my head out into the world, to people who have had similar experiences or who want to connect on a deeper level. I am so grateful to this little book of short stories for allowing me to make that happen. And I am grateful to you for supporting my art. In a world with so much noise and so many things that clamor for your attention, it means so much to me that you’d spend even a minute of your day on something I’ve created. Thank you for giving me that gift.
For those who have no idea what book I’m talking about, click the button below.
You embrace feminine energy so beautifully. How do you do this, or is it natural to you?
This is an interesting question, @dayray, because in terms of energy, I used to say that at my core, I naturally embraced a more masculine energy. I’ve always found myself with more male friends than female, and I was never much into the stereotypical “girl things” when I was a kid. I liked running through the desert wasteland next to our house, fighting off imaginary bad guys with my brother and shooting guns with Dad. Mom was in prison so she wasn’t around a whole lot and I always thought Dad was so cool so maybe that’s why I leaned into the masculine within me. But it wasn’t long before I learned that energy, masculine and feminine, is fluid, forever changing and evolving.
As I got older I learned to tap into my feminine energy at a deeper level. From a purely physical standpoint, I align with the feminine nature. I am proud to be a woman and find this incredible power in the pure raw form of a woman’s existence in the world. I lean into my sexuality, my fierce appetite for beauty and intimacy, and my endless well of empathy that connects me to the pain of the universe.
I was partly raised by two incredibly strong women, my grandmas. One survived getting bombed by the nazis in France during World War II and the other was born into poverty on a farm in the middle of nowhere. They each had to learn to push past their circumstances and they came out the other side with an immense amount of strength. To me, that is part of what being a woman is—rising above whatever is thrown at you while still holding onto your grace and keeping your heart open and soft.
When my Mom got out of prison, she embodied this beautiful mix of both masculine and feminine. She’s strong, empathetic, wild, powerful, gentle, fearless, sexual, and so damn free. I resonated with these layers, some dualistic in nature, and what I’ve learned is that my energy is fluid, constantly flowing between masculine and feminine.
We all have both energies within us. It’s just how we tap into them that shines through our character. I think by tapping into both is how we discover our true power as they both play a vital part in how the universe operates. By joining the universe in its duality, we’re syncing up with our natural rhythm. Light and dark. Day and night. Sun and moon. Inhale and exhale. There are all binaries that exist in nature.
By gaining awareness of both the masculine and feminine energy within myself, I’ve been able to connect to who I really am at a soul level, regardless of external influences or societal norms. By combining both energies, the yin and yang, I learned to step into my true personal flow.
How did you and Perry meet? How do you make traveling such a big part of your life?
Thank you, @lynnrachelle18. I appreciate you taking an interest in how this unexpected love story began.
We were about two weeks into our summer on Vans Warped Tour. With over seventy bands, it's the largest traveling music festival in the US, stopping at over forty cities. I was working for a record label selling merch for the bands. Working Warped Tour was basically a rite of passage to being in the music industry full time. It was like a punk rock summer camp.
A grueling summer—up and out to the semi-trucks by seven in the morning to unload boxes upon boxes of merch. All day I’d sling merch in the blazing sun while music blared from multiple stages all at once. It was like being in a bar where everyone tries to talk at the same time, each person getting louder to talk over the other. After the last bands were off the stages, usually around ten or eleven at night, I’d pack up all the boxes and the tent and get everything back to the trucks to load up, just to do it all over again the next day, and the day after that. I never knew what day it was, what state I was in, or when I was going to get my next shower.
Perry was my saving grace that summer. He was the singer of a band and it was his first time on Warped too. We were both wide-eyed, filled with dreams and naive ambitions. I’m not entirely sure which state we were in when we met, but I know it was in the south somewhere — Texas, Georgia, or maybe in one of the Carolinas. But what I do know for sure was that I was instantly taken by him. His sun-drenched skin and his dark eyes with thick lashes. His long black hair weighted down by lazy curls. His light and free gait, unaware of the swelter in the air. I’d seen him bobbing through the catering tables at lunch time, bouncing through the maze of tour busses, and pushing music gear through dusty, gravel roads.
Every night the tour put on a BBQ for the late nighters and hungry workers. Perry invited me to join him on the evening of the day we first met. We stood among the humming tourbuses and talked about family, dreams, God, childhood, and everything in between.
We were inseparable the rest of the tour. We’d stay up all hours of the night cuddling in his bunk and reading Steinbeck to each other. I’d read quietly, my head nestled in his neck I could feel his facial hair grazing my forehead. Some nights we’d listen to music together and fall asleep, each of us with one earbud in our ears.
Sometimes we’d get an off day in a city worth visiting. We spent a couple days in New York City, both our first times. It felt like a dream. Me, a girl escaping my broken family in a soul-crushing nowhere town in the dust of the Mojave Desert and him too, fleeing from his broken home in a shit-hole town buried in the valley of central California, about five hours north of where I grew up.
All the way across the country walking the streets of New York City, under her bright lights and tall buildings, arm in arm like we didn’t have a care in the world. And we didn’t. We wandered with no plans and nowhere to go. This was all we needed. Just us in a city where we didn’t know anyone and no one knew where we were, under the night sky with music in our heads and books in our bags. This was the beginning. This was everything.
Our nomadic beginning bled into our plans for the future. We both found the value in traveling, in the wonder that comes with experiencing somewhere new and in the discomfort that comes from navigating new cultures and landscapes. It gave us perspectives both of the world, and of ourselves, that we wouldn’t have been able to access without it. We spent five years traveling, finding ourselves and learning about each other and the world around us. We grew so much and it brought us even closer together.
We don’t travel full-time anymore because we’re now in creation mode. Traveling left us feeling so inspired that we needed to stay still for a moment so we could put that inspiration into our art. We bought a house nestled in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, away from distraction and needless noise, so we could focus and create. I’m finishing my memoir and he’s finishing his full-length folk album. We still travel a little here and there throughout the year, but not nearly as much. Traveling will always be part of our life, but I believe everything has its season and it’s important to tap into that flow and build upon growth. After these projects are completed, who knows what the next season will look like.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I’ll be covering these topics that are close to my heart—relationships, self-development, creativity, writing, the human condition—in more detail with subscribers of my mailing list. If you’re interested in furthering this conversation or taking a deeper dive with me, you can sign up below.