Auntie Kira here. Back when I was a drinker, I would say that if you just give me a glass of wine, I’ll give you whatever life advice you need, whether or not you want it. I thought it was the wine giving the helpful life advice. Turns out, I give the same quality unsolicited life advice without the alcohol. And maybe it makes a little more sense these days. You’re about to get some of it and you can let me know.

Anyway, a while back I made a comment in another post about how I have something a bit more personal to share but it was taking a while to get it out and I wasn’t sure when I would be ready. These little bits have been bouncing around in my head for months now and I’m finally ready to put everything into a (hopefully) coherent structure and release it.

I suppose to start the story I should rewind back about 20 or so years ago. Clint and I were in the earlier stages of our marriage and we were doing what most people in their 20’s do, building our lives, attempting to climb the corporate ladder, making “grown up” friends, all of that. I can’t fully speak for Clint, but I can tell you I was very focused on being a grown up and doing all of the things that adults are supposed to do, the things that society expects. No one really tells you how to become a grown up, just that you are supposed to.

Looking back, we had a bunch of stupid friends, and I can say that now because, except for about two or three people, I don’t maintain contact with anyone from back then. We hung out, we partied, we went to bars, but mostly we drank too much and did stupid things, and then we got up on Monday morning, worked our 9-5 jobs for the corporate bloodsuckers, earned our modest paycheck, and then did it all over again. I didn’t think anything of it really, I was just so focused on being a normal grown up and doing what I thought society wanted me to do: to be the wife I thought Clint wanted me to be and to just be this fun party animal that everyone wanted to be around. I grew out my hair and went to the salon every six weeks to bleach it, I wore skimpy clothes and the highest heels, I piled on the jewelry and makeup. I even considered plastic surgery to make me more perfect. The perfect woman. That’s all I wanted, to just be perfect and to have people love me. I carried on like this for years and I thought I was happy because I was doing what I was supposed to do and I was trying really hard at it. And I’m not saying I was terribly unhappy; I was married to my best friend, had a decent job, we had dogs, I had some hobbies, so things weren’t bad, they just weren’t right and I knew it.

Around 2019, the year of our 20th anniversary, is when I really started to realize that I couldn’t carry on the way I had been.

I think the first thing that happened was when I started running, back in 2013. It was the first time I got into anything athletic and even though it was super hard, I kept at it and had some success. Not only with the distances I was able to complete and the time goals I was able to achieve, but the way I was able to see some physical changes in myself. I didn’t lose any weight when all was said and done, but I dropped two full pants sizes and went from squishy to solid in lots of places. I started to learn that I can do difficult things if I really want to, which I suppose is something I knew all along, but I hadn’t really tried much as an adult.

So if we jump back to 2019, a lot was going on back then. The company we worked for had been sold, my boss, whom I actually liked quite a bit, had left after the sale, and I was stuck working for a total tool who told me my work was terrible and yet simultaneously took credit for it during company-wide meetings. I had to make a change in my life, a big one, and I didn’t know what it was going to be yet. And I’m not saying I had any regrets about getting married or that our 20th anniversary was weighing on me in that way. But when you can mark something that happened 20 years ago, it’s nearly impossible not to look back over 20 years and wonder if you spent the time wisely. I had some successes but definitely some things that could have gone differently.

Our 20th anniversary party came and went, and I won’t give too many details but a family member showed up unannounced and proceeded to get incredibly drunk, more than I had ever seen them. Although most guests at the party thought they were fun to hang out with, I was beyond embarrassed at their behavior and while I have largely forgiven them (if you know me, you know I can hold a grudge like no one’s business), I’ll never forget it. I had scaled back my drinking quite a bit after I became a runner, because you only need to do one summer run the morning after a night of tequila to realize that is not the way to hydrate, but this incident really sealed it for me, that alcohol was not my friend. Perhaps on a bigger scale I knew it wasn’t just that, but it’s easy to get drunk and forget your troubles, and I know I was doing that at least some of the time.

After that, I still drank here and there, probably never more than two drinks in an evening again, and I pretty much stopped entirely in early 2023. These days I have about one drink a year. It’s just not worth it. Maybe it did make me more fun, but I can tell you none of my drinking friends were actually my friends, they were just people I went drinking with, and without the drinking we didn’t have anything in common and didn’t like each other that much.

Shortly after that incident, I left my job with the corporate bloodsuckers and started to wonder how much being perfect actually mattered. I tried for a little bit longer, although by then I was coloring my hair all different shades of the rainbow and I was steadily covering myself in tattoos, so I wasn’t exactly blending in as some basic girl or anything anyway. Between the running, the reduced alcohol consumption, and the courage to start over after almost 20 years at the same job, I started to learn that I can do hard things, that I can do what I want, and that it will be okay.

In 2020, I landed a job at a cannabis company, and I won’t rehash that whole story because you’ve heard pieces of it before. The short version is, and I say this with the most love I can, I met the most genuine bunch of weirdos I’ve ever encountered in one place and I felt, for the first time, that there might actually be a place for me, the real me, in the world. I remember having a conversation with the owners of the company one time, and we were talking about career paths and if there was a danger in getting pigeonholed into the cannabis industry. I made some comment about how I wasn’t sure if “regular” companies would take me seriously with this job on my resume, as if I was now tarnished for taking a turn to the dark side. They both had the same response: you don’t want to work at a place that wouldn’t hire you because of that. I agreed, because they were right. Could I really see myself at some stuffy bank after all of this? Hell, no. I wasn’t going back and I think we all knew it.

It wasn’t just my career that wasn’t going back. I gradually stopped caring about my need to be the perfect woman, to be the person I was never meant to be in the first place. I even shaved off my hair a few years ago, which has nothing to do with gender identity; I just like it that way and I also like that it’s a “fuck you” to cultural norms and the patriarchy. Gender is just a social construct anyway. Appearance aside, I started thinking about what I really wanted, independent of what I was told I wanted, and started going for it. I walked away from a successful career when it had nothing left to offer me. I started this crazy business.

I remember talking about all of this with Clint at some point not too too long ago. I told him how I had just tried so hard to be what I thought he wanted but I couldn’t do it and I was sorry. It turned out he didn’t care if I made myself into the perfect woman, because we had gotten together long before I started any of that and it wasn’t even what he wanted. I was putting all this pressure on myself to impress people who didn’t matter and changing from the person I was, and I was becoming someone he didn’t want me to be, because the original weirdo I was in the 90’s was the one that Clint fell in love with in the first place.

So as we have been building this business, Elevated Gatherings (please tell me you’ve heard of it), I’ve often felt pressure to stop being unique and do more like others are doing. I mean, there are a lot of caterers making a lot of money opening bags of frozen food and throwing it into an oven or a fryer. I spend all this time driving around to little farms and then we cook everything from scratch. Should we just compromise who we are and do it the easy way like so many others? Of course not.

But then I got thinking about how everything has led me here, and everything I have done, both trying to be normal and realizing I can’t be. And now Auntie Kira will deliver another piece of unsolicited life advice. I’m borrowing it from the sage philosopher Bad Bunny, and his album whose title translates to, “I do whatever I want.” If you’ve been following him at all, you can tell he really does do whatever he wants. Remember his halftime show? He gave love and representation to his island in a way no one did before. Some people hated it, but could you imagine if he gave in and did what he thought everyone would want?

It’s not just Bad Bunny; it’s pretty much every interesting person or group of people out there. My favorite band, 311, does whatever they want. No one else is mixing styles and positivity the way they do. Or what about David Lynch, or RuPaul, or Freddie Mercury? I can make a pretty long list but I’ll stop there. I’m sure any one of them could tell you how hard it is, but look at the payoff. However you define doing whatever you want, as long as you aren’t impeding others’ ability to pursue what they want along the way, you should just do it. I spent too much time too afraid and too controlled by what I thought society wanted me to be and, although I do believe you can’t get where you are without being where you’ve been, I also know I’ll never get that time back.

In a world full of sheep, I’ll take being an interesting weirdo who does what I want any day. Life’s too short for anything else.