What I Bring to Cloud City
For most of my young life, I thought I was supposed to be an artist, the kind with paint in my hair, graphite smudged on my face. As a child, I asked Santa for art supplies. I spent hours drawing in my bedroom. For high school spring break, I scoffed at beach resorts and instead took a train to Chicago to visit the art museum for a long weekend. I imagined moving to a big city and living a romantic life as an artist, living in a warehouse loft with other artists, drinking too much coffee, smoking cigarettes, talking about film and books. I was a kid. It was the early 90s.
When I started college, I went broke buying art supplies for my painting and design classes, and I got disenchanted with the cost of tuition and traditional education methods. Having no financial support from family, I dropped out of college. I worked at a lively coffee shop and was building a life with creative, interesting, smart, and funny people who cared about things like politics and oppression and liberation.
At the time, I had a skateboarding and snowboarding boyfriend who had a love of the outdoors. When he graduated from college with a degree in Urban Planning, of course, he decided to move to Portland. (With those interests, how could he not?) So I came with him. I was 21-years-old. I had nothing to lose. That was the summer of 1997.
We packed our cat and all our belongings in his old Saab and drove across the country. I fell in love with Portland immediately. Coming from working-class Michigan where I felt like an outsider my whole life, Portland felt like home. I worked at Scribner's bookstore in the basement of Pioneer Place mall, the Friends Library Store at Central Library, and Hamburger Mary's (the location at SW Broadway just south of Burnside). I learned to love early morning breakfast dates at Junior's and mac n' cheese at the Montage, driving out to Astoria for the day, meeting friends for late-night coffee and dessert at the Pied Cow, resale shopping on Hawthorne, wandering through records shops and used book stores, falling in love with (and at) my favorite local bars (Virginia Cafe and River City Saloon), and heading up to the mountain for a day of snowboarding.
But life wasn't easy. My boyfriend and I broke up, thankfully amicably, but I was still mostly alone in this new city. It was often a struggle to buy groceries. I was young, but I was old enough to worry about my future. Feeling desperate, I decided to try college again and enrolled in Portland State, a decision that changed my life in the most radical ways. My experiences at PSU transformed me from a kid who despised school, who didn't complete classes, who intentionally didn't go to class on test days because tests were boring to someone who felt like she'd been stabbed in the gut when she got an A- on a paper. I threw myself into my education, and the world opened up to me.
I ended up staying in higher education for nearly two decades, getting a degree in English, a Masters in Conflict Resolution, and a Masters in Fine Arts (writing). Though my path veered from art in the traditional sense, my work built on the energy of creativity. I helped build programs for people who, like me, didn't start off with much. As an English teacher, my work wasn't about commas and thesis statements and smooth transitions, but about helping people find their voice, their passion, and helping them find whatever the hell lit them up in life and to develop the tools to move in that direction.
But after so many years in one system, I started getting curious about other opportunities, so in 2013, I started working my friend's UX design agency during my academic summers, doing design research, interviewing users, analyzing data, and running ideation workshops with a fast-moving, nimble, and brilliant design team at an ethically-run, woman-led company. That was my first real taste of what it is like in the small business world, a world filled with creative people taking risks to bring new things into the world. I wanted more.
Ultimately, I gave up the security of academic tenure, and since, I've filled my life with an exciting mix of opportunities. I've helped other startups get off the ground, from writing business plans to helping with branding and marketing to setting up operations. I've run multi-day, off-site company retreats, and I've dabbled in professional coaching. I've made it 80% of the way through writing a novel, as well as helped many people on their writing projects. I spent a year as a senior researcher at a fast-paced, high-intensity design agency, and I've been able to devote a lot of my time, energy, and skillset to community organizations like APANO. I serve on the board of the Income Movement Foundation, and most recently, I helped found a collective of Korean adoptees called Yeondae.
I've become the person I am in Portland. This city has given me so much. Portland isn't perfect, I know, but I love it, and I love the people here, it's uniqueness - and the way it strives to be better, to do better. I'm proud of Portlanders, my friends and neighbors. It's thrilling to be at a place in my life where all my experiences, interests, and skill sets intersect at my own family business. Cloud City is just a small real estate brokerage, but I'm doing what I love with Eli, the love of my life, in and for the city I love, which is filled with the people and places I love. What more can I ask for?