LIFE LESSONS | PSYCHOLOGY

Creating My Own Secret Sauce

The beauty that hides in plain sight

Celebrating my friend’s birthday at the top of Seattle’s Space Needle at sunset. Photo credit KL Simmons

A handful of decisions have had major impacts on my life. For starters, I moved to Seattle from Philadelphia a few months before my 20th birthday, knowing only one person, a friend, who had moved there the year before me.

It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. I fell deeply in love with Seattle.

However, I moved back to Philly shortly before I turned 21, which is when I cut off most of my hair. I’d never had short hair before and wanted to know what it was like. Immensely liberating!

1999- Me on the right with one of my co-workers who worked at the Internet porn site. Photo by KL Simmons

I love caring for children and have gotten along with them very well, but by the time I was 22, I decided that I didn’t want to bear any children. I didn’t want to commit the time, energy, and money that it took to give birth and raise a child in the United States.

Another fantastic decision I’m glad I made early on.

Cutting my hair off and deciding not to have children made me feel incredibly free and more in tune with the free-spirit kind of person I was becoming.