Why We're Doing This — I Never Did Things the Conventional Way

We Sold Everything | April 2026

There is a thread that runs through my entire life. I can see it clearly now, looking back, though for a long time I couldn't see it at all — I was too busy living inside it.

The thread is this: I have always been moving toward something I didn't yet have a name for. And I have always trusted that moving was better than staying still, even when I couldn't explain why.

Moving to Europe is not the beginning of that story. It is simply the latest chapter of one that started a long time ago, on a farm in Minnesota, with a girl who asked too many questions and felt othered by almost everything around her.

Where I Started

I was born in Portland. Raised on a small farm in rural Minnesota from the time I was six — chickens, pigs, goats, organic vegetables at a time when that word barely existed in rural Minnesota. Back to Oregon by middle school, settling in Bend, where I would spend my formative years.

I was left-handed, had an unusual name, lived on a farm, and asked too many questions. Kids bullied me. The religion my mother had embraced — she was a Jehovah's Witness — meant I sat alone in the library during holiday parties and never once went trick-or-treating. I always felt othered. Like I was watching life through a window that everyone else had simply walked through without thinking about it.

My mother was a strong and complicated woman navigating her own considerable storms. She was eventually expelled from the church, and by middle school the religion chapter was closed, she was preoccupied with her own survival, and my sister and I were largely left to find our own way.

I was, in the most literal sense, raising myself.

Music and Friends and the Long Way Through

Music saved me before almost anything else did. I grew up on my mother and stepfather's record collection — Simon and Garfunkel, T. Rex, Pink Floyd, Hall and Oates. I absorbed it all. When The Wall came out I was twelve, still in Minnesota, and I wanted to go to the movie so badly but wasn't allowed. The album went on repeat in my room instead. I had Comfortably Numb memorized word for word — every nuanced enunciation, sung with the depth of feeling that only a lonely scared kid can bring to a song like that.

I loved dancing. Had always loved it. No dance lessons — my mother didn't drive for years — so I made up my own dances in my bedroom to my favorite songs with the door closed. Hours of this, from early childhood through high school, until I could finally go to bars where local bands played and dance all night. I didn't even always drink when I was there. Sometimes I just wanted to dance, and I did.

I met Jenell my sophomore year of high school. We don't remember meeting — she was just suddenly there, and we were bonded in the way that certain teenage girls bond, the kind that has no name but feels like recognition. Two people who had the same unnamed longing, the same need for connection, moving through their teen years side by side in the way that teenagers do — parties, music, boys, bad decisions and good ones, all of it. Our friendship survived everything it went through and outlasted circumstances that ended it too soon. It was only when Kelly and I were in Arizona, years later, that we found each other again in the deep way — and she has been one of my closest people ever since. When she needed to move from Ohio to Arizona, Kelly and I flew to Dayton and drove the U-Haul back so she could drive her car. That is what lifetime friendships do. They show up.

After high school I was emotionally unprepared for conventional life. I attempted community college twice and dropped out both times before finishing the quarter. I wasn't ready and I knew it even if I couldn't say why. So instead I moved.

Bellingham, Washington. Bozeman, Montana. Yellowstone National Park, where I waited tables at the Old Faithful Lodge. Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Back to Bozeman again. I didn't have a car. Just my bike. I was twenty-one years old, moving through the world on instinct and momentum, listening to Ramble On and Rambling Man and telling myself that movement was who I was.

It was in Yellowstone that I met Krista — my cosmic soul sister. She was everything I was not. Comfortable in her own skin, bold, completely unafraid to say exactly what she was thinking or feeling at any given moment. Where I was uncertain and careful, she moved through rooms like someone who had already settled the question of her own worthiness. She went on to get her four-year degree and then her master's. She had two extraordinary daughters. She knew what she wanted and moved toward it directly.

We had the same wounds underneath. The same complicated mothers, the same difficult childhoods, the same things we were both reckoning with in our different ways. Some people come into your life and rearrange everything. Krista was one of those people. If you're lucky you get one or two of them in a lifetime — people you connect with on the deepest level and simply call friend for the rest of your life, regardless of time or distance or how many years pass between conversations.

The Door That Changed Everything

I had been working at a video store back in Bend when I won a gift certificate to a local shop called The Curiosity Shoppe — described simply as a commitment to conscious living. I still remember the first time I walked through that door. I was aware in real time that something significant was happening.

The store sold spiritual and meaningful music, books, jewelry, meditation and spiritually based items. It hosted touring singer-songwriters. It smelled like incense and possibility. For a girl who had been spiritually hungry her entire life but had only ever been offered answers that didn't satisfy, walking into that store was like being handed a key to a door I hadn't known existed but had been searching for my whole life.

I worked there off and on for eleven years, starting at nineteen. That place saved my life. Not dramatically, not all at once, but slowly and completely.

It was there I was first introduced to the books that would rewire me. The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. Mutant Message Down Under — a single woman taking a risk, going on a walkabout, trusting the wilderness to hold her. And The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, which became something I have never put down.

His philosophy has stayed with me through every chapter of my life: be open to signs from the universe, trust what you feel, release your assumptions about what things should look like, have faith, keep going. Even small people can do big things in their own lives.

It is not lost on me that The Alchemist begins in Spain.

During those years I also apprenticed with a local herbalist, took classes in astrology, healing, and clairvoyance. The women who taught me — the herbalist, the astrologer, the community that gathered at The Curiosity Shoppe — gave me a framework for understanding myself and the world that no classroom ever had. They met me where I was. They showed me what was possible.

The Girls in the Tents

At twenty-five I found what felt like my dream job — working with at-risk teenagers at a residential wilderness program. I started as night staff, became the cook and backup wilderness guide, then field guide, head field guide, operations manager, mentor. Five years. No college degree. Just experience, hunger, and a willingness to devour every training I could find.

The first program was for girls. And yes — I knew. I was deeply aware of the parallels between those kids and the girl I had once been. I knew what they needed because I had needed it too. I knew what I wished someone had given me. So I gave it to them instead.

The most sacred moments were the mornings when a kid would emerge from her tent with a light in her eyes that hadn't been there the night before. At graduation, each kid completed a symbolic walk back to their parents — a five-mile hike. Those final moments undid everyone. Parents, staff, kids — all of us in tears. I was so honored to be part of that work. I still am.

Arizona and the Flash of Knowing

At thirty-three, after a loving relationship ended, I lay in bed the night we agreed to part ways and had a flash — sudden, absolute, certain. I said out loud into the dark: I'm moving to Arizona.

It was Cinco de Mayo. By September I had sold my house, my car, and almost everything I owned and moved to Tucson alone.

I transferred with my job at Wild Oats natural food store. Worked as a flight attendant at a private airline. Moved to Phoenix. Attended the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts — studying mind-body transformational psychology, polarity therapy, and nutrition. Managed a day spa. Became a professional organizer. Designed and sold custom closets, pantries and offices.

I was building something, even when I couldn't see the blueprint.

Years later another relationship ended and I moved back to Oregon. And then on an ordinary day at a nonprofit serving people experiencing homelessness and chronic poverty, I met Kelly.

Three weeks later I knew. This was it. This was the person I had been becoming myself for.

Looking back now I can see the thread that runs through all of it — the farm in Minnesota, the library during holiday parties, Comfortably Numb on repeat in a dark bedroom, the bike instead of the car, Jenell and the invisible bond of shared longing, Krista and the mirror she held up, the gift certificate that opened a door I had been searching for, the girls emerging from their tents with new light in their eyes, the flash of knowing on Cinco de Mayo.

I have always followed an inner compass that others couldn't always see or understand. I have always trusted the flash of knowing over the voice of fear.

But if I am being completely honest — and this blog is nothing if not completely honest — the moving was not always courage. Sometimes it was running. Sometimes it was the only thing I knew how to do when staying felt too hard or too scary or too much like risking something I wasn't sure I deserved.

I wrote about that more fully in another post — the one about the campfire at nineteen, and the thought that arrived so quietly it almost didn't seem real. If you haven't read it, read that one next. It is the truth that runs underneath this one.

What I can tell you here is that the thread was always real, even when I couldn't see it. The searching was always genuine, even when it looked like wandering. And every single step of it — the long way, the winding way, the way that stopped making sense to outside observers a long time ago — every step of it led me here.

To Kelly. To Mollie and Samson. To this blog. To Spain.

Moving to Europe is not a departure from who I am.

It is the most Lainie thing I have ever done.

Next — Kelly's story. A different kind of becoming, told with the same honesty.