The Reconnection of Oneself

I almost died when I was 27.

I do not need to tell that entire story here. Some parts of a life can remain private and still shape everything that follows. What matters is that I was given a second chance, that women helped carry me through it, and that I have spent much of the time since trying to understand what I am supposed to do with it.

In the first week of October last year, someone bought something from Timeless Grace for the first time. As I approach year two, I find myself thinking less about what I have built and more about why I built it. More specifically, I have been thinking about who I was long before Timeless Grace existed and who I am trying to return to now.

Today, I was driving with my girls while "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls played. I looked at them and thought about how extraordinary it is to watch children discover themselves. Their interests emerge, their personalities sharpen, and you start to see what makes each of them come alive. As I help my daughters and son make that journey, I am realizing that I am still making it too.

Maybe we never stop becoming ourselves. Maybe growing older is less about creating a new person than remembering the one who existed before the world started telling us who we were supposed to be.

Long before Timeless Grace, motherhood, marriage, careers, algorithms, or any of the strange measurements we use to decide whether our lives are going well, I was a little girl who desperately wanted to understand the world.

When I was five, I wanted to be an explorer because the world seemed impossibly large. I became fascinated with Cleopatra, ancient civilizations, light, color, shapes, and stories. I wrote long stories of my own. I made things with my hands. I wanted to know why people behaved the way they did and believed what they believed. By ninth grade, a book like Anthem could consume me so completely that I would launch into passionate debates with my teachers about individualism and society.

People did not always know what to do with me, and if I am truthful, there were many years when I did not know what to do with myself either. My interests did not fit neatly together. I could care deeply about fashion and ancient history, business and art, beautiful rooms and dirty hands, social worlds and solitude. I was rarely trying to provoke anyone. I was trying to understand.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, I watched Britney Spears perform "…Baby One More Time" on television while adults debated whether she was showing too much of her stomach. I saw something different. I saw a dancer and gymnast moving her body, styling herself, and having fun. I saw self-expression.

So I began making my own outfits and experimenting with my hair. Sometimes people understood it, and sometimes they did not. My mother, importantly, encouraged me. Fashion became one of the earliest ways I learned that creating something beautiful can be its own language.

But the deepest thread of my childhood was quieter than that. It was listening.

In second and third grade, I spent a great deal of time in nursing homes with my grandmother. My grandfather was dying of Alzheimer's, and I watched her care for him and for the people around her. Many of the residents were veterans. Some were living with severe memory disorders. No other children sat there talking with them, holding their hands or helping feed them at the end. Beyond the paid staff, few people did.

But I wanted to.

I played music for them on the piano and occasionally sang. I sat with them and listened to stories about lives that had begun decades before mine. Nobody told me it would make me a good person. I was genuinely interested. I wanted to understand what they had experienced, what they had sacrificed, and who they had been before age and illness reduced the world's ability to see them clearly.

I understood very young that a human life could hold an enormous story invisible from the outside.

When I was about eleven, I would sit with my great-grandmother in her trailer while she told me about living through the Great Depression in downtown Detroit. She told me about making bathtub gin. She told me where she hid her money. She told me how she saved everything she could so my grandfather could have a clarinet and march in a military parade in California.

Was I too young for some of those stories? Maybe. But for my soul, I was not.

I wanted to understand how women lived when they didn't have enough money, food, security, or certainty. As I have learned more about my family, I have found women who remarried because economic survival required it, women who made difficult choices to keep their daughters housed and safe. They stretched what they had. They repaired, cooked, sewed, worked, improvised, and endured.

None of them would have described themselves as building a personal brand.

They were building lives.

My great-uncle, great-grandmother, and grandmother in WWII-era Michigan

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

I eventually entered the marketing world, where we become very good at measuring things; revenue, conversion, reach, engagement. I learned to recognize what sells, build relationships, close deals, and find the message that makes someone act. I am good at that work. But at some point I realized I had spent enormous energy driving the numbers of other businesses without asking whether the work was feeding anything inside of me.

That realization helped form the foundation of Timeless Grace's brand values and mission.

Ironically, during this first year, I have sometimes watched myself recreate the same world I was trying to leave. I have worried about whether a Reel will perform, whether I am posting enough, whether I am meeting the right people, how quickly I can scale, and how I can get more people to notice.

Those questions are part of running a business. Timeless Grace has to make money to exist, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the numbers cannot become the reason it exists. I did not create it to make viral Reels, get on Shark Tank, or climb some invisible social ladder toward bigger rooms.

Sometimes I forget that. I think many of us do.

We live in a culture that makes visibility feel synonymous with significance. Yet some of the people who changed my life most profoundly were never broadcasting themselves at all. My grandmother was not sitting with people in a nursing home because someone would photograph her doing it. The women who came before me were not stretching a household budget because anyone would applaud. They did it because someone needed it done. They did it because they loved people.

I was reminded of that in Bishop, California. In May 2025, months before Timeless Grace made its first sale, I went rock climbing there with essentially no experience. In that landscape, I met women who changed something in me. They were strong and adventurous, but what struck me most was how little their strength depended on being witnessed. They were doing hard things because they wanted to experience the mountain, the air, their bodies, and one another.

Me, rock climbing in Bishop, California, May 2025

On May 25, 2025, I tore a piece of lined paper from a notebook and wrote myself a note. I still keep it in my wallet:

Beautiful mountains. Women who do hard things without the need for clicks or positive reinforcement, simply for the experience of fresh air, movement, connection, challenging your body, and living a life based on adventure + kinship.

The constant release of disconnection to the reconnection of oneself.

Beyond an influencer, beyond a thought leader or someone with a false bottom line, but rather a purposeful contribution to empowering women + guiding them along.

I did not know I was writing part of the Timeless Grace mission.

The constant release of disconnection to the reconnection of oneself. That is Timeless Grace.

The apron was simply the first physical expression of it.

I created the Classic Grace Apron because I wanted a garment I couldn't find: beautiful enough that putting it on changed how I felt, and functional enough to support the work I was actually doing. Women are constantly moving between roles. We host, build businesses, raise children, care for aging parents, sit beside people who are leaving this world, and make birthday cakes late at night. Those acts are not less valuable because nobody sees them. They deserve beauty. They deserve dignity.

The Classic Grace Apron was never really the point. The woman wearing it was.

When I picture who I want wearing Timeless Grace, I do not primarily imagine someone promoting it in front of a camera. I think about an apron with flour on it because she made bread for her family. An apron with dirt in the pocket because she was planting something. An apron covered in paint because she made something that existed only in her imagination that morning. An apron worn while preparing food for a friend who is grieving. An apron that gets used.

That woman may never photograph it or tag us. And she may be exactly the woman changing the heartbeat of the world.

Some of the most influential women I have ever known had no audience at all. Their influence lived in the child who felt safe because of them, the family held together, the music played in a nursing home, the clarinet bought after months of saving. That kind of influence does not fit neatly into an analytics dashboard. But I think it is the kind that lasts.

Women helped save my life. They have taught me, challenged me, carried me, and reminded me who I was during periods when I could no longer see her clearly myself.

Now I am raising girls and a son, and watching them become themselves has made me fiercely protective of the things inside a person that cannot be measured. Curiosity. Individuality. Wonder. Courage. The strange little interests that make no commercial sense but make someone's eyes light up.

I want my children to know those things have value before the world tries to convince them otherwise.

Maybe that is what I am relearning too. For years I thought I needed to become easier to categorize. More polished, more consistent, somehow less much. The older I get, the less interested I am in sanding down the pieces of myself that do not fit neatly together.

Those pieces are the reason this company exists.

Sales goals, spreadsheets, inventory decisions, and experiments that fail spectacularly will still happen. But those things are tools. They are not the heartbeat. The heartbeat is the woman: the maker, the caregiver, the explorer, the woman whose life did not follow the clean line she expected, the woman slowly remembering parts of herself she forgot.

I was given another chance to live. I do not want to spend it performing a version of myself designed to receive applause. I want to make things, stay curious, raise children who know themselves, and listen to people whose stories might otherwise disappear.

I want Timeless Grace to grow. But more than that, I want it to mean something.

Perhaps the measure of year two is not how far outward we can reach, but how deeply we can return.

To the people we were before we learned to perform.
To the people we are still becoming.
To the reconnection of oneself.