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You don't have a talent problem. You have a permission problem. If you've ever felt drawn to paint, dance, write, or make something — and then talked yourself out of it because it felt ridiculous for "someone like you" — this episode is about why that happens, what it's actually costing you, and how to stop waiting for permission that isn't coming.

Drawing on Julia Cameron's concept of the "shadow artist" from The Artist's Way, Kristin breaks down the difference between people who are stuck circling a creative life and people who are actually living one — and it isn't talent.

What You'll Hear

• What a shadow artist actually is: someone caught between the dream of action and the fear of failure, feeling a vague discontent or restlessness they can't quite name
• Why "I'm just not talented" is a story, not a fact — and why Kristin says drawing (and most creative skill) is learned, not inherited
• The five signs you're a shadow artist: consuming instead of creating, surrounding yourself with art without claiming it, being quietly (or not-so-quietly) critical of people who do the thing, feeling restless despite an objectively fine life, and having a long list of practical reasons why now isn't the time
• Why Kristin called herself "an art lover" instead of an artist for a long time — and what that phrase was really protecting her from
• A story from Kristin's first drawing class at the community college, and what happened when she walked in scared instead of waiting to feel ready
• How martyrdom gets rewarded in Mormon culture specifically — and why "look what I gave up for my family/the gospel" is a sophisticated excuse, not a virtue
• Steven Pressfield's idea of the "unlived life" — and why unexpressed desire doesn't disappear, it resurfaces as resentment, jealousy, and irritability
• Why you should "have the audacity of a mediocre white man" and stop waiting for permission or credentials before you start

Key Takeaways

• Talent is not the gate. Showing up repeatedly and tolerating the discomfort of being a beginner is the entire difference between you and the person whose art you admire.
• The urge to create doesn't fade with neglect. It goes underground and comes out sideways — as restlessness, irritability, or a hum of dissatisfaction you can't explain.
• Waiting until you're not scared is waiting forever. Fear is a passenger on this trip, not a stop sign.
• Martyrdom (for family, for the church, for anyone) is often just a well-dressed excuse for staying small — and no one is handing out a reward for it.

Your unlived desire is not going anywhere. It goes underground and comes back out as resentment, as restlessness, as that low hum of something's missing that you can't quite name.

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You didn't leave because you wanted to sin. You left because you saw things you couldn't unsee, and you followed your integrity out. This episode is about the price of that: being misunderstood by the people who used to know you best, and what to do about it.

What This Episode Covers

Kristin's husband recently saw extended family for the first time in a while. His text afterward: "they are afraid of me." Nothing about him had fundamentally changed — a tattoo, some facial hair, a different drink order. What changed is that he no longer fits their worldview, and that's enough for a "family-focused" religion to quietly write someone off.

This episode breaks down why that happens and five ways to stop letting it run your life.

Five Ways to Navigate Being Misunderstood

1. It's not about you, it's about them. The labels — lazy, deceived, never had a testimony — aren't an assessment of you. They're a release valve that lets believing members avoid examining their own foundation. Your leaving threatens a worldview built on decades of labor, money, and identity. It's easier to decide something is wrong with you than to ask whether something is wrong with the system.

2. What other people think of you is none of your business. This isn't generic self-help. Exmormon women were raised in a system where worthiness was measured by visibility — temple recommend interviews, callings, how the ward perceived you. Being well-regarded was treated as proof you were living correctly. Untangling your identity from other people's opinions means something different when that's your starting point. This also isn't a license to ignore all feedback — feedback on your actions is useful. Someone's private verdict about your character is not.

3. Stop auditioning. You don't owe anyone a performance of your outcome — good or bad. You can't be present in a hard season if you're managing how it looks. You can't enjoy a good one if you're performing for an audience. The church trained you to audition for your worthiness. You're allowed to opt out of the trial entirely. Replace "how will this look to others" with "what do I actually want here."

4. Find the people who don't label you. A friend's group of Mormon friends dropped her the moment she started wearing pants to church. That's the ceiling on belonging in a system built on conformity — step out of line once and you're out. Finding people who love you without requiring proof of anything is one of the real, unexpected rewards on the other side.

5. Allow the grief. You're allowed to miss the relationship you used to have, even while knowing you made the right call. The people you love may never see what you see, or feel the freedom you've found. That's a real loss. It doesn't undo the decision.

Key Takeaway

You are not required to win back a verdict from people who were never actually weighing the evidence. Their judgment is self-preservation, not truth. Stop trying to prove you're happy. Find the people who don't need you to be anyone other than who you are — then go live your life.

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A woman posted on an LDS forum that her garments were so uncomfortable, she'd stopped wearing them — and then asked permission. Is this okay? Am I sinning? That question is the entry point into this episode: a close look at how Mormonism trains women to defer their own authority to outside approval, how that shows up far beyond garments or sexuality, and what it actually takes to reclaim full ownership of your own body, voice, and life.

Kristin unpacks infantilization as a system — not a single rule, but an infrastructure that teaches women to check in before acting on their own desire, comfort, ambition, or anger. She shares her own experience starting pole dancing and painting as embodiment practices, walks through the difference between compliance and ownership when your choices look the same from the outside, and offers a concrete way to tell the difference between old conditioned fear and real danger.

What's Covered

• The forum story: a woman asking strangers for permission to trust her own body, and what that reveals about paternalistic control
• Infantilization as an infrastructure, not a single moment — how it shows up in sexuality, ambition, anger, physical strength, intellectual authority, voice in conflict, solitude, rest, and rage at injustice
• Why sexuality in Mormonism is routed through male permission, and what it means for a woman to own her sexuality as hers first
• Kristin's experience starting pole dancing as an embodiment practice with no audience and no justification required
• Reclaiming womanhood as a four-part practice: noticing where you give away authority, separating compliance from ownership, expecting discomfort without mistaking it for danger, and dropping the need to justify your own desire
• A real test for telling old conditioned fear apart from an actual danger signal
• How Kristin and her husband had to rebuild their marriage from choice instead of obligation after leaving the church
• Painting and dance as embodiment practices — why physical, repeated, unsupervised creative expression rebuilds self-trust in a way thinking alone can't.

If you recognize that habit of checking outside yourself before you trust your own answer — that's exactly the work I do with women one-on-one.

I offer a free Reclamation Call: one conversation, just you and me, where we look at where you're still deferring your authority and what it would actually take to reclaim it. No pitch, no pressure — just a real look at where you are and what's next.

You can book yours at the link in the show notes. You don't need the forum. You don't need permission. You just need one honest conversation to start.

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Resistance Isn't a Stop Sign — It's a Map

This week I'm breaking down Resistance — the concept Stephen Pressfield writes about in The War of Art — and why it ambushes you right at the exact moment you're closest to the thing you actually want. I'll walk through where Resistance really comes from, how to tell it apart from real intuition (this part matters especially if you grew up being taught your feelings were a moral compass), and what it actually takes to move through it — not by white-knuckling your way past it, but by understanding the game your own brain is playing.

What You'll Learn:

• The difference between the surface reasons you avoid your work (fear, perfectionism, distraction, self-medicating with food/shopping/scrolling, manufactured drama) and the real reason underneath all of them
• Why Resistance is proportional to how much something matters to your growth — not to how physically risky it actually is
• Why the loudest Resistance shows up right before the things closest to your calling
• Five ways to tell Resistance apart from your intuition: timing, content vs. noise, direction, physical signature, and whether it holds up under scrutiny
• Why this is a distinct challenge for women raised in high-control religion, where doubt was pathologized and your own emotional signals were used as the mechanism of control
• The Amateur vs. Professional framework — and why "turning pro" is about your relationship to the work, not your skill level
• A track-record practice for rebuilding trust in your own signal over time

Key Takeaway: Resistance isn't proof you should stop. It's proof you're close to something real. The work isn't waiting for it to quiet down — it won't. The work is learning to stop believing what it tells you, and showing up anyway.

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If you were raised Mormon, you were taught to outsource your authority, your boundaries, and your worth to everyone around you. This episode isn't about making good art — it's about using creativity as a rehearsal space for trusting yourself.

Kristin shares her own experience coming out of the church with a voracious, almost obsessive need to create — painting until 2am, forgetting to eat, unable to get enough of what the practice was doing for her. Looking back, she's identified exactly what that hunger was: creativity isn't the reward for finding yourself. It's how you build who you are.

In this episode, Kristin breaks down ten ways a creative practice — painting, writing, or whatever medium calls to you — rebuilds the internal skills that high-control religion strips away.

In This Episode

1. Releasing the need for control Why art refuses to let you force an outcome, and how that uncertainty becomes practice for staying present instead of white-knuckling toward a predetermined result.

2. Creating boundaries around your time Claiming hours that belong to no one but you — and why the people around you may resist that shift before they adjust to it.

3. Trying new things The case for novel experience as a nervous-system reset, and why the unfamiliar class or the unfamiliar hobby matters more than whether you're "good" at it.

4. Tolerating being bad at something Breaking the link between performance and permission to feel okay — including Kristin's ongoing war with painting flowers.

5. Flow state What it feels like to exist without self-surveillance after years of monitoring your own righteousness, and a simple way to start practicing it today.

6. Commitment — without the binary Why turning creative practice into a checklist recreates the same pass/fail system you're trying to leave, and what happens when you commit to yourself without the threat of punishment.

7. Risk taking Using low-stakes creative choices to practice the sensation of "I don't know what will happen and I'm doing it anyway" — without any real-world consequence attached.

8. Taking up physical space Claiming a table, a corner, a room as an act of quiet rebellion against the belief that your space belongs to everyone but you.

9. Being in the process — there's no "arriving" Unlearning the idea that everything must build toward exaltation, perfection, or a finish line.

10. Play Reconnecting to your body and your curiosity as sources of delight, and replacing "what ought I to be doing" with "what feels joyful right now."

Key Takeaway

None of these ten things are really about becoming a better artist. Creative practice is a rehearsal for trusting yourself — for recognizing impulse, tolerating imperfection, and taking up space. The boundary you set today in the studio is the boundary you'll already know how to set tomorrow, everywhere else.

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Regret doesn't only live in the church. It shows up in relationships, in choices we can't take back, in years we wish we'd spent differently. If you've ever thought "I should have figured this out sooner" or "look at all the years I wasted," this episode is for you.

Kristin breaks down five shifts in perspective that dismantle regret at the root — not by rewriting the past, but by changing your relationship to it. This is the difference between staying anchored to who you were and stepping fully into who you're becoming.

What You'll Learn

1. There is no upside to beating yourself up. Self-punishment feels like accountability. It isn't. It's a drain on the exact energy you need to build your new life. Shame kept you in line inside the church — it has no job to do out here.

2. It was supposed to happen. Not because of fate or prophecy. Because it did. Arguing with what already happened is a fight you lose every time. The question isn't "what should I have done" — it's "what do I choose now."

3. Let go of the imaginary past. The version of your life where you left sooner, knew better, did it all right — that version doesn't exist. It never did. You're grieving a fantasy, not a real alternative.

4. Your past decisions were made with past tools. You cannot judge the choices you made with the awareness you only have now. You didn't have this clarity then. You couldn't have. That's not an excuse — it's the truth.

5. Grief is the antidote to regret. Regret keeps you spinning in your head, trying to solve something that's already over. Grief drops you into your body and lets you actually metabolize the loss — of time, identity, relationships, the person you thought you were. That's how it moves through you instead of staying stuck in you.

Key Takeaway

You are not required to keep punishing a version of yourself who was doing the best she could with what she had. Self-compassion isn't letting yourself off the hook — it's the only thing that actually frees you to take responsibility, make amends, and build forward.

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We are taught to praise quiet endurance, self-sacrifice, and endless productivity in women — and taught to fear untamed laughter, chaotic play, and uninhibited delight. In high-control religious cultures, fun isn't just discouraged. It's treated as spiritually dangerous.

In this episode, we unpack why joy feels like a threat: the good girl conditioning that keeps women hyper-vigilant, the temple covenant against "loud laughter," the compulsion to perform happiness on social media, and the rigid expectations that quietly ruin every unstructured moment. We'll look at what Brené Brown calls "foreboding joy" — the vulnerability of fully feeling delight without bracing for the fallout — and what the science actually says about play as a nervous system necessity, not a luxury.

You'll leave with three practical shifts to start reclaiming fun: how to schedule play as a boundary instead of a task, how to practice unposted joy, and how to identify what actually brings you alive instead of what you think should.

You don't have to earn fun. It was yours to begin with.

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"I'm just not creative." "I could never do that." "I'm not the kind of person who finishes things." You've said one of these — or something close to it — so many times it stopped sounding like an opinion. It started sounding like a fact. It isn't one.

In this episode, Kristin breaks down the difference between a circumstance (provable, measurable, true regardless of who's looking) and a limiting belief (a thought you've repeated until it felt like biology). She explains why your brain keeps finding evidence to confirm what you already believe about yourself, why this pattern runs especially deep for anyone raised in a high-control religious structure, and exactly how to start testing the beliefs that are quietly running your life.

In this episode: What separates a fact from a belief — and why your brain can't tell the difference on its own

Why growing up in a high-demand religious system trains you to accept assigned identities instead of testing them

Four questions to figure out whether a belief is truly yours, or something you inherited

A real coaching example: how one client dismantled "I never finish anything" by finding the evidence she'd been ignoring The one-word shift ("yet") that gets you out of black-and-white thinking

Why separating the belief from your identity — "I've been telling myself I'm not creative" vs. "I'm not creative" — changes what's possible One small experiment to try this week that gives your brain new evidence to work with

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Are You a Perfectionist? Here's Why That's Not the Compliment You Think It Is

Perfectionism gets worn like a badge of honor. I used to wear mine that way too. But underneath the polished exterior, perfectionism isn't a high standard — it's an impossible one.

In this episode, I break down what perfectionism actually is, why your brain defaults to it, and the practical antidote I use to get my own imperfect work out into the world.

I talk about the myth of "perfect" itself — how even our own definitions of it are nebulous, how one person's perfect manuscript is another person's rough draft.

I get into how Mormon culture trains this particular flavor of perfectionism from childhood, where testimony meetings only make room for certainty and struggle is only allowed in past tense. And I talk about how the wider culture backs this up — rewarding the finished book, not the drafts; the overnight success, not the seven invisible years before it.

I share what perfectionism actually looked like in my daily life — the schedule I built for myself with a checklist so long that missing one item gave me permission to abandon the whole day.

I walk through the small, sneaky ways perfectionism shows up for most of us: buying the supplies and never starting, quitting a new skill the second it gets hard, treating rest as something to be earned instead of allowed.

Then I get into what actually works. I talk about Brooke Castillo's concept of B- work — the idea that done imperfectly beats undone every time — and why creative practice is the best low-stakes place to build the muscle of showing up messy.

I share why I've had to get comfortable being cringe, why the loudest critics are rarely the people who've actually walked the path themselves, and a practical exercise for taking the sting out of other people's judgment.

If this episode resonates, I made something for you. My Reclamation Sketchbook is a free 7-day guided art journal — one creative prompt a day, no experience or talent required. It's the easiest place I know to practice doing something imperfectly on purpose.

Articles Referenced in this episode: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-discomfort-zone/202408/overcoming-perfectionism

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4562912/

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Faith deconstruction isn't a clean process. You're rebuilding a self while still going to work, parenting, managing a marriage and a household. There's no roadmap for it — you're improvising for the first time in a life that used to hand you all the answers. In this episode, I'm walking through the things I got wrong along the way. Not to give you one more thing to get right, but so you can spot the patterns faster than I did.

What I cover: Not being able to sit with uncertainty. After decades inside a system that had all the answers, uncertainty feels intolerable. I talk about the pull to replace one authority with another — wellness culture, politics, self-help, even coaching — and why developing a tolerance for not knowing is what actually makes you free.

Making decisions from reaction. Anger is what gets you out the door. It's not where you want to make your future decisions from. I unpack the difference between total rejection of the old system and actually deciding for yourself what you think — because doing the opposite of what you were told is still letting the old system set the terms.

All-or-nothing thinking. Mormonism trains this hard — good or bad, worthy or unworthy, no in between. I talk about how that binary doesn't disappear when you leave, it just switches teams. The nuance is harder to hold, but a self built on binary categories is just as brittle as the one you left.

Not telling my family sooner. I sat on this for years, partly to protect them and partly to protect myself. I get honest about what that silence actually communicated, and why there's no universal right timeline here — just your own judgment about your specific people.

Assuming my kids' experience matched mine. I projected my own reckoning onto my three kids, who each had a completely different relationship to the church depending on their age when we left. I talk about what I missed and why staying curious about their experience mattered more than narrating mine to them.

Staying in my head. The information binge — podcasts, documentaries, historical records — is a necessary stage, but it can also become a way to avoid the grief underneath it. I talk about what finally got me out of my head and into my body, including how painting became part of my process.

Expecting a linear timeline. Healing isn't a straight line, it's a spiral. I still get hit with grief or anger I don't expect. I talk about why that's normal and not a sign you're doing it wrong.

Closing thought: Nothing is wrong with you. Things haven't gone wrong. Setting out on this journey at all is the brave part — the mess is just what it looks like from the inside.

Download the Reclamation Sketchbook HERE