How I Became a Mapmaker... By Accident
/When I went to college, I tried to get in as an elementary education major. At that point, I'd been working with kids for 6 years and I knew that I loved teaching. At 17, the idea of getting to spend all day doing crafts and teaching and singing to kindergartners was a dream.
But the Universe had other plans. I didn’t get into my chosen major because my GPA was too low. Even though I was intelligent, I’d been through hell in high school and it impacted my grades. As a smart kid, this meant that it also affected my self-worth.
So I got into college as “Undecided,” which pretty much defined the rest of my collegiate career.
By the end of my freshman year I had been working in the library all year and realized maybe I could turn my love of reading and writing into a career instead.
As a sophomore, I declared my major as English, and by the end of my junior year I’d had two years of literature classes with no idea of what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. I didn’t want to teach English, and even though I’d had a love affair with books since I was little, the idea of actually making a living as a writer didn’t even occur to me. (Even as a writer for the student paper, which I did for fun!) Journalism as a career didn’t appeal to me, and I began to worry that maybe... I just loved learning.
Plus, I had these totally random piles of manila folders with all the tips and tricks I had collected from magazines for the last decade on how to be more efficient, how to get organized, how to learn better, exercise routines, nutrition tips, and everything I could find on being happy.
I didn’t even know what I was saving all of those clips for, though whenever I needed inspiration I would go through my carefully curated folders for ideas.
Then, in my junior year I took a geography class with an incredible professor. He was English, so he had a terrific accent and even better, he was hilarious, so he made every single class interactive and fun.
I dove into my Geography major, and fell in love with so many aspects of it.
In some ways, it was really good! It was good for me to fall in love with higher education and to be able to see the value beyond my love of learning.
But I still felt restless. Everyone that I told I was a geography major with minors in international studies, history, government and theater thought I was either on my way to DC, going to be a geography teacher, and occasionally, someone thought I would be a mapmaker (a cartographer). But I didn’t want to do any of that.
I did consider cartography for a bit though.
When I took my first mapmaking course in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and started to explore and understand the world from a bird’s eye view - looking at layers in maps for natural formations, populations, cultures, religions, infrastructure, ethnicities - it was incredible. Suddenly big-picture thinking and seeing things from a strategic perspective became possible in a way that I never could’ve expected.
This spilled over into every aspect of my life - my friendships, my course load, my goals, my future. How I looked at everything changed and instead of seeing bits of magazine clippings in my manilla folders I saw tools I wanted to teach other women. Tips and tricks to build better lives. And don’t get me wrong, those tips and tricks were wonderful, and many of them are still applicable to making our lives better.
But what I didn’t know then, was that if you don’t have a great mindset, you can have all the clarity in the world, or no clarity, and you’re still not going to move forward in a way that is real, sustainable, and in alignment with your biggest, bravest vision for your life.
Not to worry, the Universe helped me course correct.
With the clarity that came around my desire to help women find their voices and thrive in whatever way that looks like for them, came one of the worst years of my life.
I was raped by someone that I thought was a friend, I told my friends about it and they didn’t believe me, and the fragile hold I had on my inner self-peace after not truly dealing with over a decade of trauma came crashing down.
I gave up on school, I gave up on friends, and I gave up on life. My suicide attempt landed me in a psych ward for a month when I was 20 years old, and that’s where I learned to meditate.
It didn’t solve everything by any means, but meditation gave me the greatest tool of all, which was inner solitude.
The knowledge that no matter what came my way, I would be OK. I didn’t believe that entirely in the beginning, but I do now.
After I got home from the hospital, with no job, no money, no classes, no friends and no roommates, I got into an unhealthy relationship that wound up with my house being broken into and all of my valuables and electronics being stolen.
But I could still meditate. And I told anyone who would listen that (truthfully) I’d been looking to downsize anyway. I also learned the value of renter’s insurance in a way I could never possibly forget!
Eventually I left school, a few credits shy of a degree in Geography and stopped listening to anyone but my own voice. I had to, because when you’re locked up for a month, away from the world, from social media (and this was ten years ago), from everything that distracts us, your inner voice becomes pretty f**king loud.
I spent a decade untangling and re-tangling my life, figuring it out along the way as we all do, and rebuilding my foundation on self development, personal accountability and the fierce belief that we are co-creators with the Universe.
I started working with women halfway through my own learning and eventually, started teaching them how to do the same. How to get crystal clear on what they want, how to meditate, and how to design their dream lives.