Hey, I’m Kat 👋
I write about what it’s like to build a beautiful life without any guarantees — because I’m disabled, chronically ill, and a cancer survivor, and “guarantee” stopped being a word I could use honestly a long time ago.
This is a place for the messy middle. The part after the emergency, when everyone else has moved on and you’re still living inside the change.
It started with a body
that stopped negotiating.
I was raised Mormon, by a mother I now understand had narcissistic features — so I learned early to override what my body was telling me in favor of what I was supposed to feel. That training runs deep. It took two marriages that echoed the same dynamic, a cancer diagnosis, and a body that simply refused to keep cooperating with the override, before I started actually listening.
I live with ME/CFS and POTS. For sixteen years, I also believed I had celiac disease — until I found out, recently, that I don’t. Sixteen years of reading every label, avoiding every risk, living by a story about my body that turned out to be wrong.
Then there was the cancer. Uterine leiomyosarcoma — a rare, chemo-resistant kind, where surgery is the only real shot you get. I was lucky in layers: caught early, removed intact, staged low when it could easily have gone the other way. I’m currently living well past my diagnosis, and I still carry real statistical odds that this isn’t over. Both of those are true at once, every single day.
What I do with all of that.
I bake sourdough — in fragments, from bed, because a full afternoon in the kitchen isn’t something my body reliably gives me. I fold the dough, I rest, I come back and fold it again. Somewhere in the folding, I found the actual shape of what I now write about: agency and joy don’t require a resolved body or a guarantee of more time. They’re built the same way bread is — in small, repeatable returns.
That’s what led me here, to grace & magic, and to building Crafting Your Artisan Life — a course born directly out of learning to build a life by hand, without a recipe anyone handed me.
A few ways in
The Blog
Essays from the four rooms I actually live in: the body, the unlearning, the making, and the in-between.
The Podcast
Solo, unscripted, honest updates — anniversaries, fears named out loud, whatever I’m actually thinking about that week.
Crafting Your Artisan Life
A self-directed course for women building deeper agency and joy inside whatever life is currently throwing at them.
No superpowers here
I’m disabled and living with multiple chronic illnesses — ME/CFS and POTS, alongside being a cancer survivor. I’m not going to tell you it’s a superpower. Some days it’s just hard, full stop.
I make bread from bed more often than I make it from a kitchen counter, and I’ve stopped apologizing for that.
I was raised inside a belief system that told me exactly what I was allowed to want. I’m still, slowly, unlearning parts of it.
I believe in ordinary Tuesdays. Genuinely. Some of the most important things that have ever happened to me looked, at the time, like nothing at all.
What steers everything I write
Two truths,
held at once
Terrified and genuinely happy. Grieving and still curious. Neither one cancels the other.
No tidy bow
Not every hard thing resolves by the time I finish writing about it. Sometimes the ending is just: I’m still here.
Artisan pace
over hustle
Nothing here is built for speed. Bread needs time. So does a life you actually recognize as yours.
The signposts
- PrecisionNaming the specific thing, not the vague, comfortable version of it. Real numbers. Real names for diagnoses, fears, beliefs.
- PermissionFor joy that doesn’t wait for better circumstances, and for grief that doesn’t need to explain itself.
- Ordinary magicThe belief that unremarkable days are often doing more work than the remarkable ones.
- Rest as processNot the opposite of productivity, but one of its actual ingredients.
- Curiosity over certaintyEspecially about my own body, my own beliefs, and the stories I was handed before I could question them.
I’m not further along because I have it figured out. I’m further along because I’ve had more practice folding the dough, resting, and coming back to it again — under real pressure, without a guarantee of how any of it ends.