Turning 38: Lessons on Being a Disruptor

It's my birthdayyyy and I am turning 38 years old. I have kept up an annual tradition since I was 26 years young to create an essay on my reflections from that year of life. You can check out my essay archive to see what I was up to in those young years when my knees were fresh and my sinews were tight, but as I was reflecting on what are my lessons for this birthday, the concept of disruption kept coming up.

A lot of my life has been driven by disrupting the status-quo through defiance, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more of a disruptor not through just defiance, but communion. 

I was born and raised in Utah. I experienced a lot of discrimination and people telling me what I could, would, and should not do, but I would defiantly do what they said I couldn’t. 

Whether it was my clothes and wearing fashionable things that other people maybe weren't, like wearing kitten heels (ya’ll remember those) to high school and my teacher saying, “You're gonna impel somebody with them shoes.” And I said in response, “No, this is fashionee, get on board.” Weeks later, other people were adopting the trend.

Or my defiance when it came to college, and applying to a ton of prestigious schools across the country to prove a point, after being told that going to college outside of Utah would be a stretch for me and not likely to happen, despite my stellar academic record. I got into Cornell University kind of out of spite, a funny reason to apply to the colleges I did. 

I’ve even been defiant and disruptive when it came to my own body. I'm a curvy woman with the tig ols’ (if you know you know) and I was told by so many people, you shouldn't love yourself. You shouldn't like yourself. You shouldn't take up space. You better not be up in here enjoying yourself in that body. I have constantly shown a self-love that is in defiance of the things around me. 

I’ve also been a defiant disruptor by creating a business. I've run The New Quo for the last seven years, and created it because I was in these toxic work environments that were full of stereotype and negativity bias, and knew I could create tools to disrupt that. 

In this 38th year of life, that lesson of disruption was still at play after dealing with all of the chaos of what was happening politically and economically.

I've worked in the inclusion, diversity, and equity space for a long time now, and knew a backlash was coming because bigots will bigot. At the top of this year, I lost 90 % of my business revenue and income, and I was lucky I had some savings and investments to weather the storm. But I kept thinking, am I going to do something in defiance of our federal government literally criminalizing the concept of empathy and community and acting a fool?

And I realized that defiance wasn't what I wanted to do in response to this tomfoolery. Communion was. 

How I define communion is creating spaces of deep emotional connection, deep empathy and understanding, play, generosity, and joy. These practices are not in response and reaction to what we don’t want, as defiance often operates - they just exist as a beautiful alternative that is powerful on its own. 

I spent a lot of time this year on creating spaces for deep communion despite the immense uncertainty and challenges I was dealt. One of those projects was called Change My Mind: A Live Storytelling Experience in New York City, funded by local government funds from the New York City Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes and the New York City Commission on Human Rights. People are isolated and lonely, and these local government agencies wanted to get creative and bring people together of different backgrounds to understand each other and to make meaningful relationships with one another.

I pitched Change My Mind and facilitated, produced, and performed in these deep, meaningful storytelling events where people would get up and talk about true stories from their lives, like their first generation immigrant experience, their coming out story, dealing with the incarceration system, dealing with catastrophe and environmental loss and so much more.

These stories were funny, light, serious and all of the emotional spectrum and kaleidoscope you can imagine. People of all backgrounds came to these events, connected meaningfully with one another, and learned something new about people they never would have met on their own. Producing these events in the midst of this chaos was so incredibly meaningful and an act of disruption by creating a space for communion on values being oppressed and ignored in our wider society. 

The second project that I did this year that was a communion based project of disruption was The New Quo Learning Community, which you may be a part of or have seen online in other posts, or through Tell it Proud podcast episodes. I witnessed the federal government trying to erase history and punish people for speaking truth to power, and I said to myself, “If I.C.E. came knocking on my door today, I want to know that I've said all the things I wanted to say and made all the things I wanted to make.”

I published weekly essays for TNQ community members on social justice insights from history, pop culture, books, and original poetry. I've researched, written, and published 48 original essays this year with some of my favorites being chosen family and the fallacy of nuclear love, courage is the antidote to oppression, what the west got wrong about neurodivergence, and why you shouldn’t ignore your intuition.

So much of my time this year was spent on disruption. Not in defiance of what I don’t like, but instead focused on vision, imagination, and co-creating an equitable future that we know can exist. Not just in spite of the people who don't want those things to come to fruition, because they aren’t even part of the equation. We can create spaces of communion that disrupts the status-quo for the better because we can and because we will.

I hope this inspires you to think about how you're disrupting things, not just in defiance, not just in spite, but in joy, generosity, and playfulness of creating something that is meaningful, that uplifts people, that shows them that there is gratitude and abundance in a world driven by fear, driven by anxiety, driven by black and white thinking and rigidity that is keeping innovation from its highest level.

I am so incredibly grateful to be turning 38, to be looking at this next year of 2026 with my heart full of joy, generosity, curiosity, communion, and liberation, because they ain't gonna stop us. Every act of oppression just keeps motivating us forward.