What Didn’t Stay in Alaska

I spent last week in Alaska, returning to a place that holds more than memory for me. It holds a way of being that shaped how I move through the world, even now.

I lived in the Interior, in Fairbanks, for fifteen years beginning in my mid-twenties. I left for Chicago to attend graduate school in Dance/Movement therapy, then returned for another decade. In my thirties, I spent building my career, growing my family, and weaving myself into community. We were back there last week, moving through places that once held the architecture of my daily life, and I was reminded how much of that time still lives in me. I also continue to hold land in Southeast Alaska, so the relationship has not ended; it has simply evolved.

What Alaska offered me was not just a setting, but a set of conditions that shaped how I learned to live and work.

The pace was different, dictated less by urgency and more by the realities of the environment. Nature was not something you stepped into for respite; it was something you lived within, something that could be grounding and expansive while also unpredictable and, at times, dangerous. That context required a different kind of attention. It asked for awareness, for responsiveness, for a relationship with limits and timing that could not be overridden by will alone. Alongside that, there was a kind of openness I had not experienced before.

In those early years, I built a cabin in the woods without running water or electricity. It was not a rejection of complexity, but simply the life that was available and unfolding in that place. I was also building my identity as a therapist and, later, birthing my children with a midwife at a birthing center, experiences that stood in quiet contrast to how I had been raised outside of Chicago, where progress was often defined by proximity to institutions, and where structure and certainty guided most major decisions.

In Alaska, those assumptions loosened.

Looking back, I can see that I was living inside a context that made it possible to begin before I felt fully prepared. There were fewer layers between an idea and its execution, fewer barriers reinforcing the belief that expertise must come before action. For an example, when I became interested in Equine therapy after reading about its benefits as a Dance/Movement therapist, the path from curiosity to practice was unexpectedly direct. My supervisor supported the idea, secured funding, and I found myself leading a group, learning in real time, building something that did not previously exist in that setting.

That way of living didn’t stay in Alaska.

It shaped how I understand systems & how they either expand or constrain what feels possible, how they quietly teach us to wait for permission or invite us to participate in building what is needed. In Alaska, the combination of fewer people, less rigid competition, and a different relationship to time created access. Not perfect access, and not without complexity, but enough space to try, to lead, and to figure things out without needing full mastery in advance. Years later, I recognize that the questions I ask in my work are rooted in that experience.

When I work with leaders and organizations through The Shift Shop, I am often listening for the places where people have stopped questioning the structure itself, where it has become assumed that work must be done in a particular way, that contribution must come at a certain cost, or that leadership requires a level of depletion that goes unnamed but widely accepted. These are not neutral conditions; they are designed environments that shape behavior and narrow what feels possible.

That same orientation guided me in founding the Postpartum Support International Georgia Chapter (PSI–GA), where the need for coordinated systems of perinatal mental health care required stepping into something that did not yet exist. There was no complete roadmap, only a recognition that the current landscape was insufficient and a willingness to begin anyway. The co-creation of the Centering YOU Postpartum Edition card deck followed a similar path, translating clinical insight into a tangible, accessible tool without waiting for perfect conditions.

What I carried forward was not a preference for simplicity, but a different relationship to beginning.

Being back in Alaska last week, I could feel that orientation again—not as nostalgia, but as a recalibration. A reminder that many of the systems we move within are far more constructed than they appear, and that our participation in them often depends on how much we trust ourselves to step in before everything is fully mapped out.

Alaska did not remove uncertainty. It made it visible. It also made clear that capacity, creativity, and action are shaped by the conditions we are living inside. And those conditions, more often than we acknowledge, can be changed.

f this reflection resonates, it may be worth asking what the systems you’re part of are requiring—and whether they are built to sustain it.

This is the work I do through The Shift Shop: partnering with leaders and organizations to examine and redesign how work, leadership, and care are structured.

If you’re ready to look at that more closely, you can start here.