ABOUT

I've been on welfare and in boardrooms. I've built companies and burned them down. I've been a firefighter, an ambulance driver, a bartender, a single mom on food stamps, building a skincare company out of my mother's basement that ended up in Whole Foods, which sounds inspirational until you know I was also bouncing checks and eating ramen while negotiating international distribution deals. I somehow convinced Pepperdine to let me into their MBA program without a bachelor's degree, which either makes me impressive or delusional. Jury's still out.

I didn't have a simple childhood. But my stepdad raised me as his own. Even after he and my mom split, he stayed. He chose me. He's 78 now and lives with us. He drives me absolutely crazy, and I love him.

I got fierce young. Probably too young. Armored up and kept going because that's what the women in my family have always done. My mother, her mother, and her mother before her. Women who refused to stay down and refused to shut up. My mom always said my will was stronger than hers. I took that as a compliment. She may not have meant it as one.

That fierceness built a lot of things. It also cost me something. But that's what the articles are for.

Saint Kay started because I kept having the same conversations, at dinner tables, on park benches, after two glasses of wine, the kind where someone says the thing they've been holding, and the whole table goes quiet for a second. I finally thought, maybe I should just turn the mic on.