If my artist life didn't work or if I needed to work in some capacity part-time in something, I knew I'd have a real life skill [become a therapist].

Being successful as a creative person is a crapshoot, but it's essential if you feel drawn to being creative that you express it.

With regard to how I chose Pacifica, my story is interesting. I did not go to Pacifica to specifically become a therapist. I went to Pacifica to study Jungian psychology and archetypes and mythology and there were many different programs there.

There's a real careful line you have to walk there because your first job [therapist] is to create safety for the client to feel safe enough to turn their vision in towards themselves and their experience in the moment and to reveal things that usually carry a lot of shame or that kind of stuff around.

I took everything really seriously and was overly sensitive about things, and I think that's rooted in perfectionism.

Coming into Pacifica I knew that I wanted whatever I was going to learn there, I knew I wanted to integrate that into my art no matter what.

Right before I went to Pacifica, I had written and performed a one-woman show and I consider that to be my original art form. Spaulding Grey and Karen Finley and other spoken word artists and performance artists really very much interested me, that art form.