The Wildfire Didn’t Burn Her House – But It Changed Everything with Katie Svoboda-Rini

00:00 Katie Swaboda-Rini's life was shaped by pivot after pivot. Some of them chosen and many of them not. From caretaking as a teenager to losing her home in a wildfire, each moment pushed her further from herself. But in the middle of the chaos, something shifted. This is a story about finding your way back, embracing imperfection, and choosing softness after survival. But through all this, I just kind of realized that there was no perfect time. 00:27 Like the Katie who was gonna start the cake business after she got out of pastry school, she was trying to find the perfect time to do it. Again, the Katie during COVID who was like, okay, well, I wanna get back to this. I've always wanted to start my own business. I was looking for this perfect time. I was waiting for like this right moment. Through all this, I realized there is no right moment. I'm Maciel Houli and this is The Life Shift. Candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. 01:05 Hello, my friends. Welcome to the LifeShift Podcast. I am here with Katie. Hello, Katie. Hi, Matt. Thank you for joining and thank you for reaching out after hearing one of your friends on the LifeShift Podcast. It has been this journey that I never could have expected for myself. So thank you. Yeah. And thank you for going down said path. We were talking before recording Life is... 01:27 Certainly interesting, it keeps us on our toes and the different pivots that we've had and some forced upon us and some that we've chosen. Every time I hear the word pivot, I think of Ross and his pivoting up the staircase like every single time. And I've had a few pivots like that in my life, getting kind of jammed in the corner, but it really is through my journey I have learned that the art of pivoting is really a skill. 01:56 and kind of an important life skill in general. And sometimes it takes a lot to learn it. But I think there's a point in which our journeys bring us to this place, if we're lucky, to have the ability to reflect on those moments and think about, OK, that probably makes sense why I chose to do it that way or why I chose to prolong something such as grief in my instance, you know. 02:25 My mom was killed in an accident when I was eight. And I really, truly don't feel that I kind of faced grief head on until I was like early 30s. I think a lot of that was subconscious. I think a lot of that was what society was kind of feeding me how I needed to be. But I think a lot of other parts of that were me choosing not to because either I wasn't ready or who knows what it would dredge up. I think 02:52 there is a point in our lives, if we're lucky enough, that we have the opportunity to reflect and to be self-aware of the decisions that we make and why we may have done that. And I fully identify with that. My mother became terminally ill when I was 16, and I became her caretaker. She passed away three weeks before I turned 18. And every time I touched my grief, it felt like a bottomless pit. 03:22 I didn't really actually start to process it through things other than depression or vices and living kind of half turned off, right? That really fight or flight mode, survival mode for years. And until my father, was not really, he was an on again, off again part of my life, he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. And at this time I had 03:49 settled down, I had gotten married, we had a child, we had a home, and I was going to school. I was back in college. My mother's illness and death, I was ready to go to college at 16 when she got sick. And it had waylaid that part of my life for, you know, a decade. So my father's illness fell with me and a two year old at home. And I was going through the 04:18 medical coursework to get gastric bypass at the time. That's nice large part of my story, no pun intended there. But he moved into our two bedroom condo with my two year old and me and my husband while I was going school full time online. So it was my junior year in university. I finished that up in the ICU with him. He passed away a few weeks later. Six weeks later, I had gastric bypass and I ended up quitting. 04:44 school, got so was so burnt out. But not only that, the battle with my weight my entire life, my mother had a very unhealthy relationship with her body and food and didn't have the tools to deal with it and did appending it to me. It was a coping mechanism. It was just it was so many different things. And through the hospice that my father passed away in, I got a degree counseling and hadn't ever really told my story to somebody outside of it with my mother. 05:14 The story of her sickness and death is very complex and traumatic and just all sorts of crazy. And I hadn't really told that story to anybody who hadn't seen me experience it in some way, friends, family and things. And I sat down with this grief counselor and I talked to them about how this process with my father was really mirroring a lot of what I experienced with my mother and that for me, it was so... 05:43 Crazy because here I was, you know, I 31 years old. I was semi educated now. I was stable. had support and I still couldn't save him. And that was a big part of my story with my mother was like, I should have done better. I should have been able to take better care of her. I should have saved her. And coming to that realization of like, oh, I'm almost like double the age now and actually kind of stable, have some resources and I still couldn't save him. 06:14 helped me to start to heal a little bit and process from what had happened with my mother. And I got into individual counseling. I was like, this is helping me so much. The grief counseling on the go so far, like let's get into individual counseling. And also through this journey with the gastric bypass, I realized that even though I didn't want to eat, I still wanted to bake. 06:40 I was still like, I have pictures of me two weeks after my bypass surgery in the kitchen with my daughter baking cupcakes. And I realized that although my relationship with food is still complicated, that a big portion of what drew me so much into baking and into the kitchen was the piece of celebration and connection and love. And, you know, I grew up with four siblings in a very kind of chaotic kind of crazy household. And 07:11 The only time I really felt like seen in the chaos was on my birthday, right? When I got a cake, when I got some form of specialized attention. And I also loved watching all the PBS shows, right? Making with Julia, Yan Can Cook. I grew up on those, Jacques Pepin. And then later when I was caretaking with my mother, we spent a lot of time watching Food Network. And at that time even, 07:40 I had this desire to go to culinary school, but I also had such a shameful relationship with my body and with food that I couldn't bring myself to be like the fat kid who wanted to work with food, who wanted to be a chef. So was actually in school for psychology. So I don't regret the time I spent in college, but also had that story not been there, had that shame not been there, I think I would have known from the get go that like, 08:10 That felt right. But I think, mean, so much of your story and I mean, you just jumped right into your backstory, which is, which is great that you did that not great of a backstory. I think you have a really complicated backstory and I think a lot of it makes sense. I think a lot of the pieces that unfolded in the way that they did, in my opinion, in my experience, makes sense as to why you did certain things and maybe the 08:37 the attention that you liked from, you that you got from your birthday translated into the things that you gravitated towards because you could create that for other people because you knew how that felt. And it's kind of this escape from the grief that you were also running from and all the things, you know, the decisions we make sometimes maybe if we sat down logically at a moment and said, okay, logically. 09:04 I should not be doing this or logically I should be doing it this way because this is what feels right. When we're dysregulated from pushing down our grief, when we're chasing something or running away from something that we know to be true in protection of ourselves, like we throw the logic out the window. mean, I understand that. I was chasing the next job thinking. 09:32 that next promotion is the one that's gonna make me feel X, Y, Z. When all along I knew it was like, you have pushed down so much for so long and you need to touch it, but you can't because you're not ready for it. And so you just keep running and you just keep running. But what I hear in your story is like, pivot after pivot forced you into these really hard... 09:59 hard situations at 16, we're not prepared to kind of take on the responsibility. Also, not your responsibility to cure someone's illness, not your responsibility to quote unquote, do better. But at the same time, we kind of do that. And it's just like the human experience. And I think that people listening to this show and other shows like it, I think we 10:26 all of us have these like similar feelings and in the moment we're like, the only one, I can't tell anyone about this. Like we're the only one that feels this way, but we're not, thankfully. People think we're crazy. If we say this, they'll think We say that, but they wouldn't. No, they wouldn't. be like, oh, wait a second. around us might, but. Right, you, me too. Cool. Yeah, okay. Exactly. No, I think it's super important, but what I say is interesting about your backstory is, 10:54 When talking to people about coming on the Life Shift podcast, am like, hey, you know, like, what is this life shift moment that we're kind of center things around? And like all the things that you've mentioned could be a singular life shift moment. And what's ironic is everyone listening, this is not the life shift moment that you're actually going to talk about. So compounding all those things, your life continues to throw you curveballs and things like that. So 11:24 I mean, we can unpack whatever you want here, but I mean, you've painted this picture of a of would you classify your life before 20 as like somewhat unstable? It. Definitely so emotionally, maybe it definitely emotionally. The super instability actually started when I was 11. We lived in the same house. I grew up in North Pole, Alaska. 11:48 My business card says perpetual Christmas elf, because that's just kind of my vibe. I love wrapping paper way too much. So that's something you know about me now. I lived in the same house, you know, the instability like my parents divorced when I was three, my stepdad moved in when I was five. My living grandfather passed away when I was five. But like we were in the same space all the time. Very. You know, kind of mundane. We had a garden. It's North Pole, Alaska. Like I ran away from moose. 12:17 seriously have been chased by moose twice in my life. It's not fun. They're fast. So the instability started when I was 11 and my mom had what people might refer to as a midlife crisis. But I now recognize that she was severely depressed and she also was looking for that thing that would make her feel better. And she said she was tired of her feet being cold. So she moved us to Sacramento, California from North Pole, Alaska when I was 11. And that's really when the instability started. 12:47 From there, the two siblings that moved with us, my older two siblings were adults and they decided to stay. My middle sister and my younger brother were both back in Alaska within two years because they had some issues. So I went from being one of five to one of three to an only child with a mom who was working full time and dating a lot. that was the other thing that she started to look for outside of herself was validation in relationships. 13:16 And so when she got sick originally, I was the only one there with her. The reason there was so much guilt for me over her sickness and death was that the night that so it was was actually appendicitis. So the night that her appendix ruptured, I was begging her to let me call an ambulance. And she told me, no, I won't go with him. Like you can call an ambulance all you want, but you're just going to waste their time. I'm not going to go with them. So my guilt came from this space of 13:45 I knew something was wrong. I could feel it. Like I was shaking and crying. was like in. Yeah, it was not pretty. And I still didn't call an ambulance and you were a kid. Yeah, right. Like I know 16 year olds now and I'm like, I wouldn't expect them to be able to handle a situation like that. But then later we went through the whole process, got her into the ER. She went through surgery and then. 14:12 her lung shut down and she was in an induced coma. So within nine days, I went from like, I tested out of high school, gotten my driver's license, ready to go into college early because I was born in high school. And then within nine days, my entire house was packed up. My mom was in a coma and I was sleeping on my sister's couch in Alaska because they were going to put me in foster care. I had no legal guardian except for her. All of those experiences, which then led into 14:41 lots of instability moving. Like after she passed away, I lived with my friend's grandma and then I was like sleeping on friends' couches and working dead in jobs and in not pretty relationships. Went back and forth between Alaska and California a couple of times within a few years. Do you think you were seeking like something or do you feel lost? I was, I was lost for sure. I was lost. I 15:08 I knew that I wanted to build something for my life. I knew that I wanted to be a mother one day, but I also knew I did not want to have a child in the circumstances I was in. Did you long for something different than what you had, or did you picture that childhood that you grew up in and kind of wanted to replicate that? In a way, I think I wanted to replicate my idea of what that childhood was. 15:38 When it was taken away from me, I used to think that that childhood was ideal. Looking back now, one, I don't have a lot of memories of it, which is not really a good sign, apparently. But what I do remember of it and what I know of the adults in my life, no matter how much they tried to do their best with what they had, it was an incredibly chaotic environment. There was always screaming. There was always yelling. There was, you know, punitive. 16:08 But I ended up internalizing all four of my siblings. They acted out, you know, whether it was some form of violence or partying drugs, whatever, I acted in and I like I kept to myself and I stayed quiet in my room. But I had like a box of Oreos with me, right? Self soothing. I ate it. Yes, it's a safety. It's a comfort. It's a totally common of. 16:35 there's chaos, you kind of like try to find the comfort. And if that's what your comfort is, it makes I mean, I did the same thing as a teen, I like, it was I didn't realize it. But it was definitely like food was the was the safe space until it brought on the shame, which was just a joy to experience as a teenager, the shame that comes along with, with something that is also an addiction. know, so we I studied addiction in my undergrad work in psychology, and 17:05 You know, one of the things they talk about is that successful addiction recovery means leaving the people, places and things that you used to have around you. Like the people who are the most successful are the ones who completely leave all of that. Right. You can't do that with food. You can't just like light all the food in the pantry on fire and walk away because people have to eat. And in a way, I compounded my issue by like a year after having gastric bypass, I went to pastry school. I don't. 17:33 see that as a problem as long as you figure out how you can live with that if it brings you joy. There's still like, it is a very deep rooted struggle for me and I still do struggle with that self compassion piece. But that's also part of this journey and part of this growth that actually oddly enough came out of the Marff fire. Yeah, the funny thing is, is that, you know, all these previous life shifts, especially 18:00 I stayed in counseling and like talk therapy fairly consistently after my father died and I had my gastric bypass. Did you find that it was actually helping you move forward or was it just helping you not go back? 18:17 I think it was the first step in the moving forward. There wasn't like a large catapulting moment. It helped me start to bring in some of that self-compassion towards like 16 year old Katie, 18 year old Katie, 24 year old Katie. 11 year old. 11 year old Katie. All the Katie's bring in some of that and also just recognize because there's this part of me that 18:44 When I would think about these things and think about how many problems I had had that came up because of them, then there's this other voice that jumps in and goes, it wasn't that bad, dude. Like, what are you talking about? It wasn't that bad. Like your mom wasn't beating you every night or like selling you off to her boyfriends. It wasn't that bad. I grew up with my grandmother who worked in a mean for back lack of a better term. She called it a battered women's shelter. And she was a child advocate for these women who came in out of these horrendously abusive. 19:14 situations. She didn't tell me a lot of the stories until I got a little older, but she had some medical issues that stemmed from one of the kids kicking her really hard in the shin. So like I grew up with this awareness that that was there and she was, you know, a helper, right? Which is great. That woman was amazing. My mother's mother was an amazing woman. I do believe that that was my father's illness and the counseling that I saw afterwards. And then the counseling I went through with 19:44 the gastric bypass, because to do that, I had to seek out counseling also and also allowing myself to realize that like it wasn't just a willpower issue. It was so much deeper than that. Later, also through that journey of seeking counseling, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which. You know, was never said, you know, and I had sought counseling before. 20:10 I had a doctor tell me when I was 13, I was manic depressive, which is bipolar. I'm not bipolar. I get bored easily. That allowed me to kind of bring in some self-compassion of like, oh, no, you're not lazy or you're not horrible. Like there's not something horribly wrong with you. Your brain works slightly differently. And that was the catalyst. Like it's been a long journey. That was 2017. So eight years now almost. And I'm still on that road. 20:41 You know, pastry school, I graduated in early 2019 and the entire goal of pastry school was to start my own custom order cake business. That's where my heart was, was cake. And I had people telling me, no, go and work in a few kitchens first and get to know what you like that other people do and don't like. Don't listen to other people. I mean, yes, listen to other people's experience. But also my daughter's four at the time. And I was barely 21:09 able to function enough to see her because I was working so hard for like no money. It's not the food industry is a whole nother monster and it's a very kind of thankless monster, unfortunately. So I ended up stepping back from this position that I had taken and just going part time and working as an assistant in the catering kitchen. And through that, I actually ended up just getting really lucky and finding this kitchen lease that was going to allow me to have my custom order. 21:39 business. And my kitchen lease started on March 1 of 2020. And we all know what happened after that. COVID put me back as a stay at home mom, I was home for about a year and a half. Wow. So you couldn't do anything when when the pandemic? Okay. No, not really. I mean, the I was still making cakes for friends and family. And I started playing around a bit. And because my daughter was being robbed of her education, she was in pre K at the time. 22:07 I decided to mix the two and I got a world map and I told her to point to countries on the map and I would research, you know, nostalgic and traditional cultural foods and how they came about and we would make them and we would talk about how like the climate and the history of conquering and spice trades and all this stuff fed into these regional dishes, which was like one of the funnest things ever, but. 22:33 Also sourcing all of those ingredients during COVID was not easy. But we ended up, we were in a two bedroom townhome with a five year old and a new puppy and my husband in the closet for work. So we sold that townhome and moved into like our dream home, not very far away and got back into the industry. I ended up taking over the catering kitchen I had left pre-COVID in July of 21. And I was like, yeah. 22:57 Other than owning my own business, it was a dream job because they were basically like, Katie, we trust you, go do it. And they wanted me to build up their wedding cake program basically from scratch. And I was like, yeah, that's great. 23:13 And then December 30th of 2021 also happens to be a bonus COVID story because I tested positive for COVID on a home test that morning. First time the whole pandemic had been almost two years into the pandemic and we were in a COVID testing line and there was a fire outside of our town and our town got evacuated. Go back in, get the dogs out of their kennels. We had three dogs at this time and two cats. 23:41 And that night we thought our house burned down. One of our neighbors who was actually out of state at the time, right, it was right after Christmas. A bunch of people were out of town and they had been watching the news and they saw their house fully engulfed on the news and sent a screenshot. And our house was within the fire line that night. And I said two things that night to my husband that I remember very clearly. One of them was, well, that's one way for me to get a new kitchen. 24:11 Which got to bring in humor, right? A little, you know, dark sense of humor. comes with the whole traumatic background thing. And the second one was, thank goodness you saved all the pictures. Right. He had during the covid like boredom at home stretch had taken a whole bunch of my family pictures and digitized them. And. The next day we realized our house was still standing and we're, yeah, we have a house, we have a house. 24:39 just some broken windows and like a burnt down fence line and we can go home as soon as we get those things fixed. Well, then we went down the rabbit hole. Everything comes with a rabbit hole if we haven't realized that by this point in our lives yet. And it turns out that the homes that burned around us, we were directly adjacent to two houses. It leapfrogged our house. So there was 11 across the street from us and then two directly behind us. And 25:09 Essentially, the wind was blowing. There were gusts over 100 miles an hour that day, which is why the fire burned a thousand homes in like 12 hours. It was so fast. And that smoke from those homes around us that were burning was toxic, toxic to the point where anything that was porous, like if it could hold a stain, if it could hold a smell, it was hazardous to not only our house, but it's actually worse for children. 25:38 because children are still developing. So there's these carcinogenic compounds, especially apparently from the treated lumber that was used to build homes prior to 2004. So we went like deep down this rabbit hole. ended up, we were living 20 minutes away because when you call rentals and you're like, okay, I need a short term rental. It has to be six months or less because that's all the insurance will approve. Oh, and I have three large dogs and two cats. 26:06 Okay, my smallest dog is 60 pounds and she's a pit bull mix. Like I had like 300 properties, even with the situation we were in. So managing that along with the insurance claim and the contractors and my daughter's mental health. Right. She turned seven, 10 days before the fire. We wouldn't let her back in the house. 26:32 it wasn't worth the risk. So everything she had ever owned, everything she knew, you know, my husband and I were just like, how do you know how to deal with something like that? You know, especially all of these people around us who had lost their homes, they had a clear path forward, right? It was clean up your lot, get with the build, either sell your lot, take your insurance money, buy another house or get with a builder and start rebuilding. 27:01 Like you have a clear path. We had this incredibly murky, like he said, she said, had to dig into the deepest depths of the archives of finding experts in this field, which isn't even really a field. So these remediation companies, they were using standards that were meant for water and mold remediation. I'm like, what does that have to do with the fact that 27:29 our house got convection baked in a bunch of smoke. Like that doesn't, like it's not the same thing. So the complexity comes in the sense that like on the surface, everyone else is like, well, your house is still there. Yeah. And you're like, well, yeah, like technically it's still there, but we can't live in it. And now we have to jump through more hoops because we have to prove to someone that it's not livable. Whereas 27:57 maybe the neighbors tragedy to lose everything. But there was nothing to fix, essentially, in their sense. They just knew they had no house. You had a house, but you couldn't live in it. So was like having no house, but it's still there. And we had to also make the choice to throw away, like everything was still there, but it was toxic. We were coming into the house wearing in 95 masks and gloves. 28:26 and photographing everything that we owned and throwing it in trash bags. This includes the very few mementos that I had of my mothers, the very few mementos of my fathers, of my grandmothers, like Christmas ornaments from my entire childhood. Irreplaceable is not strong enough a word. So you had to see all these things and then make the conscious choice to remove it, whereas... 28:53 had your entire house burned down, you wouldn't have had the choice. You wouldn't have had to face that. It would have been devastating. But interestingly enough, as our story unfolded, when we talked to people who had lost their homes and we told them about the hoops we were having to jump through for the majority of the time. So somebody who had been declared a total loss, right? 29:17 Their insurance company was automatically paying them out like 75 % of their personal property, along with 100 % of their dwelling coverage. And then they only had to prove the other 25 % of personal property and then the upgrade insurances and things like that for the rebuild, which means they had the cash to give to contractors to start rebuilding. We, on the other hand, had to individually itemize 29:45 Everything once our claim got into what they consider a large claim. So we got extremely lucky because the industrial hygienist who tested our home was sent by the insurance company and told us to get the house. Had he said, oh, no, this just needs clean. We would have then gotten into a battle of experts where we would have had to hire somebody on our own dime, which the majority of the smoke damage people in the community. 30:15 got into that battle. We know it's three and half years after the fire. There's still a vacant house next to us that they are still in a court battle to get fully remediated. So we ended up in this being very fortunate in our misfortune in that we didn't have to play that. However, it took us until June, so six months after the fire to actually get our 30:42 adjuster to approve the industrial hygienist to come in in the first place. So we had to literally advocate every single step of the way and eke every single nickel and dime out. We ended up having to fire two GCs and ended up with a third GC who overcharged us, under delivered, didn't charge our insurance company properly. So there's still like 40,000 plus dollars sitting in our insurance. 31:11 that we can't get out because they didn't itemize the charges properly. I can't help but think of like the human aspect of it and like what it seems like on top of just being a human, which is hard enough in itself, right? In a normal day, what does that do to like your psyche? What does that do to your burnout status? What is like? I can imagine myself just like wanting to collapse at some point. Did you? Oh, you have the drive to push? Did you burn out? Like what happened to you? 31:41 I went through all of it within a couple of months after the fire. I realized that working wasn't sustainable. don't I didn't make enough money at the time to make it worth the extra 20 minute commute and the back and the forth. And I was also in charge of the operation. Right. I was the head baker at the catering place. So I decided to step down and I found somebody to replace me. 32:06 I basically shifted into managing our personal property inventory, seeking out as much counseling as humanly possible, right? I was seeing an individual counselor. We were seeing like a relationship family counselor. I had my daughter in play therapy. you know, my, like I said, my educational background's in psychology and I understood how important it was to really face this instead of. 32:34 hiding from it, but oh no, I hid. I also hid. Did you? You did the surface level things, maybe? It was kind of riding waves, right? I didn't really feel like, you know, fully regulated. was still and it was very reminiscent of the period of time with my mother and not having any control, right? I had no control and I had no clue what was going to be happening, right? We could plan. We could try to plan for something. 33:04 But then things kept coming up and interestingly enough, it was on a full whim, right? It was about two weeks after the fire and all these different community groups had been popping up. And I was in one of the community groups and saw somebody post that they had heard about a young girl whose birthday was coming up and her mom had already had all the birthday decorations and such. And it was in their house and they lost it. And I was like, OK, well, I'll make her a cake. 33:34 I mean, because I was living in a hotel. So I was like, yeah, I'll make a cake. That's a great idea. I just I got really into doing as many of these cakes as I possibly could. I think I did two dozen ish that first year. And it was it was cathartic in that, I felt like I could contribute something right because these families, these children and I knew the type of strain these parents were under. 34:01 And most of them didn't have the privilege that we had where I could step back from work. So contributing even the smallest amount of taking something off those parents plate and celebrating those kids. Because during the my lifespan and things like when we moved to California, when I was young, like I knew what it was like to have this huge upheaval and to not feel safe or secure at all. But on my end, it was also a very 34:31 It was a creative outlet for me. Cake, especially birthday cakes, like highly themed novelty cake is my favorite thing to do, but I've never been able to do it professionally for a myriad of reasons. So all of my highly decorated cakes have been done as personal favors or for family for my daughter. My daughter's birthday is when I get really extra and do like the 3D structures and really intricate details and things. 34:58 I start planning her cake like four months in advance. It's kind of ridiculous. So it was a space where I found that sense of being able to contribute something to the greater community. Right. And it built a lot of community. The fire itself built a lot of community. These groups were, you know, superior rising as one of them. And then there was like Marshall Rock and Marshall together. Several organizations just started by people in the 35:27 community who were offering up their skills and their time to navigate this incredibly unexpected. Literally, I would have never thought in my wildest dreams that the house was in a wildfire zone. It was not even in like the back of the back of my mind that, you know, hail, sure, but wind, sure, but not fire. And then I started. 35:54 the community group Superior Rising that started for our actual little town of Superior, because there was three towns, there was two towns and then the unincorporated Boulder County involved. So Lewisville and the Superior. So Superior Rising popped up and when the big government effort to clean up the lots that had burned out started actually getting underway, which again took months, it was I think nine months. 36:23 The last celebration for the community cleanups was in October of that year. So that was 10 months after the fire. But when they started calling for volunteers to help set up these neighborhood cleanup celebrations is what they were calling them. I went to the little meeting and I had seen on Pinterest something called paint your own cookies, which you do like a black outline and then give them a little edible paint palette. And it's just edible watercolor. 36:51 And I was like, you know what, I'll do those. Like it's a child friendly activity. I get to bake and I started doing that and I had never really done a lot of the cookies before. And that was a learning curve. Not going to lie. But even after pastry school and like working in the industry, royal icing is a whole nother monster, guys. I got really into doing that. And so when we finally got home, it took us 22 months to get home. Still, the house isn't fully finished because the contractors were 37:22 That's the technical term for that one. I didn't want to go back to work outside the home, but I still had a drive to be in my industry and to be baking and creating and learning and sharing. Right. Like, that's all I want to do. I just want to I just want to feed people sugar. Of course, like two months after we got home, we found a lump in one of the dog's throats that ended up being terminal cancer, which was super not fun. She was only four or two. of course, it's also my daughter's favorite dog. 37:51 Why did it have to be her favorite dog? But through all this, I just kind of realized that there was no perfect time, right? Like the Katie who was gonna start the cake business after she got out of pastry school, she was trying to find the perfect time to do it. Again, the Katie during COVID who was like, okay, well, I wanna get back to this. I've always wanted to start my own business. I was looking for this perfect time. I was waiting for this right moment. Through all this, I realized one, there is no right moment. Right, anything could happen at any time too. 38:20 You also know anything at any time, right? Your mom's appendix could rupture one night and then literally change everything or your house could not burn down like. And then that that whole thing, too, it was very validating to hear from the people who had lost their homes that they felt like it would have been easier for our house to burn down. That's mostly what I heard from people when I told them what was going on with us. 38:50 But every once in a while, like there was one woman, we were in line for a Christmas event, like getting Christmas ornaments. And my daughter, my eight year old daughter was standing there with me and she was like minimizing our experience, right? Like I was talking about like, oh, hey, where did you live? You know, what process of rebuilding are you in? You know, the things that we talk about. And then she was like, oh, what about you? And I told her where we're at and she was like, oh, you didn't even lose your house. Like I wasn't. 39:20 allowed to be there. That whole environment and the survivor's guilt that came with it also was something. I also I knew I wanted to show up for my daughter because her experience was valid. Like she went through some nasty stuff. And, you know, one of her best friends, who was the one across the street from us, got to move back into the neighborhood seven months later because they were able to take that insurance payout and buy a new house around the corner. 39:50 while they worked on rebuilding their house, where we were outside of our neighborhood for over a year and then still outside of our house for almost two years. So a couple of lessons came out of it. One is that like all of it's valid. Right. I've used the analogy of everybody fell down the stairs, like everybody who evacuated that day fell down a metaphorical staircase. Right. Some of us got a couple of bumps and bruises and some of us like broke our necks. But everybody fell down the stairs. 40:19 minimizing somebody else's pain because you feel like your pain is greater in some way. It's interesting as adults to see how the adults around us act. then a lot of times we have to like almost breathe through the moments to realize like probably a lot of the stuff that they just said is not really about me, but rather about their own experiences or some some kind of unsettled. 40:44 something in their life that they haven't kind of processed. I'm really curious though about how you think this experience changed you the most. do you feel that you were able to process things more from earlier in your life? Do you see things differently now? How did this unfortunate, really hard experience change you as an individual? For me, I feel like it's 41:12 allowed me to really put into practice a lot of things that I have learned through other experiences, through education, through counseling, you know, having a theoretical idea of how to or what to. But also the most interesting part of it is that it really the shift happened the biggest after I got home and started settling back in. 41:42 And I think it was that little bit of regained safety. Along with the fact that I also was just tired, right? I was I was tired of being in that fight or flight response. I was tired of being in survival mode. And even now, you know, we've been home for. It'll be two years in October. Even now, I'm still learning to implement a lot of these things and learning new tools as I go. 42:11 That's another thing is that, you know, everything in life is a process. There's no such thing as like, because the second you achieve one goal, it's like there's just another one and then another one and another one. It's taught me a lot about what resilience actually is. I think that a lot of times we're taught or we're shown that resilience is, you know, denial or ignoring of things, right? Hiding it away, locking it in, tucking it down. When in actuality, it's really about 42:41 You know. 42:43 OK, the best way I can think of this is recently watching the Wheel of Time series. I don't know if you watched that at all. There's a scene in it where there's a woman who's incredibly seasick, right? Really, really, really seasick. And the captain of the ship comes over and she's like, well, what's happening is your your legs are really rigid. So your body can't move with the waves, right? So you need to loosen up so that as the boat is moving, you're actually staying still. Right. 43:13 And I really think that resilience comes down to finding that space in yourself where you can be. So self-compassion, self-compassion is a big one, and finding that stability within yourself, which a lot of us weren't given as children, right? So finding that stability in yourself and knowing that these things come along and like. Feelings are important, they're valuable and. 43:41 As a child, a lot of times my feelings were too much, right? My feelings were too much for the adults around me. They couldn't handle it. Therefore, I never learned how to handle it. And finding that stability within yourself so that when the boat is rocking, as so often happens, when the boat does rock, you're able to regulate and know that like, and find that space between. 44:08 the reaction that comes out of that survival mode and the response that you can bring in with that moment of just stability and pause within yourself. Work in progress. Yeah, I think it gives you the way you describe it. It almost it gives you the safety or the ability to feel safe in any moment in the way you describe it because I think 44:35 It's not a place, safety's not a place for you. It's not a location, I guess I should say. It's something within yourself in which you know, because of past experiences, because of maybe failing at past experiences in your opinion, or succeeding, or whatever it may be, because of all of these moments, now you are working towards building that safety wherever you are, in whatever moment, whether it's good. 45:04 whether it's bad, whatever it is, you're trying to find maybe home in yourself. Exactly. And as a mother now, my daughter's 10. I have come to understand that as a parent, it is my job to be her safe space so that she can build her own safe space within herself. That part. Exactly. And that's the part that I think so many people as 45:33 so many of us adults who are struggling with this dysregulation and not even recognizing it for what it is, right? It wasn't until I heard the phrase, it's not your emotions that are the problem, it's our judgments of our own emotions, right? Like we seriously place judgments on a lizard brain nervous system reaction, right? Like, oh, why am I feeling like that right now? There's something wrong with me that I'm feeling like this right now. No, it's a 46:02 programmed response to a stimulus that we don't actually know what it is or where it came from. But also the blame is a learned thing from the people around us. Exactly. The blame and the judgment. That self-critical voice, like I didn't put that in my head. Yeah. I wasn't just like six months old walking around going, oh, I need an inner critic. Where can I get that? But it starts developing that young. Yeah. 46:31 But you also, I mean, you also had a lot of what I would define as like traumatic experiences early on. so from someone that has also felt that way and losing my mom and the things that that happened after. It's like we we assume so much more because we're looking for safety around us. And when we don't find it, we assume that that's what we get. We get whatever is here being fed to us. 47:01 And so it's not always, it's not always accurate. And then the inner critic, that little judge, that little inner critic comes in and goes, the reason why you don't feel safe right now is because there's something wrong with you. You should feel that you shouldn't feel like that. Why do you feel that way? Yeah, for me, it was it was very much when I when I lost my mom, I assumed perfectionism because I thought if I'm not perfect, then my dad's going to leave me because my mom left. And maybe it was because I wasn't perfect. 47:31 Like that, like, wow, like, those are the weird things that happen to our brain. And then if no one's there to help us realize that those are not true, we carry them and then they become snowballs, which I'm sure you've had in your life where, where something that was maybe small and manageable at the beginning became something much larger and much harder to unravel and kind of work through. But it also sounds like now you're at least acknowledging all that. 48:00 Like all of it is part. So if you have a bad day, you're probably like, it's a pretty bad day and that's okay. I'm gonna find my way through it. I've been here before and I'll be here again, but I know that it's not forever, right? Like I feel like that's how I kind of moved through the world now and it took me a while to get here. Yes, I'm pushing 40. I'll be 40 in a few months. Just now starting to understand and realize that like my differences as in, you know, being late diagnosed ADHD. 48:28 I've also recently like looked into things like sensory processing disorder. I've been diagnosed with that now too. And understanding and realizing that these differences are not some point of shame, right? It's not something that was bad or wrong. Also growing up with developing brains, the way brains develop, okay, here's the almost neuroscientist in me coming out. Developing brains when they're developed steeped in stress hormones to 48:58 on extreme extent, right, which our brains perceive so many things as threats. They perceive our own emotions as threats, which is part of the reason why we then look for these coping mechanisms or we go into shutdown or anything like that, because our nervous system literally thinks that it's trying to protect us from, you know, a bear. It's still a very useful thing for we to be hiking in the woods and see a bear. However. 49:24 in our normal daily lives, there are so many of these perceived threats that we are living in a constant state of fight or flight, which is dysregulation, which means our metabolism is thrown off. It means our our executive functioning, right? Our prefrontal cortex is like all that. Sorry. Not sorry, because neuroscience is fascinating and amazing. And it's really placing judgments on those. On those feelings that pop up, right? Like 49:54 something happens, somebody says something to you and your stomach turns, right? And you interpret it as they're speaking in that tone of voice as a reflection of you. They don't like you, they don't care about you, things like that. And then we end up in cycles of rumiation, we end up in cycles of shame, we end up in self-hatred and all these things. 50:18 I am convinced the more that I do, the more reading that I do, the more like somatic therapy that I do. I'm convinced that a very large portion of the mental health issues in people in general and human beings is because there's a mismatch in between our nervous system overreacting to daily stressors, right? As in like, you know, 50:44 A timer is going off, we have to get out of the door to get to school on time, but we react like a bear is chasing us. 50:54 I like I tell my daughter all the time, like we're just walking around with electricity shooting through a bowl of meat jello. OK, it's fatty tissue and neurons and it's shooting off tens of thousands of times a day with electrical impulses. And that is literally the entirety of human experience. Bringing some of that weight, some of that weight of judgment and bringing in the self-compassion piece, I think is so huge and people don't even realize that. 51:24 they're doing it. Yeah, no, think hopefully more so now that people are having open conversations about it. I think it's important to kind of wrap up the conversation. I'm wondering if like this version of you these days with the way you feel about the way you feel, if you could go back to like the almost 18 year old version of Katie and all the things that had just transpired in her life, is there anything that you would want to tell her? 51:57 that she's doing the best she can with what she has. 52:06 I mean, that really kind of sums it up, right? We do, all of us do, do the best we can with what we have. Our parents, even sitting here now, knowing how much my mother struggles impacted me in such a negative way, she was doing the best she could with what she had too. But that along with, you know, you can be your own safe space, right? 52:33 And I would probably hand her a couple of the books that I've read recently and ask her to read them, you know, 20 years sooner. Yeah, but sometimes we don't get to the place that we're in unless we go through all the things and so. All the things, right? All the things. The lessons learned the hard way. Yeah. And sometimes the hard things allow us to be even better humans and show up in a different way that maybe can help serve others like the way you did through. 53:00 the challenging times of people rebuilding and finding little moments of glimmer and light that you can give to other people, despite the fact that you were also going through it and you were also struggling. But then at the same time, knowing that those were filling your cup in a way that you needed at the time. So it's like we're a product of all of these good, bad and different experiences. And sometimes it takes us a while to realize that and reflect upon it. So thank you for doing it in this. 53:28 unique way of the life shift podcast. I'd love to if there were people out there that want to hear more of your story, want to talk to you more, want to learn about your business and all these things, like what's the best way to find you get in your space, learn more about you. My business has now shifted through all this. And I found this space and named it sweet skills workshops. I'm trying to create a space that is to help home bakers. 53:57 level up and bring in creativity and fun and bring some of that weight and that pressure off. think quite a lot of us can be very, very hard on ourselves when we struggle. Cakes stink, buttercream breaks, things like that. I'm teaching method and technique so that recipes are not limiting anymore. so I can be found on Instagram and Facebook. 54:25 just sweet.skills.workshops. The website is sweet-skillsworkshops.com. Really, you know, the perfectionism, that weight of judgment that we put on ourselves, I'm teaching from a space of, you know, I like to mess around in the kitchen and find out what happens and teaching from a space of bringing that weight of the expectations of perfection off of ourselves. 54:55 learning how to pivot and when you can pivot and when it's time to just eat it as cake snacks and make another batch. So that's that's what I'm teaching from a standpoint of perfection isn't the goal. Progress is the goal. Yeah. And fun and creativity and the things that light you up, I think are super important. Well, 55:20 Thank you for bringing that to the world. I think it's super important. I would also encourage anyone listening that maybe resonates with parts of your personal story to find a way to reach out to you and just tell you that that certain part that you shared, you know, connected with them in a way that made them feel less alone. think there's so much joy and growth that comes from community, as you saw, as people were trying to rebuild in your community, literally the people coming together and understanding that we're not. 55:48 as alone as we might feel in the moment. So I really encourage people to do that. And I thank you again for just being a part of the LifeShift Podcast. Well, thanks for having me, Matt. You are most welcome. And thank you all for listening. If there's anything that you need from me, please reach out to me. And otherwise, I will be back next week with a brand new episode of the LifeShift Podcast. Thanks again, Katie. Thanks. 56:24 For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com