A Love Letter

A Kind of Homecoming

I grew up believing there were practical people and creative people. Stable people and dreamers. People who worked real jobs and people who somehow became writers, artists, musicians, photographers, or the kinds of women who lived inside old brick buildings with plants in the windows and books stacked in uneven piles beside velvet chairs.

I grew up around hardworking people. Good people. Tired people. Funny people. Resourceful people. The kind of people who knew how to stretch a meal, work doubles, fix things with their hands, and keep going through heartbreak because there wasn’t another option.

Creativity existed, but usually quietly. Practicality always came first.

And still, somewhere underneath all of it, I carried this strange pull towards beauty. For meaning. For story. For a life that felt textured and alive in a way I didn’t yet have language for.

I remember being young and imagining city women in coffee shops and bookstores. Women with messy notebooks and perfect ink pens and confidence. Women who seemed to belong to themselves. I could scarcely dream up that I could actually be that— a girl with D’s in grammar and deeply rooted Appalachian speech patterns that still slip out when I’m tired, emotional, or home in myself.

For a long time, I thought creativity belonged to other people.

So I did what many women do. I built a practical life.

I worked. I stayed responsible. I became good at things. Very good, actually. I learned marketing and leadership and fundraising and branding and operations. I learned how to build things for other people. I learned how to survive inside systems. I learned how to make something beautiful out of limited resources.

But underneath all of it, there was always another thread pulling at me.

A sentence I couldn’t stop thinking about. A story idea while unloading groceries. A brand that felt like more than a brand. A campaign that became deeply personal. A life I could almost picture but not fully claim.

And honestly? Some of my becoming happened in deeply unglamorous places.

Under fluorescent lights. Behind customer service counters.In break rooms. At folding tables.In exhausted late-night Google Docs sessions after everyone else had gone to sleep.

I loved big. I loved awful. I stayed too long. I overgave. I tried to earn belonging through usefulness.

And still, the thread kept tugging.

Not away from those experiences — but through them.

Because the truth is, those places taught me almost everything I know about people. About longing. About resilience. About what makes someone feel seen. About why stories matter. About why community matters. About why work matters when it’s connected to something personal.

Wild Folke Method wasn’t born overnight. It was built slowly, quietly, over decades. Inside grocery aisles, nonprofit meetings, kitchen table conversations, heartbreak, motherhood, intuition, burnout, reinvention, creativity, and community.

When I launched Wild Folke Method, it didn’t really feel like a launch.

It felt like a homecoming.

Like finally coming home to the person I’d been becoming all along.

Not a rejection of the life I’d lived before — but a deeper understanding of it.

A realization that none of it had been wasted. Every grocery aisle, every late-night brainstorm, every nonprofit meeting, every hard season, every creative spark I tried to ignore… all of it had been pointing me here.

And honestly, I think that’s what so many of us are searching for.

Not overnight transformation. Not hustle culture. Not becoming someone entirely new.

Just the quiet courage to come home to ourselves.

To the thing we can’t stop thinking about. To the work that feels deeply alive. To the dream that keeps tugging at us, even while we’re paying bills, raising children, showing up for everyone else, or building practical lives.

I want that for more people.

For the business owner quietly carrying a bigger vision. For the nonprofit leader exhausted from doing meaningful work with too little support. For the artist who still hasn’t given themselves permission to call themselves an artist. For the founder trying to build something sustainable without losing themselves in the process.For the person who feels a creative ache they can’t quite explain.

Maybe a homecoming starts small.

Maybe it starts by:

• paying attention to what keeps pulling at you,

• noticing what makes you feel most alive,

• getting honest about what no longer fits,

• letting yourself want something,

• or believing, even for a moment, that your voice matters too.

  
  

That’s the kind of work I care about.

Not just building brands.

Building lives — and work — that feel more honest, connected, meaningful, and fully our own.

xo,

Julie