Built Different
Built Wild

The road isn’t always straight.
Neither is the story worth living.

IT ALL STARTED WITH THE PINK SMOKE

I didn’t set out to build a universe.
I was trying to build a new life.

Turns out, those two things got a little tangled.

For a long time, I knew something didn’t fit.

Maybe it was me.
Maybe it was the life I had built.
Maybe it was all the damn boxes I had spent years folding myself into.

Whatever it was, I could feel something underneath it all.

A woman I hadn’t quite met yet.

She lived at a volume I’d spent years turning down.

Wilder than I had been told was appropriate.

She wanted more than the life I kept trying to convince myself should be enough.

And she would not shut up.

So I did what any reasonable 43-year-old woman having an existential reckoning would do.

I handed her a hot pink hat
and let her run wild.

That was the beginning of Wild Jai.

But before I had words for any of this, there was a feeling.

A pull.

A little curl of something strange drifting through the life
I’d spent years convincing myself was enough.

I call it the Pink Smoke.

The Pink Smoke isn’t a destination. It’s what appears when your soul outgrows the life you’ve been trying to live.

It’s the idea that won’t leave you alone.

The dream that keeps coming back after you’ve explained to it, repeatedly and with several very practical reasons, why it is completely ridiculous.

It’s the place you visit and somehow recognize.

The story you haven’t written yet.

The business you have no idea how to build.

The tiny voice inside you that finally gets tired of being tiny.

You don’t always know where the Pink Smoke is leading.

That’s the trouble with it.

It does not arrive with a five-year plan, a sensible budget, and a neatly labeled binder.

Although I do love a good binder.

It just keeps drifting ahead of you.

And eventually, you have to decide.

Keep living the life you already know.

Or follow the damn smoke.

I followed mine west.

Toward South Dakota.

Toward a life that felt more like me.

Toward stories I hadn’t lived yet, roads I hadn’t traveled, ridiculous ideas I couldn’t stop thinking about, and a version of myself I had spent far too long keeping under control.

Somewhere along the trail, the reinvention became Wild Jai.

The stories became The Journal.
The words worth keeping became The Library.
The people and animals I love became legends, and somewhere between real life and a little Wild Jai imagination, Pink Smoke Lore began writing itself.

And the completely unreasonable dream involving coffee, confections, a food trailer, and enough pink smoke to make subtlety file a formal complaint?

That became Pink Smoke Social.

Pink Smoke Social is what happened when reinvention stopped being an idea and became something I could build.

Because I don’t believe reinvention is supposed to live forever inside a journal.

At some point, you have to get up and make something.

Pack the boxes.

Take the road trip.

Write the story.

Start the business.

Make the dessert far more ridiculous than it has any business being.

Build the trailer.

Wear the hat.

Stop asking whether the life you want makes sense to people who aren’t the ones who have to live it.

Wild Jai is not the story of a woman who figured everything out.

Thank God. That would be a very short website.

It is the story of a woman who finally stopped waiting until she had everything figured out before she started living.

A real reinvention.

In real time.

With wrong turns, big dreams, roadside treasures, coffee, confections, a tiny Sheriff, a Trail Mama, a High-Roller Cowboy, and probably more pink than any reasonable situation requires.