I did a podcast.
Not a "here's my top three candle-making tips" podcast. A sit-down-with-espresso-martinis-and-tell-the-truth podcast. Angie Schermerhorn hosts a show called Have You Met? about women building businesses here in Western Massachusetts, and she asked me to come on, and I said yes before I really thought about what yes meant.
Because here's the thing about telling your story out loud, in someone else's chair, on camera. You can't edit it. You can't draft it four times and delete the part that makes you look like a mess. It just comes out of your mouth and then it exists.
You can watch the whole conversation here. It's 43 minutes. Bring a drink.
What people usually get
The version of me most people meet is a table at a craft fair. Pretty jars. Pressed flowers. A woman who talks too much and will absolutely tell you which scent your mother-in-law would like.
The version underneath is a woman who was a police officer until June 17, 2022, when she responded to a call about an unresponsive person in a car, broke a window to get to him, and cut her wrist open doing it. I saved his life. I lost the use of my dominant hand. And the career I went to school for, went to the academy for, actually wanted — that was over in about ten minutes.
I don't lead with that at a farmers market. Nobody wants a trauma dump with their pumpkin candle.
But it's the reason the candles are named what they're named. And after three years of telling the shorter version, I wanted to say the long one somewhere it would stay said.
The part I didn't plan to say
There's a stretch of that episode where Angie asks about the months after the injury, and I hear myself telling her about night mode.
Night mode was what my house did at eleven in the morning. Doors locked. Shades down. Takeout ordered. Me on the couch or in the bed, not moving, for as long as I could get away with it. The only reason I went outside was the dogs.
I told her about grieving my independence — how I went from a woman who said "I got it" to anyone who offered help, to a woman calling around asking if somebody could please come open a package of salmon for her. Because I couldn't. Because my right hand didn't work and I hadn't taught my left one anything yet.
And I told her about people saying let me know if you need anything and then not picking up. Not because they're bad people. Because everyone's busy and nobody actually believes you'll call. I called. A lot of times nobody could come. So I figured out how to wrap my own bandage using my feet, my teeth, and my left hand, and I want you to sit with that image for a second, because I still do.
Then there was a night in my kitchen
I'm going to say this the way I said it on the show, minus the parts that don't need repeating.
About nine months in, I hit the bottom of it. I was standing in my kitchen in a flannel and sweats with a song on, and I broke down on the floor, and I decided I did not want to live the life I was living anymore.
And then I decided something else instead.
I'd gotten a text not long before that. Three words. I'm proud of you. That's it. That's the whole text. And it sat in my phone doing nothing until the night it did everything.
I chose the start of my life over the end of it. I put everything down. I danced in my kitchen, badly, one-handed. And then I picked up my phone and texted my brother, who's been in the candle industry for years, and I asked him if we could start pouring candles.
He wrote back almost immediately. See you Friday.
No questions. No "are you sure." No "is this a phase." Just a day of the week.
That Friday I drove out to his warehouse in Deerfield and learned to make candles with one working hand. I drove out there again. And again. Eventually I couldn't keep making that drive every day, so I moved production into my basement, and later I got rid of my spare bedroom so the candle room could get bigger and moved my office upstairs.
That's the actual origin story. Not a kitchen. A warehouse in Deerfield and a brother who didn't ask questions.
Why the candles have those names
People ask about this constantly and I finally had 43 minutes to answer it properly.
I named them after how I was feeling, or how I wanted to feel.
Somebody asks how you're doing and you say fine, and it's a lie, and you both know it's a lie. So I made Surviving. Because some days that's the honest answer and it deserves a jar.
Some days I washed my hair and walked my dogs and that was a whole triumph, so there's Born to Thrive.
Some days I was at a family thing physically present and mentally halfway home, so there's Feels Like Home.
And there were nights my head was so loud I couldn't hear anything else. I'd journal with my left hand because my right one didn't work, and some pages were just scribbles because there weren't words. I wanted quiet so badly. That's Pure Harmony, and I'm not going to tell you a candle fixed it, but lighting it was a thing I could do on purpose, and at that point in my life "a thing I could do on purpose" was in very short supply.
Just a Vibe came from the kitchen. From the first time I could move my body again and smile about it and think, okay. I'm vibing. That's a candle.
What sharing it actually did
Here's the part that surprised me, and it's the reason I keep doing it.
Every single time I've told the truth publicly, people have come out of the woodwork. Me too. My grandfather. My department did the same thing to me and I didn't say anything. Thank you for still being here.
And my business grew. Not because vulnerability is a marketing strategy — please don't do that — but because people would rather buy from a person than a logo. When you're quiet, everyone assumes you're fine. I stopped being quiet.
I lost my best friend Evan to suicide. I know exactly what the other outcome looks like from the outside. So if telling my story means one woman stands up for herself inside her department, or one person doesn't become a statistic, that's worth being uncomfortable on camera.
Go watch it
It's funny. I promise it's funny. We drank espresso martinis and I told a story about skinny dipping in a lake in Austria that I'd forgotten I was going to tell.
Have You Met Kelsey Davey? — the full episode
And if you want the candle that's named after the answer you give when "fine" isn't true, it's in the shop.
If you're struggling the way I was, please call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US. It's free, it's 24/7, and it's staffed by people who want you here. I'm glad I'm still here. I want you here too.