ABOUT HOLLY

My heart <3 I don't know if that sounds corny, but I have such a heart for my heart.

Kindness. I love people who are kind. Y'all, kindness is sexy. It's sexy. Like when somebody's kind, you're like, yeah, I see you over there. I see you, I see you tipping that server extra. And giving people a smile, and holding the door, and remembering their names. I see you and I think it's hot and I like it.

You know, I always felt like I belonged in old Hollywood, although that was such a hard time to be a woman, you know? It’s just so glamorous. I love Bette Davis. I've been told I look just like her so many times. I've got those big Bette Davis eyes.

It would be my dad. I miss him every day. I wanna talk to my ghost dad, like the dad who was not beaten down by the world, maybe my dad as a young man. I wanna know what his dreams are and what he knows about life.

Oh, that's a hard question. I have not been lucky in love. I've loved many, and I feel like I've always been really great at friendships. But I was always attracted to men who were not available in some kind of way. I dated someone for a very long time who was married. I dated someone after that who never said “I love you.” I dated someone after that who was not sexually available to me. And so this pattern of falling for people who weren't available, I think came from a desire to prove that I’m desirable. If I can convince this person who's not available to love me, then I get to win. Love and anxiety were so closely intertwined that I didn't recognize love apart from anxiety. And so I was primed to crave love that was entangled with anxiety. Now that I’m awake to this, I’m able to start pursuing partners that make me feel at ease when I’m around them. Now I can try to love my lover the way I love my friends. And never lose connection with myself, even while in deep connection with others.

Oh, that has been such a journey for me because I've always been an ambitious person, a very driven person. And success was this goal post that kept getting moved further and further along, right? It’s this exhausting never ending pursuit. And what I've realized recently is all of those measurements of success are coming from that void of I am not enough. If I agree that I am already enough, if I agree that I'm already lovable, if I agree that I'm already successful, what does that give me freedom to choose? What does that give me freedom from? And I think that that's the definition of success, is having freedom, the freedom to be at ease in your own skin, right here, right now.

Question everything. Including yourself.

I have experienced moments in my life that there is something bigger than my body. And I would probably call that a soul. And there are two parts to that soul. One is the Holly that has lived this life. There's a soul that is being expressed through a body, through a nervous system, through a genetic coding and a lifetime's worth of experiences that filter information and get communicated through my actions, choices, words and behaviors. That is one version of my soul. It's the unique me, but there's another part of that soul that is connected to everybody else.

You and I, we are experiencing this moment. We are experiencing this life and we are co-creating life. We are co-creating a moment right now, which we don't know the ripple effects of, and we're having a shared experience. I think these shared experiences are opportunities to heal, create, and connect with that collective soul. Because the more that we can heal, the more we have access to what’s possible. Cuz when the nervous system falls away, we can see each other and we can co-create something very beautiful. So I believe that we're here to heal. I believe that we're here to co-create and I believe that we're here to love, however much we can, through a body that is limited in its capacity to love.

There's a quote by Carl Rogers that changed the way that I relate to people. And I am probably going to not say it word for word, but I'll try to recall it as best as I can. When you look at a sunset, you don't say to the sunset, oh, I wish you were a little more orange on the corner. He says that people are as beautiful as sunsets if you let them be. Their purples and their pinks and their oranges are different than mine. There is so much beauty in people and there's also a lot of pain. And that's beautiful too because that's a shared human experience. There is no ugliness. Anger is beautiful. It can be righteous and indignant and useful for change. Sadness is beautiful. It's grief. It is love. It is the heart asking to be seen and heard and understood so deeply. So I think that there is beauty in all of the light and colors that we have as sunsets. And I also believe that there is beauty in the twilight and the darkness that is part of the sunset as it creeps in. I try to appreciate the sunset in every person.

Leap. There are moments in your life where you'll feel the call to leap and you cannot see what's on the other side. They always say, look before you leap. But there are many important moments in your life where you need to leap before you can look, and you will feel it in your bones when it's time. It is an act of courage and an act of love to leap when your bones are compelling you to, because no matter what happens, something beautiful will come out of it because you are beautiful, and you will put beauty into whatever is about to happen. And the other gift is, you listened to yourself, you trusted yourself above all others, and you didn't let anything hold you back. And you will not have any regrets because you leapt and you listened to yourself.

In order to leap, I think it's really about removing obstacles to your heart. If we don't listen to our heart when we need something or when something feels true for us, it's like divorcing a part of yourself, silencing a part of yourself. I did that for so many years, so many years, and I was just surviving in my life. I was succeeding, but I wasn't thriving. I wasn't in my life. When you can trust yourself and give, give yourself the gift of listening, you never know where that impulse is gonna lead you. And what I think is so beautiful about anything, a conversation like this or creating a business, these are all just containers. They're containers for us to heal. They're containers for us to share and connect and create and grow if we let them be. Or we could just go through the motions and survive.

So if there's anything standing in your way of that, something you've gotta heal, something or someone you've gotta break up with, you've gotta burn it down or move it out of the way. Anything that is standing in the way of you living in your life and being in your life and falling in love with your life.

I've used many matches in my life. No regrets. I'm a serial arsonist.

I think of my mother. She was the leader of our family. My mother is a leader. She is the chief nursing officer for a hospital in western Kentucky. She's very good at what she does. She leads all of the nursing staff and, and is an executive and sits on the board. I got to see her leadership in our home and she led through so many challenging circumstances through dealing with my father who suffered from mental illness. My father had a traumatic brain injury when I was 19 years old. He was riding a motorcycle without a helmet and was in a coma for weeks. She led his recovery, to the extent that he was able to recover. She led us through financial stress. She was the leader of all of her children's passions. She supported us in every way that she could. She figured out what each of us individually needed, uniquely. And she made every sacrifice and every opportunity for us to express what we were passionate about.

I would say that my mother was an extraordinary leader, and only now has she been able to start loving herself and focusing on herself. And that is such a joy to watch.

I think the one that comes to mind is this musical that I did called Turkeys! written by my now dear friend, Ian Michaels.

I remember being backstage with the cast and we had our arms around each other, and it was one of our last shows and we had tears in our eyes, and we were about to go out on stage. And that feeling, we get to do this, I felt like that was heaven. Like heaven here on earth. That is the moment. It's being surrounded in community by other people who you love, with your arms around each other, feeling the excitement that you're about to create something really magical and knowing how precious it is, because it's all about to end. That is happiness to me.

Hug each other. We need touch safe, consensual touch. We need it so much. Our brains need it. Bodies need it. Hug each other, hold onto each other, touch each other because that connection reminds us of why we're here. And it shows people that they are important. It shows them how significant they are. Because at the worst moment of my life, when I thought I needed to end everything, it was because I felt so insignificant, that I didn't have anything important worth sharing or worth staying on this planet for. But when you hug people, you remind them that they are significant to you, and that they are connected to something beyond their body, and that I think is incredibly important. So simple and so necessary.