Hi, my friends and readers, it’s been a minute. I’ve been busy. I’ve been living. Life has been “lifeing.”
Quick catch-up:
I bought a house with my partner in October of 2022. It was not planned. I had just sold my desert home a few months before and moved back to my hometown of Spokane, WA to be closer to family and to live simply while I launched a company. In the desert, I got an idea for a business that I felt would change my life. Not for financial reasons alone, but because it would solve a problem for me. I wanted to solve the problem of safety while traveling and adventuring solo as a woman.
Then I met my partner (again) and we fell instantly in love after having known each other since high school. We stumbled upon the cutest most perfect fixer-upper and we went all in on each other and the house and our lives together. It wasn’t how I had planned it.
In January 2023 I decided that I would try having a job, “One last time.” I had this house now, a dog, and a new life, and my partner and I together had great earning potential. I wanted the benefits of a job, the salary, and the comradery of working with a team. I wanted the salary. That was really what it was. Stability and security and good pay. I’m an experienced CSM and I landed a remote job in Customer Success for a tech company that created employee recognition software.
Within the first month of working for them, I realized that if these two founders, two regular guys, seemingly mediocre in every way, could build and launch a company that sustained their salaries and the salaries of a few employees for the past ten years, why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I build my own company?
Looking back, I’ve been on this path to being a founder for my whole life. Including all the twists and turns and highs and lows and strange detours. I’ve always been an entrepreneur, and was hustling lemonade stands and selling Barbie doll clothes I made to earn enough money to buy a Nintendo when I was like eight. But my journey was tumultuous.
In 2017 I got sober by way of self-admitting to Bellevue Psychiatric three days before Christmas. I’ve been sober ever since, and in the past almost six years have created a life beyond my wildest dreams, and have achieved so much. I’ve bought two homes now and ran a successful women-only Airbnb in the desert outside of Joshua Tree National Park.
When in the desert, a woman traveling to Joshua Tree on vacation solo disappeared and was later found dead, not far from my house. Gabby Petito was famously missing after traveling in a van with her boyfriend to Utah. Lauren Cho went missing from a local desert Airbnb and I was largely impacted by her story. Two women were shot and killed in their tent while camping. And honestly, that’s just what was in the news.
Do you know how many days and hours I’ve been afraid to be a woman? Just being a woman? If you’re a woman reading this, you probably do.
So here we are now.
When solving for safety I said to myself, what do I need? What do I use? What will keep me safe?
I personally rigorously comb through reviews when planning to travel. And by “travel” I mean a road trip to a hot spring in Idaho. Or a road trip to go hike in Death Valley. Travel doesn’t have to be expensive or mean hopping a plane.
When I plan for travel I use Yelp, Trip Advisor, All Trails, hipcamp, Airbnb, Google, and I belong to social groups and use Reddit threads and so on. I don’t feel safe just heading out on an unknown hike and a lot of times, to be honest, it’s not safe. I’ve done some risky shit and I want to be able to tell someone about it. I want to be able to tell other women about it.
For example, I was going to book a trailer in Moab, Utah. It was high-traffic season but my sister was camping out there and celebrating her birthday, so I was going to try to get whatever I could find. I found a trailer that had 4.8 stars on Airbnb so I started reading reviews, and it wasn’t until like the 48th review that I found a woman who said that the host had been super inappropriate with her, and she ended up fleeing in the middle of the night.
She went to local businesses in town the next day and found out that the man was known for this type of behavior in the community. Now, the problem with the standard review system is trust and reliability. How can I trust this woman’s account when so many other reviews were seemingly positive? The host had responded to her review and accused her of being “an emotional woman” and used so much gaslighting and aggression that it was obvious to me. That regardless of the accuracy of her account, I would never stay anywhere where that man was the host.
That’s the information I’m looking for. When I’m digging through reviews, I’m looking for experiences and information that are pertinent to a woman’s personal safety. I don’t care if the nature on the hike was just “meh” and if the hike was too long. I want to know if the parking lot was well-lit, how far from my car to the trailhead, what kinds of people frequent the trail, is there cell service, etc.
Part of the problem of our society today and the attitudes towards women, is women are not looking out for one another in a real way. I’m sorry to say it but it’s true. Because we don’t have that avenue. And we don’t have that established community of facts first. That’s how we create trust. Facts and data are what we depend on. Was the parking lot well-lit? yes or no. That’s the facts. We don’t want to tear anyone down and that’s what reviews have become, this toxic critical unforgiving space and it’s a joke honestly.
There is a funny South Park episode about Yelp food critics that is horrifyingly accurate as always.
Women-centric businesses can often be exclusive just by way of existing. A lot of association with pink and feminine lingo like “girlies” “queens” and “bitches.” I don’t want to go there. I distrust businesses that are too pink or too women-centric. I have a weird thing about women’s groups and joining, probably environmental from being a girl and then a teen in the 90s. And maybe my addict rebel loner spirit. Most women I talk to relate to distrusting women’s groups.
So I decided let’s be really inclusive. Let’s really focus on safety and be vigilant in those efforts. And trust me, I care about your personal safety probably more than you do lol.
I’m a founder ya’ll. I own a company called Pchy. Pchy is revolutionizing information sharing amongst women in an effort to help women travel more freely and feel safer doing so. This is the next part of the journey. If you’ve been reading Normal for a while then you probably followed the memoir I’ve been writing, To All the Jobs I’ve Had Before. This is hopefully the final chapter.
I will share updates about the founder's journey (me!) along the way and plan to revive the Normal Newsletter to keep up on sobriety and life and all the things.
Follow Pchy on Instagram and subscribe to the Pchy newsletter. We will be sharing a lot of tales about women traveling over at the WTF (Women Traveling Freely) blog and the newsletter will keep you up on when the app will be available in your area.
If you love the Normal Newsletter consider sharing with your friends and family. Comment. Like. All those efforts help solo entrepreneurs and writers to keep going.
I love you,
Jade