Don’t mistake me for the surface.

There’s beauty in my life: style, travel, nature, love, my children. I’m fortunate, and I know it.

But while resources protected me from some consequences, they never protected me from myself. Underneath is a woman who’s been trying — badly and honestly — to understand herself before she burns down what she loves.

I grew up a study in contrasts: raised in Las Vegas, reading leadership books between college classes. That city taught me early that what people show you and what they want are rarely the same thing. Long before I ran restaurants, I understood what hospitality runs on: read the room, sense what it craves, and make everyone in it feel welcome. That instinct built my businesses. But pointed at my own life, it built something else: a performance.

Over time, performing stopped being something I did and became who I was. From far away, that version of me looked great. Up close, it kept people at arm’s length, and eventually, it kept me from knowing myself better, too. I made myself impressive. Generous. Beautiful. Necessary. Everything but known.

I got so good at it, in fact, that it took me years to realize I’d never clocked out. I was still performing — in my marriage, my work, my friendships, my motherhood, my own body. And underneath all that people-pleasing was something smaller and more human than I wanted to admit:

I didn’t want to give anyone ammunition. If no one ever saw my flaws, no one could use them against me.

It took me a long time to understand that I wasn’t just reacting to my life. I was helping create the chaos I kept blaming it for.

Therapy helped. Pain helped. Consequences helped. So did a separation from my husband, and the people who loved me enough to hold up the mirror and not flinch when I hated what I saw. So did psychedelics and plant medicine — not a magic pill, but a door: the opening cracks you open, and the real work keeps happening in therapy, long after.

My old programming had been running the show for years; I just kept calling it me. But then, slowly, I started to catch it in the act. I learned to pause — not perfectly, not always, but enough to notice the gap between the trigger and the old reflex. Enough to understand that my dignity lived in that gap.

Then my body gave me away.

During the first photo shoot for this site, my longtime friend and photography mentor lowered her camera. Something in my life was quietly taking me apart inside in a way the lens couldn’t see, and yet she told me she’d never seen me look so beautiful.

“You’re different,” she said. “I don’t know what changed.”

But I did. I wasn’t performing.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I walked in with my own rules. I wasn’t dressed for anyone else. I wasn’t trying to be admired into existence. I was telling my own story, and I wasn’t letting anyone dictate how it got told.

That is the work now. Not becoming perfect. Not becoming endlessly peaceful. Not becoming some glossy, healed version of myself who never fucks up. The work is becoming honest enough to stop performing a life and start actually living one.

That’s why I’m building Rage Baby.

The Lineage I Come From

My mother grew up in Okinawa, the best English speaker in her school district, certain of one thing: she was going to be an American.

She came from an island whose language, names, and loyalties had been rewritten by occupation and war. She carried what survived into a new country and built a life out of sheer will: three jobs, secondhand Jimmy Choos, hair and nails always done. She knew how to look like she was winning. But underneath it, I knew, as her daughter, that she ached to be known, and never quite was.

I carry both halves of her: the polished surface, and the loneliness beneath it.

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My mother believed knowledge could bend destiny.

Our house was full of self-help books, and they weren’t decoration — they were read, absorbed, argued with, and used. At twenty-three, she signed me up for the kind of self-improvement seminar that built you up one day, broke you down the next, and taught you how to handle your own agency on the third. I ate it up. Her grit became my resilience, whether I wanted it or not, and I inherited her faith that you could read your way to a better life.

She was partly right. And here’s where we split: Knowing isn’t enough. You can read every book, sit through every seminar, and understand every pattern, and still repeat the same damn thing for another decade — until something you can’t name finally shocks you awake.

Still, her books were never wasted. My interests have always seemed scattered to people meeting me for the first time — permaculture, psychology, healing the body with plants, a layperson’s fascination with how communities get planned. For years I couldn’t name what tied them together, but now I can: every one of them is about tending something living so it can thrive, not just survive. Rage Baby is where that thread finally comes together. It’s where all of it was born.

The island that refused to disappear

Okinawa is older than the country that claims it…its own kingdom for centuries, trading and thriving long before it was bombed, annexed, and told it was Japanese. It refused to disappear. Its language went underground and survived. Its people kept their own clock: time was something lived on nature’s terms — through typhoons, tsunami warnings, the seasons you fish and farm by — and was never something to beat. Okinawans are humble, happy, quick to laugh, and impossible to erase.

That’s the blood I come from. When I went looking, I found the same refusal in myself. The hardest season of my life left me changed but not erased — grittier now, a little more skeptical in a healthy way, and clearer. I can hold the wide view and the close one at once like a magpie who sees a whole field and the single shiny thing in it. I might think I have it all figured out today, and then life hands me the next thing, and I do it again — carrying the tools from the last conflict into the next, strengthening the muscle over a lifetime.

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Which is good, because I don’t believe in an endgame.

Some people are certain there’s a finish line — a heaven or a hell waiting at the end. I think heaven and hell are here on earth, now, in how we treat ourselves and each other. So to me, life isn’t a race, it’s a relay. You run your leg with as much wisdom, humor, and compassion as you can…and then you hand something on.

Which brings me to my children — the daughter I was given, and the bonus kids I chose. The kids I chose have a mom of their own, and I’m not here to replace her. What I am is someone who gets to decide, every ordinary day, what I hand down. Because familial lines don’t have to repeat. What gets passed down can be chosen — and that, more than anything I’ve built, is the work now: not to be a perfect mother, but an honest one. And to hand them something lighter than what I was handed.

The Rage Beneath

When I made my own roots tour back to Okinawa in 2026 — the island my mother left — I went looking for where I come from. I found the lightness and the resilience I just told you about. And I found the heat: The little temper issue I’ve always known I had turned out to be a family pattern, handed down like an heirloom nobody asked for.

My temper doesn’t explode outward so much as inward. I’m an imploder, fueled by It’s all my fault, I’m the problem, I did it wrong, and for years I aimed that at the people closest to me.

But the temper wasn’t the only inheritance. Underneath it ran a quieter pattern: I’d been telling myself a story about who I was that my behavior didn’t back up. I thought I was self-aware. It took the people who love me to say otherwise. In fact, one of my closest friends said to me one day, “Jamie, you may be a lot of things, but humble is not one of them.” Another just held up the mirror. And while it hurt, they were reflecting back to me my pattern, and I’m highly attuned to patterns. So I stopped asking where I could blame myself, and started asking where I could take responsibility. (Those are not the same question. One is a place to collapse. The other is a place to begin.)

So here’s what I’ve come to believe, and it’s the reason for everything I’m writing and building now: rage isn’t the enemy; it’s information. I can be angry and speak clearly, because the two aren’t mutually exclusive. My rage was never the real problem…it was a signal from the part of me that learned survival first during those long years of performance. My work now (and maybe yours, too?) isn’t to silence it. The work — the method — is to notice it, question the inheritance beneath it, pause before the reflex takes over, choose my why over my wound, and act with restraint.

I don’t always get it right. The first time I chose the new muscle over the old one, it wasn’t a clean victory (I bickered with someone I love anyway). But I felt myself choose. That’s the whole game now: strengthen the muscle, one conflict at a time.

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Come As You Are

So I’m building the room I always needed. You’ll find it at @ragebaby.salon. For most of my life I perfected a surface that hides. Now I want to offer one that cares, since I’ve finally learned the difference.

Rage Baby Salon is where I ask the hard questions out loud — and where I send you one each week to your inbox. And Rage Baby, the book I’m writing now, is where I tell the deeper story.

It isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t trying to be. But if you’ve ever kept the peace by abandoning yourself, or known better and done the thing anyway, or built a beautiful life that sometimes doesn’t feel as good as it looks — or that’s still a work in progress — this might be your room.

For most of my life, my words ran ahead of my actions: I knew better, said better, and still did the old thing. It took until this past year for that to shift, and for my actions to finally start catching up with my words.

That’s not arrival. I’m not writing from a mountaintop or preaching from a soapbox; I’m telling you all of this from inside the work. I’m still learning. Still repairing. Still choosing. (Still getting it fucking wrong.) Still reaching for the most honest version of myself without pretending the gap is fully closed.

If you found your way here, my hope isn’t that you’ll see me as someone with answers. It’s that you’ll feel less alone in the questions you’re already asking.

So come as you are. Just don’t come pretending.

Start with Rage Baby Salon
One question can change everything.

Every Sunday, I send one thoughtful question. It’s a quiet pause in a loud world…like a reset. No noise or overwhelm, just a prompt to ground you and help you see your life more clearly.