Embracing Artistic Deviations: Our Homestead in the Hills
After eight years of unfulfilled potential on a Colorado farm, we broke free from family indoctrination and reclaimed our lives, turning “what if” into reality in West Virginia. Join us on our journey of transformation and self-discovery.
For eight years, we cultivated a forty-acre farm in Peyton, Colorado, but it certainly didn’t look like a masterpiece. I spent long stretches floundering, often fighting with my husband, Alan about which projects deserved priority and whether it was my responsibility to lead them. I clung to the mentality of “if he wants it built, he should build it.” That “why do I have to do it?” mindset had been ingrained in me from childhood. When Alan lost his job in January 2024, our farm should have served as a fully functioning safety net—a place where we could rely on income while he pivoted from IT to farming. Instead, I realized I had wasted years; the farm was barely creeping toward functionality, and his severance pay was propping it up while I drifted between panic and numbness.
During this time, I recognized the strange isolation we were living in. We had become tangential to the “family” inner circle: close enough to feel their influence and critiques, yet entirely cut off from their support. We orbited a “Family Superself” that demanded our conformity but offered no promise of safety.
Leaving that system forced me to confront a hard truth: I had been failing my own household by trying to please a group that had already cast us out. To thrive, I needed to dismantle the habits of a lifetime. I had to dispel the “people-pleaser” and “image-chaser” who was still trying to earn a place at a table that wasn’t built for us. I had to trade my reactive survival instincts for a calm, steadfast focus on my husband, Alan, and our two teenage children. I realized that as long as we remained tied to that toxic core, we were merely fueling a fire that was consuming our peace.
When clarity finally hit, the exit came swiftly. We recognized that the forty acres, greenhouse, and aquaponic system—though labors of love—paled in comparison to the freedom we sought. In just three months, we sold the farm, bought a 23-year-old Fleetwood Bounder, and I took the wheel with only thirty miles of prior RV experience. We left with the essentials and our pets. Our daughter and I returned later to retrieve her hard-won Mangalitsa pig, Skipper, and six chickens after building them new enclosures in West Virginia. We weren’t just relocating; we were severing ties to an influence that had drained us for far too long.
Now, on this West Virginia ridge, we are the architects of our own belonging. We are constructing our homestead from the ground up—not with contractors, but with our own hands. Our son often needs an emphatic push to join us; the lifetime of damage to his confidence is glaringly obvious. Yet he has boundless potential that he is beginning to acknowledge as we build our home and workshops—spaces that reflect our true nature, where the “weirdness” I was once mocked for is now the source of our work’s value.
This move represents our profound Artistic Deviation. We walked away from the margins of someone else’s drama to become the creators of our own story. Artistic Deviations Homestead is where we finally stopped being “tangential” to others and started being central to each other. We are no longer waiting for support that will never come; we are crafting it ourselves, one carefully selected beam at a time.
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