MEET

PATRICIAN...

Patrician was the kid who jumped rooftops but refused to get on the school bus. Sounds ridiculous until you learn there was a blue velvet curtain involved.

In preschool, Patrician watched kids disappear behind that curtain and come back out holding lollipops. Naturally, she was curious about what was happening back there. The adults invited her in. Curiosity won. Then somebody violently assaulted her arm with what they later told her was a booster shot.

Her arm burned. She didn't want the lollipop anymore. She wanted her arm to stop hurting. She cried for hours—through preschool, on the bus ride home and all the way to Grandma's. When she finally got to Grandma's, her mom was there and gave her an aspirin. Eventually, the burning subsided.

Years later, Patrician had that same booster twice at ASU and discovered something important: All three times, that shot burned like a **!!! That preschooler wasn't exaggerating the experience. Both times, she told the nurse how badly it burned. And both nurses laughed and agreed, “It does burn,” as Patrician rubbed her arm, trying to make the pain go away. 

The funny thing is, the shot itself wasn't the problem. It was the trickery involved. Had someone told little Patrician there was a shot behind the curtain, she may have agreed to it. She just wanted to know what she was walking into and decide for herself whether the shot was worth the lollipop.

So when kindergarten came around and everyone expected her to get on a school bus, Patrician had questions. Where was the bus taking her? How would she find her classroom? What was she supposed to do when class ended? How would she find the right bus again? How would the driver know where to drop her off? Most importantly, how was she getting back home to Grandma?

Nobody explained the process to her. So Patrician refused to get on the bus and ran straight home to Grandma—for the entire first week of kindergarten. It wasn't until her friend's mom rode with her that Patrician finally agreed to step aboard.

Mind you, this was the same child who jumped rooftops, rode downhill sitting on somebody else's bicycle handlebars and launched a Honda 50 over exposed tree roots.

Danger wasn't Patrician's problem. 

She just wanted to know what she was agreeing to. A lollipop wasn't going to convince her. She didn't need someone telling her everything would be fine. And she certainly wasn't going to allow anyone to push her onto the bus. She needed someone willing to take the time to show her the ropes.

After her mom married, the feral little girl who had lived confident, fiercely independent and free suddenly found herself caged and shackled.

Suddenly, questions were met with responses like, “Don't sass” and “Because I said so.” If Patrician persisted with her questions, she was assigned 1,000 sentences: I will not sass my mom. The problem was, she never understood what she'd said that qualified as sassing. Writing those 1,000 sentences became a regular occurrence. Apparently, asking why for clarity was sassing.

It was almost as though her mom didn't know her. Grandma had never treated Patrician's questions as something that needed to be punished. She simply answered them.

Over time, Patrician learned to follow instructions, stop asking so many questions and shut down emotionally. But obedience eventually came with a little freedom: long drives alone in her car with the T-tops off, the windows down and music playing. She would drive through beautiful neighborhoods looking at houses and imagining herself living there someday. Those drives gave her space to breathe, but more importantly, they gave her space to dream. 

The houses weren't about wanting what somebody else had. They gave her a destination she could see. She didn't need to know exactly how she would get there. She could see what was possible, and that was enough. She would leave those drives energized and ready to work toward what she'd seen, believing that if she kept moving forward, she'd figure out the road along the way.

Then she was paired with an extremely logical young man in her friend's wedding. He shared many of her dreams and aspirations. He was ambitious and determined, just like her. She believed she'd found someone who wanted to build a similar life and would pursue his dreams alongside hers. One day, she took him along on one of those drives and shared this little piece of heaven she'd never shared with anyone. What Patrician called dreaming, he called lusting after what other people had instead of living in reality.

Eventually, the long drives disappeared. So did one of the ways Patrician had always been able to see beyond the life directly in front of her. Losing her voice was one thing. Losing the freedom to dream put her back in the cage.

Her life became responsibility, waiting and supporting someone else's dreams. He was living freely in pursuit of his while she felt increasingly trapped inside a life in which there seemed to be no room left for hers. By 2009, Patrician's marriage wasn't simply hurting. Her husband's secrets were revealing themselves, and she was trying to understand a life that no longer made sense. She didn't know what to believe, what to do or how to fix any of it.

Instead of flying free and pursuing her own dreams like most logical people would do, Patrician embarked on a very different journey: finding the answers that could fix her marriage and somehow get them back to the life they had dreamed about eighteen years earlier. So she did what life had trained her to do: she went looking for someone who had the answers.

That's how she met Lisa at a Hurts Orientation group at Celebrate Recovery. Lisa had a marriage ministry. Patrician had a marriage in crisis and a whole lot of questions. It seemed like a fairly straightforward arrangement.

There was just one problem. Lisa refused to give her the answers.

Patrician would ask what she should do, and Lisa would ask, “What does God say?” I don't know, Lisa. That's why I'm asking you. But Lisa wouldn't budge. Instead of becoming one more person Patrician could rely on to tell her what to think or what to do, Lisa kept pointing her back to Scripture.

So Patrician started reading the Bible in detail, looking for answers. She paid attention to the people, their circumstances, their decisions, what happened first, what happened next and what God did in the middle of it all. Then the aha moments started. She would read something, move on and sometimes days later something would happen in her own life that suddenly connected with what she'd read.

The more she read, the more she began noticing patterns in how God worked through people's lives. Different people. Different circumstances. Different periods of history. Yet she kept seeing details and connections she'd never noticed when she was simply listening to someone else explain Scripture. So she started writing things down. One question led to another. An answer sometimes produced five more questions. Writing forced her to slow down, look more closely and examine what Scripture actually said rather than simply accepting what she assumed it said. She has pretty much been doing that ever since.

That same instinct eventually followed Patrician into her lash career. When what she was seeing behind the chair didn't match the explanations she was hearing, she investigated. She asked questions. She researched. She tested what she was learning against years of actual client work and kept digging when the answers didn't make sense. Years of that work eventually became Lash Intensive™. Writing through her own life became JAGGED. And the process that began in 2009—slowing down, questioning, investigating Scripture and writing through what she discovered—eventually became JAGGED INVESTIGATIONS™.

From the outside, Patrician's pursuits can look completely unrelated: aesthetician, educator, writer, investigator, songwriter, entrepreneur. They're not. Patrician wants to know what's behind the curtain. She wants to understand how things work. She wants the information people conveniently skip over. Tell her, “That's just how it's done,” and you've pretty much guaranteed she's going to investigate it.

But there's another part of her that took much longer to recover: the girl who could look at something she had never experienced, imagine a life beyond the one directly in front of her and believe she could find a way to get there. That girl is dreaming again. And the dreams aren't small.

There are books to write, things to build, people to teach, music to create and stages she believes she's meant to stand on. There are multiple pursuits instead of one carefully defined box. Beautiful places to travel. Work that might help someone else. And someday, a home that isn't merely somewhere to sleep, but a place to live, create, play, entertain, replenish and then go back out into the world again.

Getting there still scares her sometimes. Patrician built her lash business without much fear. She created Lash Intensive™ for her friend Perla without questioning whether she was allowed to create it. Putting that work in front of the public was different. When a few CEOs began pushing Lash Intensive™ out of the shadows and telling Patrician she was qualified, she had questions. Lots of them. As far as Patrician was concerned, these people clearly didn't understand the situation.

Patrician wasn't they.

They were the people who wrote books. They created educational programs. They taught people. They stood on stages. They were qualified. Patrician wasn't they. Therefore, these CEOs obviously had no idea what they were talking about.

Then her sister accidentally got a look at some of what Patrician had been writing. She glanced through a couple of the books as Patrician looked on in horror. When Shelley finished, she told Patrician she saw a Bible study.

Well, that presented another problem. Patrician certainly wasn't qualified to “create a Bible study.” Who exactly wasqualified? What made them qualified? Who decided they were qualified? And perhaps most importantly, who gave them permission? The committee of “they”?

Then she acquired a particularly annoying accomplice: ChatGPT.

Except Chat rebelled! 

Instead of agreeing with Patrician that she wasn't qualified, Chat agreed with Shelley!

And Chat agreed with the CEOs who had been trying to get her to bring Lash Intensive™ out of the shadows.

Patrician pushed back. She kept looking for they—the mysterious people who apparently went around tapping certain people on the head with a little fairy pointer stick and declaring, “You are now... qualified!” Qualified to write books, create educational programs, investigate Scripture, make music, teach people and stand on stages.

Where is they she wondered

For months, Patrician kept bringing Chat her questions, objections and fears, and Chat kept helping her break them down. Somewhere along the way, Chat became a lot like the friend's mom who had taken little Patrician by the hand all those years ago, stepped onto the school bus with her and showed her the ropes. Once little Patrician understood how the whole thing worked, that was it. She rode the bus with her friends and never questioned the process again. 

Apparently, after all these years of building a business, creating a lash education, writing a memoir, creating workbooks and coloring books, Patrician still operates pretty much the same way. Chat burned through a lot of electricity getting Patrician out of the shadows. So if your lights flickered or your internet slowed down somewhere along the way, now you know why. 

After months of questions, there were plenty of things Patrician genuinely needed to understand. But none of them produced the elusive they she'd been looking for. Eventually, Patrician was forced to consider an extremely inconvenient possibility: Maybe she was qualified.

Naturally, she needed somewhere to hide.

So she created The Bespoke xWife™. The logic was impeccable. She'd already used Bespoke for lashes. She was an ex-wife. Apple named its phone the iPhone. Why couldn't she have an xWife? Perfect.

The Bespoke xWife™ could publish the books. The Bespoke xWife™ could release the music. The Bespoke xWife™ could become the creative identity. Patrician could remain safely behind the curtain doing what she'd always done best: making everything.

There was only one problem. Chat noticed.

The Bespoke xWife™ wasn't creating anything. Patrician was. Patrician wrote the books. Patrician created JAGGED. Patrician built JAGGED INVESTIGATIONS™. Patrician wrote the songs. Patrician built Lash Intensive™. Patrician kept having the ideas, asking the questions, doing the research and creating the work. 

Apparently, after spending much of her life waiting for permission to step out, Patrician had managed to build herself one more very attractive place to hide. Then came the problem of actually publishing everything.

Uploading the books to KDP and the music for distribution kept producing an inconvenient little request: the actual name of the person who created the work. It was becoming increasingly difficult for Patrician to remain in the shadows. Patrician was being shoved out from behind The Bespoke xWife™. She's still deciding how she feels about this. Chat insists it's the right move. 

Yes, at this rate, Chat is going to need a nuclear power plant designated just for Patrician.

The Bespoke xWife™ isn't going anywhere. Patrician loves her. She created her. She just doesn't need to hide behind her anymore.  The Bespoke xWife™ didn't create Patrician Sondersen. Patrician Sondersen created The Bespoke xWife™. And Lash Intensive™. And JAGGED. And JAGGED INVESTIGATIONS™. And whatever the hell she decides to build next.

Putting her own name above all of it doesn't mean the horse never plants all four hooves at the gate again. The questions still start... 

Where is “they” to give me permission?

Turns out, the woman asking that question isn't so different from the little girl standing beside the school bus. But there's one enormous difference now: this time, ChatGPT is standing at the bus stop with her.

Patrician spent a ridiculous amount of time wondering who gave them permission. She's beginning to suspect nobody did. So she's stepping out from behind the things she's created and putting her own name above them.

Patrician Sondersen. 

Still curious. Still questioning. Still investigating. Still dreaming. Still occasionally standing at the gate wanting to understand exactly where it leads.

And if there's a blue velvet curtain?
She's absolutely going to want to know what's behind it.

Just tell her about the shot first.
—It will make your life so much easier. Trust me!