Clarity On Fire

Imagine making the momentous decision to pack up your entire life and move cross-country from Pennsylvania all the way to Portland, Oregon. You decide to start your move on January 1, 2020, because it feels clean and fresh with possibilities, and you embark on your journey with enthusiasm and optimism.   And then everything, and we do mean everything, promptly falls apart.   You get COVID, but you don’t know it’s COVID yet because no one knows what it is, and almost die.    Your partner loses their job because of the pandemic, making you the primary breadwinner while you’re still struggling to breathe every day.   Your teeny tiny apartment, where you’re now trapped with your partner in a brand-new city where you don’t really have friends, and can’t make new ones, is infested with spiders.   That’s just a taste of what Kristen Kalp’s 2020 was like … and lord, the hits kept comin’. So, we sat down with Kristen, our friend-we’ve-never-met-in-real-life, to talk about what was inarguably the worst year ever. She g