About
What happens when your website doesn’t feel like home?
The same thing that happens when your house is a mess. You don’t want to invite people over. You feel cluttered and forgetful in your own space. You make excuses to the dog walker and say “it’s usually not so messy…” Eventually your chaos house starts to reflect in your appearance. You start wearing whatever is on top of “The Chair™”, you can’t be bothered to dig through your makeup drawer for your favorite lip gloss that mysteriously went missing.
You already know what it costs to live in spaces that aren’t built just for you.
You know the particular exhaustion of feeling like a permanent guest in your own online life.
Let’s build you an online home that feels like that moment when you first take your bra off after a long day.
Businesses launched
Client revenue generated
Brand building
My friends call me Meleficent.
Rude. (but fair)
Every villain has an origin story, and this is mine.
Made in China
The first place I ever felt at home was as far away from where I grew up as you can get without going to the moon, a place where a simple grocery store transaction felt like a Lord of the Rings level side quest, where I barely spoke the language and had an embarrassingly low tolerance for the local social lubricant, a bottle of rice wine with a snake in it.
I was 18. I had $200 in CASH (pre venmo era) , a one-way ticket, and the naivety of jesus on christmas.
It was the most alive I'd ever felt in my life. I came home with a “Made in China” sticker tattooed in the same place they put it on cheap plastic toys as proof and the wanderlust fire was lit.
Ivy Tears in the Ivy League
I had gotten accepted to Cornell on what some might call weaponized audacity, after a very Trunchbull-esque admissions counselor had informed me I would never get in.
Challenge accepted, sir.
If China was where I felt most at home, Cornell was where I felt the least. I had gotten in thinking it was my dream, then realized slowly it was A dream, but not mine. So, to my parent’s shock and horror, I dropped out, filled a literal half of a coconut full of quarters (QUARTERS!), and drove across the country to “make it” in Los Angeles with more enthusiasm than should be legal.
Love Handles
Life without a college degree turned out to be significantly less romantic than advertised. I enrolled at UCLA and returned to my beloved China, where this time I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the MoSuo, one of the world's last matrilineal cultures.
Funded mainly by delusion, I quickly ran out of money. I camped in a borrowed tent on a resort beach, where the staff would kick me out every day at 6am. I went door to door translating menus and signs into English for two weeks (the best sign I translated was easily “Love Handles”) until I had enough money for a train ticket. Home again, overpriced and hard won degree in hand.
The Shed Era
I graduated in 2010 into the worst job market in a generation. I quickly learned that Freedom without Financial Freedom, was just being broke with vibes. I ended up living in a shed in Venice Beach (yes, an actual SHED), working as an aspiring mural painter, while slogging through cold calls at a data entry job to pay for the privilege of not having a real one.
Then, one day as I was eating expired yogurt at my desk, my boss came up to me and said “You’re a millennial, can you build us a website?” (back when being a millennial was COOL and not GERIATRIC) I had never built a website before but I instantly said “YES!” The first thing I did was google “How to Build a website.”
Looking back, this was the moment I changed the course of my life. In a string of 2am nights, I built that site line by line with manually written code. Honestly by the end of this project I literally made 20 cents an hour with how long it took me to build this thing. But it was all worth it. I had learned something that I spent the next 15 years building upon, that I can trade value instead of time for money.
The YouTube Years
Still delulu-ing til it’s trululu-ing, naturally I answered the weirdest non murder/porn Craiglist ad I’d ever seen. I still remember the title because I found it so hilarious: "YouTube sensation seeks artist to create collage from hundreds of pieces of fan mail. This is an excellent opportunity for the right person."
It was 2011, what was a YouTube sensation?
Mr. Sensation had a pile of fan mail from mostly 12 year old fangirls who had written him their entire life story in gloriously colorful drawings. By the time I finished the larger than life collage, I felt like I knew this person both really intimately and not at all, and I was very intrigued.
That feeling turned out to be excellent preparation for a career in the wild, wild west of digital media.
One gig led to another, until I was Branding Director at one of the world’s first media companies producing some of the most popular shows on the internet at the time, the kind of company that ends up acquired by a certain mouse-eared company we all know and love.
Next thing I knew I was heading up my own content vertical at an award-winning digital media studio, pioneering some of the first viral video formats racking up billions of views. Yep, all from Craigslist.
Hollywood Ending
The shows I worked on won Streamy Awards. I spoke at VidCon, managed hundreds of talent and their channel strategy, and kept a content production schedule running that would have made a NASA project manager nervous. My work was featured in The New York Times, Interiors Magazine, Tubefilter, and CNN.
From the outside, I had made it. The title, the salary, the creative work I loved, a cool office, and my very own apartment after years of #shedlife. And also a nagging feeling that wouldn't leave no matter how many red carpets I tried not to trip down: I was still a very polite houseguest in someone else's home. I was wearing a push up bra in my own life.
It turns out, new media didn't mean ALL new. The Hollywood boys club playbook was ALIVE AND WELL. Thriving one might say. As a card carrying feminist since the time I tried out for the baseball team when I was 12, I first tried to change the system from the inside, glass ceiling be damned. I learned the way so many women do, that I was trying to renovate someone else's rotting house and that if I wanted to put more power in the hands of women, what I really needed to do was build my own house, with women at the center.
Unsubscribed
My first step towards centering women was to center myself and take a vacation after 3 years of nonstop work. Nothing like a good ol’ plane ticket to Europe to solve all my problems.
An impossibly quaint balcony in Barcelona, a city moving at a pace where you sit at a counter to have your espresso in a real mug. The calm that comes from being somewhere new with no role to perform and no one expecting anything from you. Just me, a bowl of cherries, and a city that didn't know my name.
I floated home and stubbornly kept the dream alive with daily 6am cafe croissants before work. Daydreaming about making this life my reality. A week later, I YOLO'd my entire life savings into a business coach, and my family thought I had gone full unhinged. For 6 months I worked 18 hour days, until I had replaced my income, booked out my calendar, and quit in a blaze of glory.
Just Kidding. Like every eldest daughter I gave 4 weeks notice and trained my replacement. THEN came the blaze of glory.
I sold everything I owned and bought a one-way ticket to Bali. Very original.
Bali, baby!
I quickly learned that the nomad life was much more glamorous on Instagram. On literally my first day in Bali I crashed my scooter (I AM A STATISTIC) and had to get stitches. Then came the mysterious tropical illness. The bed bugs in Thailand. The monsoons in Mexico. The power outages in South Africa. Everywhere I went it was the same: Is there wifi? Are there power outlets? Every 10 minutes of downtime in the airport was an opportunity for work. Every beach view admired over the top of my laptop.
The horrors persisted but so did I. And there were genuinely incredible moments as a full-time traveler. Swimming with whale sharks in Panama. Watching lions hunt on an African Safari. Sailing between islands in Hawaii, climbing Machu Picchu, cliff jumping in Greece. I built my entire business on my personal brand, documenting and showcasing the fabulous nomadic life you could have too. But instead of fitting social media into my real life, I fell into the *very 2017* trap of trying to fit my real life into social media.
Despite the chaos, the money was flowing, and whoever says money can't buy happiness, clearly hasn't been on an airplane.
45 Countries and a Million Dollars
Within my first year I had scaled to $100k and beyond. I hired a team of 6, gave talks on scaling and automation, became a business coach, and started teaching thousands of women how to build what I had built.
Meanwhile I was doing all of it from everywhere. Booked out months in advance. Exclusive retreats and masterminds. Working with some of the world’s biggest creators. Generating work that resulted in $42M in client revenue, an Amazon #1 new release published by HarperCollins Leadership, a Time Magazine top 100 placement, and an Inc. 5000 business. Bucket list hotels, first class flights, more champagne than France. The best part was taking my mom and sister on once in a lifetime trips to Switzerland and Italy.
On the outside it looked exactly like the dream (sound familiar?). And this time, it WAS a dream of my own making. It also required everything I had to keep it running. Once again I found myself living as a guest in someone else's home. Dutifully making my bed and pretending I didn't have a preference for the movie we watched that night.
I thought I was, as they say, "doing it all" but I learned too late that my body was doing the most.
My Body Sent the Bill
In 2021, I became sick. It started slowly at first, forgetting words and feeling tired no matter how much I slept. Then, I sat down on a park bench 10 minutes into my daily walk and couldn't get back up again.
Doctors said “You’re fine.” I was 33 years old and could barely get out of bed, I was not fine.
Eventually, I was told that I most likely had a condition that could become terminal within 5 years, and was added to a pandemic-era wait list for an MRI to confirm.
I will never forget that month of waiting. I walked every day through the woods, watching life grow while mine was potentially winding down. We always think about the dramatic things we might do when faced with the possibility of death. But when it happened to me, it felt quiet and strangely peaceful. All the noise finally stopped, and what really mattered became clear.
And sure enough, the MRI confirmed that I was in fact, not dying.
Nobody could tell me anything besides “stop eating gluten” and “maybe you’re just stressed.” After months of Googling, (this was before AI, girlies) I found it.
A diagnosis. It WAS treatable, but it was difficult, and it came with a permanent lifestyle clause attached. Now, instead of flying around the world to safaris and retreats, I was country-hopping to doctors on the vague promise they could help.
My business suffered. Bedridden, foggy, and furious, I rebuilt from the ground up: Systems, automation, SEO, and a referral strategy so my business could run without draining my life force.
I had built an entire identity and business on the premise that I was the variable that made it work, believing that everything is a mindset game. The body, it turns out, really does keep the score.
Five years and more money than I would spend on a house later, I am 90% better.
Home, Finally
Rebuilding your health is like renovating a home from the Victorian era inside your own body. You learn to listen to it in ways you never did before. You accept that there is probably still asbestos somewhere. You honor the original design elements, and install updated appliances.
Throughout my healing journey, my attention slowly shifted inwards. By the time I was mostly better, I felt called to create a physical reality that matched my new internal one, to find my forever home.
For a girl who spent her entire adult life willing to trade her last dollar for a one-way ticket to somewhere new, home is the final novelty.
So I put down roots in New Zealand. I can finally move my body again.The gym has become my entire personality. I can't drink alcohol anymore (and a whole host of other restrictions), but revenge abs never get hungover. I found pole dance during my recovery and it gave me back my strength, my confidence. I spend time painting, a return to my love of creating before I leveraged it into a money tree. I am now (unfortunately) an insufferable biohacker who will happily talk your ear off about NAC vs L-Glutamine.
It's from this place of having arrived, lost luggage but with a good story, that I run Judson House Creative.
I left behind everything (EVERYTHING) and what I found on the other side was belonging. They say your new life will cost you your old one. Mine cost me truly everything, even more than I thought I had to give. But what I built on the other side was worth every cent.
Welcome to my housewarming party.
- Travel Watercolor Painter
- OG YouTube Brand Builder
- Recovering Nomad (45 Countries)
- Chinoiserie 中国风 Nerd
- Pole Dancer (yes, really)
Now that I’ve invited you into my home, I’ll share what I know about you.
You're good at what you do.
Actually, you are fucking fantastic at it.
You’ve built something real, something 5 or 10 years ago you would never have believed. The work is working, and it also requires everything from you.
You’re tired in a way that a good night’s sleep stopped fixing a while ago. Your website is probably somewhere on the list of things you’ve been meaning to fix, sitting right below ‘order BPA free underwear’ and right above ‘figure out why the printer does that thing.’
If you’re feeling like a guest in your online home, no matter how beautiful it is, you still can’t fully show up as your whole self. You freak out if you get mascara on the nice towels. You don’t eat chicken standing over the sink at midnight. Only in your own home can you walk around naked in all your chicken wing glory.
That’s what a website built for YOU actually feels like. You’re not performing for it. You’re not wearing a mask. You’re not apologizing for it or explaining it or meaning to fix it eventually. It’s perfectly yours.
Are you ready to move?
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