Prologue

Hello! 

My name is Katie Heady, I like to think of myself as a little adventurous grandmother reincarnated. I was born from my mother’s womb on the 30th of October. I have two elder siblings and I grew up rather comfortably. I’ve gone through a couple struggles in my life, but I feel like these struggles have allowed me to be a more well-rounded artist. One particular incident that has changed me the most is the death of my father. I was rather young when my father passed, he passed away to pancreatic cancer around 2001. This leads my mom in a hard patch dealing with three kids all on her own. And it didn’t help how angry I was all the time. But my mom always put up with me and was so patient with me even when I didn’t understand or wasn’t compelled to be patient with her. And for that even to this day, I feel so in debt to her patience and kindness for taking on a challenge of raising a hell storm like myself.

 One thing I really was fond of doing when I was younger was going in the forest by my house, there was a beautiful stream and one of the larger rivers in Maryland was just five mins away from my house. I remember I would always try to make that effort to go to the forest every so often. It really helped me enhance my imagination and having a forest behind your house is just mystical in itself.  

Even now I’m constantly curious when I explore new places. I remember going to Gettysburg last year, I drove there all by myself. It was an experience that was both new but also was refreshing. I didn’t have to be dependent on anyone or anything. To just rely on oneself is an odd pleasure but because no one is stopping that’s what makes it thrilling. I went on several trips afterward in the following months, when I returned back home in the summer from school.

 One trip in particular that I remember was going to Annapolis over the summer. I went to Annapolis when I was in fifth grade, I just remember coming into the capitol building, the tour guide would be poetically explaining the historical importance of the rooms all located throughout the building. I returned to the same building 8 years later; I’d been dreaming about going on this trip for years. I eventually gave myself an excuse to go all the way out to Annapolis, MD from Columbia, MD. All due to a cool warehouse book sale going on in Annapolis, was my “main” excuse aside from my second agenda, which was to explore Old Annapolis. The book sale was actually quite entertaining and they had a wonderful selection of Neil Gaiman’s novels and Stephen Kings. I remember browsing over an aisle dedicated to literature from other countries. I found a few French novels; I picked one up for a friend and studied through another one for myself. When I picked up the French novel, I was able to make sense of a few of the sentences and phrases. Languages have become a great interest to me the past couple years. I first became interested in them when I was watching anime. Later on when I got older I started watching Korean Television shows and foreign films for fun.

When I got to middle school, I decided to star learning French, unfortunately I dropped it early on in high school. I rekindle my love of languages in my senior year of high school, when I took Italian; I felt like it was clear to me how to conjugate and to break down a languages, particularly with French, Spanish, Italian, and Korean. It’s truly a fun portal into another culture when you can understand them and even learn something new about someone because of their heritage, language, etc, I think these interests have really helped me get out of my comfort zone, they pushed me to become a better more wholesome person because of my curiosity.

Thanks for listening,

Katie