My résumé makes a lot more sense if you stop expecting it to behave like a traditional résumé. I have worked in technology, taught piano for nearly two decades, built a music education business, managed online communities, worked in editorial and communications, moved into social media and digital marketing, developed training and content programs, produced a podcast, and somehow also ended up founding a nonprofit kitten rescue.
There was never a master plan connecting all of those things. For a long time, I actually thought that was a problem. Looking backward, though, there is a much clearer through-line than I could see while I was living it.
I started in tech. In the '90s.
My professional relationship with technology goes back much further than my current job title suggests. I started working in IT and technical environments in the late 1990s, back when connecting to the internet involved noises we have collectively agreed never to inflict on ourselves again.
I liked technology, and I was good at figuring out how things worked, but I was always particularly interested in the point where technology met people. If I understood something that someone else didn't, I wanted to figure out how to explain it in a way that made sense to them. If something wasn't working, I wanted to know why. If the same problem kept happening, I wanted to know whether there was a better way to solve it.
I didn't have language for that as a professional skill yet. It was just how my brain worked.
Then I spent almost twenty years teaching piano.
In 2000, I started Piano With Tabby and became a private piano teacher. Music education eventually became a major part of my professional life, including teaching Kindermusik and becoming involved in communications and social media work alongside teaching.
On paper, leaving technical work for music education looks like a pretty dramatic career change. In practice, many of the skills were surprisingly similar. Teaching is largely an exercise in understanding how another person processes information. Knowing how to play something yourself isn't enough. You have to figure out what the student already understands, where the disconnect is happening, and how to explain the same concept differently when the first explanation doesn't work.
That requires a lot of listening, troubleshooting, experimentation and adaptation. It also taught me very early that the technically correct explanation isn't necessarily the useful explanation. If the person you're talking to doesn't understand it, finding another way to communicate it is part of the job.
That lesson has followed me through virtually every role I've had since.
The internet eventually pulled me back in.
While I was teaching, the internet was changing from a place people deliberately “went” into infrastructure underneath everyday life. Social media was becoming part of how people found information, made decisions, formed communities and built relationships with people they might never meet in person.
That fascinated me, particularly the community side of it. I wasn't especially interested in using social media as a digital billboard. I was interested in what happened when people gathered around a shared product, interest, problem or identity and started talking to one another.
Eventually, communications and community work stopped being something I did alongside my career and became the career itself.
I worked in communications and editorial leadership with TEDxLeagueCity before moving deeper into technology community management. At cPanel and WebPros, and later at Liquibase, I worked in roles that lived somewhere between the people using a product and the company building it. I managed communities, content and conversations, but I was also listening for patterns, identifying friction, surfacing feedback, helping users find answers and helping internal teams understand what users were actually experiencing.
I discovered that I really liked working in that space between an organization and the people it was trying to reach. There is almost always a gap between what an organization thinks it has communicated and what the person on the other side actually understands or needs to know. A surprising amount of my career has been spent finding that gap and figuring out how to close it.
Somewhere along the way, community became marketing.
Over time, my work expanded from community and social media into broader digital marketing. Today, I'm a Digital Marketing Manager at Bigleaf Networks, where my work crosses content strategy, social media, SEO, campaigns, training, digital experiences and quite a few projects that don't fit neatly inside a single marketing discipline.
That last part is probably not an accident.
I tend to gravitate toward projects where several things need to work together. I like taking a complicated collection of information, tools, people and objectives and figuring out how to turn it into a system that actually functions. Sometimes that means developing a content workflow. Sometimes it's figuring out how one piece of content can become an entire campaign without simply repeating itself fifteen times. Sometimes it's building training that makes a complicated technical concept understandable to someone who doesn't spend their life thinking about networks.
When I look at that work next to what I was doing as a piano teacher, the connection is pretty obvious. The subject matter has changed considerably, but I'm still trying to understand the audience, figure out where the disconnect is, organize complicated information and find the explanation that makes it click.
Then, naturally, I started a kitten rescue.
This is the point where my career path starts looking especially strange again.
Tabby's Tiny Tabbies began with rescue work and eventually became an actual nonprofit organization. Running an animal rescue might seem completely disconnected from technology or digital marketing, but it has probably made the pattern in my career more obvious to me than anything else I've done.
A rescue is not primarily a kitten-cuddling operation, although there is admittedly a fair amount of kitten cuddling. It's an operations problem, a communications problem, a data problem, a resource-allocation problem, a community problem and occasionally a tiny-screaming-animal-at-three-in-the-morning problem.
I built the website and the processes behind it. I manage adoption applications, medical records and intake information. I create educational resources and fundraising campaigns. I coordinate fosters, adopters, clinics and other rescuers. I track what works, notice what doesn't, and change the system when I realize we're repeatedly creating unnecessary work for ourselves.
This is also where one of my more persistent habits becomes particularly obvious: once I have done the same thing manually enough times, I start wondering why I'm still doing it manually.
I don't necessarily need everything automated, but I do need things to make sense. I want information where I can find it. I want processes that account for what actually happens rather than what somebody imagined would happen when they designed them. If a person has to remember seventeen unwritten steps to complete a routine task correctly, I don't think the person is the problem. I think the process is unfinished.
Apparently I've been approaching work this way for most of my life.
For a long time, I thought my career was scattered.
We're given a fairly specific story about what a successful career is supposed to look like. You choose a field, become increasingly specialized in it, and move through progressively more senior versions of roughly the same job. If your résumé doesn't tell that story, it can be difficult not to look at it as evidence that you wandered off course somewhere.
I did that for a long time. I looked at the pivots and thought they were the story.
Now I think the accumulation is the story.
Teaching taught me how to meet people where they are and change my approach when something isn't working. Technical work taught me how to troubleshoot and how systems fit together. Community management taught me how to listen at scale and recognize patterns inside hundreds of individual conversations. Editorial work taught me how to find the useful story inside a pile of information. Marketing taught me how to connect communication to an actual objective instead of treating the communication itself as the outcome.
Rescue has required nearly all of those skills at once, usually with fewer resources, higher stakes and much less tolerance for a process that only works in theory.
None of those experiences replaced the ones before them. They accumulated.
I'm a generalist on purpose now.
There was a time when I might have described myself as someone who still hadn't figured out what she wanted to be when she grew up. I don't really see it that way anymore.
I'm interested in systems and people, particularly the places where the two interact badly. I like complicated problems that don't belong entirely to one department or discipline. I like learning enough about something to understand how the pieces fit together, and then figuring out what could work better.
Sometimes the result is a content strategy, a workflow, a website, a training program or a community. Sometimes it's an organization designed to keep very small cats alive. Those things look wildly different from the outside, but the part of the work that interests me is remarkably consistent.
I build things, I grow things, and I help things thrive.
It just took me a fairly unusual career path to realize that was what I'd been doing all along.