My Why

One of the questions I get asked a lot is why I became a massage therapist. The honest answer is that it took me a really long time to figure it out — and the path here was anything but a straight line. But looking back, I think my body was trying to tell me where I belonged long before my brain caught up.

I grew up in gymnastics — ten years as a gymnast, then about twelve years coaching. I dislocated my shoulder as a teenager. At the time, it was just a thing that happened — painful, annoying, dealt with. What nobody caught was that I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that makes my joints unstable. I wouldn't get that diagnosis until I was 47. For three decades, I just thought my body was difficult — joints that slipped, pain that never fully went away, and headaches that started in my teens and never stopped. Chronic headaches that I now know were rooted in shoulder dysfunction that had been building since that first dislocation. But back then, I didn't know any of that. I just knew I hurt.

I graduated high school in 1994 with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I tried community college, bailed, and dove into the workforce. For the next 12 years, I worked my way through corporate America — and almost always held two jobs at once, one corporate and one serving or bartending. It's not a real mystery why my body hates me.

My longest stretch was six years at an ad agency, working in the media and accounting departments. Seventy-hour weeks. Hunched over a desk. Pouring fuel on a fire that had been burning since I was a teenager. The headaches were relentless. My shoulders were so locked up I could barely turn my head. I had a coworker who would dig her elbow into my shoulders when I begged for relief. It helped for about ten minutes. But sitting at my desk at ten o'clock at night, crying from the headaches and the sheer exhaustion of it all, something clicked. I didn't just want someone to dig an elbow into my shoulders. I wanted to be the person who actually fixed the problem. That was the moment I knew I wanted to be a massage therapist.

But I was scared. I had bills. I had a life built around a paycheck. So I pushed the idea aside and kept going. I left the ad agency and moved on — licensed insurance agent, advertising account executive. Still grinding, still in pain, still ignoring the thing that had been calling me for years. Somewhere along the way, I also became a trainer at the restaurant where I'd been serving for about seven years, spending roughly five years teaching new staff the ropes. Always two jobs. Always running.

Then life did what life does — and it did a lot of it in a very short period of time. I got married in 2003 and welcomed three stepchildren into my life. We moved from my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa to Illinois. My son Payton was born in 2005. A year later, my marriage fell apart and I moved back to Cedar Rapids as a single mom with a baby.

That's when I finally stopped ignoring the thing that had been nagging at me for years. I enrolled in massage therapy school in 2006 — at 29, with a baby on my hip and no plan B. I got licensed in 2007. They say life begins at 30, and for me, that's when everything clicked. I loved the work from the start. I had found the thing I was supposed to do.

The timing, however, was brutal. The 2008 recession hit and I was a brand-new therapist with almost no established clientele. Clients were cutting massage first. I was a single mom working two jobs and barely scraping by, so I made what felt like the practical choice — I went back to school for a nursing degree.

Around the same time, the universe decided to weigh in on my personal life. In 2008, Cedar Rapids was hit by a catastrophic 500-year flood. The Cedar River swallowed entire neighborhoods, displaced tens of thousands of people, and submerged the county courthouse along with everything inside it — including my pending divorce proceedings. My husband and I got back together that same year. We've now been married for 23 years. Sometimes the universe knows what it's doing even when you don't.

What followed was a stretch of years that I can only describe as controlled chaos. We moved back to Illinois. Then back to Iowa. My husband took a job in Virginia while the kids and I stayed back. I was still chasing that nursing degree — four years, three schools, three states, roughly 900 community college credits, and an associate's degree later, I finally admitted to myself that I didn't want to be a nurse. I was already doing what I loved. I just needed the world to stabilize long enough to build a practice around it.

In 2011, my husband took a job in Lansing, Michigan, and we moved one last time. I arrived knowing absolutely no one. Within three months, I somehow lucked into starting my own massage therapy business — Health & Harmony, born in 2012 in a 99 square foot room I rented from a chiropractor. It was just me, a table, and a dream I'd been carrying around since those late nights crying at my desk at the ad agency.

That was 19 years ago. I haven't looked back.

It was my own pain that led me to this profession — but it's what I've learned from it that's kept me here. Those headaches I'd been living with since I was a teenager? No doctor or scan ever explained them. I eventually figured it out — it was muscular dysfunction in my shoulders. Imbalance, instability, compensation patterns that had been building for decades — was driving chronic tension in my neck, which was driving chronic headaches. The same pain that made my life miserable in my twenties became the thing I've spent the last 19 years learning to solve for other people.

And I still haven't learned how to slow down. I picked up taekwondo at 40 — because apparently my joints hadn't been through enough — and yes, I earned my black belt. I've only recently taken a hiatus because of my knee and shoulder issues, but I'm heading back as an assistant instructor in June. My body and I have a complicated relationship, but we're still negotiating.

Over the years, I've developed a deep understanding of how muscular dysfunction drives chronic pain and headaches — something our healthcare system routinely overlooks. Doctors have limited time, limited tools, and limited understanding of the musculoskeletal component. People get prescribed medication, told to manage their stress, and sent home. I've watched clients walk through my door who have been dismissed by doctor after doctor, who've tried every drug and every scan and every specialist, and who had given up on finding relief. And then the right hands found the right muscle in the right order, and everything changed.

I can't fix the healthcare system. But I can make a real difference for the people who walk through my door. When given the right input, I believe deeply in the body's ability to heal itself. That belief is the foundation of Health & Harmony — a space built from nothing, in a 99 square foot room, in a state where I knew no one, with no partners and no advantages. Just passion, stubbornness, and the conviction that this work matters. Today, I employ nine massage therapists, an esthetician, and a support team — a clinic built entirely on the belief that people deserve better care than they're getting.

And now, after 19 years of perfecting this work (which is always a work in progress), I'm getting ready for the next chapter. I've spent nearly two decades developing a method for treating chronic headaches rooted in shoulder and neck dysfunction — a method born from my own pain, refined through thousands of clients, lots of learning, and proven by results that speak for themselves. I'm building a continuing education course to teach it to other therapists. Because I can only see so many clients in a day. But if I can teach other therapists to do what I do — and do it well — the impact multiplies in ways I could never achieve on my own. More therapists doing this work at a high level means more people finally getting the help they've been looking for.

That teenage girl with the bad shoulder and the pounding headaches who spent her twenties hunched over a desk wondering if this was just how life felt — she couldn't have imagined any of this. Twelve years of corporate America, a flooded courthouse, a 99 square foot room, and 19 years of relentless curiosity later, I get to spend my days actually helping people — not moving numbers around in columns, but putting my hands on someone in pain and making it better. After everything it took to get here, I can't imagine doing anything else.

~Kim