COMMON STRANGERS

FEATURING KATHERINE PETERSON

Written by Des Dare Barragan

We met Katy in her cozy La Mesa home which was dressed in eclectic wall decor, blanketed couches, and Christmas trinkets from the month before. Our time together began with a photo shoot of her acting out the routine habits that maintain her mental health from day to day. Katy’s decision to capture these activities for the mag was so telling of who she is and what’s most important to her. After exchanging a few rounds of “cool cool cools”, we dove into her story.

Katy was born in Houston, Texas, and lived a troubled childhood under the guardianship of her nuclear family until the age of eleven. At that time, she moved to live with her aunt and uncle in San Diego. Katy explains that she “kinda fell out of her family” at age 16. Within time, she met a man in the military and left to build a life with him in North Carolina. Katy and her husband eventually separated, but she remained in NC for the fire service.

“I was waitressing at the time and really into the art scene, and I wanted to give back and wanted to feel like I was doing something for anybody other than myself.” So in 2019, Katy enrolled in classes as a volunteer at the local fire station and, within three weeks, was offered a spot in the city’s academy. She gladly went from a volunteer to part-time to fulltime but experienced circumstances that led her home to San Diego for a reset. “Because of my childhood, just because of the way that I’d been living my life, I didn’t really have a good foundation.” Katy kept trying to build a life from turbulence and emotion, but it just wasn’t working, and she wasn’t moving forward in the direction she needed. “I was in kind of a rough relationship; I had hit a point with the fire service where I was just taking on too much stress, too much trauma.”

“It was no longer treading water. I needed to change something drastically in order to survive.”

Katy learned self-care tools in therapy from a young age but would only use them sporadically for instant gratification, and once the work got difficult, her commitment would taper off.

“I was tired of being in a loop; I was tired of feeling like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna do better,’ and then having these emotional breakdowns. You can understand the way that your mind works and the way that it’s come to be what it is, but there has to be some responsibility at the end of it.” Katy often found herself in one of two relatable extremes: holding on to an identity of victimhood (not wanting to take responsibility for anything) or beating herself up and treating herself like everything was her fault. She describes how embracing the grey areas in all things has been life-altering for her, “I have complex PTSD, which tends to put you more in your flight or fight mode. Definitely makes a person more black-and-white in their thinking. The biggest theme for me over this last year is no longer thinking of things in black and white. It’s more, ‘Okay, yes, this thing happened to me, but where can I take control of the situation, take responsibility of the situation.’”

Katy implements ownership of her mental health through daily rituals that keep her in the present and root her in her most authentic self. These include climbing, running, journaling, and an obsession with crocheting! She tells us that the physical exercise gets her endorphins going and makes her feel productive because she’s going outside and doing something good for her body. Journaling is a practice she aims to do twice a day, and it provides a safe space to process her emotions, take her thoughts out of her head, and place them somewhere visible. And then there’s crocheting, where she gets the satisfaction of putting a bunch of knots together, which end in a tangible product made by hand. Katy illustrates it this way, “A lot of understanding my identity now has been finding my way back to myself. Not Katherine at 25 or 20, but small Katherine. Understanding her needs and why her coping mechanisms started. Like the crocheting thing, I think I started up crocheting when I was a tiny kiddo, and I never fully got into it cause it wasn’t a kid activity to be doing. So I just kind of didn’t do it anymore. Identity, it’s just been very much of a coming back to myself; Here’s what we have, so now that I know that this is what I have, where do I go with it?”

Katherine has learned to start with the smallest thing she can and fully commit to that one step before taking the next. Her next step was building a healthy community in San Diego.

Months before leaving North Carolina, some repressed memories from Katy’s childhood surfaced. “That, coupled with dealing with traumatic things from the fire service, just got me to a point where I didn’t feel comfortable in many social interactions.” In a group of anything larger than six people, Katy would feel rejected or judged, and even though she knew she was misunderstanding those interactions, she couldn’t shake the perception. Katy informs us that that level of mistrust is what it looks like to be processing a trauma response. “It took some leaning into myself, leaning into my family, spending time in nature to start to get my body to ramp down to where I could actually start interacting with people in a healthy way for myself.”

While it was complicated to be social, Katy did her best to remain consistent in pursuing friendship and has two local spots that are her main hubs for safe community. “Public Square is like my favorite coffee house. I probably go there maybe a little too much! I love everyone that works there. People are just more encouraged to talk and engage.”

Katy has also found community at her gym, Mesa Rim, which she describes as “Probably the healthiest workplace I’ve ever worked in. People will ask how you’re feeling. That’s the first question that they ask you; it’s just very good interactions. And those communities kind of overlap with each other, so a lot of the time, I will find climbers at Public Square.” The final piece of Katy’s current support system has been connecting with childhood friends, who may have taken a different path than her, but there’s a mutual understanding of where they’ve come from. Community has helped dissolve victimhood’s appeal, that is when we think we are alone in trauma. It has also helped Katy believe that she is worthy of the space she is in.

We asked Katy for the words she would use to describe herself, and this was her response:

“I am artistic. I enjoy words a lot because I feel like it’s an amazing way to be able to communicate. Communication is very important to me. Community’s huge to me. Even in my darkest moments, I appreciate the connections that I get from people. I’m becoming a whole lot more family-based now. That one, I didn’t think, was necessarily a huge important factor to me, but this last year has been so healing being with my family, so that’s a huge one to me now. And athletic. Maybe a little empathy in there.”

Check out this list of mental health resources that Katy put together just for you.

BOOKS

“Widen the Window” by Elizabeth Stanley

“The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk

FILM

Stutz a Netflix film directed by Jonah Hill

PODCAST

Huberman Podcast