I like to joke that I made my first millions dollars “from the back seat of my car.”

That’s because I originally hail from a rural Pennsylvania trailer park where I desperately needed to figure out what it meant to live a good life and do work I was proud of. (Let’s face it, eight years at the ice cream stand were glorious, but where does a small-town girl go for more?)

That question led me on a life-long journey traveling the open road, studying career happiness, and experimenting in business, when I discovered that you may be down to your last twenty bucks (and ounce of sanity), but you will always have your ideas. And good ideas can always be sold.

Enter: The Middle Finger Project. I started The Middle Finger Project as a way to help small-town girls worldwide trust in their own ideas and turn them into reality. A decade later, what once began as an optimistic online column has evolved into a company with a book published by the biggest publisher in the world, a suite of online training programs, and a killer crew of fans who consistently look to TMF to find their voice and remember who they are.

I still can’t believe this shit.

An Inappropriate List of Mildly Relevant Facts About Me That May Or May Not Make You Wish You Had a Beer

1. My biggest fear in life is a greasy keyboard. Ergo, I wash my hands like I’m strung-out on Dial, and if you shook my hand, you’d think I were AN ACTUAL LUMBERJACK.
2. I firmly believe that Frank’s Hot Sauce is a vitamin. I take it daily.
3. Favorite smell? Tomato plant.
4. Writing takes me forever, but apparently, some people like it. This is nice.
5. Fish can go to hell.
6. The very first time I ever met with my literary agency in NYC? I thought the Flat Iron Building was a steakhouse. (I really regaled them with my intellectual prowess.)
7. This is what happens when you grow up in a rural Pennsylvania trailer park.
8. But you also get really, really good at being scrappy.
9. I’m not married.
10. I don’t want kids.
11. I LOVE both of these things about myself.
12. I live part-time in Costa Rica with my darling hunk, C. It is hot as balls.
13. I go to Santiago, Chile every spring to visit my best girlfriends, who I met when I lived there before Costa Rica.
14. I’m also massively obsessed with Great Britain.
15. We go to the U.K. every summer, where I have held retreats and held photoshoots for women from around the world. This year, I’m going summer school in Scotland to learn how to silversmith jewelry, and then I’m speaking in London in the fall.
16. I believe that everyone should live abroad at least twice—the first time, you’ll be too drunk to remember.
17. I love the show Outlander.
18. What I meant to say was, “Jamie Fraser.”
19. I can’t go to bed without washing my feet.
20. I have secret fantasies of learning special effects makeup. Mostly just so I can pretend to be a monster and then walk straight over to the neighbors when they are being too loud and FREAK THEM THE FUCK OUT.
21. I was born in Philly and it is the only city in the United States that really feels like me.
22. Which is probably why I bought my first apartment in Old City, Philadelphia this year—sight unseen, from abroad.
23. Must be the pretzels.
24. The Internet is my superpower.
25. Teaching creative writing is my lover.
26. I also really like teaching about the modern art of making really great f*cking money.
27. Earplugs. That is all.
28. If you’re talking to me, I am undoubtedly wondering, “does the face that I’m making look weird?”
29. I instantly fall in love with people who have big, loud, happy laughs.
30. Having hair and makeup come in and make me glam before a photoshoot is probably my favorite guilty pleasure in the world.
31. CONFIDENCE IS EVERYTHING—and it helps when your eyelids are on fire.
32. I hope to meet you!
33. Subscribe to the blog!
34. And have a fantastic fucking day!