#introduceyourself: Hi, I'm Laura! (real foodie, natural health junkie, musician/songwriter, speech therapist, actress, singer, piano teacher, writer...)

Hey Steemians! I'm thrilled to be joining the Steemit community. I've been hearing about Steemit from @jeffberwick of @dollarvigilante for several months now, so it was about time I took the plunge. (Thanks, Jeff!!) I've been browsing through various posts and profiles, and wow-- what an amazing, diverse community with a wide variety of interesting topics and info! I look forward to adding even more to the diversity of topics here.

I'm most passionate about family, friends, community, faith, the arts (music, musicals, theatre, visual art, writing, photography...), real food, nature, health & wellness, traveling, culture, kindness... and that about sums it up.

Some areas of interest I plan to post about:

• Real food recipes and related topics
• Natural health and wellness
• Anti-cancer and my cancer stories (I've had cancer twice and am taking evidence-based steps to reduce my chances of ever getting it again!)
• Music (I've started 3 successful music teaching businesses and would love to share what I've learned; I play & teach piano, sing & teach voice, compose music & lyrics, have written music for musicals...)
• Dating (especially online dating, which I had a lot of experience with until getting married last year!)
• Speech and language (I'm a speech therapist and have skills & knowledge that I would be happy to share in all sorts of related areas... techniques to help with stuttering/fluency, how to tell if your toddler/child is delayed in speech/language/development, tips for parents with children with speech/language/communication delays or challenges, voice/voice disorders/voice therapy, and more)
• Places to see & where to eat in California (my native land)
• How to plan a beautiful wedding in 3 months (which I did)
• Life! I've had a varied and interesting life and look forward to sharing more.

A little background on me... I was born and raised in a little university town in northern California.

I went to college in L.A. County, graduating with a degree in Child & Family Psychology. Logically, I went on to start my own piano-teaching business (Cue the music.... "What can you do with a B.A. in Psychology?"), which was very successful, and I loved the perks of being self-employed.

A few years out of college, I was hungry for solid community (most college friends had moved away and I was in the single young adult post-college, self-employment abyss with very few peers around) and I've always been ambitious about making a positive impact in the world. So in 2008, I dropped my piano studio, joined a non-profit and moved to South Africa for almost a year, where I was part of a semi-neo-monastic community, diving into South African culture and the pros and cons of a super-tight-community life, and spent a good amount of time volunteering in an inner city shelter for teenage girls. Prior to living in South Africa, I'd already felt inspired to fight global injustices on the micro level (e.g., human trafficking) and to be a positive influence in the lives of youth. Working with the girls in that shelter was a great match for those ambitions. The whole year in South Africa was life-changing for many reasons (we'll save that for another post!)... simultaneously one of the hardest and best years of my life up until that point. Although I would never have chosen to go through any of the darkest moments of that year, I do treasure the life lessons and forced massive personal growth that my time in South Africa served as a catalyst for.

I've also always intended to return to South Africa, at least to visit. I have yet to make good on that plan, but it will happen someday. South Africa is a richly beautiful country, diverse not only in its people but in its landscape, animals, and everything else. On the traveling side... Cape Town-- on the southernmost tip of the entire continent of Africa-- was a definite highlight of my traveling in South Africa, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for an amazing place to travel! A safari in Kruger National Park was also at the top of the list of AMAZING.

Post-South Africa in my mid-20's... I returned to my hometown in northern California to re-figure out my life. I spent a few very healing years back there, reconnecting with family and friends, processing and working through some of the more painful experiences (mostly due to some deep interpersonal hurts within the community) I'd had during the year overseas, teaching piano and voice lessons, acting and performing in musical theatre and non-musical plays, making a lot of wonderful new friends in my theatre and church communities there, and working as a behavioral therapist and classroom aide with kids with special needs (severe Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down's Syndrome, etc.). I had done some work with kids on the Autism Spectrum before, and continued that work in those few years. It was during that time that I decided to pursue a Master's in Speech-Language Pathology (a.k.a. Speech Therapy).

So I did the grad school thing... I completed an "accelerated degree" (i.e., 4 full years-worth of school crammed into 2 actual years). I loved my program, and my peers in my cohort were wonderful life-savers, most of whom became good friends and now good colleagues as well.

In 2013, after finishing my degree, I moved to San Diego to: 1) be closer to my nieces, brother & sister-in-law, and 2) LBH, I knew I wanted to find my Mr. Right life partner, and the pickin's were slim in the smaller cities I'd been in. I figured-- bigger metropolitan area = I could cast my net wider and find the right fella. And... almost 3 years later, I had found and married him!

Other than dating, wedding planning & getting married, my past few years in San Diego have been full of:

• writing songs for a full-length musical and having it produced in Northern California (2011)
• joining New Musicals Inc. in Hollywood for their year-long musical theatre writing training program and beyond
• writing music (with 2 collaborators--a lyricist and a bookwriter-- from New Musicals Inc.) for another original full-length musical, this time about the real-life disappearance of bestselling murder mystery writer Agatha Christie
• working as a Speech-Language Pathologist (a.k.a. speech therapist) in school districts for 3 years until giving up on school districts (for multiple reasons-- also a post for another time)
• now back to being out of the claws of the district machines and BLISSFULLY self-employed... part-time independent speech therapist, and part-time private music teacher.

On Steemit, I look forward to posting and sharing in a variety of categories/tags from the breadth and depth of experiences I've been privileged to have, as well as gleaning wisdom & knowledge from the rest of this amazing community! Really looking forward to interacting with the rest of you!