Karen spent twelve years as a silversmith before a repetitive motion injury redirected her into tech, arts administration, and eventually engineering leadership at Stanford Research Institute. What looks like scattered careers was actually a woman refusing to choose between the creative self and the practical one.

Now she works with high-functioning professionals who optimized themselves into legibility and are asking if the version of themselves that existed before the job, the divorce, the kids is still recoverable. She runs Second Wind Women, a podcast for women in creative reinvention, and The Alquemie, a three-month intensive for women rebuilding their relationship with their own authority.

If you’re in that spot, she does 45-minute conversations called Prima Materia Sessions to map what happened and whether reclamation is possible.