We’re looking forward to introducing you to Kathleen Day. Check out our conversation below.
Kathleen, really appreciate you sharing your stories and insights with us. The world would have so much more understanding and empathy if we all were a bit more open about our stories and how they have helped shaped our journey and worldview. Let’s jump in with a fun one: What are you being called to do now, that you may have been afraid of before?
I would have to say definitely my intuitive life coaching. I’d relied on word-of-mouth marketing since I started in 2014, constantly inundated with imposter syndrome. 2025 marked the year that I finally launched my services through my website and started an Instagram page for it. I’m pursuing my Jungian Coach certification now and truly wonder why I was so hesitant to go all in for so long!
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Hi—I’m K. Day, a multidisciplinary creative, journalist & intuitive life coach. I’ve cultivated over two decades in these areas and I love sharing my experience with the rest of the world. Functionally, I rely on my creative businesses (both my creative consulting & my jewelry line) for a living. Though I founded PEPPER Magazine in 2022, I’ve shifted my journalistic pursuits to being more of a self-led creative outlet for myself, as a way to promote local artists and business.
I’m enthusiastic about pushing my life coaching to the forefront of what I do. In the process of continuing my education, I’ve also taken on a position as a featured coach & spokesperson with the Cafe86— a national nonprofit organization “helping workers “86” toxic environments”, starting with the hospitality industry and expanding to all industries in need. They focus on mental health, peer support, and workplace justice. This is an important step for me within the mental health sector, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be of greater help to my community and beyond.
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
I’ve always been an artist, and the commonality I’ve come to find in everything I do is storytelling. That started as far back as I could write words and draw. I would come up with imaginative stories and characters, write poetry and songs…I would even document everything that went on around me. Early on, I somehow developed a hyper-awareness of how fleeting and impermanent our lives and memories are. I needed to capture everything in words and pictures, which eventually led to photography by middle school.
By high school, I was enrolled in photojournalism. This constant observation of my classmates and people / places / things in the world around me engendered a deep longing to understand why people think and act the way they do. This led to me formally taking psychology, sociology and anthropology from tenth grade forward. To me, all of these things were interlinked and dependent upon the other.
I always knew I was an artist, always a storyteller. It was through these added layers in my young life that I realized my aptitude for psychology and knew somehow or other I would pursue a career in the mental health space, inevitably.
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
Whew—that’s a loaded question! But an important one, I think.
I’d have to say it had to have been back in 2014 when I finally took the leap and announced myself formally as an intuitive life coach. I had been fairly quiet about my bouts with clinical depression, anxiety and my neurodivergence prior to that. My approach had been to soldier on and to throw myself entirely into my creative businesses and modeling up to that point. 2014 was the year that changed for me. It had to—it would be my own story that would later create a bridge between myself and my clients.
I’d formally began taking psychology courses as far back as 1998, as a Junior in high school and never really stopped. My self-led studies were a constant niche interest for me until around 2012 when I decided to take on more applied studies, conducting my earliest sessions with live subjects—at the time, friends and acquaintances.
My induction into coaching coincided with opening up publicly about my own hard life experiences and the mental health issues I had to overcome and navigate to have a healthy life. Looking back, I’m so glad I did the brave thing and chose to be open about my story. I’ve come to believe that in today’s world, transparency is the only true armor. After all, what can others say about you if you’re already completely open about your shortcomings and struggles? It’s been a gift, in this way.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
The shortest answer to this complicated topic, for me anyway, is the reliance upon pop psychology and rhetorical self-help. The internet is ripe with memes and articles promoting toxic positivity, ableism, even harmful misinformation on anything from neurodivergence to narcissism. The biggest mistake I see well-meaning people make is regurgitating this misinformation and fully buying into it without any formal knowledge of these subjects.
This can be dangerous when vulnerable demographics absorb this misleading information and attempt to apply it to their daily lives as a way to manage the very real mental health issues they carry. It causes a sort of psychological and sociological dissonance that makes it hard for professionals like myself to work with and correct. It also gives people a false sense of security, thinking they’ve got it all worked out while they continue self-sabotaging behaviors and being inadvertently harmful or entitled with the people in their lives.
I could go on, but that’s where I see people getting it wrong the most.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: What is the story you hope people tell about you when you’re gone?
Honestly, that I helped. That I helped them and my community at every turn, in any way I could. That I did my best to be of service, that I felt like home in how I treated them, that I cultivated beauty and compassion into my surroundings and the lives I touched.
I’ve been told as much many times, by clients, colleagues and dear friends. Nothing warms my heart more or makes me feel as completely whole and at peace. On even the hardest days, that is what keeps me going.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alchemistandbutterfly.weebly.com/
- Instagram: @kathleen.day.official / @coach.kday / @creative.consultant.kday
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathleen-day-37b033175
- Facebook: Life Coach K. Day https://m.facebook.com/lifecoach.kdaygomez/
- Other: Blog – https://substack.com/@authorkday
Blog Instagram – @thealchemist.and.thebutterfly
Image Credits
Images by Wild Lens photography, Simply Sefra photography, with additional captures (in collage) by Smalkine media, Cupcake photography, Bethany Castro, Letty Barolia, Serendipity Social & Motion Arts Media.
