Meet Alexis

A Life of Challenging Expectations

Long before I ever gave it a name, I was learning what it meant to give myself permission to define who I am.

As a teenager, I stepped onto the ice and became the first female varsity hockey player in my school’s history to play men’s varsity high school hockey. As a goaltender, I went on to set records in the State of Michigan as a female competing in men’s varsity hockey. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about challenging stereotypes or creating a philosophy that would eventually become the foundation of a business. I simply knew that I loved the game, that I belonged on the ice, and that I wasn’t willing to let someone else’s definition of what a girl was supposed to do determine what I could do.

Years later, that same belief would become Permission to Define.

From Environmental Consulting to Education

After graduating from college, I spent 15 years working as an environmental consultant before making a significant career change and moving into education. For more than a decade, I have worked as an educator, a role that has reinforced something I have believed throughout much of my life: people are far more complex, capable, and extraordinary than the labels placed upon them.

My own life has required me to challenge more than a few of those labels.

Finding My Voice & Becoming an Advocate

As someone living with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I eventually made the decision to take experiences I once believed I needed to hide and use them to create understanding. Since 2018, I have shared my lived experience through education, advocacy, professional training, and speaking engagements at the local, national, and international levels. My work brings together lived experience and education with the belief that meaningful change begins when we are willing to replace assumptions with curiosity and truly listen to the people whose lives we are trying to understand.

But my life is much bigger than my work, my advocacy, or any diagnosis I carry.

The People Who and the Things That Make Life

I am a lifelong lover of sports and especially baseball. I have held season tickets to the Detroit Tigers since 2006, and there are few places where I would rather spend a summer evening than at the ballpark. I love the traditions of the game, the strategy, the atmosphere, and the way baseball somehow gives you permission to simply sit still for a few hours and be completely present.

Some of my favorite moments happen far away from a stadium, at my family’s summer home on Torch Lake in Northern Michigan. Northern Michigan has always held a special place in my life—a place to slow down, spend time with the people I love, and appreciate the kind of moments that don’t need to be extraordinary to become meaningful.

Family is an enormous part of my life. I come from a large extended family, and I am incredibly fortunate that many of my cousins and family members are also among my closest friends. I value deep relationships, authenticity, laughter, and the kind of connection that allows people to simply be themselves. Sometimes my idea of a perfect evening is nothing more complicated than sitting somewhere comfortable and losing track of time during a really good conversation with a close friend.

A deeply important part of my life is my partner, Erik. Our relationship has taught me a great deal about what it means to trust another person, to allow myself to depend on someone, and to know that I do not have to navigate everything alone. I care for him deeply, but what makes his place in my life especially meaningful is the way he believes in me—not only for who I am, but for who I am continually becoming. Whether I am dreaming up a new idea, taking on a project, building Permission to Define, or pursuing something that matters to me, Erik is one of the people standing beside me saying, “Go for it.” He supports the things I want to create and the directions I want to explore, even when they begin as nothing more than an idea in my head. Having someone I can trust, depend on, laugh with, and build a life alongside has become one of the parts of my story I value most.

I also tell my story through art—just in a slightly unconventional way.

My body has become a collection of stories told through tattoos. My body art represents experiences, people, memories, survival, identity, and pieces of myself that deserve to have a permanent place in my story. Some of those meanings are immediately visible. Others belong only to me and the people I choose to share them with. Together, they have become a visual record of where I have been, what I have survived, who I love, and who I continue to become.

Music is another constant in my life. My playlists rarely respect genre boundaries, and I love everything from discovering a song that speaks to exactly where I am in a particular moment to spending a summer evening outdoors listening to live music. Concerts, small venues, outdoor performances—if there is good music and good company, I am usually happy to be there.

Permission to Define was not born from a business plan. It was born from a life.

From being the girl who stepped onto the ice when girls weren’t expected to be there, to changing careers after 15 years and beginning again, to becoming an educator, advocate, speaker, and lived-experience professional, I have spent much of my life discovering that we do not have to accept the definitions the world hands us.

We can question them.

We can challenge them.

We can outgrow them.

And ultimately, we can define ourselves.

That is what Permission to Define means to me.

Your life. Your choices. Your definition.