The Queen of Poop: Why I Chose a Life Full of Sh*t

So here's the thing nobody tells you when you're planning your "successful life": the cleaner your hands stay, the emptier your soul gets.

I'm writing this from my farm office, which is really just the tack room with better WiFi. My boots are caked in mud and horse manure. There's alpaca fiber stuck to my sweater. One of the cats just brought in something unidentifiable and ran under my bed with it. And I'm the wealthiest person I know.

Not Tesla-in-the-driveway rich. Not corner-office-with-a-view rich. But rich in the way that actually matters when you're lying on your deathbed thinking about whether you spent your one wild life doing shit that fed your soul or just... shit.

I think about my friends sometimes—the ones with climate-controlled offices, fancy espresso machines and carefully curated desk plants that never need actual dirt under their fingernails. They're crushing it by every conventional metric. Good for them. I mean it.

But here's what we rarely say directly: Many people are working to pay for a house they barely spend time in, and a shiny new car that takes them back and forth to the job that pays for the house and the car. It's the most socially acceptable hamster wheel ever built—and we're told that success means making it spin faster, buying more, accumulating fancy shit to impress people we may not even like.

Meanwhile, I'm out here at dawn breaking ice off water troughs. I'm mucking stalls in January when it's so cold my snot freezes. I'm hauling fifty-pound feed bags and scraping shit off paddocks because someone has to, and that someone is me.

And I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Because here's what I get instead: I get to choose how I spend my time and energy. Actually choose. After lunch today, I took the dog for a walk in the forest. Just because. Because I wanted to. Because the sun was hitting the trees just right and I could.

You know what else I get? A horse nuzzling my shoulder while the sun comes up over the fields. I get to watch troubled people discover they're not actually broken when a 1,200-pound animal chooses to trust them. I get mud and chaos and the kind of tired that comes from actual physical work instead of soul-sucking fluorescent exhaustion.

The work is hard, but here's the paradox: it's very little stress. Because when you're the boss of your own time and energy, when your biggest workplace drama is hay distribution among livestock, work is just work. Not slow soul death.

I get to be the “Queen of Poop”. And that crown is heavy, muddy, and absolutely mine.

Because true wealth isn't in your bank account. It's in your boots. It's in your ability to walk outside your door and immediately be exactly where you want to be. It's in deciding at 2 PM on a Tuesday that you and the dog need forest time, and just... going. It's in going to bed physically tired instead of emotionally destroyed. It's in looking at your life and thinking "yeah, this is weird and hard and I smell like a barn, but this is MINE."

So yeah, I chose shit. Literally. Mountains of it. And every single morning when I pull on my muck boots and head out to feed the crew, I'm choosing it again.

Because there's nothing more soul-crushing than an insta-perfect life you never actually wanted.

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Currently accepting applications for the position of Poop Princess. Must love animals, embrace chaos, and understand that autonomy beats air conditioning every single time.