Hello Internet, This is Jacki, btw. I wanted to take some time to introduce you to my very second guest blogger (you can read the very first one here.) Guest Blog number 2 comes from my friend Sunny. Y’all… I love Sunny so much. We’ve hung together, we’ve worked together, we briefly owned the same car (that only I got to drive), but more than any of that, we’ve spent time online together.
Sunny has realized and is living her best life, and I am incredibly proud of her. She’s unafraid to speak up for herself, and more importantly than that, she’s unafraid to wholly be herself. That’s the quality I love most in all of my close friends. Sunny is soft and hard and strong but understanding. In short, she’s an amazing human.
When I asked her to guest blog for me, I didn’t know exactly what I’d be getting. I especially didn’t know she’d be giving me allergies with her writing, y’all. But, I guess, that’s what folks who are unafraid of emotions can bring out in me. This blog is not going to be as chaotic as Logan’s, because different writers require different things. I won’t be interjecting on this one, because I think it’s worth reading all the way through without my babbling breaking up the rhythm.So, with all that said, enjoy Sunny’s blog, which just so happens to go live the same day Celine Dion drops a new track. Hit play on this bad boy before you start reading. Okay? Okay.
The last several years of my life have really taught me a lot. I made a conscious decision to choose myself over some ideas I had about what my life would end up like, which I had spent decades ruminating on since I was a little girl. I was a tomboy when I was a little kid. I grew up on a farm in Missouri for a while. You could almost always find me in a pasture sharing the salt lick with the cows, carrying around a chicken, or chasing baby pigs.
When I was a teen, we moved to rural Arkansas, to a little mountain town. After that, I spent many years exploring wooded hills, free climbing bluffs with nothing but childhood bravado, and trying to make friends with the deer that ate my mom’s rose garden. I spent the majority of my time watching Animal Planet and idolizing Steve Irwin, Jeff Corwin, and the other adventurous wildlife educators who were broadcast to my generation. I wasn’t much of a cartoon kid; I have always really loved to learn things.
One of my first few “real jobs” as an adult was for the Missouri Department of Conservation in fisheries, as a lab tech. To my peers, I was largely considered awkward. I had other quirks (like being obsessed with Celine Dion) and tended to gravitate toward building friendships with my teachers and other adults I trusted.
Moving to Florida
When I was twenty, I up and moved to Florida.
I packed what I could fit in my PT Cruiser and had maybe a couple of hundred bucks in my bank account. Looking back on that period in my life, I consider it to be one of the bravest things I have ever done. I didn’t know anyone in Florida, really, and had no family or any connections in the area until I made them for myself. I arrived with this knowing that I was given an opportunity to wholly reinvent myself. No one in Florida knew that everyone at home thought I was awkward. It was like a lightbulb went off in my head to try other identities. I spent the next several years of my life being the life of the party, in an attempt to seem social.
Years of maturing and analyzing later, I realize now that I was a kid who grew up in the 90’s when they labeled high masking autistic girls as gifted instead of putting us on the spectrum who were trying really hard to make friends and fit in. I will say I had fun and made some incredible memories in my “party phase”. I shelved Celine Dion and learned all about hair metal. I traded “My Heart Will Go On” for “Dr. Feelgood” and “Runnin’ with the Devil”. I definitely went a little wild. I partied with rockstars on cruise ships, worked merch booths for nationally touring bands, sang on stage topless with Steel Panther, and DLR’s guitar player. I had an amazing time, and I will say that it did teach me a lot of confidence and social norms. In my ”rock and roll years,” I was mostly employed as a model. I worked events all over the United States, and it was a really cool way to get paid to travel.
I began to notice as I got older, into my late twenties, that the shallow hellos at the bar, knocking a shot back, and the hangover afterward with very few true friends was becoming too heavy a mask to continue to wear. I had a string of failed relationships behind me with free-spirited people who couldn’t see themselves settling down. Even amidst my running wild, I still saw myself finding a person who would see a woman worth investing in and having a family with. I’d call that young naivety…trying to find Prince Charming in a dark dive bar.
It didn’t take me long to go from a nighttime-activities type of person to being a daytime-activities girly again. I went to see cover bands less and less and found myself near the water more and more. One spring after working bike week I bought a cheap kayak and I was so thrilled to have my own boat. I remember my dad saying something like “That’s a waste of money, you’ll never use it!” Florida has some incredible ecosystems to kayak in, and I found my first love for the water at Wekiva Springs with a friend who had a huge hand in my spiritual awakening. I found myself in my little kayak a lot more than even I expected.
In 2020, when we were all forced to stay inside, I lost my work doing events. When I was on the hunt for a new endeavor, I saw an ad on Facebook for a company needing kayak guides for bioluminescent tours. My first thought was “no shit, I didn’t even know that was a job.. I can get paid to kayak?” I set up an interview and was pretty much shooed in the door, as it really seemed like a perfect fit. Before I was officially hired and trained, I had to go on a tour with a tenured employee to see if I liked it. I showed up not really sure what to expect. When we paddled out, I was immediately mesmerized by the water around me, looking exactly like a glow stick. Florida has bioluminescent algae in the Indian River Lagoon every summer. You can see photos and videos of it all day, but until you see a manatee or a dolphin swim past you, painted in light, it is hard to believe. Sold. Signed my soul away on the dotted line to the most biologically diverse estuary in North America.
Being out there reminded me, in the midst of some of the heaviest trials of my life, that there is still beauty to find, things to learn, people to meet, and memories to make. Those waters have literally carried me through recovery from two abusive relationships, losing my mother, and finding my way back to my authenticity.
Suddenly, I was the girl who ran around outside because she loved it again, but I got PAID for it.
Putting Nature Facts to Work
Suddenly, knowing a ton of animal facts was a positive thing, and I had a new place to immerse myself in and learn about. I am great at making a script and adjusting it based on track record, so this job is so perfect for my flavor of neurodivergence. I see an animal do a thing, I learn about why it is doing the thing, and I tell people why it’s doing the thing. My memory is great, so every time I see a new thing, I add it to my mental files. After close to a thousand tours, I could sustain any length of tour and have an amazing time doing it. I tell the same dad jokes summer after summer to new people every night, and everyone laughs because it’s the first time they’ve heard it. I could stand at a podium with zero preparation and speak on the lagoon and its importance to a crowd with no hiccups, but please don’t ask me to make a ten-minute phone call to tech support or to schedule an appointment.
When I really leaned in to honoring these things I enjoyed that I forgot about, a lot of the people I met when I was out kicking up my heels were concerned about me. I got asked if I was ok a lot. I wasn’t, really, and I guess that’s what catalyzed my 180. People in Florida just didn’t know that rock and roll party girl wasn’t really “me” until I made her me. They didn’t know I ran barefoot in overalls with knots in my hair, sunup to sundown, at least until my mom got me a computer. It took a lot of work on my part, representing myself the way I wanted to be seen, before people I partied with really understood that wasn’t me anymore. I understand why they felt cognitive dissonance, and showing up without my mask wasn’t a big task for me once I started figuring it all out.
I spent several years on the water working for other companies, learning and gathering field observations. I very much try my best to impart on my guests a deep understanding of the places I steward as well. I want abundance, and I deserve abundance, but I also have feelings about making money off of an ecosystem that needs help. I try to show up to every tour with a mindset of providing an experience in which I deserve, inherently, in the eyes of the universe, I suppose, to be seeing all of the beautiful things I get to see and make money doing it.
I am out there first and foremost because it is cool as HELL, getting to make a living at it is just my way of figuring out how to afford myself to be out there all the time. I joke sometimes that I have monetized my autism in the best way. It isn’t always easy for neurodivergent people to hold down a job. Only 21% of autistic adults are in full-time employment, making them one of the least employed disability groups. I feel so incredibly fortunate to have found my “thing” and found a way to make it work swimmingly well in my life.
The Birth of Something Sunny
After working many summers for a couple of different companies and feeling like there were too many questionable things happening during their ops, I decided, “Why shouldn’t I try to start my own outfitter?” After a winter of crying, brainstorming, learning how to file business documents, and learning how to apply for government permits, Sunny Nights Kayak Tours was born from the deepest part of my hopes and dreams.
With the birth of SNKT, I cut the cord with my hopes and dreams of having a traditional family and a husband. I always waited and kept myself open to my Prince Charming seeing me and whisking me away (even when I was rocking out to Kiss), and I always lost myself when I had another failed relationship behind me. I finally chose myself. I will say I always have loved myself, but I didn’t understand how to invest in myself. I’m coming up on one whole year of operating my own business doing what I love, and there have been so many affirmations of being in the right place at the right time, I couldn’t even begin to list all of them.
My favorite, though, would have to be sitting for hours in my kayak with critically endangered Pygmy devil rays swimming around me in peak dinoflagellate bioluminescence. There had been no documentation of these animals being deep in the lagoon, only near inlets. I informed some researchers over the winter that my summer sightings were corroborated when several dead ones were found after Florida had an unusually hard freeze. Unfortunate, but also foolproof confirmation of my observations!
I can’t wait to see the opportunities I earn with my authentic, open heart. I recognize them more and more the longer I live fearlessly choosing myself. I look forward to crying tears of gratitude on my way to work summer after summer for the rest of my life. I look back on my life when I was younger, working dead-end jobs, and I remember begrudgingly getting ready to sell my soul every day, and wondering how I was going to manage this for my entire life.
I so very much look forward to representing the place that has saved me, in a way I feel could save it back. Whether that is inspiring a little kid into conservation when I show them how amazing it is, making scientific observations in the field, or speaking at rezoning hearings along the shores, I float.
Selling your soul every day isn’t the problem. I’d give my soul to these sacred waters for free if I could figure out how to eat food, pay rent, and have a reliable car while doing it. If I could wish anything for anyone on this planet, it’s the bravery to try things on instead of just accepting going to work you don’t love day in and day out, and only getting to be happy on the weekends if at all. I wish for you to find something that makes you feel so ripped open you cry tears of awe after showing up a thousand times, two thousand times, three thousand times.
When we are little, we have this knowing that what we are “supposed” to do is love and be happy, but when we grow up, we are supposed to work. Be the person that little kid you would root for. I’m giving it my all.
If you ever find yourself in central Florida, I operate my tours out of the Titusville area, about an hour from Orlando. I only have seven boats to keep it intimate, and education-focused, and I’m the only bioluminescent kayaking outfitter that brings a microscope into the field so you can really see the algae responsible for the glowing water of our amazing Indian River Lagoon.
The best time to see the algae is the warmer months; it really likes warm, warm water! I offer tours year-round, though, in the wintertime, there is a bioluminescent stingless jelly that I focus my tours on. You can see rocket launches with a great view, too, in the areas I paddle. I just caught the Artemis rocket going up from my kayak on April 1st, and it was such an incredible way to watch us make history.
That’s my friend Sunny, y’all! Next time you find yourself in the Central Florida area, hop in her Kayak! She will teach you so much, not only about the world around you but also the world inside you (and sometimes I think that knowledge is harder to come by, so soak it in.) Okay? Okay.
