Tumbleweed Tiny House Workshop Quote: Kathey Wilson

"I came from a very poor North Carolina mountain family. My father worked in a saw mill and I really didn’t know that I was poor until I went to college and my suite mates gave me a cookbook that was called White Trash Cookin’ and I looked at the pictures and it looked just like my mother’s stove with the salt-shaker box on the back and the grease bucket and the refrigerator. So I had this hunger inside of me to be so much more than that, even though I was losing sight of "You know, you were ok, you didn’t know you were poor, you had a roof over your head, you had food" whatever. But in my travels in life I wanted more, more, more, more. Now where I am in life is I look back, and I lived in a 5400-square-foot house on the lake with everything I wanted, and I was miserable. Because I had not been taught how to look inside of myself to see what really truly mattered, and it’s not the house and all the stuff that you have. And one of the things that has come from my personal growth is realizing that as a human being, we don’t feel that we’re in control of a lot of things, so if we can buy all of these things, it’s mine and I can control it. So I realized for myself that’s what I was doing; that’s the only thing I felt I had control of. And now I can take those things and I’ve looked away and I’m excited about living in and building myself a tiny house and going: Wow, the most important thing is me that’s gonna be living in that tiny house and not all that stuff I felt that I needed to have control of.


--Kathey Wilson, 52, from Asheville, NC.