I Didn’t Become Who I Thought I’d Be. And I’m Glad.

Growing up in Iceland, I had a rather curated vision of my future. I saw myself living in America, sporting an inverted bob haircut, wearing monochrome tailored skirt suits with matching heels, and swaying my hips in a certain way. There was a white picket fence around my perfect house, with citrus trees growing confidently in the yard, as though they had always belonged there.

I was quite particular about these things. I had polished enough shoes as a child to recognise what I considered questionable footwear choices, and I was certainly not pleased when my mother arrived at school wearing clogs. Put on a heel, woman! Her fashion and lifestyle magazines were my window into a world beyond Iceland, and I was busy imagining my place in it.

Of course, life had its own ideas.

I grew up doing gymnastics and later became a competitive aerobics athlete. In 1993, I won the Icelandic Aerobic Championship wearing a handcrafted coral Lycra outfit with gold flecks, pink leg warmers, and white Reeboks. I felt completely aligned with what I was doing. Shortly afterward, I traveled to Tokyo to compete in the Suzuki World Cup, proudly wearing a Reebok tracksuit covered in sponsor logos. I looked like an influencer from the future.

But beneath all the aerobics excitement, I had another dream. I wanted to become an actress.

At the time, I was in the final round of auditions for acting school in Iceland. I had two weeks to prepare, but Tokyo proved rather distracting. Between the extraordinary city, its fashion, beautifully packaged everything, and vending machines that seemed to contain an entire universe, I didn’t rehearse nearly enough.

The day after returning to Iceland, I walked into that final audition unprepared. I didn’t get in. Later, a member of the admissions committee told me they had believed in my talent but couldn’t understand why I hadn’t prepared.

It was disappointing, but somewhere beneath that disappointment was relief. The truth was, I didn’t really want to study acting in Iceland. I wanted to go to America. That apparent failure helped me recognize what I already knew but hadn’t fully admitted to myself. Sometimes failure is simply feedback, pointing us toward a different possibility.

And so I left Iceland to pursue theatre and playwriting at the University of Washington.

My years in theatre, both studying the craft and pursuing acting professionally, deepened my fascination with human behavior. Actors spend their lives exploring other people’s realities, examining their desires, contradictions, relationships, and the circumstances that shape their choices. I loved that process of stepping into someone else’s world and discovering what made them tick.

Eventually, my path took me into marketing, advertising, and branding, beginning at Nordstrom’s corporate headquarters in Seattle and later working with brands including Baccarat Hotel & Residences, 1 Hotels, Sóley Organics, Furtuna Skin, and EleVen by Venus Williams.

On the surface, acting and branding might appear to belong to different worlds. But both revolve around storytelling, understanding people, and creating an emotional connection. Looking back, I can see how one chapter informed the next.
When I began working with emerging artists at NYU in 2022, I found myself returning to the questions I’d explored in theatre. Actors spend an enormous amount of time investigating characters. What drives them? What do they want? What stands in their way? But I was curious about the person behind the character. What happens when we turn those questions toward ourselves?

That curiosity became EVOKE Your Story, a methodology I began developing to help actors and artists explore their own narratives, not just the ones they perform. As the work evolved, I realized these questions were just as relevant beyond the rehearsal room. We all play roles, carry expectations, and live with stories about who we are and what we’re capable of. Some are wonderfully useful. Others have long overstayed their welcome.

My interest in the relationship between our thoughts, emotions, and physiology also led me to train as a certified HeartMath® Coach. It brought another dimension to my work, helping people understand their emotional responses and approach decisions with greater clarity.

In 2023, my husband, Shanga Parker, a Full Arts Professor at NYU Tisch, joined EVOKE as co-founder. After more than two decades together, we’ve added another role to our relationship: creative and business partners. We bring different experiences and perspectives to the work, continuing to develop something that neither of us could have imagined when our paths first crossed.

I’m still becoming, although I’m no longer particularly interested in arriving at some perfectly finished version of myself. I have plenty of things I want to create, including bringing EVOKE to more people through new experiences, courses, and a digital platform. But I’m also increasingly interested in how I experience the life I’m already living.
Not long ago, I told my husband over dinner that I’d decided to give myself the gift of living my life from the inside out. Less doing life and more actually living it. Allowing myself to linger over tea in my favorite hand-painted china, write letters on beautiful stationery, and occasionally let the day unfold without trying to organize every moment into something productive. I still appreciate a beautifully curated future, but I want to leave room for the unexpected.

If there’s one thing I’d say to another woman wondering whether she’s too old, too late, or whether life has somehow passed her by, it’s this: Who decided there was a deadline? And whose story are you measuring yours against?

We spend so much of our lives following narratives we’ve inherited, absorbed, or simply repeated until they began to sound like facts. But the mind, I’ve learned, is not always a reliable narrator. We can question those assumptions, change direction, and explore what else might be possible.
I still think about that girl in Iceland with her inverted bob, tailored suits, and citrus trees. She was so certain she knew what lay ahead. And in some ways, she wasn’t entirely wrong. I did make it to America. The white picket fence never materialised, and my wardrobe has become considerably more eclectic.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the future is that we don’t have to know exactly what it looks like to begin living it.

And I rather like that.