Searching for work and meaning in life, she decided to see if her fans would be interested in becoming her pupils. She billed her services over social media and set up virtual one-on-one singing and songwriting lessons, offering workshops on a sliding scale or for free.
“Performing and writing has been my purpose for most of my adult life, and feeling the vacuum created by that disappearing this [mentoring] has rushed in at a moment of inspiration and absolutely filled that void for me,” Patterson says.
At first she was unsure whether she d be any good at working with students, and feared that giving lessons meant she was giving up on being a creator. But she remembered and eventually embraced a phrase she learned from martial arts instructor Ely Matson at Denver Kung Fu: “You teach to learn.