Episode #045 · Kloé Mallard
I’ve Lived Six Different Lives
What happens when the thing you built your identity around suddenly disappears?
At just 30 years old, Kloé says she feels like she’s already lived six different lives. From studying music in Chicago to performing on cruise ships around the world, losing her voice and falling into depression, rebuilding her life through school and corporate work, and now stepping into a caregiving role for her mother, this conversation explores what it means to keep evolving when every version of your life asks something different of you.
We talk about the pressure to perform, the emotional complexity of outgrowing old identities, and the reality that many workplaces don’t actually want our “full authentic selves”—despite what modern work culture claims.
This episode is about adaptation, self-worth, creativity, survival, and the quiet fear so many people carry: Do other people think I’m doing this right?
Losing the Career That Had Become Part of Your Identity
Kloé knew her voice was struggling before anyone officially told her.
She was pushing harder to hit notes that used to come easily. She had already gone home between contracts to rest and tried returning to work, hoping she could keep going. Then, during rehearsals for another cruise ship contract, she was called into an office and told she needed to go home.
Looking back, Kloé catches herself initially taking all the blame. She was young, going out after singing for hours, and admits she wasn't always taking care of her voice. But she also remembers knowing she was hurting and continuing to perform because she didn't want to let the band down.
“If I'm not there, who's gonna do it?” she remembers thinking.
Being sent home brought some relief. It also sounded very different inside her own head: I'm not good enough anymore. You suck. You're damaged goods. Go home.
Kloé moved back in with her mom and eventually fell into a depression. There was no backup plan waiting for her. Music had been part of her life since childhood, and performing wasn't simply something she did for work.
“To me, my life was taken from me,” she tells me.
Figuring Out What Comes Next When You Don't Have a Plan B
Kloé didn't immediately go searching for another dream.
Her faith gave her something to lean on as she began questioning the belief that her voice was the only thing that defined her. Eventually, she started with something concrete: she had left college with about a year and a half remaining. She could go back and finish. So she did.
She enrolled at North Carolina A&T, worked at Best Buy, and found herself back in classrooms with students several years younger than she was. She laughs about being labeled an “adult learner” in her early twenties.
Her approach at the time was simple: “Let's just try to finish what we started first.” That decision ended up opening an entirely different professional path.
When Kloé needed an internship to graduate, her Best Buy manager connected her with someone at the corporate office. She joined the company's summer internship program, the internship was extended, and eventually she was asked whether she'd move to Minnesota for a corporate role. Why not?
After years of performing on ships, moving between contracts, cities, and groups of people, Kloé found herself entering a much more conventional version of working life.
What Happens When a Creative Person Starts Working a Corporate Job?
The adjustment was harder than Kloé expected.
Cruise ship life had plenty of repetition, but the people and energy changed constantly. Even when she sang the same songs, she was performing for a different crowd. Corporate work brought a kind of sameness she hadn't experienced before: scanning the same badge, going upstairs, sitting at the same desk, doing the work, and going home.
“The mundane-ness, the routine, it was killing my soul just a little,” she tells me.
Kloé liked the people she worked with and found creativity in her event-planning role, but she also started deliberately looking for places where she could use the parts of herself she missed.
She worked with an in-house studio team, recorded training videos, did voiceover work, and appeared on camera. Eventually, she found an agent and began doing creative work outside her job as well.
“I found ways to incorporate the thing I love into the thing I had to do,” she says.
The skills she'd developed as a performer followed her into this new environment, too. Years of filling dead air between songs taught her to improvise. Performing for different audiences taught her to read a room and adjust when something wasn't landing.
The stage was gone from her daily work, but pieces of the performer remained.
Can You Really Bring Your Authentic Self to Work?
When I bring up the familiar workplace advice to “bring your whole self to work,” Kloé immediately rolls her eyes.
“I'm so sick of hearing that,” she says. “It's not true.”
For Kloé, working in Minnesota as a Black woman made the limits of that idea particularly apparent. She describes finding spaces with other Black colleagues where she could show up differently, while recognizing that there was always a cap on how much of herself belonged in the broader corporate environment. An experience involving an employee resource group made that boundary even clearer to her.
Kloé doesn't see adapting to different environments as being fake. She compares it to what she learned as a performer: you read the crowd.
“You have to be a chameleon in every space,” she tells me. Different people and environments get different versions of her, and she isn't convinced that anyone's completely unfiltered self necessarily belongs at work. That question of how other people experience her extends beyond the workplace.
Kloé is now in another major transition, taking on a caregiving role for her mom and admitting that she doesn't feel particularly supported in it. She's thinking about which relationships are showing up for this version of her life and what taking care of herself looks like while she takes care of someone else.
At the end of our conversation, I ask Kloé what unresolved question she's living inside right now.
Her answer gets directly at something she's trying to release: “Do people think I'm doing it right?”
She wonders how other people see the decisions she's making and whether they think she's doing okay. She knows she cares too much about their opinions. She also knows external validation may never come.
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Kloé Mallard
Kloé Mallard is a Host, Storyteller, and the Creative Force Behind Klo With The Fro. She’s a New York girl at heart — raised on church choirs, theatre stages, and the belief that performing was her purpose. She moved to Chicago to study music, dropped out to sing on cruise ships, and spent three years living her dream… until she lost her voice and had to figure out who she was without the one thing she thought defined her. Rebuilding herself meant going back to school for PR, stepping into a corporate events role and eventually finding her way back to the mic — this time on her own terms. That’s how Klo With The Fro (KWTF) was born. Since launching, she’s interviewed powerhouse leaders like Zinet Kemal, De’Vonna Pittman, and Drinal Foster, moderated panels for TCBANND and several ERGs, and created “Hey Kloé!”, a series that spotlights the people shaping the Twin Cities. She’s also spent the last two years hosting the MNPOC Pride Awards Ceremony and Park Celebration, bringing joy, culture, and community to the stage.
