How the Wanderer Ended Up Staying for Nine Years

By 31, Sloan was in the Upper Peninsula working four jobs at once: a nonprofit, serving, personal training, and a running store. Still broke. Still very tired.

The running store sat next door to a coffee shop. She'd served its owner one night, and the next day, when she came in for coffee, he asked whether all those jobs were actually paying her enough. They clearly weren't, so they sat down for a conversation. He told her he liked how she talked to people, and offered her work as a barista.

I ask whether she believed his compliment, given how she'd been regarding herself at the time. She says she did, because her ability to talk to people was one of the few things she already knew about herself. "I just didn't know that other people saw that."

Then 2020 arrived and the service industry collapsed. She was laid off. The coffee shop kept roasting, the community kept showing up, and she spent the months learning the roast and the business.

"It's a harsh place to live. There's a lot of snow up here... And you kind of just have to help each other."

The coffee shop owner was aging and had floated the idea of turning the shop into an employee cooperative. Sloan wrote a business plan without really knowing what a business plan was. A friend who worked as a financial advisor read it, told her not to change anything, and said they should get her talking to banks.

Then the owners of their rented apartment put their house on the market. Thirty days, a kid, two cats, in a tourist town in 2021. They spent five weeks in a friend's backyard in something between a pop-up trailer and a motorhome while they closed on a house in September, on a barista's income. "I don't want to panic buy a house," she recalled saying to her partner. And then she panic bought a house.

Sloan closed on the business in November. She had no assets, so the bank put a lien on the house she'd owned for two months. By December she was a homeowner, a business owner, and partnered with a man raising a teenager. In March, they broke up.

Meanwhile, she was building the business her way. The previous owner had built the shop as a personal brand, his face in the ads, and the advertisers she inherited came asking for her handwriting and her photograph. She said no. "It's about the community that comes here."

I read one of her own lines back to her. She'd said she was finally feeling like herself, then added "cliché, I know." I wanted to understand what she felt was cliché about it. "Because I think I have to justify everything," she says. There's a voice still running that tells her she's different, and it comes with an eye roll attached.

She tells me about the time she met her current partner at an REI in Pittsburgh around 2010. Her partner flirted with her and Sloan was deeply uncomfortable. "I can't be more different," she remembers thinking.

They reconnected about fifteen years later. It was then she came out to her over the phone, at 35. Her mother said she'd always wondered. Nobody was surprised, nobody was upset, nobody rolled their eyes.

At a leadership training the day before we spoke, someone asked Sloan where she was from. She tells me it's the question she dreads most, because she has no answer to give. What she said instead was that she's lived here nine years, longer than she's lived anywhere.

The room she said it in was full of people who have spent their whole lives in the area, some who left briefly and came back, and transplants like her. They marvelled at how many places she'd lived and asked what that was like. She had nothing to compare it to.

She'd been turning the same thing over with her partner, Lindsay, the night before. What's it like to live in the same house your entire life? What's it like to have a twin? "I don't have another experience, and so this is what's made me."

There was never a grand plan, and she doesn't have one now. What she has is a shape she can describe: switchbacks, the same things revisited again and again, and the insistence that she's learned and is moving forward.

"As long as we're continuing to be better for ourselves and better for our circle of people that we love, and maybe better for the greater good if we can impact that, then that's the life."