About Kate

I didn't choose the ending of my old life. I did choose what came next.

This is the story I bring to every stage, every retreat, and every conversation — not because it's extraordinary, but because it's proof of something ordinary and miraculous: people can begin again.

Where It Started

A girl who loved movement.

Before anything else, I was a gymnast. I grew up in Wisconsin in a world of chalk dust, early mornings, and the stubborn belief that if you practiced something long enough, your body would learn to do impossible things. That belief became my first career — years spent coaching young athletes, building teams, and discovering that what I loved even more than the sport was the community around it.

Movement was my identity. My body was the instrument I trusted most in the world.

Which is part of why what happened next took so much from me.

Kate doing a one-armed handstand beside an alpine lake in the mountains
Once a gymnast, always a gymnast
The Journey

Chapters I didn't plan — and the one I finally wrote myself.

The Accident

The day everything changed

A life-changing accident redrew the map of my body and my future in an instant. The athlete who trusted her body completely suddenly couldn't trust it to get through a normal day. There was no dramatic movie-moment of acceptance — just the slow, disorienting realization that the old life wasn't coming back.

The Long Middle

Years of chronic pain

Chronic pain is a strange kind of grief — you mourn someone who is still technically here. For years I lived in a body that hurt, in a loop of specialists, treatments, good days that fooled me and bad days that humbled me. I kept working, kept showing up, kept smiling in rooms where no one knew what it cost me to be standing there.

I learned things in those years I wouldn't wish on anyone and wouldn't trade for anything: how to endure, how to ask for help, how to find slivers of joy inside limitation.

Compound Grief

When loss doesn't wait its turn

Grief rarely arrives on schedule, and it doesn't wait for you to finish the last one. Losses stacked on losses — of people, of identity, of the future I'd assumed was mine. There was a season when I felt like I was made mostly of goodbyes.

What carried me wasn't a breakthrough. It was people. A handful of humans who kept showing up, who let me be a mess, who reminded me that connection isn't a luxury for when life is good — it's the raft you cross the hard part on.

Recovery

Surgery, healing, and getting my life back

Major surgery gave me a real shot at recovery — and recovery gave me something I hadn't felt in years: a future with room in it. Rebuilding my strength taught me the same lesson gymnastics had, from the other side: bodies and lives are rebuilt the same way, one unglamorous rep at a time.

Los Angeles

Starting over, on purpose

Healed enough to choose again, I made the biggest bet of my life: I left everything familiar and moved to Los Angeles to build a life centered on the things that had actually saved me — community, connection, creativity, and purpose.

I founded my own company, began producing gatherings and experiences that bring people together, and started telling my story out loud — first in living rooms, then on stages and podcasts. It turns out the story I was most ashamed of was the one people most needed to hear.

Today

Building the thing I needed

Today I speak, write, host retreats, and build communities for people standing where I once stood — at the edge of an unwanted new chapter, wondering if there's anything good on the other side. There is. I've seen it. I live in it.

Healing didn't give me my old life back. It gave me the courage to build a truer one.
Kate Vollmer
What Guides Me

The values underneath everything.

Honesty over polish

I'd rather tell you the messy truth that helps than the shiny version that doesn't. Real stories, told honestly, are what make people feel less alone.

Community first

Nobody heals alone, and nobody should have to. I build rooms — literal and figurative — where people find their people.

Hope with receipts

Optimism means more coming from someone who's been through it. I don't offer platitudes — I offer what actually worked, and the honesty about what didn't.

Want the story behind the story?

I share the unabridged version — the setbacks, the lessons, the practical tools — from stages, on podcasts, and at retreats.

Invite Kate to Share It