model-turned-executive-

companies aimed at minimizing stress in the workplace.

Now we’re back to where we started. The shutdown meant no speaking engagements, so Rogers started podcasting, with her guests telling their own healing stories. And this is when, depending on who you are in this tale, everything dramatically fell into place, or dramatically blew up.

On a recommendation, she booked ex-felon and motivational speaker Sonny Von Cleveland. Something clicked. They spent hours on FaceTime for months after the show, until they both had to admit this was much more than friendship

Her divorce didn’t go well, “but I’m not going to tarnish 17 years (of marriage) by three months of a shitty divorce,” she says. “I’m not gonna say, ‘You’re a fundamentally bad person.’ You’re not.”

Her beloved British Blue cats were, for her, a casualty of the divorce, and the incredibly dreary winters made her miss them even more. She thought of one cheery place where she’d vacationed as a kid. Didn’t she have all the postcards?

When her plane landed at Palm Springs International Airport, Sonny was waiting. It was 2021, and she had one more dream to realize before she could relax into her new life.

Frisky Business Palm Springs Cat Cafe opened in December 2022 at 4781 E. Palm Canyon Drive, Suite F, with a room full of adoptable kitties, and a separate cafe serving coffees, teas and delicious local bites. Photos of her “Baby Blues” are on the wall when you walk in. She still misses them a lot.

Rogers uses her voice to smash the narrative that mental illness is weakness. In actuality, it is just something that can happen to a brain, like anemia happens to blood, arthritis to joints, IBS to stomachs.

One in five Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year. —CDC.gov

If that’s you, reach out. You might be surprised by how many people in your circle have firsthand experience.

I will leave you with a great quote that made me think of Rogers. It that has no solid attribution, so I took the liberty of giving it one:

A strong woman knows she has strength enough for the journey, but a woman of strength knows it is in the journey where she will become strong. —Likely a badass girl who fought a battle but wasn’t allowed to put her name on her own damn quote