I’m Heather Meadows, a lover of stories, art, language, culture, and food. I’m interested in social issues and science and making the world a better place.
I live in Lexington, Kentucky. I’m originally from Nicholasville, and I’ve previously lived in Huntsville, Alabama, Augusta, Georgia, and Atlanta, Georgia.
I love traveling and exploring; I’ve been to several US states, Japan, England, and Wales, and I spent years exploring Georgia’s hiking trails and waterfalls. I hope to see many more places!
I have a wonderful family, including the man I’ve been married to since 2003, my parents, two brothers, two nephews, and one niece. I also have some really great friends.
I have worked in content management and copywriting, and now I am a marketing technology analyst. I don’t do marketing strategy; I am focused on supporting and improving the internal tools that help storytellers do their jobs.
Storytelling
I really enjoy writing and rewriting, figuring out what the message is and then crafting an effective way to present it. Since 2014 I have focused seriously on creative writing as a hobby; I post those stories elsewhere. I’ve also written a fair amount of nonfiction on this blog: stories about things that have happened to me, writeups of events, essays on various topics.
My writing has always been honest, but when I first started publishing on the internet, I was extremely candid. Since then, I’ve learned to filter myself, or at least to find the appropriate audience.
I’m interested in storytelling beyond prose writing as well. I worked in television news for five years, and that gave me an appreciation for how stories can be told through images, motion, and sound. I also really enjoy comics; I pay close attention to the pacing, size, and placement of the panels. Someday I hope to create something in one or both of those media.
Problem-solving
I love figuring out how things work and coming up with ways to make them better. It’s part of why I switched from being a copywriter to a marketing technology analyst in 2020. Humans fascinate me, and I’m interested in figuring out how to give everyone the opportunity and inspiration to achieve their potential (including myself).
Health stuff
You’ll see a lot of health-related stuff in my archives. I’ve had cancer (1997–1998), congestive heart failure (2007 and 2016), obesity (on and off from 1996–2011), sleep apnea (2007–2011), and pseudotumor cerebri (2010–2011), and I’ve also suffered from depression since I was a teenager. I’m now cancer free thanks to chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant from my youngest brother, Ben. I restored my heart function both times with medication, diet, and exercise. My sleep apnea, pseudotumor cerebri, and obesity were resolved through duodenal switch weight loss surgery. And I finally sought treatment for my depression in 2016. After a few years of trying various medications and searching for the right therapist, I finally seem to have a balance of meds and coping mechanisms that work for me.
My current worry is Covid. Given my health history, I don’t want to risk getting it at all, even though members of my family have had it and come through fine (as far as we know). My organs were weakened by chemotherapy and my heart has failed twice; I am not about to tempt fate. So I am still masked up wherever I go, even though the world is pretending Covid is over.
Why “pixelscribbles”?
When I got my first domain name, I felt that the URL should be a title. I wanted my website to encompass everything about me: writing, art, photos, and whatever else I came up with. Since the site was online, viewed in pixels, I decided on “pixelscribbles”. The “scribbles” part came from something like false humility—I was trying to make my work seem less important so it wouldn’t hurt as badly if someone didn’t like it.
Now I am less concerned about this site being publicly palatable—it’s become an archive for me, a place to revisit the different phases of my life.