Welcome to my blog! My name is Nicole Borhaven Corke and I live in Kamloops, British Columbia, where I work at the local university as a student advisor. My previous employment was in the social services field where I worked with multiply challenged adults and disadvantaged teens. Working with these populations allowed me to gain insight behind the masks and stereotypes of “lazy” and “crazy” and further develop compassion for all walks of life.

An avid student of human nature, I grew up as a very curious and existentially-minded youth. Due to this, and likely my sensitive and eager-to-please nature, I was an observer. Observing helped me make sense of my inner and outer worlds: Why did he get so angry after he fell? (childhood). How can she be so flirtatious and I suck at it? (ugh, high school). Where did this fear of rejection come from? (all of it).

It was therefore a natural path that when I headed to university, I would focus on psychology (major) and communications (minor). My love of writing should have also led me to focus on English, but my 18-year-old egocentric who-the-hell-are-you-to-tell-me-how-to-write-or-interpret-that-poem self quickly abandoned that path.

I’ve been writing since my early years (the image of Holly Hobby on my square plastic lunch kit inspired my first story) and I continue to write amidst my often hairy and wonderfully full life as a married mother of two. As any kind of art is generally an expression of one’s inner world, you will find that my blog (and soon-to-be-completed YA novel) contains reflections on cultivating compassion, vulnerability, and the importance of expanding awareness to bring our (often unhelpful) unconscious habits out of the dark where we can examine and work with them. For more on why my writing centres around the concept of normalizing, see “Why Normalizing?”.

I hope you enjoy Normalizing Nicole. I look forward to any comments you may have!

Note: A big thanks to the Unsplash website that offers free use of amazing photos!