“When I was growing up, I remember cousins or aunts said I was the black sheep or the bad seed of all the kids, and that has always kind of fucked me up,” Josie says. “But at the same time I wear it as a badge of pride.”

Josie has had something to push back on her whole life. There are photos of her when she was a child pushing back on gender norms: dressed like a tomboy in grubby jeans and a T-shirt with a baseball cap playing with her dolls or dressed in girly dresses playing trucks in the sandbox with the boys.

Her family-life was normal and every day was somewhat the same. Josie would come home from school and do her homework – her dad always helped with Math, her mom with English. They ate dinner together with her siblings, usually the same meals on the same nights of the week every week. They would clean up, watch a little TV and go to bed. Her bedtime was 9 p.m. until she was a teenager. Everything was uniform, just like the uniform she wore to St. Michael School every day.

Now, Josie is sitting across from me at her kitchen table in Eugene, Oregon where, after relinquishing a burgeoning career in marketing, she’s hunkered down to pursue something more creative and meaningful at the University of Oregon. She’s 34, single, and has one roommate: her black cat Butters – or ‘Burt.’ Every morning here “looks pretty much the same”: Josie will get up and go to the bathroom. Burt comes in there and sits on her lap, then they go downstairs together so that she can feed him.

“There’s just something about these routines that make me feel better,” Josie says.

But she needs to break the routine from time to time for fresh air.

“As regimented as I can be about some things,” she says, “I have to go like way to the other end of the spectrum when I want to have fun. I’m definitely a work hard play hard kind of a person.”

She started to feel this in high school, too, when the uniformity began to wear on her. Catholicism had taught her from a young age that she was supposed to be in pursuit of a specific way of being. If she followed the rules on how to live her life, she would fit into the perfect little box that would ensure that she would spend eternal life in Heaven with God. She didn’t know any other way; this was her reality. Slowly she began to catch glimpses of the possibility of life beyond the rules of the church.

“And I was like, ‘I’m not going to follow these rules and I’m going to go as far in the other direction as I can,’” she says.

While many of her friends followed the strict schedule dictated by the church and their small, Iowa town, the nonconformist attitude she has had since she was a small child helped Josie defect from the church and it’s destiny over time. Her desire to go and go far is what led her to the West Coast.

But she isn’t completely free.

“I just obsess over mistakes that I’ve made,” she says. “Maybe because I have this innate sense of wanting to be perfect, wanting to be like a normal person.”

She talks more about Catholicism and the ten commandments, the rules that you’re supposed to follow and how if you don’t, you’re supposed to always repent or atone for what you’ve done wrong. You always have to make yourself right. And while she doesn’t entirely disagree with this karmic philosophy, she wonders if sometimes she lets it overwhelm her.

“There’ve been a couple of times where I have to tell myself, ‘I forgive you,’” she says.

Burt jumps up onto the table again and Josie wraps her fingers around his belly to pick him up into her arms. She may not have a husband or a house or a baby on the way, but she’s working hard to create something that is her own. She’s more than halfway through her Master’s degree in Journalism and earnestly watering the seeds of a sprouting reputation in the Eugene comedy scene.

“Perfection to me has always meant something a little different,” she says.