About Joe and Hilde
Hilde
At the heart of it all is Hilde, a wonderfully somewhat dramatic woman who swings between “This is amazing!” and “WTF is this chaos?!” She juggles, loves cooking, overthinks almost everything, and often falls into existential rabbit holes. She’s acutely aware of the BS she was raised with and works hard at unlearning it. Wildly introspective and sometimes overwhelmed, she’s always trying to make sense of life with humor and heart.
Joe
Joe is Hilde’s steady partner of nearly forty years, a hardworking, practical man who shows love through action and always encourages her dreams. His natural way of moving through life, shaped in part by a late diagnosis of being on the spectrum, adds both heart and complexity to their everyday story. He agrees with Hilde that Knowing about the spectrum takes away the 'WTAF is happening?!" and gives clarity to their entire lives together.
The Story So Far...
Third kid. Parents barely out of their teens. What could go wrong?
Confident, curious & insightful, little Hilde spent her days outside
Adults blew it TF up. Hilde unsquished herself from the middle & kept hobbling through.
Certain. Confident. Running on vibes, Aqua Net & Club fumes. A man was imminent.
Hilde believed marriage was adulthood. She was sincere, twenty-three, and stepping into something bigger than she knew.
Kids, routines, responsibility. She loved it, but was marriage supposed to be this singular & f*cking HARD? Things weren't adding up
Two teens, a desk in a closet and an unemployed spouse and no backup plan. Hilde got the degree despite it all.
Health issues entered the chat uninvited. Took 9 years of pestering docs & insisting she wasn't crazy.
Turns out carrying too much for too long actually DOES have a cost. Who knew.
Picked up some paint & pens. Doodles and gratitude helped.
Life continues and so does acceptance. Hilde makes peace with reality. Sorta.
Meet the Creator Behind Joe & Hilde
The creator behind The Adventures of Joe and Hilde: Life, Love and the Spectrum is a storyteller, therapist, teacher, and Gratidoodler™ and someone who has spent a lifetime trying to make sense of the baffling, ordinary and weird chaos of being human. Through doodles, vignettes, cartoons and small reflections, she creates a variety of characters, like Hilde and Joe, to say the quiet parts of life out loud.
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When not drawing or making miniatures, she’s laughing with her family, playing dollhouse with her grandchild, or deep-thinking about the multiple-world theory and the possibility of aliens in the ocean. She's on a daily quest to navigate autoimmune issues while she and her spouse learn how to embrace his late-in-life autism diagnosis after years of misunderstanding. It's a bumbly road, but they're figuring it out.
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Married for almost 40 years, she lives on the East Coast, has a snuggly cat who adopted her, and a doodle filled cast of journal characters. She's a proud card-carrying Gen-Xer with more pens, sketchbooks, and Procreate files than she’ll ever admit. Heading into her latter years, she continues doing what she loves most: seeking authenticity, creating, connecting, and making meaning for herself and other women.​