Wellesley Michael has the sweetest little rescue pup Petunia, and they do everything possible together. Always looking for a new Lego set, she will forever be a theatre kid, and enjoys taking in D.C.'s vast theatre scene.

Wellesley formed a passion for community organizing purely out of a search for hope, support, and community after the murder of George Floyd. She then got trapped in the world of politics by working on campaigns in her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. In D.C., she has worked on digital communications in the U.S. House, Senate, and the Biden-Harris White House. Currently, Wellesley is building the first-ever Creator Program for Senate Democrats — connecting Senators with content creators and new media.

Quotes: 

"It eases my anxiety a lot to know the finality of something, but that doesn't make it less difficult."

"My job was managing the VP comms accounts and I needed to make sure that the American public saw the total breadth of everything that Kamala Harris had done as Vice President that people didn't give her credit for or know about. A lot of the things that she did were not in the media."

"We knew the job was ending and there were different paths of what the ending would look like. No matter what happened, on January 20th, the Biden-Harris administration was over. It was just a matter of, would it be then the Harris-Walz administration moving in? But there were many waves of grief."

"The hardest part of any sort of high impact work that's really short is your life transitions so quickly to something different. And when you're so focused on the outcomes for someone else all day, it's hard to manage your self care. And even in the most basic sense of where am I getting food?"

Find Wellesley:

Instagram

LinkedIn

To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/

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This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.