Editor’s note: The views expressed in I Am So Popular are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the outlook or beliefs of anyone else in the IST network.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I wrote an essay called Quit Your Job that ran on MSN.com. That piece landed on one of their most hits ever lists. This was back during the high-tech boom, there wasn’t a recession like there is now, and so quitting one’s job wasn’t that big of a risk. Anyone with a fifth grade education and rudimentary computer skills could get a gig at one of the gazillion startups. If you didn’t like what you were doing, you could find something else.

That’s not the case these days and still, I know, if I encourage people to quit jobs they don’t like, even if they don’t follow through on my advice, the temptation remains strong. By applause, how many of you spend a lot of your cubicle slavery time fantasizing that you could quit to pursue your passion?

Good news: you’re in the right city not only to entertain those visions, but to actually get out there and give your dreams a shot. Plenty of people here are carving out their own version of happy. Maybe they’re juggling four part time jobs so they can paint or write poetry in their off hours. Maybe they’re one of the countless baristas with the graduate degree, glad for a doctorate in philosophy with no interest in trying for an adjunct professor gig.

mary louise butters

I first met MLB at a party many years ago. That seemed to be the end of it until I fell into this odd side gig of writing about art quilters. You go ahead and laugh at that concept all you want, but trust me, there are a lot of folks out there making contemporary quilts your grandmother would never recognize (or try to emulate) and these pieces hang in museums and fetch thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars.

I can’t tell you how many times it was suggested to me that I interview MLB about her quilts. I missed the chance with my first quilting book. But now, researching my second, I gave her a call.

What I found, during our interviews, was a human hell bent on the old follow-your-bliss routine. I don’t mean someone thinking about following her bliss. I mean someone who, in the wake of a divorce, with grief compounded by the death of a beloved dog, decided fuck it, she was going to do exactly what she wanted to do from now on. And so she has. And how did this begin? SHE QUIT HER JOB.

These days, MLB works out of a commercial kitchen off of South Congress, cranking out these treats that I am careful only to buy once a month or so, less my formerly huge buttocks return in full force and then some. But more than her brownies, it’s her attitude I dig.

And from whence did this attitude come?

“I grew up in a family of cooks,” says MLB. “I gathered a lot of data about the sensuality of living in this body. It’s meant to be enjoyed. Food is a portal to joy. It’s connected to community and health— it’s so multifaceted. I always knew food and how to feed myself and I grew up wanting to make things more beautiful. When you have the experience of something that sustains you, beyond just putting food in front of you, you realize the different creative ways there are to eat and enjoy that experience. We all have stories of favorite restaurants and meals and being around people and food that were beautiful and nourishing.”

So, in the interest of getting “our culture to embrace more of the joys of food rather than the dogma,” she decided brownies were the way to go. Or, as she puts it, “Chocolate is a forgivable sin. No one questions whether or not you need it and it’s not going away.”

mary louise butters

“I realized I was trying to find my voice in fabric. I started doing traditional pieces and taking classes and got the basics down. It wasn’t long before I came to a turning point. I was at a job at Central Market. I’d gone to a New Year’s Eve party and was asked to share best and worst moments of the past year. I couldn’t think of the best moment and that’s unusual for me—I get excited over belly button lint. So I said that’s it, I’m going to create a studio and cut out the bullshit and quit the job and follow what has been calling me.”

Let’s go over that one more time: SHE QUIT HER JOB.

Pursuing art with no regular job made paying the bills less effortless, but she had a husband at the time and he helped out. Then the marriage meandered down the path to a sort of low-grade hell, and, she says, “My life became like the human experience of the perfect storm. At the same time all this was coming together I connected with friends who wanted me to make something chocolate. I whipped up this recipe that had been given to me by John Henry Faulk’s wife. I completely bastardized it and made it my own, doing the same thing to the recipe that I was doing with the quilts.”

She gave some brownies to friends who demanded to know why she wasn’t baking them for a living.

“I thought maybe it’s time, if everything’s going to change, why not change everything? It’s like trying to jump over the Grand Canyon. You make the first step and the rest come after. I recognized the mystery and beauty of chocolate, which is an incredible tool to express so may emotions. It’s such a mysterious food. It’s so dynamic. There’s nothing static about it.”

So she ran away for a little trip to the coast, and read “150 pounds of cookbooks” in her quest to fully research chocolate. She came back, started baking the first commercial batches in her home kitchen, and that was that.

“It was like having a baby, once you have it, you can’t put it back in,” she says.

She financed her endeavor with loans taken against her house. She took risk after risk. She made baby steps forward.

“Everyone wants a Cinderella story but it doesn’t happen that fast,” she says. “I kept taking risks and taking money out of the house, throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. All along you realize you’re getting what you asked for which is to be in the flow, be in the bigger river where you’re engaged in the community where you’re making a difference where there wasn’t one before, at least not on a personal level. And I kept doing it. So for three years, without missing a single week, I baked, packaged and delivered every single brownie.”

And then things started getting really interesting. She got a call from the Food Network and they did a piece on her. She got invited first to Sundance and then the Oscars to serve up her brownies. Just the other week, she got a call from Rachel Ray’s people. All this without a PR person. Word-of-mouth—mouths overjoyed at the result of her pursuing her passion—has been the thing that has brought her all this national attention.

Let’s be honest: Yes, it could’ve gone to shit for Mary Louise Butters. She could’ve lost her house and her shirt on her business. But she didn’t. She had this pull, she couldn’t say no. She went with it. It worked. And how did it all start?

SHE QUIT HER JOB.

So I say, got a passion? Then go ahead, quit your damn job. Make it happen. Worst case scenario, you go back to a job you hate. Best case scenario, the fantasy comes true.

Advises MLB: “I would say there are a couple of ways of following your bliss. You can fling yourself off a cliff and as the wind rushes past wonder if your wings are opening or are you free falling. The other way is to say I want to get from here to here. They’re the same thing as long as you’re holding to the vision that you want to get there. There is a galaxy of ways to get there. But if you let go of wanting to get there, you’re going to torture yourself. It’s not going to go away.”

Spike Gillespie should not be left alone with brownies. She blogs regularly for LaunchPad Coworking and at www.spikeg.com. She is also head mistress for the Dick Monologues. Next show is August 27th and you can email her at spike@spikeg.com to reserve seats.