At just 32 years of age, Lauren McCullough has seen and experienced enough to fill an entire life. Born in San Francisco, Lauren has lived in Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Las Vegas, Baja, Columbia, the Philippines, and here in Tampa, where she has become an integral part of Team Good Guys Signs.
This is actually her second stint working here. She had been at Good Guys Signs for about a year in 2014, before moving to Sin City. She eventually came back to Tampa this past January, and returned to work in the production department.
When Lauren’s off the clock, she likes to remain active. She’s played in softball, basketball, and flag football leagues. She goes to the gym on a daily basis, noting that she just can’t sit still.
You wouldn’t know it to look at her pleasant, warm smile that Lauren is a rock inside. She’s tough. She’s resilient. Afraid of heights– she’s gone skydiving. She doesn’t know how to swim, but she goes wakeboarding in the gulf. One fear she revealed…. rollercoasters.
“I don’t like rollercoasters, probably because it’s something you can’t control,” says Lauren. The control issue may be a by-product of her earlier life.
When she was young, she lived in gang-dominated East LA. She couldn’t control the bullets that would fly by her house every day and every night. She couldn’t control if her friends were killed as a cause of gang violence. She finally made it out of that brutal living situation, and as she says, “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to overcome…being able to get out of there.”
Lauren is also gay. She couldn’t control her sexuality. She conveys that it is who she is, “I’ve always been kind of a tomboy, I always hung out with guys and played sports. I think I kind of knew I was gay when I was about eight.”
These things could easily break a person. Guns and gayness could knock down a person to shrivel up into a ball, scared of life. Not Lauren McCullough. She stands a little taller, as she proudly declares, “I’m resilient. I don’t allow myself to get too negative. If life brings challenges, I push through. I don’t wallow in self-pity.”
And maybe it’s the mindset that’s engrained in her very fiber that led her to marriage. We have to go back to the past for the genesis of her matrimony to really get a feel for it. Having had been in boarding school in Jamaica in her teens, she made a friend, named Kehaulani. The two went their separate ways from there when school finished, and didn’t see each other for a decade. Lauren was happening to be celebrating her birthday in Frisco, ironically where Kehaulani was living. Lauren wrote her and asked if she wanted to get together while she was in town. “We did, and it was instant attraction for both of us,” Lauren beams. The pair have now been happily married for five years.
This lady, who’s not even afraid to take on the owner of our company in a game of hoops, is covered in tattoos. “They’re derived from dreams I have when I’m sleeping. I also have ones that remind of people and things. I made my very first tattoo myself.” You might assume a person feels the need to hide behind a beard or a tattoo. Not Lauren. She knows everyone has problems, and she believes hers from the past are of no greater consequence than anybody else’s. She’s as open a book as you could read.
The kid with a crossover dribble that can kill, and a dedicated employee who routinely lifts 650 pounds of materials per day…well, she’s pretty darn inspiring.