Kayla Tellington shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Kayla, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: What is a normal day like for you right now?
If it’s a weekday, I wake up and head straight to work. I teach high school English. During my lunch break, if I can squeeze in the time, I respond to both my sweets business and literary magazine emails. The rest of the day is usually packed with lessons, PowerPoints, grading nearly 200 students’ work (or at least trying really, really hard to), and all the things that come with teaching.
Once I get home, I usually take one of four paths, and the order changes every day. Path one: preparing ingredients or shopping for materials for an upcoming order. Path two: hours of actual baking. Path three: sitting at my desk, creating content, lesson plans, and grading while responding to more emails. And path four: lying around, feeling guilty about all the things I know I should be doing after work… never really relaxing, even when I’m trying to out of spite.
Weekends are different but not exactly slower. I usually wake up after a long night of baking, finish up orders, take photos, and wait for pickups while I clean up and try to reclaim a bit of my time.
I miss the days when life was simpler…. when I could work a short shift, knock out a quick baking order, and spend the rest of the day playing in makeup, gaming with friends, or binging a show. But I’ve come so far in all that I’m building now that I’ve learned to be grateful for even the slightly slower days.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Kayla “KayTell” Tellington. I’m an educator, writer, editor, and baker. My brand as a whole is “KayTell”, and everything attached to that name is rooted in authenticity, honesty, and creating an experience worth remembering and sharing.
My sweets business, KayTell’s Sweets, was actually the first time I started using that name. It was the first time I felt brave enough to do something without waiting until I was “ready.”
When I started, I dreamed big. I wanted my baking to take off. I imagined blowing up on social media, getting featured on the news, opening a storefront, maybe even winning an award. And as my presentation finally started to match the flavors I worked so hard to perfect, I realized I was starting to lose sight of what mattered to me most: making good baked goods and sharing them with people.
I became more focused on likes, followers, and whether I could realistically turn this into something that would change my entire life, and that pressure took the joy out of it. Eventually, my goal shifted. I realized that I didn’t need to “take over the world” with my sweets. My purpose became much simpler… to bring people joy through my baking, to show supporters that their orders directly fuel someone’s dreams.
When I make a cake or a dozen cupcakes, I care about them as much as the customer does. I remember their birthdays, their celebrations, and I genuinely look forward to being part of those moments. For me, KayTell’s Sweets is about being genuine. It is about sharing another piece of who I am with people who care enough to tune in.
Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What was your earliest memory of feeling powerful?
For me, power has always been tied to making someone else happy. Maybe it’s the people-pleaser in me that I haven’t quite grown out of yet, but when something I do brings joy to someone else, I feel like I’m on top of the world.
My earliest memory of that feeling was in elementary school at Furley Elementary. Every so often, I would bring in a cake I made at home, almost always a double chocolate one. I never asked the teacher beforehand, which as a teacher now I realize probably wasn’t the best idea. I can only imagine how hard it was to tell a room full of kids, “Hey, there’s cake, but not for you.” So I now realize I basically forced their hand.
But at some point during the day, the teacher would let me share it with the class, and everyone loved it. Even other teachers would stop by for a slice. For a few minutes, the entire classroom, even the adults, were smiling because of something I made. I remember feeling like I could raise my hand and graze the surface of the moon.
I still chase that same feeling now. Whenever I make something new and share it with my partner or family, I get that same rush, waiting – terrified if it does not stand up to my name and excited to hear that it surpasses it.
What fear has held you back the most in your life?
I have a basic answer that most people probably share, which is the fear of failure, of disappointing myself, my parents, or my peers. I have avoided a lot of things because of that fear. I have turned down wedding cakes, refused to try new pastries, and even told food reviewers I had no openings on the day they wanted, because I would rather not try than try and fail.
But if I think a little harder, my biggest fear is being too late. In some ways that connects to failure, but it feels deeper than that. I am afraid that I will get so caught up in my own head that I will miss an opportunity. Not just a small one that could have grown into something bigger, but a life changing one that I let pass by because I hesitated. Then, by the time I am finally ready, the train has already left the station.
There are nights when I stay up running through every scenario in my head, wondering if it was all to end today, did I do enough to be remembered the way I hope to be?
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? What’s a belief you used to hold tightly but now think was naive or wrong?
I used to believe that I should be there for everyone around me, no matter what. I spread myself thin for my friends because I saw that they needed someone. I would spend my last dollar, go against my parents’ wishes, cancel cake orders, postpone business plans, and push my own feelings aside to put others first.
And honestly, I can still see myself doing that because it is part of who I am. But my belief in that idea changed when I realized it is okay not to do those things when people are not capable of returning your effort. Not even the success, but just the attempt to be there for you without judgment or haste for you to be better. At the end of many of my early adulthood friendships, I was in that angry stage of realizing that people-pleasing was hurting me more than it was healing others.
I probably could have expressed those feelings better to people I started to see differently, and I do realize that I could not be angry at people for treating me a certain way when I had always told them it was fine. But as I have grown, I have learned that I became a better person for my friends once I realized it was okay to put myself first.
When I stopped feeling like I was drowning, and when people around me seemed to have stopped punishing me for no longer being their ray of sunshine, I realized I had left no sunshine for myself. It took a lot of people basically screaming at me that it is okay to expect a friend to be the kind of friend who helps you prioritize yourself the same way you prioritized them. You are not a bad person for wishing that people would see you for more than a pick-me-up. That realization completely changed how I approach friendships.
Not every friend has to be your best friend. Sometimes a person is a reader like you and you connect through that. Sometimes a person bakes and you relate on that. Maybe you were friends in grade school and now you just comment congratulations on each other’s posts every so often. But I do not need to engulf myself in every person who comes into my life and ask, “Hey, want to be friends?”
Now, I have a better balance of supporting others, although I still sometimes slip into going above and beyond for people who probably do not even have my number saved or my name remembered. But being someone who truly wants to see everyone win and be happy takes discipline, and that kind of discipline takes a long time to master.
Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. If immortality were real, what would you build?
If immortality were real, the ultimate goal for me, if I were ever blessed to be wealthy, would be to build schools, libraries, and recreation centers. Not just the buildings themselves, but to fund the educators who would bring them to life. I would try to create a system where teachers have the circumstances to go into their classrooms and focus only on their students and their futures. I do not yet know exactly what that system would look like, but I know it is coming.
I would bring back the concept of libraries being a regular, welcoming spot for everyone. To be honest, growing up I only ever went to my school library. If I had known everything public libraries offered, I know I would have been there every day. I want our youth to have a community built around building them up. I could sit for hours and talk about my dreams of being a prominent voice in education and how I want to use that voice for good.
The way I see it, many parents in the city face limited options. They either live somewhere they cannot fully afford in hopes that the slightly better school system will protect and prepare their child, or they stay where they are and hope the neighborhood school can do enough to keep their child safe and supported. For others, the only choice is to convince their child, often as young as eleven, to understand the importance of education so they can test into a “better” school that might be thirty minutes away and past ten other schools closer to home.
My mother never stopped talking about how important my education was, and I took that to heart. I also took to heart what that sacrifice meant. To get into a “better” school, I had to leave behind my friends, my familiar bus stops, and my sense of belonging to start over somewhere across town with strangers. It was hard, but it taught me that opportunity often comes with loss, and that not every child should have to lose their community in order to gain a quality education.
If immortality were real, I would spend it creating a world where students, families, and teachers no longer have to make that trade. Where education is not something you have to chase across zip codes, but something that is built right where you are.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kaytellonline.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaytellssweets/?hl=en
- Other: We currently accept orders through our contact number!
