The real story
Raised in chaos.
Built in fire.
Writer. Speaker. Advocate. She heals out loud — because she was so very lost in the silence.
Where I come from
Born in Aspen.
33 places called home since.
Rhode Island at 5. California at 9. Missouri at 16. Back to California at 17 — and then all the way through it for the better part of two decades. Aspen to Oceanside to Escondido to Carlsbad and eventually here, Arizona. I am a gypsy at heart. Not reckless. Responsive. I move when something calls, and something has been calling my whole life.
I was raised by a single mother in the 1980s who worked constantly just to keep a roof over our heads. She always did. But her time was the one thing she couldn't give me. So I raised myself, mostly. In my bedroom building fantasy worlds. On the street, teaching the neighborhood kids to dance. At 9, I was running what amounted to the apartment complex's unofficial dance school — choreography memorized like scripture, always in the center, always the one getting the special parts.
That feeling — of being prepared for something and rewarded with connection — I spent the next thirty years trying to find it again. I just didn't know yet that I'd have to build it myself.
The hard years
I made big decisions and stayed
too long in the wrong ones.
I got pregnant at 20 by someone I knew was wrong for me. The red flags weren't just waving — they were on fire. But I stayed, because consistency, even painful consistency, felt better than the freefall of walking away from the only thing I had. What followed were years of survival. Bartending through nights so my mother could watch my daughter during the day. Relationships that looked like security from the outside and were something else entirely on the inside.
Three kids. Multiple co-parents. Moves every year or two. I lost jobs because no one showed up when they were supposed to. I rearranged everything — holidays, meals, bedtime — to absorb the chaos of people who moved through life without cleaning up after themselves. Eventually I stopped fighting for structure. I started floating. Or maybe it's more honest to say I drowned for a while.
I drank through some of it. Not because I was addicted to the alcohol — but because of what it gave me. It took me away from my pain. From my reality. From the version of my life I couldn't figure out how to fix yet.
"I healed out loud because I was so very lost in the silence."
I've been agoraphobic. I've lived through a stalker. I've been in relationships that required me to make myself smaller and smaller until I barely recognized what was left. I've had PMDD send me to the ER with no answers and no plan — they sent me home without even saying the word. I carry CPTSD from years of a nervous system that never learned what safety felt like. I have AUDHD, which explains a great deal about how I'm wired — and explains why every system built for other people's brains never quite fit mine.
I am not less. I never was. I just needed the right container.
My handle is @audrality — a word I made for the alternate reality I built to survive the one I was living in. It started as escape. It became identity. It became the name for everything I am building now: a world made entirely on my own terms.
What I built
Over twenty years of building things —
mostly from scratch.
It started before I had a name for it. I invented products to help my kids — including a corner-weighted blanket to keep strollers from flying away at the beach. I built a business called The Buzz Ladies specifically to get myself out of my own house when agoraphobia had me locked inside it. I taught myself web design, SEO, and digital marketing from the ground up — took the courses, got the certifications, became the fuel behind a digital marketing campaign that won multiple international awards.
I have tried corporate. Twice. Desperation took me there both times — I needed the lights back on, literally. I was a team lead. I delivered. But I couldn't play the game long enough to stay, and I finally stopped pretending I could. I quit when I realized that no amount of stability was worth becoming someone I didn't recognize in the mirror.
There were years my personal life was too chaotic to hold anything I was building. I spiraled in ways I'm still a little amazed I came back from. But I did come back. And when I did, I built differently — slower, more honest, more mine.
Right now
Arizona. My son still at home.
Growing closer every day.
I live in Arizona now — the wash behind my house, the wide-open desert sky, a kitchen I actually cook in. My youngest is still home with me. I have three kids total. They are the through-line of every hard year and every good one.
My days look like: making something from scratch, writing something I actually mean, building something that doesn't exist yet. I am passionate about living without big-business intervention — knowing what's in what I put on my body and into it, learning from the land, making things by hand the way they used to be made. I am healing out loud, not because it's comfortable, but because I was so lost in the silence that I refuse to go back there.
I am passionate about healing outside the places you're told to look. Not through the system — through discipline, radical honesty, nervous system work, food, and the hard-won daily practice of taking your life back. That's what I write about. That's what I speak about. That's what I build communities around.
I am growing stronger and closer to my best self every single day. Not in a straight line. In the only way that's ever been available to me — forward, honest, and completely my own.
Where I'm headed
The next chapter
is already in motion.
I wrote the book that didn't exist when I needed it — The PMDD Guidebook. Sixty-two pages of real tools, written from the floor by someone who clawed her way back. It's the survival guide I wish someone had handed me thirty years ago.
Now I'm building 1:1 coaching to go with it — a 12-week program for women who are done white-knuckling through their cycle and ready to take their life back.
And I'm speaking. Not yet from the stages I'm working toward — but the work is in motion. I have a team. I have the topics. I have thirty years of lived experience and the voice to carry it. The rooms will come. I'm building toward them the same way I've built everything else — one honest step at a time.
The work
Five things being built.
Each one from something lived.
Everything I build comes from something I've lived — not a trend, not a market gap someone told me to fill. A need I had, a gap I fell into, a thing I built for myself first and then couldn't stop sharing.
If this landed
"You are not your worst thoughts. You are a soul still here for a reason."
If you've read this far, something here was meant for you. Stay close — I write when I have something worth saying, which means when you hear from me, it will be real.