Audra Leigh smiling at her kitchen table with coffee, fresh bread and a journal

Audra Leigh · Arizona

I heal out loud, because I was so lost in the silence.

Writer, speaker and PMDD and CPTSD advocate. Born in Aspen, thirty-three places called home since, now in the Arizona desert. Living with PMDD, CPTSD and AuDHD, and building a life on my own terms anyway.

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Find me @audrality everywhere

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 to keep a roof over our heads. She always did. But her time was the one thing she couldn't give me. So I mostly raised myself. In my bedroom building fantasy worlds. On the street, teaching the neighborhood kids to dance. At 9, I was running the apartment complex's unofficial dance school, choreography memorized like scripture.

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.

Audra Leigh smiling at sunset in the Arizona desert

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 waving, they were on fire. But I stayed, because consistency, even painful consistency, felt better than the freefall. 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 on the inside.

Three kids. Multiple co-parents. A move every year or two. I drank through some of it, not for the alcohol but for what it gave me: a way out of a reality I couldn't fix yet.

I've been agoraphobic. I've lived through a stalker. I've had PMDD send me to the ER, and been sent home without anyone saying the word. I carry CPTSD from years of a nervous system that never learned what safety felt like. I have AuDHD, which 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, @audrality, is 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.

What I built

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 to get myself out of my own house when agoraphobia had me locked inside it. I taught myself web design, SEO and digital marketing, earned the certifications, and became the fuel behind a campaign that won multiple international awards.

I've tried corporate. Twice. Desperation took me there both times. I was a team lead and I delivered, but I couldn't play the game long enough to stay. No amount of stability was worth becoming someone I didn't recognize in the mirror.

There were years my life was too chaotic to hold anything I was building. But I came 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 desert sky, a kitchen I actually cook in. I have three kids. They are the through-line of every hard year and every good one.

My days look like making something from scratch, writing something I mean, and building something that doesn't exist yet. I'm passionate about living without big-business intervention: knowing what's in what I put on and in my body, learning from the land, making things by hand.

And I'm passionate about healing outside the places you're told to look. Not through the system, but through discipline, radical honesty, nervous system work, food, and the daily practice of taking your life back. That's what I write about, speak about, and mentor women through.

Forward, honest, and completely my own.

The work