With Soil-Stained Hands

“ I was gone for a long time — but my body stayed.”

The Valley and the Return

This morning, with soil packed beneath my fingernails and the last chill of morning mist still clinging to my skin, I pressed my hands into the Earth and felt it: myself. Not the self I spent years polishing for the world. Not the self I tried to build to survive. But the raw, breathing animal of me, still alive under all the wreckage.

I was gone for a long time.

Not physically. My body stayed. It always does, even when everything else slips away.

But for most of the last three decades, I lived somewhere underground, or at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean—in a location so deep and dark I didn’t even know I'd descended. The kind of valley you don't realize you're in until the first sharp thread of light finally breaks across your skin — and you can see where you’ve been for the first time in ages.

Loss. Grief. Depression.
Excruciating physical pain.
Forgetting who I was.

Recovery from traumas so old, so buried, they barely had a voice anymore.
Things I didn’t want to admit were real.

A near fatal car accident that left me with a traumatic brain injury and amnesia in my youth had me living for years without a full map of my identity or a memory of my own life. When fragments of childhood came roaring back, there were pieces that were hard to digest. Memories of sexual violations, of being dismissed as imaginative, of being trained to swallow my voice, of feeling lonely in a huge famiy— didn't come neatly, like pages being turned. They came like floods breaking dam walls. They came with a fire I wasn't ready for, and for a long time, I coped the only way I knew how: by abandoning myself again.

Alcohol. Drugs. Partying not to connect, but to blur. To make it all less sharp. To feel anything when numbness was the only rhythm my body seemed to know.

There are whole years I don't remember clearly.

Whole friendships I lost by drifting away without explanation. Moments I wish I could go back and sit inside again—not to fix them, but to be present with them. To be present with you, if you were there.

“ You don't realize you've been underground until the light breaks through.”

If You Were There

Some of you reading this might have known me back then.

Maybe you were a friend I loved deeply but abandoned when I moved cities, chasing something newer, shinier, thinking reinvention would heal the pain underneath.

Maybe you’re someone whose name I still hold with tenderness—even if I can’t quite stitch together the memories the way they deserve to be remembered.

Maybe you were one of the friends who got a weird, out-of-the-blue message from me during my stint in network marketing, when I was desperate to build "something" because I didn't yet know how to belong to myself.

If you felt used, forgotten, or hurt by the ways I moved in my lost years: I see you, and I understand now how that may have felt.

It was never because you aren't precious to me.

It was because I hadn't yet learned how to carry preciousness—my own or anyone else's—without tarnishing it.

The Field I Tend Now

The attention economy, the false promises of success, the pressure to curate a "good life" online—I swallowed all of it for a while. We all got slimed. Some of us are still wiping it off.

The energetic Field I'm tending now is my line in the soil. Not for a brand. Not for “likes’ or applause. But to honor my own remembering.

I’m not here to market a fantasy life.
I’m not here to perform strength.
I’m not here to curate authenticity.

I'm here to be what I needed most all those years: someone willing to stand still. To feel it all. To walk through the valley without pretending it's already over. To be in the experience with my entire being, my breath, my bones, and a grounded presence.

I'm rebuilding my relationships—and my work—slowly, deliberately, from that place.

“ If your bones ache for something slower, truer, wilder... You're welcome here.”

If you feel the hum of that remembering under your own skin,
If you feel tired of curated online “realities” and the slime they leave behind,
If you want to build something real, even if your hands are shaking and your voice still feels small—

You're welcome here.

If you’re feeling anything stirring as you read this—a memory, a regret, a whisper— please reach reach out, I'd love to hear from you. Comment below or send a private note. Real voices and honest reflections are always allowed here.

And if this isn’t for you? If the thread of our connection is one you choose to lay down?
I honor that too.

We bless each other best when we walk where the breath still calls us.

With soil-stained hands,
AmyJo