For most of my teenage years, I thought I was depressed. By 19, I knew I had ADHD. For a while, I wondered if I was bipolar. At 35, as a new mom with two kids under two, I realized I was probably autistic. None of those explanations necessarily told the whole story.
Growing up, I was the girl teachers loved having in class who just wasn’t “reaching her full potential.” I was smart and capable, but I could handle something ridiculously difficult and then get completely overwhelmed by something that seemed stupidly simple. There was an emotional side too. I was sensitive, intense, and sometimes way too much. I could lash out at people I loved when I was overwhelmed, frustrated, or desperately trying to communicate something I didn’t even fully understand myself.
Looking back now, I can see that I grew up in a family full of people with very different nervous-system languages and very different ways of giving and receiving love. We didn’t know that then. We interpreted each other with the information we had, and some of what happened in those gaps became trauma I carried for years.
ADHD gave me one piece of the puzzle, but it didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain the sensitivity or why my emotions could become so big that I couldn’t seem to stop what was happening once it started. So I kept living. I built a career in healthcare, got married, got divorced, and spent almost three years pretty intentionally keeping to myself while I worked through a lot of my own shit. Eventually I got married again. After a year of hormones, monitoring, trying like hell to get pregnant, and finally having to go through IVF just as the pandemic was starting, I became a mom.
Then, while I was home with two kids under two, I heard someone describing the way autism and ADHD can present together in women.
And holy shit.
ADHD hadn’t been wrong. It just hadn’t been the whole picture.
Suddenly there was language for experiences I’d been trying to explain for most of my life. I could start to understand the sensory stuff, the overwhelm, the communication breakdowns, the masking, and the nervous-system reactions that sometimes happened faster than I could understand them. Even now, I can usually recognize what initiated one of those reactions, but that doesn’t mean I can always stop it before it happens.
That language didn’t excuse the times I’d hurt people I loved. It gave me somewhere to start. More importantly, it gave me words I could hand to the people around me. I didn’t only want to understand myself. I wanted the people I loved to understand how to love me in ways I could actually receive, and I wanted to understand the ways they were trying to love me too.
When my oldest later began his own diagnostic process, I started mine. Around the same time, life apparently decided I didn’t have quite enough going on. I passed my CMA exam, and that afternoon we had to unexpectedly put my dog Bella down. Bella had been with me through infertility and had filled a place in me during the time when I desperately wanted a baby and couldn’t have one. A few days later, I threw my back out and ended up out of work for about two and a half weeks. While I was home, I found out my medical office was closing.
I had worked since I was 16. I was almost 38 years old and had never been unemployed.
So I made a plan. I was going to pivot careers. I started interviewing for a position that seemed like it could be the next thing, and that turned into five interviews and a ridiculous amount of waiting. I had also recently started seeing a therapist, and during one of our conversations she introduced me to sidereal astrology.
Astrology wasn’t new to me, but this way of looking at my chart was. At first, it was honestly a really good distraction while everything else was completely up in the air. Then, after five interviews, the position was frozen. My office closed. I became unemployed, decided I’d keep trying to pivot through the summer, and struggled with suddenly being a stay-at-home mom when I already knew that wasn’t something I was built for.
So I kept digging into astrology because my brain needed somewhere to go. And because apparently I’m incapable of casually researching anything, I investigated the absolute hell out of it.
The deeper I went into my birth chart, the more I kept having these ridiculous moments of recognition. Astrology wasn’t diagnosing my autism or telling me who I was. It was giving me another language for things I already knew were there.
Neurodivergence had given me language for my nervous system and experiences I’d never been able to explain. Astrology started giving me another way to understand how all the different parts of me could live together. It helped me understand why parts of myself I’d always thought were completely contradictory weren’t necessarily contradictory at all. It also gave me another way to look at what happens when different nervous systems, emotional patterns, communication styles, histories, and ways of loving all exist in the same family.
Even symbolism in my chart around the wound of being deeply misunderstood hit differently because I already knew that story. The chart didn’t tell me I’d been misunderstood.
I’d lived it.
I didn’t want a list of personality traits or a bunch of astrology language I couldn’t actually do anything with. I wanted to understand what all of those symbols and placements looked like when they were living together inside one actual human being. So I started building a framework for translating my chart into my actual life.
And my brain did what my brain does with complicated information.
It built a map.
Mine became a forest. Not because astrology says I have a forest inside me. It was the way my brain began making sense of this enormous internal web of thoughts, memories, emotions, connections, different versions of myself, and all the parts of me that seemed to need completely different things.
There was water. Rocks. Trails through the trees. A campfire. And after one massive breakthrough about who I had been before survival had such a big say in who I needed to be, there was nine-year-old me. Barefoot. Curious. Running around near the water and absolutely going to find out what was out there.
Then something really cool started happening. The individual placements in my chart started finding their own roles in this little community based on the parts of me they represented. There were explorers and storytellers. Parts that needed to investigate everything. Parts that felt everything. Parts that needed structure. Parts that dreamed. Parts that protected.
Saturn tended the fire. Nine-year-old me could run off exploring because Jupiter was following along. Other versions of me could sit by the water or around the campfire, and for once I wasn’t trying to figure out which one was the REAL me.
They were all me. They just finally had somewhere they could all exist together.
And then there was the Cabin.
The Cabin became home base. It was warm. The fire was going. There was room at the table. Nobody had to explain themselves perfectly before they were allowed through the door. You could explore as far as you wanted because the Cabin wasn’t there to keep you from leaving. It was there so you knew where you could come back.
As I kept working with the map, I started recognizing my own role in the landscape too. Guide. Translator. Bridge. Alchemist. Not because my chart predicted I would build any of this, but because those strengths were already showing up in the way I had worked my entire life.
I’d spent years in healthcare taking complicated information and figuring out how to explain it in a way that made sense to the actual human sitting in front of me. I notice patterns. I connect things. I ask a million questions. I care deeply about the person underneath all of the information.
Apparently I’d been translating things long before I thought to give it a name.
At first, I jokingly called myself the Camp Counselor. Eventually, Guide fit better, but not in the sense of someone who knows where your path is supposed to lead. I think of it more like a river guide. A river guide knows how to read the water, the current, the rocks, the patterns, and the little signs that tell you something is changing underneath the surface. They know how to read the language of the landscape without pretending they’ve already walked somebody else’s trail.
Eventually I started imagining another traveler coming into the Cabin. They’d arrive carrying a backpack full of stones they’d collected along the way. Experiences. Relationships. Questions. Adaptations. Things they’d been told about themselves. Things they didn’t completely understand yet.
We’d sit down at the table, and they’d take out a stone. I’d pick it up, turn it over in my hand, and ask, “Where did you find this?”
Not, “Let me tell you what this means.”
Where did YOU find it?
Because that was the whole point. I could look at the symbols. I could notice patterns and ask questions. I could help put language around what we were seeing. But I wasn’t the one who had carried that stone.
You tell me the story. I help translate.
The goal was never for somebody to leave the Cabin with an empty backpack. Maybe you still take that stone with you, but now you know where you found it. Maybe you understand why you picked it up or why you’ve carried it this long. Maybe it doesn’t feel quite as heavy anymore.
Eventually I realized I wasn’t just imagining another traveler anymore. I was building a way to actually invite one in.
That became Stone & Sky.
Some of Stone & Sky came from wanting other people to experience that feeling of suddenly realizing, Oh my God. There are words for this. But another part of it didn’t fully click until I started building something for families.
I looked at what I’d created and realized it was almost like the book I wish my own family had been handed when I was growing up. Not something telling us who was right or who needed to change. Just something that could have helped all of us understand ourselves and each other a little bit better.
This is how this person experiences the world. This is how that person experiences it. This is where you keep missing each other. This is what love looks like when they give it. This is what they may need when everything becomes too much.
Maybe we still would have hurt each other sometimes. We’re human. Of course we would have. But maybe we would have had better language. Maybe we could have understood that loving somebody and knowing how to love them in a way their nervous system can actually receive are not always the same thing.
I can’t go backward and hand my family that book.
But I can make it now.
That’s when I realized the place I’d created to understand my own internal world could become somewhere another person could explore theirs. I didn’t create Stone & Sky and then give it a forest. Stone & Sky grew out of the forest. The river was already moving. Saturn was already tending the fire. There was already room around the campfire, and the Cabin door was already there.
And now, you just opened it.
Whenever life gives you another stone, you already know the way back. 🪨✨
