After The Desert

When I came home from the desert, I did what most people do when they finally feel seen in their body again.

I went looking for answers.

I found a functional doctor who listened and ran every lab test under the sun. And I mean every one. Blood. Urine. Hormones. Gut. Toxins. The full picture. What came back wasn’t a surprise so much as a confirmation of what I already felt in my bones.

My body was overburdened.

Severe mold exposure.
Lyme disease.
Gut dysfunction.
Hormones completely dysregulated.
A nervous system stuck in full survival mode.

Nothing was mild. Nothing was subtle. My body wasn’t whispering anymore. It was shutting down.

So I did what I thought healing required. I got serious. I got aggressive. I got very intentional. I started protocols. Supplements stacked on supplements. Powders. Pills. Drops. Timing schedules that could qualify as a part-time job.

And instead of getting better, I felt worse.

Around the same time, we discovered mold in our home. Not a little. Not questionable. Alarming levels. The kind you don’t argue with. The kind that makes your stomach drop when you realize you’ve been sleeping and breathing inside it for years.

We moved out. We gutted the house. Walls opened. Systems replaced. And still, something wasn’t right.

Eventually, we uncovered the final layer. Mold buried under the roof sheathing. Not detected before because it was sealed in. Hidden. Persisting. Quietly keeping me sick while I was doing everything right.

I had been trying to heal in an environment that was actively harming me.

And worse, I was overwhelming a body already drowning by piling more on top of it.

At some point, somewhere between the lab results, the gutted house, and the endless supplement routines, it hit me. Healing wasn’t going to come from doing more. It was going to come from subtracting.

I spent the better part of my thirties pushing my body through everything. Building businesses. Carrying responsibility. Living through a divorce with two young kids. Performing resilience because life didn’t pause long enough to ask whether I was okay.

Eventually, I found myself alone in a small space by a lake. No protocols taped to the wall. No supplement graveyard on the counter. No performance of healing. Just quiet. Water. Space.

And that’s where things began to change.

For the first time, I stopped trying to force my body into health. I stopped fighting symptoms like enemies. I stopped throwing inputs at a system that clearly needed rest, safety, and relief.

I realized I didn’t need to add more to my body.
I needed to clear it.

I needed to reduce the noise. The chemicals. The constant stimulation. The sense of urgency. I needed to detox, yes, but not in the way I’d been taught. Not aggressively. Not heroically.

Gently. Intentionally. With respect.

That was the shift.

Healing stopped being about control and became about cooperation. About creating an environment, internal and external, where my body could finally stand down and do what it knows how to do when it’s not under siege.

That lake season didn’t fix everything overnight. But it changed the direction entirely. It taught me that safety is foundational. That you can’t out-supplement a toxic environment. That more effort doesn’t equal better outcomes. And that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stop.

This is where the real work began.
Not the dramatic kind.
The quiet, cumulative kind.

And this is the ground Outlaw Woman eventually grew from, not as a brand, but as a lived understanding that healing isn’t found in excess, performance, or fear. It’s found in discernment. In restraint. In creating conditions where life can come back online.

That’s the story behind the shift.
And it’s the lens through which everything else followed.