FROM PAIN TO POWER

From an Endometriosis Diagnosis at 14; to Clinical Herbalism, Cyclical Living, + Coming Home to My Body

My symptoms started around 12 years old.

At 14, I was diagnosed with stage 3 endometriosis and fibroids.

But by then, being poked, scanned, tested, medicated, and passed from one doctor to another wasn’t exactly new to me.

Ultrasounds. MRIs. CAT scans. Blood draws. Urine tests. Surgeries. Specialists ranging from neurologists, to gynecologists, to gastroenterologists, to urologists, and more.

And then came the pills.

Medication for the migraines. Medication for the anxiety. Hormonal birth control for "treatment" of endometriosis. NSAIDs for the pain. Muscle relaxers for TMJ. Another medication for another symptom, only to usually create an entirely new problem that needed another medication.

You know those pharmaceutical commercials where the list of potential side effects somehow feels longer than the commercial itself?

That was beginning to feel like my life.

At 18, I developed serotonin syndrome due to medical negligence after being prescribed medication for anxiety(GAD) that was contraindicated with a migraine medication I had been on since I was 8. By 19, after years of relying heavily on NSAIDs for endo pain, I had developed ulcers. TWICE.

I had spent most of my childhood and teenage years learning how to fight my body, but almost no time learning how to actually understand it.

And I knew absolutely nothing about herbal medicine.

I didn’t find herbalism because I was trying to become an herbalist.

Ironically, I originally went to school for herbal studies & aromatherapy because of skincare.

I was already a practicing esthetician, but my curiosities led me to the holistic side of things. I wanted to learn more about plants and essential oils so I could eventually formulate my own botanical skincare line.

Then COVID happened.

And somewhere along the way, the reason I thought I was there cracked wide open.

I started learning about herbs that had been used traditionally for menstrual and reproductive health. I learned about plant constituents, herbal actions, body systems, formulation, and the chemistry behind why different plants do what they do.

I learned about the Doctrine of Signatures, an old herbal philosophy built around observing plants and the similarities/relationships traditional herbalists saw between their characteristics and the body.

Instead of only asking, “How do I make this symptom stop?” I started learning the language of the plants I was working with.

And the more I learned about the plants, the more I learned about myself.

I began understanding the systems of the body they supported. I started paying attention to the patterns happening throughout my cycle. I learned how deeply interconnected our reproductive, endocrine, immune, digestive, and nervous systems really are.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t only trying to silence my body.

I was learning how to listen to her.

Maybe the plants weren’t new to me after all.

The funny thing is, when I look backward, herbalism feels a lot less like something I discovered and a lot more like something I remembered.

When I was a little girl, I would go outside to collect plants, leaves, flowers, moss, rocks, dirt- really whatever I could find- throw everything into a giant red bin filled with water, and brew my little concoctions in the yard.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

For all I know, half of what I was throwing into those pots was dandelion, nettle, & goldenrod. 

But there is something about remembering that little girl now that gets me every time.

Long before I knew the word herbalism, I was fascinated by plants.

Long before I understood plant medicine, I was mixing them together.

Long before I knew what ancestral wisdom meant, something in me was already reaching toward the earth.

That’s why I say herbalism is in our bones.

There are forms of knowledge humanity carried long before there were fluorescent pharmacy aisles and little orange bottles. People learned plants by living beside them, observing them, preparing medicine & rituals with them, and passing that knowledge forward.

My education gave me the language, science, and framework to understand what I was doing.

But my relationship with the earth feels much older than any certificate hanging on my wall.

Then I became my own experiment.

As I learned, I started formulating for myself.

I worked with different herbs and oils. I changed the way I ate. I learned about my menstrual cycle instead of treating it like an inconvenience that showed up once a month. I paid attention to stress, sleep, nourishment, inflammation, my nervous system, and the patterns my body had been screaming at me about for years.

Herbal medicine became a huge piece of my healing.

So did cyclical living.

So did understanding my hormones.

So did learning that supporting myself wasn’t going to come from one magical herb, supplement, diet, or ritual.

For me, it became about understanding the whole ecosystem of my body and using the plants as allies within it.

And slowly, my relationship with my body began to change.

I had spent years being told what my body couldn’t do.

I have stage 3 endometriosis. I had ovarian cysts + uterine fibroids. I have PCOS. I had recurrent infections from an immune system that was not functioning right. I had been told at 14 that conceiving naturally will most likely never happen for me.

And then, at 24, I got pregnant naturally with my daughter, Aria.

My miracle baby. 

I conceived her while I had a cyst on my left ovary that had grown to roughly the size of an orange. During my pregnancy it was monitored, as I continued to work with herbs and live holistically. To my fascination, by the time she was born, it was completely dissipated.

I will never forget what that pregnancy meant to me.

I went through more during it than I could ever fit into a paragraph. But after spending so much of my life being afraid of what my body couldn’t do, I got to experience something I had once believed might never be part of my story.

My body had carried me here. Every step of every day.

Herbalism became bigger than symptom relief.

This is the part of healing that I don’t think we talk about enough.

Yes, I wanted relief.

Of course I did.

But somewhere along the way, this stopped being solely about symptoms.

I started reconnecting with my cycle. My womb. My intuition. My boundaries. My voice. My relationship with the earth. The parts of myself I had learned to disconnect from simply to survive.

There are things that have happened to this body that I never chose.

There are diagnoses I never asked for.

There are years of pain I cannot go backward and erase.

But I refuse to let any of those things decide what the rest of my life gets to become.

That is where pain became power.

Not because the pain was beautiful.

Not because I needed it to become who I am.

And not because healing means pretending horrible things were secretly gifts.

It means they don’t get the final word.

I get to decide what I build from here.

And that is how Walk The Earth was born.

What started as a desire to formulate botanical skincare became something SO much bigger.

I became a Clinical Master Herbalist + Aromatherapist, and continued on to study women’s hormone health, the interconnected systems of the body, and herbal formulations for women.

I started making the things I wished I had known existed when I was younger.

Teas. Tinctures. Balms. Oils. Steams. Botanical skincare. Cycle-supportive formulas. Rituals and tools designed to help women understand their bodies instead of spending their lives at war with them.

And somewhere between studying plants, formulating remedies, walking through the woods, learning my own cycle, and rebuilding my relationship with my body, I found something else.

My purpose. My ikigai. My dharma. 

I came home to the earth.

I came home to my body.

I came home to myself.

And I realized that I wanted other women to know that feeling too.

This is what The Apothecary Journal is for.

This isn’t going to be a perfectly polished wellness blog where I tell you to drink more water, buy a supplement, and think positive thoughts.

Excuse my French, but fuck that.

This is where we’re going deeper.

We’re going to talk about herbal medicine and the actual plants themselves. Endometriosis. PCOS. PMDD. Infertility + postpartum.e he menopausal transition. Hormones. The menstrual cycle and all its phases. Immune health. The nervous system. Botanical skincare. Plant chemistry. Cyclical living. Womb wisdom. Traditional herbal practices. Recipes. Rituals. The ways our bodies communicate with us...

And we’re also going to talk about the woman living inside that body.

The one learning to advocate for herself.

The one learning to say no.

The one reclaiming her voice after years of making herself smaller.

The one realizing that a diagnosis may become part of her story without becoming the author of it.

The one learning that healing isn’t always about returning to whoever she was before the pain.

Sometimes it’s about meeting the woman who walked through the fire and came out knowing exactly who she is.

Taking what burned you and refusing to become its ashes. Letting the fire forge you instead of destroy you, and rising from it rebirthed.

I call that alchemy.

Turning pain into knowledge.

Knowledge into power.

Power into purpose.

And purpose into something that might make the path a little less lonely for the woman walking behind me.

That’s Walk The Earth.

And this is only the beginning. 🌿