The Girl Who Sold Skincare and Talked to Clouds
A Field Note From The Underworld
“The year was 2016. I was selling skincare. I was crying in parking lots. And I was hearing God in Trevor Hall songs.”
(Listen While You Read → Trevor Hall — “Arrows”)
There was a version of me you’ll never meet.
She wore scrubs. She sold skincare. She smiled like she meant it.
She was also dying quietly—while remembering God in parking lots.
This is for anyone who’s been mid-collapse and mid-transcendence at the same damn time.
You’re not behind. You’re on mythic time.
The Girl Who Sold Skincare and Talked to Clouds
(Baton Rouge, 2016–2017)
There once was a girl who put braces on other people’s teeth
while her own life felt crooked and aching.
She wore a smile like armor—Ulta lip gloss,
Rodan and Fields serums,
affirmations scrawled in Expo marker
on bathroom mirrors she barely believed in.
But her soul was already splitting at the seams,
quietly, beautifully—
in Target parking lots,
while her toddler laughed in the backseat
and the clouds turned into secret glyphs only she could read.
She sold skincare like a woman trying to outrun despair—
thinking if she looked healed,
maybe she wouldn’t have to feel so broken.
She memorized sales pitches by day,
but by lunch break
she was outside on the curb,
knees tucked to her chest,
earbuds in,
listening to Trevor Hall’s The Fruitful Darkness
like it was scripture from another realm.
“Suffering, I've known your name—
I wrote a song to seal your flame…”
That album held her.
Reminded her she wasn’t crazy—just shedding.
Just dying to the false self.
Just beginning.
She cried behind the dental office dumpster
because no one else knew what she was becoming.
Not even her.
She just knew the air had changed,
and the clouds were talking,
and her son’s eyes looked like something ancient and holy.
She tried the self-help canon.
It left her overwhelmed and empty.
Then Alan Watts arrived—like a laugh in the dark.
Then A Course in Miracles—a mirror so clean it hurt to look.
Then Manly P. Hall cracked the vault open
and the whole myth came flooding in.
She still packed her son’s lunch.
Still bought Halloween costumes.
Still folded laundry with gnosis leaking out her fingers.
She didn’t tell anyone.
But the wind knew.
The dirt knew.
The child knew.
And now?
She’s no longer selling promises.
She is the promise.
She’s swimming up from the underworld
carrying light in her teeth.
Maddox is older—no longer the tiny toddler from those golden afternoons—
but still her tether to this Earth.
Still her compass.
Still the only real currency she trusts.
And that girl—
the one from 2016 who stared at clouds
and listened to The Fruitful Darkness
like it was breathing for her—
she didn’t disappear.
She just shape-shifted.
She just went underground
to learn the language of return.
🜃
“This is the fruitful darkness... this is the garden of your becoming.”
—Trevor Hall
Outro CTA:
If this cracked something open—
drop a comment, forward it to someone climbing their own ladder out of the dark,
or just whisper thank you to your own past self.
She didn’t give up.
She became the map.
More Field Notes from the Resurrection Map coming soon.
We’re not just healing.
We’re rewriting the myth.
Love,
Emily