the voice that remains: cutting through the noise to find the path home.
For years, I have been obsessed with a small cluster of islands in the South Puget Sound. In one of my notebooks, dating back to 2017, contains drawings of a structually unsound shipping container home.
One designed by me and for me. Links to building and zoning codes have crowded my notes and emails. Property alerts go straight to my inbox.
Pinterest boards litter my feed going back 2–4 years, detailing the many attempts, failures, and quests I’ve had on my way to find what I consider to be home. I thought about camper renovations, live-aboarding, car camping, sleeping in pods, off-grid cabins, homesteading, and shipping container houses.
I didn’t mind making homes out of things that were hard.
For a while, I thought of myself as someone who could get through anything. As someone who could be beaten down, fist over fist over fist, into the ground to get up and move forward without wiping the blood off.
I thought of myself as someone who needed to parade forward relentlessly into the beatings the world was prepared to give me. That perhaps, the pain I face on a daily basis is the price I pay for being alive.
When you grow up not quite right, and you don’t understand it, you tend to internalize many things about yourself. For me, alien was far too intense and deviant of a word to describe what I felt.
I, more so, felt like a twin. A twin that was hidden, in the shadows, that resumed a life for a sibling just like it. Everything was yours, but it wasn’t right. It was there to receive it if you wanted to. But, I didn’t want it.
I’m turning 20 in less than a month. And yet, I think often on that twin in a switched body who didn’t quite know how to interact with the world.
It felt like I was given a life that, in any other circumstances, should have been quite easily to plow through. 4.0 GPA. Ivy League. FAANG tech job. Be a thought leader on twitter and become a VC. Done.
But inside, I was placed in the twin that didn’t know she was incredibly chronically ill, with severe undiagnosed autism and ADHD.
I didn’t know those terms. I just knew, that I was off. And I felt the pain of interacting with the world in the myriad of ways that I did was the price for me being off. It was the price for me being the twin.
Sure, there was warning signs here and there. Any conversation aimed at monetization or creating excessive amounts of wealth held absolutely none of my attention. Startup jobs were something that I did as I assumed my twin was supposed to, as opposed to something I wanted.
I’ve wanted to fuck off into remote woods or the sea with no contact or chance of rescue for as long as I remember, even if it meant doing something illegal or potentially re-enacting a one person Titanic.
And when I thought about it, when I looked back far enough into my youth, I see what I truly wanted. What was truly there.
Not a desire to live out the life of the twin, and to indulge in a life of luxury, wealth, education, access, and instant gratification. Instead, a desire to let the twin die.
Not that I didn’t like being the twin — I loved being her. I loved her when the speaking engagements were offered, when the invitations to exclusive events happened, when the recognition shown through in articles.
But day to day, she was dormant. She was driving my life towards that bottomless pit of ego and self-gratification, yet she rarely spoke up when the panic attacks happened on set, or the autism made me non-verbal for days at home.
In my attempts to make up for all of the ways I broke off in the eyes of society, I thought that by continuing to live out as her, the high school drop out success story — to create a new startup that revolutionizes stuff, that I could prove to everyone the other twin never existed.
That I, as I was, a lone sibling, was weird, hard to deal with / understand, and yet that I acheived what we all wanted to. But, I didn’t want what we all wanted.
I retired fully from mental health activism and advocacy in February. I stopped picking up the phone when the speaking engagements came. I fully left my social media platforms. I took my first non-startup / contract job in 5 years of my development career. The pot that seemingly was always boiling over managed to go down to a minor simmer.
In that calm, I stripped back not only myself, but Astra. I dissected it, took it apart, and held it to the light. When the press, resources, partnerships, and reach was removed — what was it? I didn’t have an answer. And I pressed into finding it.
I put myself and my leadership decisions on trial, like a scathing review of everything my hands had ever touched.
When you have nothing left to give into your disguise, it loses its’ potency and you hold it in your hands as though its’ some sort of mirror that contains your mortal sins. Astra became that unrecognizable reflection of actions that jars you.
The one that many may recognize — a glance in the mirror after a regret with the crashing realization of a pattern that you’ve been indebted to. It inherited my autism, ADHD and communication issues. And more importantly, it held my misguided beliefs that to give to others, it must come from a place of taking from yourself.
The form of love I knew was sacrifice. It was devotion through being unhappy, following the already outlined path, and sticking through it even at the cost of the self. I was sacrificing myself to Astra, and Astra was sacrificing its’ own vision and path to be what I thought others wanted it to be.
The form of love I know now doesn’t sacrifice needlessly. It gives from a source of abundance instead of as a disguise to hide not having it.
Aetheria is going to be 1 soon. AnxietyHelper turned 6 a month ago. I turn 20 next week, and Astra turns 4 next year. And only now, for the first time, does it feel like I’m operating as myself. Not as a twin.
Within the search, isolation, withdrawal and the disconnect from a career that I once thought I would die without, I found something more valuable alone than I had ever found within a community — an ability to look at myself and my work, outside of what’s superimposed, and to know that what it is and what I have done is something that I want. Not something assigned to me.
The path is no longer determined by a hunger for validation. It’s now a full heart that reminds you the road home at night, winding through the familar streets.
Something that I have chosen, and that I will wait and work to receive without needing to be validated in my choice to work towards it.
The life that I was charging through like a forever nightmare has slowed and softened for me, it’s shown me what I’ve never had the time to see: it shows me how much care, work, and love others have put into this planet. It exists, and I experience it knowing what it took for it to exist.
The love I now know is care from a place of being cared for. It’s continuing to spread affection and being taken care of, not trying to jump start it from a place of emptiness and searching in desolate places to find it.
Having received that form of love, the same instinct is still in me. I still want to help as many people as I can. I didn’t execute it well, but I started Astra with a simple idea: when we experience pain, we can build stuff to stop others from feeling that pain.
That idea still lives on. And to honor it, I’ve spent the better part of the last year fixing everything I’ve done wrong. And the person & organization that will come out of it is the one that’s always been within me. I just never had the time or the chance to pull it out.
I probably won’t be around much on the internet. Hopefully, I’ll be dedicating my time to starting Astra’s Gen 2.0 plan and to building my home on a small island in Puget Sound starting Spring next year.
Looking back at Astra, quite honestly the only thing I recognize is the idea that we’re currently founded on and that we’ll align with forever: that experiencing pain is an opportunity to make sure no one else does.
It feels incredibly surreal to watch the thing you love most in the world grow with you, and come with you to different eras and places of your life. And with that, I realize that the thing I have poured my love into has poured it right back into me.
Astra won’t look the same. It’s not going anywhere, and neither am I. We’re both here, learning how to be ourselves, and learning how to best love everyone else.
As long I am alive, there is someone who will be working at Astra (or whatever form it takes), and someone who will be making mistakes doing it. As long as I’m alive, there will be a person fixing those mistakes.
I wrote in my last public social media post that I don’t want to be Amanda Southworth, mental health advocate. I still don’t. I just want to be the girl who works on Astra Labs. I don’t even want to be known as the person, just as the impact that Astra has.
I want my work and my writing to speak on my behalf. Not the press pieces published years ago about the worst events of my life. Not the half-patched resources that Astra has today (that we are replacing, trust me).
I want to be known by the voice I have found — only in the silence can you find out which voices are worth listening.
I’ve found mine, and I’m going where I’ve known I’ve always needed to go. There’s no need to return back to the noise anymore.
There’s no need for me to chase Forbes 30 under 30, to be posting about events I’m doing, engagements that are happening, or anything along those lines. Those things are external markers, proof that someone somewhere thinks my work has value.
I don’t need those external markers to know the clarity I’ve paid dearly to find: that Astra is my life’s love, mission, and it’s what I will do. It’s the only thing I can truly do.
When something is so linked and integral to your being, there is no living without it. There is only being apart from it. What you love is your fate, and I have found everything I ever loved in Astra, until it became the reason why I loved everything else.
Because last year, I knew what I did at 16 when I was creating Astra and having breakdowns about responsibility and trying to find out how to buy island property (which I’m still doing).
I knew what I did at 17 when I was trying to leave home for the first time, but couldn’t do it legally, so I prepared to buy and live on a boat illegally on the shores of California to continue working without needing to have my attention too divided, and when I was gonna do the same thing last summer.
I knew what I did at 13, which is that ‘I don’t like this feeling and I don’t know what to do about it but I know that working on things to help others not feel this way gives me some form of relief’.
And today, on the cusp of 20, all of those parts of Amanda are saying: Go find and build yourself a home. And when you get there, work on building a home for others through Astra.
That’s the voice I’ve always been hearing, but I’ve never listened to. It’s time for me to listen. And it’s time for me to go home, and continue separation from the platforms flood me with noise.
I won’t be present, but I’ll be here. Working on building an Astra that always should’ve been built. And giving myself a home in the form of a tiny house, on a tiny island.
I’ll be building a place for myself where I receive what I want to give to other people.
A resting ground. A break from the chaos and the unrelenting pull towards the world’s problems and attention and opportunity. A place to take a break, to sit on the stoop and to look at the sky and remember what’s above us.
A place where I can say to other people, and to myself:
“Look at this place in the world I have carved out for us.
Look at the labor I have done to prove that there is a place for you, amongst the heaviness that seeps through day to day life.
Look at this home where you can stop, and gather your breath.
Where you can feel the warmth, and the peace in the air that you work relentlessly to give to your kids, siblings, parents, partners, and friends. Where you can receive what you relinquish.
A place that reminds you that even in the most foreign of circumstances, that there is indeed a place where you were, are, and will be loved.
A place where you have been, are, and will be apart of and from. A place that requires no special invitation, no special cost, or access.
A shelter that says to you, ‘I love you, and you have a long journey home ahead of you. Rest here, until you can continue on safely’”
Until I make it home and get you there too, — ad astra per aspera.
