Two Sisters.
One Movement.

I'm Courtnie, a mom of seven-plus, an alcoholic in recovery with two-plus years sober, a volunteer labor doula for moms in addiction and recovery, an AuDHD woman with CPTSD, and a perpetual work-in-progress. I'm also a sister and a wife, and a woman who has somehow made it this far despite what can only be described as a truly impressive collection of poor decisions, plot twists, and character development.

I come from a long line of addiction and domestic abuse. I spent years figuring out how not to repeat what came before me, and I've spent a lot of that time trying to understand why people are the way they are, including myself. Now I'm in college pursuing a career in mental health, because apparently after surviving my own brain and everyone else's, I decided I should get a degree in it.

Some of my kids came from me. Some came to me. Some just needed a mom for a minute and apparently I was available. 😂 I've never been particularly good at watching someone struggle and thinking, “Wow, that's unfortunate.” If you need a stand in mom for five minutes, five months, or somewhere in between, chances are I've already mentally adopted you.

I don't have my shit together. I just have significantly more perspective than I used to, and I've learned that healing isn't always peaceful and inspirational. Sometimes it looks like crying in the Walmart parking lot, laughing at the absolute absurdity of your life, setting a boundary and immediately feeling guilty about it, or realizing that the thing you thought would destroy you actually turned you into someone pretty damn resilient.

I believe people are complicated. I believe addiction doesn't make someone disposable. I believe motherhood doesn't have to come from the same DNA. And I believe sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is sit beside them in the mess and say, “Well, this fucking sucks. But you're not doing it alone.”

I don't have all the answers. I just have a lot of stories, a big mouth, and a deeply held belief that laughter is one of the greatest survival skills we have, and that sometimes surviving yourself is an accomplishment all by itself.

So here I am, with my sister, a questionable amount of life experience, probably too many stories, and absolutely no intention of pretending I've figured it all out.

I'm Bunni. Life has handed me more plot twists than I ever asked for, and somewhere along the way I stopped trying to make them make sense and started using them instead. I've been a long haul trucker, a life coach, an author, and a public speaker, often all at the same time, since I got behind the wheel in 2019 and just kept adding to the pile instead of picking one thing and staying in my lane, literally or otherwise. Before any of that, I lived a whole life that doesn't fit neatly into a job title, and most of what I know about myself came from the parts nobody sees on a resume.

I became a widow and a mother in the same 12 hours. Grief that early doesn't leave, it just teaches you how to carry it differently, and most of the work I do now, whether it's coaching someone through a breakdown or writing about my own, traces back to that lesson in one way or another. I didn't get the luxury of easing into either role, and I've spent the years since figuring out how to hold both without letting either one define the whole story.

Somewhere in the middle of rebuilding, I found my way to volunteering as a death doula, sitting with people in their final days. It changed how I think about time, urgency, and what actually matters when everything else falls away, and it's part of why I don't have much patience left for performative hustle or pretending everything is fine when it isn't.

I'm part Choctaw, and reconnecting with that heritage over the past few years, including the language, has become one of the steadiest parts of who I'm becoming. It's not a footnote to anything else going on in my life, it's its own thread, one I'm still pulling on and expect to be pulling on for the rest of my life.

I'm also autistic and ADHD, and I live with fibromyalgia. None of that runs the show, but all of it shapes how I move through the world, how I work, and how much bullshit I'm willing to tolerate before I say something about it.

Travel is where I go to remember who I am outside of all of it. Drop me somewhere new and give me a few days and I'll come home with a stranger's life story, a new favorite food, and probably a scar turned into something useful.