My name is Kaelyn Michelle Baird.

Kaelyn translates to keeper of keys, Michelle means close to god, and my personal favorite, my last name, Baird comes from bard, meaning “poet”.

I tell you this to show you that names have meaning.

Our words have meaning.

Passed down from generation to generation, our names and our stories are what makes us human. What connects us to others, and to those who came before.

Woven together in the tapestry of human evolution, they are a biological imperative, and a way to alchemize the human experience into art.

Your life is a work of art, and the greatest story you will ever tell.

Today I’m going to share parts of mine with you.

The Foundations of Fear:

My life wasn’t the perfect pretty picture, but it was a perfect story.

My life has been an education in instability, perception, and the intelligence of the human nervous system long before I ever had the words to name it. I discovered stories and their power long before I ever had the language for trauma, spirituality, or healing.

I was born in the middle of the night, 2 months early. My mother had gotten into a car accident a week prior, and they were able to postpone her labor for a few days, but I had other plans. My mother was 16 at the time. She must have been scared, grappling with her own demons as she passed the threshold of maidhood into motherhood, and that same fear would be the fear that would be passed down in me for most of my life.

She grew up with her grandmother, my great grandmother, Joy, as her mother was an addict. Grandma Joy did the best she could, but my mother was by all accounts “young, dumb, and reckless as can be”.

My father had a complicated life. His grandmother died at 10, and from then on, he was lost. He cursed god, embraced anarchy, and found himself in and out of boy’s ranch’s, and juvie. He often would find himself running away on the trains leaving his mother, my grandmother Tana wondering where he was for weeks at a time.

When he got my mother pregnant that seemed to be somewhat of a wakeup call. His father had abandoned him when his mother became pregnant at 17. He never met or knew his father, and he vowed he would be better for his child. And he was, he fed me every night in the NICU, watching me sleep. He knew I was strong, that I would be okay, and he had the first stirrings of a love he had never known before, something worth believing in, someone worth being better for.

The Descent into Chaos:

For a while I imagine it was just like any family. A mom and a dad taking care of their newborn child.

I wonder how those first few months looked, if they were happy, if I felt safe.

At 6 months old my father was arrested.

He was sentenced to 13 years, for a crime he later found out he couldn’t legally be charged with. See my dad was already on the DA’s radar, so when his buddies got into a fight at the liquor store and he happened to be there, they used it as a way to turn my dad’s friends against him. They convicted him of conspiracy, without co-conspirators.

What followed was chaos.

My mother had always been unstable, but in the time that followed my dad’s arrest she became deeply unwell. She ran to drugs to fill the voids inside of herself, and then she started to hear voices. She was schizophrenic, and I was in her care until I was 3 years old. During that time my grandmothers tried their best to watch and take care of me, but there was only so much they could do at the time. At a certain point I was around a known and convicted child abuser, it took me well into my teenage/ young adult years to be able to accept the truth that I always knew deep inside, I was assaulted as a child.

The Women Who Saved Me:

At some point CPS was called, my grandmother Tana, my father’s mother was given custody, and my great grandmother Joy became the support for my grandmother, with me going over to her house as often as every weekend.

That moment, and those women saved the entire trajectory and story of my life.

The only friend I knew as a child was my great grandmother, Joy, my mothers grandmother who had raised her. She was a light, she lived up to her namesake in every way- a true Leo. She was my everything, my best friend, my confidant. She would tell me stories of round tables and knights on horses, we would dress up in costumes and go to renaissance fairs, she taught me to draw, and listened to my poetry and childhood songs, cheering me on as my biggest supporter and fan. She had the kindest soul I have ever known.

This is important to share because even in the depths of darkness, a shred of light can become your salvation.

She was the bedrock of my entire foundation, the birthplace of my passion, my empathy, my faith, and without her i wouldn’t become who I am today.

My grandmother, who I call mother, Tana, was also a Leo funnily enough, and a Baird. She was an artist, though she’d never tell you herself. She loved to crotchet, and craft things. Her brother and her fathers were all artists too, musicians, who never fully lived out their dreams. She got pregnant at 17, with my father, and had my aunt not long after- who grew up to have also had a child at 17- on the same exact day as my grandmother did. Her second husband, Kindra’s dad, was abusive, and somewhere along the way my grandmother learned to turn her emotions off, when she finally met my grandfather, she began a new life for herself. See my grandmother, whom I call my mother, was an artist too. I think her love of crafts and artistic expression were the bedrock of my own creativity.

Faith or Fear?:

My grandmother and grandfather did the best with what tools they had. From an outside perspective they provided for me, they loved me, I had everything I could need or want… but their love was shaped by their own generational patterns or trauma, emotional suppression, and survival based living.

I still remember my grandmother’s words ringing with the same words her mother said to her, and her mother before her “ children are supposed to be seen, not heard.” Our voices were taken away from us long before we ever even knew that they were ours to keep, before we knew that our stories, our words, and our voices were powerful.

My grandmother didn’t know how to raise a child like me. I was wild. I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t regulate my emotions. I’d have emotional outbursts, tantrums where I would get into fits of hysterically crying that were so intense I would start hyperventilating. She didn’t know what to do, so she did exactly what the doctors told her to do- medicate me. I was put on 60 mg of Adderall as a 4 year old. I was molded to believe that my focus, my intensity, my sensitivity were all problems to be managed, that there was something inherently wrong with me and my baseline operating system. I was ironically too much, while also not enough. I was a problem needing to be fixed. I was a child shushed into silence while inside i was screaming in a language that it seemed nobody else spoke.

This is the emotional programming or coding that I would live with for the greater half of my life.

The medication helped me function- but it also disconnected me entirely from my body, intuition, and the very spark that made me, me.

I learned to perform responsibility and stability, rather than truly embody it- quite often failing entirely.

My own shame and fear grew quietly in the background for years,

My teenage years were marked by depression, poor boundaries, sexual promiscuity, car accidents, friend betrayals, and overall instability…

I had won a DARE award in elementary school writing an essay on my mothers addiction, vowing that I would never touch drugs, yet I found myself starting to smoke weed with my friends because I thought it made me look cool. At first it felt like a relief, an escape, like the quiet I was searching for. I beloved it made me calmer, but it really made me more dissociated. It was a coping mechanism. A way to soften the anxiety, numb the pain, and slow down a hypervigilant nervous system. Not because I was inherently reckless, but because I didn’t know that there was a world out there that wasn’t out to get me, one where I didn’t have to chase outside validation in order to be accepted.

I didn’t have the safety of knowing I could be taken care of.  It was my nervous system screaming at me to listen to her in the only way she knew how, but at the time no one was listening to me, not even myself.

When a child grows up without a body, without a voice, the body becomes a battleground. A place of confusion.

Sex became a way for me to find validation, regulation and paradoxically dissociation, control, and reenact my abandonment trauma. I didn’t know how to say no, I didn’t know that I was even allowed.

The truth is the body is intelligent, it does what it has to in order to survive.

Fight, flight, fawn, freeze.

These bodily functions are not your fault, they are the very thing that protects you when the trauma is too much for you to understand rationally, the only way your system and body know how to respond. It’s written into our DNA, passed down in lineages and family trees until somebody decided that enough is enough.

Faith or fear?

The Bard Awakens :

Amongst the darkness there must always be a source of light.

Words saved me first. Books, escaping into a story, into a song, it was my relief. Singing at the top of my lungs when grandparents weren’t home, finding stories in music that could describe feelings far better than I had the capacity to as a child. I wondered in how they stringed the sentences together so beautifully. This brought me to writing, poetry, lyrics, late night notebooks and journals filled with all the things I couldn’t say out loud. Writing gave me meaning when nothing else around me made sense. A way to transmute the darkness in my mind onto the page and turn it into something beautiful, even if tragic. It was the first stirrings of my later philosophy being born, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Art is how the body tells the truth when language fails.

I still remember telling my parents and teachers that I was going to be a singer/songwriter for the first time. They all told me relatively the same thing “ don’t quit your day job”, and I resented this, and them, and the entire system itself. I didn’t understand this world, the way that people treated each other. I remember asking questions like “I don’t understand why people don’t do things for each other for free” I could see the corruption, the apathy, the burnout, the stress that leaked from the adults around me , all seemingly stemming from the very systems in place to place order and give us structure seemed to be tainted. I remember being 10 years old writing about the loss of my faith and innocence, thinking that god, and humanity itself must have lost its way.

This story ruled my life until somewhere in my late teens/ early adulthood I couldn’t take it anymore.

When my great-grandmother Joy passed away, the last external mirror of my light went with her. I realized I could no longer wait for someone to give me permission to exist. I had take it for myself.

So I started waking up—spiritually, emotionally, and somatically.

I had to stop escaping the story and start writing the ending myself.

That story is still a work in progress.

What to expect here:

This is the story of how I took back my life, my voice, my body, and my story.

I’m currently rebuilding from the roots, trying to build a foundation for the empire I envision for myself in the future, but I don’t want to hide anymore. I want to be heard.

This is the late-night notebooks, the poetry written in the dark, the honest unpolished truth of moving from dissociation to embodiment.

Moving forward I’m going to be sharing the chapters and the lessons I’ve kept hidden:

The unfiltered history:

the chaos of my youth, and the survival of a fractured soul. I’ll be sharing how I went from a “problem” to be managed to the keeper of my own keys.

The search for spirit:

The search for meaning, truth, and something greater. How art, nature and spirit regulated what I never could

The body as a battleground:

real talk on surviving and navigating sexual trauma, the reality of sex work, and the body’s intelligence of survival. Together we will explore how our nervous system protects us, even when we don’t yet understand how to protect ourselves.

The architecture of alchemy:

how I bridge art, somatics, neuroscience, psychology, ancient mythology, metaphysics, and esoteric wisdom to understand ourselves, the world, and how we heal. Where science and spirit intertwine, and the language of healing is the same as the divine.

Art as medicine:

creativity as a spiritual and biological need. My art, and soul.

Building from soul:

Behind the scenes of creating a brand rooted in sustainability and soul. How to build something beautiful, raw, and real, without selling your soul to the system.

My life wasn’t a pretty picture….

But I’m no longer performing to be seen,

I’m demanding to be heard.

Follow along as we build from the bones.