The Short Version

My name is Brandie Michelle Peters I am a creator, strategist and metaphysical enthusiast who also reads tarot. This is my personal website, where I write, share resources, and sell a few things. For years i ran my own successful online marketing agency. I am currently employed as the marketing director of Keith’s Cacao.  

I am also the founder of the metaphysical community PsyChicks & the website Awakened Autistic.

THE LONG VERSION

How I went from a hustle culture subscribing internet entrepreneur to freedom seeking existentialist, talking about “The Big Sad” and offering peer support online.

I like to think of my own story of existential crisis and spiritual awakening as being two seperate stories that somehow met at an intersect. Before we get into the details of that there are a few contextual things i would like to communicate so that I know we will understand one another.  Like almost neurodivergent persons that I know, i have always been incredibly multi-fauceted when it comes to my interests and skills. I have always had a difficult time reconsiling my identity down to one or two specific things for the purpose of summarizing myself in this type of format. If the very question “who are you?” makes your brain fold over and start spinning in your head, then you know exactly what I am talking about. Perhaps, this is probaly due to all the identity compartimentalizing I have been doing to mask my Autism. Perhaps, it is simply because humans are complex and dynamic beings that were never meant to be summarized down to a simplistic singular paragraph defining their niche’ for the search crawlers and algorithms. Whichever it may be, I struggle with writing a simple bio for my Instagram, let alone a long form one to confidently represent me on the internet. I’ve decided instead to write a most ernest story of my life so far, to explain to anyone who is curious exactly how I went from being a very successful internet marketing freelancer to presenting myself as the internet’s existential crisis buddy.

.The Catalyst of My Spiritual Awakening Was My Boyfriend’s Suicide

I suppose I should have virtue signalled that headline with a trigger warning, to appease the liberal thinkers and their need  for every difficult to approach subjects be blocked into “safe spaces’. However, i’ve already typed it and lost sight of the backspace – ah well . Frankly, there really isn’t any way to skimp around it , when I was 18 year’s old, the young man whom I had been in a rollercoaster-esque whirlwind summer romance with hung himself, the evening before my first day of college. If this reality wasn’t tragic enough,  in a potentially narcisstic last move he also decided to write a very lengthy, blaming personal message to me on Facebook as well as a final good-bye in the format of a text message that read “Check the obituaries tommorrow babe”.  

At age 18 , my adult life began with the confrontation of an immensly complex tragedy. Somehow the emo culture that I was engaged in at the time, that glorified self-harm and romanticised themes of death and dying lost all appeal. Instead of worrying about college classes , parties and first jobs I became deeply concerned with all things existential and metaphysical. Existential because I had never confront such survivable tragedy in my young life. Metaphysical because i so deeply wished to find relief from my grief by seeking out anwsers about the nature of existence and the unseen world. 

Some would call this going down the rabbit hole, but I prefer to think of this level of exploration and knowledge seeking as ascending, going upwards towards a higher truth, reaching, climbing, one set of the ladder at a time. I realized that I was never going to be able to un-experience what had happened to me and the best i could do was to try to find purpose through it. I spent my 18th, year very differently than your typical young adult, as I scoured the internet for information on life after death, and communication with spirits guides.  I pursued an understanding of various religions and attended 3 different churches in that first year. I became a regular in online support communities on social media all about spirituality, the nature of the Universe and various metaphysical concepts and beliefs. Not only was i chronically seeking, I was also chronically online, nothing new to me since I had all but lived on the internet since purchasing my first Macbook in the 9th grade. However, where previously my interest had been in pop culture media, fashion trends, televison movies and gaming, I now was fixated only on topics relevant to better understanding The Universe. 

This was the start of my spiritual awakening that continues to this day. This is also when I first stumbled onto the then emerging internet economy specifically the quick emerging new age spiritual market sector, leading into my eventual 10 year career providing marketing services for new age spiritual niche entrepreneurs and other businesses.

Becoming A Successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneur

I did eventually complete 5 years of college and recieved my certification in Graphic Design and a degree in Motion Picture Arts Production with specified interest in screenwriting.  I put my seeking interest in spiritual concepts aside and instead started utilize the communities I had been immersed in to find clients for my side-hustle blogger for hire.  Since the age 14, I had kept a journal esque blog about self image and body positivity. I had been fairly successful at getting my blog traffic and people were starting to ask “if I could do that for them also.” I began to take on freelance clients here and there, majority in the spirituality health and wellness category. I’d write their core content pages and provide SEO blog articles for their websites. 

At this time I hadn’t quite given up on my dreams of being a screenwriter though, and decided that I would shift my focus to marketing myself primarily as a script writer. This , pivot landed me a well-paying opportunity composing “explainer video scripts” for an agency that specialized in geo-targetting SEO. In time, they brought me in-house as their “all needs” content writer. This quite honestly was how I became fully remotely self employed in digital marketing at the age of 24. I spent 4 years with that agency writing website sales content, core content pages and blog articles uncredited for hundreds of business websites. Practically overnight I went from dabbling in freelance writing online, to being able to comfortably support myself as well as my husband and the infant son that we had recently had.

Still a seeker, my online fixation shifted from an interest in spiritual practices, and exploring the metaphysical, to an interest in professional development and entrepreneurial mindset training. I had massive aspirations and decided that I would aim to become a well known name in the digital marketing space. I followed the guidance of the then incredibly popular marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk and subscribed to his advice that all you needed to was create content , build an audience and hustle. In this era, I did “all the things” to try to position myself not only as the one to hire, but also the one to follow, for all things online marketing strategy. I cannot say that this approach did not work for me, to this day I still have an audience of followers who found me from the Facebook group posts and live videos that I used to share all about how to do online marketing. My presence and success making a full-time income online in marketing, and talking to people about what to do for online marketing garnered me plenty of opportunities. I consulted, and was offered small speaking gigs and collaborations. I found myself part of the “internet marketing” gold rush, gaining a lot for doing, frankly very little. After all, I had only just started out in the industry and was in my early twenties, but the demand for people who understood the technical workings of online everything and who could give your business a competitive edge were in high demand. 

However, I shouldn’t understate the amount of intense focus and work ethic was required of me to achieve the contiously expanding vision I had for my life at this time. As I was deeply indoctrinated into all things “hustle, grind, and girl boss”. These years were extraordinary for me as far as output and productivity. They were also painfully lonesome, anxiety riddled, and stressful. Do you want burnout? That’s how you get burnout. 

Eventually in 2016 I started my own online advertising agency and disappeared myself into it completely. Although, I do not regret how I spent the years between 2012 and 2022, a complete decade of my life, I do feel completely disassocative to who that person was who was able to achieve what I eventually achieved reflecting on it now.

You may be wondering what the heck does this experience have to do with spiritual awakening and existential crisis, hang on we’re getting there…

FROM PASSION TO SKEPTISM WHY I SHUT DOWN MY SUCCESSFUL ONLINE MARKETING AGENCY

You know how we have dog years because a lifetime passing more quickly for our canine friends, relative to the lifespan of humans? Well, part of me thinks that we should also have entreprenuer years, as when you run your own busy business, life seems to pass more quickly and you seem to “age” more rapidly, maybe not physically, but in experience and required maturity. I am 34 now as of 2024 and I will not try to argue that I am old, or worldly or anything of that nature, but I would make the claim that I am “the holder of wisdom beyond my years’ simply because I spent a decade in a technical service role, in a fast paced, evolving industry, in a niche that attracts all sorts of  different characters that you need to be adaptable in to work with.

To run the business that I did at the level that i was, I had to give up a lot of myself and become a shape-shifter, the Ditto Pokemon. For each client I had a variation of myself , molded to suit them. To attract new clients I became a “safe” palatable talking head who turned the knobs and pulled the right cranks to magically procure another customer into my perfectly refined business pipeline. As someone with a mind for systems and strategies I had figured out a way to scale and expand my business and create a seamless, attraction, onboarding, and delivery process. I had a thriving online agency but I was not a thriving person. I was exhausted from piling such an immense workload on myself , never quite mastering the art of delegation, and I was jaded.

At some point along the track I had lost my passion for digital marketing, and found that working with a revolving door of  wannabe course creators, life coaches and e-commerce start ups was no longer satisfying. And yes – this was partially due to the low percentage of success that occurs in the online business venture world. With online business management SASS products like Shopify, Kajabi, Clickfunnels, etc. becoming so accessible matched with with the household inflitration of  “marketing guru influencers” , like the Gary Vaynerchuk, Russell Brunson, Marie Forleo and Amy Porterfield there was a never-ending flow of aspiring viral success seekers that I had access to. I had garnered enough success for a handful of higher profile clients that had created a seamlessly endless stream of potential clients. However, by time I was 10 years in I had seen so many people “go all in” , to end up flat broke that my passion had shifted to skeptism.

By time 2021, rolled around, also in a complete state of burnout from the additional wave of business that came from everything transferring online during the COVID pandemic, I started to experience what I now know to be my very own inevitable existential crisis. 

It started by asking the question “should I be doing this business anymore?” but didn’t stop there, no siree, it just kept going down, down, down, in a sinking spiral. “If not this business then what should I do with my life?”, “Does it even matter what I do with my life?”, “Who am I?”, “Why am I?”, “Why are any of us?”…

If you know you know. There is simply no immediate escaping the experience of an existentialist breakdown when it begins. Rooted initially ( for me ) in the desire to do something more meaningful and full-filling with my life – became a full-on dismantling of my entire reality. To be honest, at this point it wasn’t that I wanted to stop and take some time to think and reflect, it was that I had to. I had grown so uncomfortable existing within myself and my life that if something hadn’t changed I very likely would have self destructed. 

The INTERSECT BETWEEN SPIRITUAL AWAKENING & EXISTENTIAL CRISIS ( FOR ME ) – OH YEAH, AND I ALSO FOUND OUT I AM AUTISTIC

Because of my earlier experience with my boyfriend’s suicide, I had strong footing “the spiritual corner of internet”. My knowledge and interest in all things spiritual and my skills in marketing had made me the perfect choice for marketing services when the client’s business fell into the spiritual-niche. I had also started in 2019 a bit of a side-project called PsyChicks , a community for casual metaphysical enthusiasts. I was definatley long-time wandering in the world of the woo, and for me it actually felt incredibly aligned and appropriate when my career was marketing and my heart was in spiritual exploration mode. 

That said, it wasn’t until I made the catalystic decision put my agency on hold – and take some time to recover from burn out that I realized that all this time I had been interested in spirituality but I was not myself “spiritual.”

What is the difference you might wonder? Imagine it like this, you know a subject so well you can speak about it, write about it and discuss it quite fluently ( like say you are car mechanic ) but if someone asks you how to actually turn the car on so they can ride in it, well – you cannot do it because you’d only ever studied how to do.

This is how I felt.

I knew so much, yet I put so little of what I knew into practice in my actual life.

I desired a sense of deeper understanding and to genuinely embody and experience a sense of metaphysical connection, some confirmation that would affirm that there was something more here.

And so once again I went on a journey of spiritual seeking, but this time with two objectives in mind: 1.) To embody and learn how to exist in alignment with the spiritual truth that I thought / think I believe 2.) To heal – genuinally the collected wounds, not just from 10 years of head down and hustle, or repressed grief from his suicide years ago, but also my childhood, also my mother wounds, also my fractured inner self. I hoped that I could achieve the experience of spiritual enlightenment and become certain without doubt of what exactly this is all supposed to be about.

If you’re curious, here’s what actually happened.

Burnout Recovery is not something you can zip on through to the other side of. If I am too be 100% honest I am still recovering from what the years of hyper career focus did to me. So, that’s a chronic issue I now struggle with.

My existential crisis also persists, but I am using it now as a vessel of inspiration and creativity. I am making videos, writing, creating multi-media – including this website all about the concept of the existential crisis. I am offering peer support to anyone who wishes to have an understanding and relatable person to companion them as they also naviagate this complex experience.

The spiritual awakening is ongoing. I realize now that being spiritual is more about embodiment and your behaviours than it is a sensation. I have shifted from an objective understanding of spiritual concepts and metaphysical ideas to having moments of profound connectiveness , I am also blessed wonderfully with deep self trust, insightful intuition and access to higher knowlege that I believe to be from the Universal source ( a.k.a ) God. On good days I am tapped in and my faith is abundant. Even on bad days, I have faith in a higher power and can appreciate the immenseness of it all.

If you are curious if I have “healed” everything that I aspire to heal, I’ll openly share that I haven’t – nor do I even believe that healing from our traumas is a one-time experience. I understand now that we heal many times, as we grow and gain new wisdom and perspective. At risk of being completely cliche’ it is more a journey! I am however always doing a little bit better.

In 2023, was when learned that I have autism, which has thrown another variable into the mix. I am still figuring out what being autistic in the way that I am, high functioning, low support needs, well adapted but still on the spectrum is going to look like now that I have self-realized. However, it has been very interesting peeling back the many complex layers of being unknownly autistic my entire life.

I have learned that autistics tend to be more prone to existial crisis because of hyper analytical nature. Still developing my full understanding of this. 

I KNOW THAT WAS A LOT, Expect Even More

If you had read this far, I want you to know how much I appreciate you taking the time. This wasn’t easy to put together and honestly, I left a lot out to avoid composing my entire autobiographical novel here by accident.

It just feels important for me to share my story for anyone who visits this website and wonders why I am posting what I am, or doing what I do. I know that if I came across me on the internet, specifically with the things that I currently post i’d want some contextual information before I just blindly trusted it. Ha-ha, how very autistic of me to think this, no? Anyways, I hope you have enjoyed getting to know me better and feel some resonance with my story. If you have any questions or are looking for resources or peer support a direct contact me form is listed below.

Sincere thanks for the precious gift of your attention. Wishing you well and happy exploration as you navigate your next spiritual awakening or existential crisis. OR BOTH, all at once, if only should be so lucky. *wink*