A note before you read: this isn't a tell-all. It's a why. The why behind Mystic Soul Jewelry, the why behind the quieter thing I'm now building alongside it, and the why behind keeping both under the same roof.
"Andrea, if you can live through that mother f**ing shitstorm, you can live through anything."
— Tracey, my coach, who rarely swore, and was 100% right.
That sentence is the closest thing I have to a thesis statement for the last few years of my life.
Before
I had a life I was deeply grateful for.
Family was my everything. A son, Harper, named after my grandparents. A daughter, Megan, just 21 months apart. Both sets of their grandparents woven into our daily life intentionally. I was married to a man I admired for his integrity — the kind of childhood you can't manufacture, the kind that gets harder to find every year. I was a stay-at-home mom who'd quietly built a jewelry business in the background — first Jewelry by Andrea, then Andrea Kelly Designs — between school pickups and yoga classes and the volunteering I genuinely loved.
My husband travelled often. I trusted deeply and was so proud. In him, in the marriage, in the version of my life I thought I was inside of.
I share this not because the "before" was perfect — no life is — but because it was real to me. And what came next was the realization that real to me and real weren't the same thing.
The Trifecta
Three things happened almost on top of each other.
The first was COVID.
The second was the business — the one I'd built brick by brick for over a decade — halting overnight. Markets cancelled. Wholesale orders paused. The self-funded wholesale expansion evaporated.
The third was D-Day.
In our family, D-Day stands for two things at once: destruction day and discovery day. Sometimes those are the same day. Sometimes one chases the other by a few hours. My kids and I came up with the shorthand because we needed one. Some things don't have words yet when they happen to you; you have to build the language as you go.
(On the subject of language: in our house, we don't speak his name. The three of us refer to him as redacted. That one is Megan's masterpiece, after I told her renaming his Netflix profile to "big fat c..." wasn't acceptable. She has always had a gift for the precise word — and we have been intentional about rebuilding what's allowed into our space.)
So many things exploded at once that, honestly, I didn't know what was real and what wasn't. I'd open our family computer looking for financial documents and find lists that would change my world. The ground had stopped being ground.
I sometimes wonder if a black hole feels like that. No stability beneath you. Your world being vacuumed away.
This isn't a post about that. This is a post about what got built afterward.
The Chump Chapter (And the Book That Saved Me)
Somewhere in the wreckage, Amazon suggested a book.
Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life: The Chump Lady's Survival Guide by Tracy Schorn.
I'd never heard the word "chump" used that way before. I was, it turns out, a textbook one. The book named it, owned it, and — somehow — made me laugh through the worst weeks of my life. It became my bible. It made me angry in productive ways. It changed how I saw what had happened to me, and more importantly, what I was going to do next.
I was the chump. I accept the name proudly. ALL chumps welcome here. NO judgement.
The Mess of Just Showing Up
I lost my creativity for a while and realized having it was something I had taken for granted. My brain had always lit up in ways I had to contain to be productive. Now it was grey. That part doesn't get talked about enough — the way trauma flattens your interior life so completely you can't find the part of yourself that used to make things.
I'm so grateful to the customers who ordered from me in those years. The ones who walked up to my booth at the few events I made it to. Megan and I worked the Millarville Market the summer of 2021 — the same Millarville where I'd grown up, gone to school, and attended events at the racetrack. Those early mornings, those sunrises, grounded me in a version of myself that existed before any of this.
The repeat names I'd see in the order list when nothing else was familiar. You kept the business alive while I was — and I'm saying this without flinching — a mess of just showing up.
Being a creative entrepreneur rebuilding a business during COVID, on top of everything else, was harder than I could have imagined. Most days I wasn't building.
I was just refusing to fully stop.
One thing held me steady: Spruce Meadows Market.
That yearly market became my touchstone. The ONE event I kept. The lights, the wholesomeness, the way it feels Christmassy in the best possible way — it lights a person up inside. A safe three-week cocoon of predictable goodness. Even my kids liked helping me there. It was the one place that still felt like our old life, 10 x 10 square feet of "we are still here, we are still a family, we are still making things."
If you've ever wondered why I get protective about Spruce Meadows in my emails every fall — that's why.
Becoming Mystic Soul
When I changed my last name back to my maiden name, I knew the business had to either quit or change with me.
For years I'd searched for a name other than my own. Nothing ever popped. Everything I loved was either taken or didn't have a domain available — and the domain has always been my "yes" signal. It's how I know. I believe in signs that go with my flow.
Through every iteration — Jewelry by Andrea, then Andrea Kelly Designs, then the long search for what came next — there was Shannon. My friend Shannon. Our kids met in kindergarten and are still friends to this day. We sort of look alike. We're both Pisces with long hair. Ocean lovers. She accepts me exactly as I am, which is a quiet, daily kind of gift you only really appreciate after the people who didn't accept you peel away.
She's the friend who spots redacted's car at my house and texts "hey, you okay?" She's also the friend who texts "groceries are on your porch." Two kinds of watching. The kind that asks. The kind that just shows up.
That's what running it by a friend first actually feels like. (Hold that thought.)
Then Mystic Soul Jewelry came through. I felt it before I even checked the URL.
I am a mystic soul to my core. This business has been my phoenix. She's growing more each day, and I'm finally — finally — the version of myself she was always going to need me to be.
If you've ever wondered what stones I leaned on most through that rebuild — rose quartz, labradorite, black tourmaline, and my Pisces favourite, blue kyanite, which I'm often seen wearing. Soft enough to receive. Magic enough to remember who you are. Protected enough to keep walking.
The Quieter Thing I've Been Building
Here's the part most of you don't know.
Underneath the jewelry, for the last few years, I've been quietly showing up for women going through their own version of D-Day. Friends. Friends of friends. Women I'd never met who'd been passed my number by someone who said, "that is so messed up and familiar, I know this lady Andrea who you should get in touch with." And while I don't have a magic truth ball, I do have a well-worn BS monitor.
Mine was hard. All divorces are hard — mine was particularly cruel to our children. I mediated my divorce while one of my kids was hospitalized. (Yes, really. No, you don't get over that quickly.) And then — because cruelty rarely stops where you think it will — it was used against me later. I made mistakes. So many. I am not the expert on doing this gracefully, quite the opposite. I am only the expert on having lived it.
And what I learned, over and over, is that there's a specific moment most women describe almost identically:
The moment you innocently click on a LinkedIn notification and end up looking at your husband's account of horrors. Or the moment a text comes through and you just know something is off. Or the moment something quietly doesn't add up, and your stomach knows before your brain does.
You. Can't. Quite. Put. Your. Finger. On. It.
The sick. The nausea. The shaking. Quicksand! (Maybe quicksand was the childhood warning that actually mattered.) Then — and this part is universal — the desperate scramble to find more. To verify. To know. To stop being the last one in your own life to understand it.
When it's happening, you can't post about it. You're not casually asking Facebook for a good divorce lawyer. On the other side, you're not letting your coffee date catch you posting how to source a PI. You don't even want to tell your sister yet. You need help. So you run it by a friend first.
Introducing Run it by a friend first
I'm building this with my coven. Which is a bit witchy and 100% accept-each-other-as-we-are friendship.
Shannon (above). And Kelly — who came in sideways.
Our kids were in kindergarten together. Her son and Shannon's son have been best friends since. We lived a block apart for years. Familiar face, school pickup line, hellos at school events.
Until she was the third.
A Libra holding the line for two Pisces — more work than it sounds. She makes spectacular jewelry — her one-of-a-kinds are now on the MSJ site. Twenty years at Getty Images means she knows a thing or two about pictures, too.
And — the part that still makes me laugh — this Kelly walked fully into my life right after I dropped Andrea Kelly Designs.
The universe has jokes.
The three of us meet on full moons now. We draw tarot cards. We burn lists. We try to manifest healing — for ourselves, for each other, mostly for our kids.
It is a kind of support I have never known. The kind that calms a nervous system that has been running hot for years.
And it is the soil this business is growing in.
We're starting with a waitlist — as we put in the work of becoming licensed private investigators. How exciting is that? Follow along on our journey. Learn with us. Watch what happens when women come together to support women in a healthy, no-judgement resource community.
What it is:
- Legal, public record checks
- Identity and information verification
- Red flag awareness and safety tools
- Practical guidance from women who get it
What it isn't:
- Dating advice
- Legal advice
- Revenge
- Getting even
- Airing dirty laundry — mine or yours
It's a way to check the story before you're emotionally invested.
Or your friend's dating someone new and your spidey senses won't quiet down.
Or you're piecing together the autopsy — which version was real, which red flags you waved right past.
Or your daughter just started seeing this guy.
It's for the part of your life that just exploded.
It's for what comes after the explosion.
It's for the women dating again after a long marriage.
It's for the women on apps for the first time.
And honestly — it's for our daughters, too.
No creepy tactics. No deep-dive investigations. No paranoia in a subscription box. Just legal, ethical, sensible tools designed to help women make informed decisions before — or sometimes during, or sometimes after — the moment that changes everything.
Why It Lives Under the Same Roof
People ask why I'd house a crystal jewelry business and an identity-verification toolkit under one tent for now.
Because they came from the same chapter. The same story and rebuild. The same coven, honestly. The same audience of women in the second half of life who are done apologizing for needing both softness AND a way to verify. Think trust and verify.
I'm tired of staying quiet, I want to be part of the solution and I want to empower women to make smarter decisions.
Some days labradorite is grounding. Other days a background verification helps.
The jewelry is for the days you need a reminder.
The toolkit is for the days you need a receipt.
Both are about trusting yourself more.
If You're Here
This isn't a business about revenge. It's not about getting even. It's not just about my story — though I'll share what I've learned. I always view myself and circumstances with a good dose of humor because sometimes laughing at the absurdity is the only thing you can do.
It's about giving back, in the best way I know how. It's also about being a mystic soul who needs to channel her inner self — including the shadow parts that don't feel like her. The part that asks hard questions. The part that runs the records. The part that protects what's soft. You can be deeply spiritual and still need armor. Both are true at once.
Women have told me, more times than I can count, that they appreciate the honest version — the story, the resources, the unvarnished what-it-actually-takes.
So here it is. The honest version. The one I couldn't have written three years ago without falling apart, and can write now without flinching.
If you'd like to be on the founding waitlist — for yourself, for someone you love, or just to keep an eye on what we're building — the door is open.
Join the Run It By A Friend First waitlist → (website launching soon)
And to the chapter that taught me this was needed:
thank you for the unexpected market research.
(Respectfully.)
🤍
Andrea
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