Julie West — who goes by Julie Earthy — holds two master's degrees in international environmental science, published peer-reviewed work on aquatic ecosystems in semi-arid countries, and did field work that took her from Burkina Faso to Vienna. She also spent those years watching herself and half her cohort get flattened by depression.

She was leading demonstrations in Copenhagen. She was hypersensitive, deeply attuned, and trying to hold the entire planet in one body. The guilt of admitting that it was depleting her kept her in it long after she knew.

In this conversation, Julie traces the career line from climate activist to somatic psychedelic facilitator on land in the Appalachian Mountains — and it turns out to be one line, not two. Her thesis: the earth is depleted for the same reason we are, and childhood trauma is the through line. Not as metaphor. As mechanism.

We talk about what came first when the burnout finally won, which was not a protocol or a program. She went to work on a farm and put her hands in the dirt. Her body started untangling things she hadn't consented to untangling, and she describes that process honestly — it was not comfortable, and she doesn't pretend otherwise.

Then she describes the first time she sat with a microdose so small that most people feel nothing, and felt safe in her body for the first time in her life. What undid her wasn't the experience itself. It was realizing she'd had no idea the opposite had been running the whole time.

We also get into screaming in the woods, why there's nowhere left for women to use their voices at full volume, the paradox of caring about the impact of everything down to the pigment in your paint, and the piano she taught herself as a kid by feel because a piece moved her enough to learn it.

If you've ever cared about something so much it made you sick — and then wondered whether shrinking your scope was a betrayal or a homecoming — this one is for you.

00:00 Two master's degrees, four languages, and a career that looked right
07:35 Front lines in Copenhagen and the depression nobody was naming
12:45 Hands in the dirt: what she did when the burnout finally won
15:14 The microdose that let her feel safe for the first time
24:26 "I didn't realize my reality wasn't the reality"
44:36 Screaming in the woods and the feral self
55:09 Whales, pineapple pizza, and the piano she taught herself

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