“I am a soul trying to navigate this wildly unpredictable human experience.”
Emily Bauer says it without hesitation. Not as a tagline. Not something rehearsed. Just the truth as she knows it.
“I know that sounds cliche, but it is, in fact, true. I do not know what the hell I am doing any more than anyone else does. The only difference is that I will talk about it. All of it.”
Emily makes no illusions that she has it all figured out. She offers no polished narrative about how everything makes sense now. If anything, she’s more interested in the questions than the answers, more interested in what it means to be here, in this life, carrying everything we carry, than pretending she has mastered all it throws at us: grief, fear, uncertainty, and loss.
There are people who build businesses, and then there are people who build meaning. Emily is the latter. She became the creator of something that didn’t exist until it had to. As the founder and co-owner of Embrace Our Souls, a woman-owned online jewelry store that sells beautiful, beaded bracelets, Emily is also a storyteller and a space-holder for human experience.
Each bracelet Emily creates is carefully curated with beads and colors that carry special meaning, designed to commemorate journeys and offer hope, comfort, and support. Each one represents something much harder to define: grief, healing, or encouragement, and—most of all—connection. Wearing one of Emily’s creations brings the quiet understanding that none of us is as alone as we think. We all live our unique stories, but there is overlap in some of them that helps us relate to others, that creates our personal tribes.
Behind Emily’s creative endeavor is someone who chooses to look directly at the difficult parts of life that most people spend years trying to avoid. Before the bracelets, before the storytelling, before the clarity, she was just like the rest of us: trying to figure out what happens when everything you thought you knew no longer exists in the same way.
Where the Storm Began
Before there was clarity, there was rupture.
Emily’s storm didn’t arrive quietly. It didn’t unfold in a way that could be managed or understood in neat, logical steps. It came in the form of a sudden loss—the kind that cracks like a bolt of lightning and splits your life into before and after.
When her best friend Bryan died, grief overtook Emily’s life, upending her world in a way she never anticipated. There is a rawness in the way she speaks about it. Her grief hasn’t been softened by time or distance. For Emily, that experience wasn’t a single moment or a finite time period, it was a force that moved through every aspect of her life. The version that existed before Bryan’s death didn’t survive in the same form, and that’s something she doesn’t try to hide. “I am nowhere near the person I was three years ago.”
“The really beautiful thing about surviving the storm is that we are almost always left with mere pieces of our former life and that means we can rebuild with all new materials or take some of the nutrients that survived the storm and take them to where we are going next.”
Pieces. Not a whole. Fragments of who you were. Fragments of what you built. Fragments of what you thought would always be there. In that space, something difficult and honest emerges: You have to decide what comes next.
These seasons of change we experience, changes in identity, relationships, purpose, shape who we are going forward. For Emily, it has shaped her in every single way, to her core. “ My ENTIRE life exists now in the way it does because of my grief. It started there.”
That sentence holds weight. Not just because of what it says, but because of what it accepts—that sometimes purpose doesn’t come from inspiration. Sometimes it comes from destruction.
When everything breaks, there’s a temptation to try to put it back exactly as it was, to recreate what felt safe, familiar, and certain. But Emily saw something different in the aftermath of her loss: She saw space. Space to keep moving, to trust that something beyond what she could see was still unfolding.
You can’t become something new by holding onto everything that was. In Emily’s words, “You can’t get to where you are going by staying where you are.”
For many that truth is uncomfortable. Forward momentum often requires loss: letting go of relationships, identities, and versions of yourself that no longer fit. It requires walking through the storm instead of around it.
What the Storm Reveals
For Emily, the storm didn’t just take; it revealed. What she found was strength that she didn’t fully understand before, capacity that had always been there but had never been tested in this way. “WE ARE POWERFUL AS FUCK and we severely underestimate ourselves,” she explains. Not in theory. Not as an idea. As something lived. Something proven in the moments where everything feels like too much, and yet, somehow, we continue to live, to move, to grow.
There’s a moment when survival turns into transformation. For Emily, it was when she realized her experience, struggle, and growth could become something that helped others to heal. Emily started by creating two bracelets—not for an audience, not for a business, not with a plan. She made them for herself, because she needed somewhere for the weight of her grief to go.
When she told the story behind those bracelets, something unexpected happened: people responded. They recognized themselves in what she said, in the words she chose, in the honesty she didn’t try to filter. “So many people messaged and commented, saying that I said the things they didn’t know how to say.”
What Emily created in that moment wasn’t just a pair of objects. It was a mirror. Something that allowed people to see their own grief and their own experiences reflected back to them in a way that made them feel understood. And that’s where something began to take shape. Not a business in the traditional sense, but something more profound.
Her process for creating bracelets is deep and genuine. “As I go through things in my life, the way I process is by meditating, listening, journaling, and then moving it through me. During this process, I will see a story in there that is a common thread, because really, all things we go through are not only experienced by us alone. Then I think about how I can tell that story in beads.”
Her understanding of people’s shared experiences shapes every piece of jewelry Emily makes. The colors are not random. The combinations are not merely aesthetic. Every one carries meaning, tells a story. They share messages of grief, empowerment, love, and connection. The pieces are intentional, down to the smallest detail.
When asked what it means to her to create something that helps people feel seen, she responded, “It feels surreal and often hard for me to grasp, honestly. People would be really surprised to know just how intentional all the things I make are.”
“I have such a hard time with the idea that what I do helps others heal. I know it does; it just is such an odd thing to me. I am so damn grateful that this is how I get to spend my life. Giving people space to heal and tell their stories.”
For Emily, creating is not separate from living. It’s part of how she processes, understands, and connects. “It gives me meaning. This is like deep soul work.”
When she talks about her craft, there’s a sense that this isn’t something she chose lightly. It’s something she arrived at. Slowly. Reluctantly at times. But ultimately, undeniably.
“I feel like I came here to do exactly this. To listen so that I can give voice to others so we can see just how similar we all are.” And maybe that’s the core of it: Not the bracelets themselves. Not the individual stories. But the act of listening closely enough to turn one person’s experience into something that reminds another person they’re not alone.
Wisdom from the Storm
What would you say to someone who is in the middle of their storm?
What should they keep in mind?
Emily: To know that you are bigger than the storm. The thing I tell people most often is that I took what broke me and am using it to heal me. I know that this can’t apply to everyone, but I would venture to guess that a lot of people’s purpose is tied to the storms they survived and how those stories want to come out of them. If you are looking for your purpose and are in the middle of the storm, remember that you truly decide your life. The storm will fade, and your job is to look really hard at the pieces that are left and if they should get to rebuild with you.
When the storm felt the heaviest, what kept you moving forward?
Emily: My ability to zoom out. To know that there are so many moving pieces all around me that are working for me and I don’t even know it. Here’s the thing no one wants to talk about. We all want to chase our dreams. We all want to do cool shit. The thing is, you can’t get to where you are going by staying where you are.
Read that again.
We need to make space for movement. That space means storms, cutting cords, losing jobs, losing relationships, etc., and people don’t want to go through that, so they don’t. Talking about fear and how to look at it, and dance with it, can change your entire life.
What did the hardest moments reveal about your strength?
Emily: THAT WE ARE POWERFUL AS FUCK and we severely underestimate ourselves.
If you had to choose one word to describe the season you’re in
right now:
Emily: Transformation
Finish this statement: I survived the storm and it taught me
Emily: Everything