I don’t know why this is what we all say when someone knocks on the restroom door. Every time it happens I make a mental note to come up with something a little more articulate to say, but then I have an existential crisis around why I default to referring to myself as “someone”. Is my lizard brain trying to be coy? Elusive? Paranoid? Something else entirely? Pondering everything I don’t know is a tricky business. I have a name and it’s Amy Jo Guinn. My mother, Jo, named me after two of the little women but Amy was a popular name in the mid 70’s because of Amy Carter, so there’s a ton of us. Say “Amy” when you’re around a bunch of middle aged women and half the room will look at you. Some people call me Amy Jo, some call me Amy, some call me AJ, some call me JoJo, and a couple of my siblings call me Amos. I answer to all of them. I was born and raised in Greenville County, South Carolina. I spent my freshman year of college at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, then came home for the summer and commenced the festivities of the Carolinian Debutante Club. Sometimes twice a day. All summer long. That’s a lot of Talbot’s and Laura Ashley and thank you notes. I completed my bachelor’s at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina (with a semester of which was spent pursuing What The Fuck Am I Doing With My Life in California and Mexico with the Pacific Crest Outward Bound School hiking approximately 500 miles with an 80 pound pack on my back. Needless to say, that question was answered about three days in, leaving only 87 more to go. Long story.) Anyway, I graduated from Furman in 1998 with a degree in Health and Exercise Science. After graduation, I moved to Charleston, South Carolina to be a Personal Trainer but ended up wiping sweat off of the “before worker’s” machines before I went to sleep for the day. That was a job I found meaningless. I bought a book about careers that will afford feeding yourself and paying the bills at Barnes and Noble on a desperate whim. I got accepted to the Derry Patterson Wingo School of Nursing at Charleston Southern University, a private college sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention. I removed the Darwin fish off my truck and jumped through all the hoops and completed my BSN in 2003. Two weeks later, I was in a year long internship to be an Emergency Room nurse at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Fast forward to 2013 when I met the love of my life. I buried a part of myself on my way out the ER doors as a RN for the last time in late 2015. We’re still writing the rest of my history. Together. Stay tuned.