Rewritten Road

I turn 37 in seventeen days. Which feels fake, first of all. Thirty-seven sounds like an age where you should have a signature dinner recipe (okay – I do), a respectable retirement account (I do not) and very strong opinions on backsplash (also – do not). I do have very strong opinions about trailhead parking.…

One of my favorite movies is The Fountain. It explores parallel timelines. The multiverse. How one decision and act can change the outcome on multiple planes of time. Recently someone taught me about quantum immortality. It’s one of those ideas that maybe sounds a bit insane when you first hear it but then it sort…

I talk about mountains a lot. Obviously. They photograph way better than therapy appointments. There’s something much more interesting about standing on top of a mountain I just climbed than saying, “I went to therapy on Tuesday and came home to reorganize my cabinets.” But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of…

I woke up profoundly sad today. Not because anything happened. There wasn’t bad news waiting on my phone. Nobody hurt my feelings. Nothing fell apart overnight. I just… opened my eyes and there it was: The BIG sad. The kind that doesn’t necessarily have a story attached to it. It just settles somewhere behind my…

People love to tell you to trust your gut. It’s great advice. It’s also hard as fuck when you’ve spent your entire life being taught that your gut is an unreliable narrator. I think that’s one of the quietest things abuse takes from you. Everyone talks about trust after abuse. Learning to trust people again.Learning…

I completed Peekamoose and Table. The trail that took me out Saturday. 9.2 Miles2 Summits2,506 Elevation Gain5.45 Hours I came home exhausted, so damn proud and with a pizza big enough to feed a small village. While laying in bed and bingeing OITB for the fourth time, I realized – almost as an after thought…

When I pieced together The Body That Stayed, I thought I was just writing about trauma. About the things that happened and the woman who survived it all. and I was. But somewhere through the process, I realized very deeply that surviving isn’t the end of the story. Trauma has a strange way of lingering…

Saturday, the mountain won. I threw up on the side of the trail, admitted defeat and turned around. Which isn’t exactly the inspirational hiking content I had planned. I drove home disappointed. Not because I had anything to prove, but because I had genuinely wanted to stand on that summit. Instead, I found myself wondering…

Tomorrow morning, I’m hiking a mountain I’ve never climbed before. My bag is packed. My alarm is set. I’ve checked the weather more times than I’d like to admit. The trail map is downloaded AND printed, my water and electrolytes are ready… I’ve done everything I can to prepare. And yet… There is still a…

When I went to rehab many many moons ago, there’s a phrase that gets passed around – a lot. “Do the next right thing.” I always hated hearing that because what the actual hell is the next right thing? What nobody tells you is that your new life doesn’t arrive all at once. It asks…