I have a tendency to tell my story in fragments rather than in a straight line. The truth is, there isn’t a single beginning to the road I’m on today. Just a series of places where I kept going.
I grew up learning endurance before safety. My mother’s abuse shaped my earliest landscape. Her hate became the voice inside my head and my heart. When I became a survivor of CSA, the silence around me grew heavier instead of kinder. Some things are not meant to be carried alone, but I carried them anyway.
For a long time, a very long time, I disappeared into alcohol. It was easier not to feel.
The journey to sobriety was quiet. Not a finish line as much as it was just steady ground. One choice at a time.
I found myself in a second marriage that repeated old patterns. Harm that felt familiar even when it hurt. Especially when it hurt. Leaving was sudden. The embarrassment hadn’t been enough to leave, the cheating wasn’t enough to leave, the broken ribs weren’t enough to leave.
It was his black eyes staring back at me the night he broke my tailbone. I stared death in the face and I wanted to win.
It’s been six years since I escaped. Six years of rebuilding a life I could finally stay inside of.
A year ago, I moved 1,700 miles from home. I found myself breathing easier. I found my nervous system slowing down. Then I started hiking.
For the first time in my 36 years on this floating rock, I found the space to hear my own footsteps again.
Out on the trail, nothing asks who I used to be. The air doesn’t need explanations. The mountains don’t rush me toward an ending. There’s only breath, distance and the quite rhythm of moving forward.
Somewhere along the miles, something shifted. I wasn’t hiking, walking or running to escape anymore.
I was hiking because I love it.
If you’re here, you’re meeting me in the middle of a path that doesn’t pretend to be easy. Only honest.