Stories about Transformation
What’s your relationship with change?
People either crave change or dread it. Change can feel like exciting new opportunities or profound loss. In my experience, it’s always both. Consider travel; a process that is scary, exhilarating, and naturally transformational. It doesn’t matter if we are traversing the world or our own backyard, the places we go make an impression on us. We don’t come back the same person we were when we left. We’ve learned something and have had to expand to fill our new horizons.
We are naturally dynamic creatures, and I write to explore how we transform through our experience, spiraling into the next best version of ourselves.
Travel Blogs
from topanga canyon
My recent nomadic tendencies are motivated by a search for a place…
from southern california
This is why we don’t get too comfortable, was the reminder from…
from boulder
from childhood
from asheville
Other Stories
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The Book – First Chapters
I used the lockdown as my personal creative vortex and compiled the road trips, therapy sessions, business trips, panic attacks and all the rest into a book. And that book was published in June 2022 and is available on Amazon/Etsy now! What follows are the first 2 chapters.
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Passages
Anyone who has ever quit anything knows all too well that it’s never just about the cessation of the thing. It’s about what drives us to the precipice, and what we discover beyond it.
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Meet the spirit of HALF WILD
I teased the book cover last time. I told you how I saw it and wept because it was perfect. I am not expecting you to have the same reaction, but know that this cover is deeply special to me. The model is someone who played a big role in my life and who totally embodied the spirit of HALF WILD.
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Baby steps, business travel
And there’s the first-day-back jitters of seeing my teammates. Some of them I’ve met before, and it will be a nice little reunion. Others I’ve known for years simply as faces in a box on a Zoom screen. As we come together for the first time, what will we talk about? What is the proper response to that simple inquiry: “How are you?”
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what I can’t outrun
Two boulder-sized milestones – stacked on top of one another, heaped on top of me. The kind of life-altering moments that can exhaust your emotional faculties so completely that you need a few weeks of alternating deep tissue massages and tear-soaked therapy sessions just to get back to baseline. And I got a twofer over one long weekend.
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watching the stars in big sur
It’s never really about the things. Delightful distractions, the leather smells rich and the cashmere feels soft but after the novelty of the luxury wears off, we’re all still just electric meatsuits traversing a watery orb, bumping up against each other trying to make sense of it all.
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re-contextualizing travel (with ghosts)
I finally found a natural counterbalance for all that dogged seeking. It didn’t matter if I was shopping in Scotland or sipping coffee in Savannah, the highlight of every trip was always the same, and somehow perfectly unique each time. Perhaps driven by a subconscious urge to recharge, I learned to ground myself with microdoses of actual human connection.
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righteous whining
So while life progressed in beautiful ways, sometimes working on that book felt like wasting time. I struggled with stepping into the past and spending late nights regurgitating old timelines that almost don’t feel real anymore.
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still
For three years I avoided stagnation by piling on more chaos, traveling, burning through my savings, ending up back at my parents’ house to let my bank account refill. Yesterday, I sent 50,000 carefully culled and crafted words to an editor with the intention of turning them into a book. Those two things could not have coexisted…
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a christmas tantrum
A woman quietly breaks down amid the off-gassing plastics lining the shelves of her local Target store. It’s Christmas.
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drain snakes
I worked fear through my brain like a third base coach gnawing on a wad of Big League Chew. Under the pressure of mental mastication, it shifted shape and took on a thousand new forms that evaded rationalization and neutralization.
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answering the call
Deep within you there is a tiny space that contains the infinite universe. Most people won’t tell you this because if you knew, you’d stop going to work and instead spend your whole day roller blading or skeet-shooting or whatever it is that makes that space light up like a disco.
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Peggy
But if I wanted to know her, it would mean building a mosaic out of the smashed pieces of our collective memories.
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remote work and finding a home within
The impromptu flight, the dog sitter, Airbnb, and adventure money had stacked up, and rent was coming due. Suddenly, my place felt like a beautiful, beige prison. I couldn’t afford to pay rent and travel. I chose to travel.
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COVID-22
There is no wrong way to panic. The world is not black and white, all of us can be right. The fear expression is simply coming from where we fear loss the most, and getting in touch with that reconnects us to ourselves and, if we let it, humanity.
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plucked
Birds chirped high in the trees, more scattered from her feeders as she shut the door behind her. The feeders were getting low. She needed to buy birdseed, but was it worth the risk? Was there actually any risk? Whatever. It’s annoying out there, she thought, picturing that crying baby’s wet and anguished face. The world couldn’t stay gross forever. The birds could wait.
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rewilding (yurt story)
I drank my coffee on the porch, listening to birdsong and smelling whiffs of ocean mist that spilled over the mountains. As far as I could tell, the spider was keeping her promise.
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from topanga canyon
PRINT this storyMy recent nomadic tendencies are motivated by a search for a place that feels like home that I problematically don’t believe exists. When people ask me that fundamental question about where I’m from, hoping for a quick and relatable answer, I sigh and shake my head and try to gauge how long they …
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tribute to fall
I curse the season for being the only season that confronts us so directly with its impermanence. But fall is no shorter than summer or winter. I’m no physicist, but I am confident that time doesn’t move more quickly in October than it does in May.
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cool girl, bad habits
I was, I thought, cool. Not in the real effortless Paul Newman way we think of cool, obviously, but I believed that if I adorned myself with enough physical trappings of cool, I would absorb it by osmosis. Like the giant bug alien (Edgar) in Men in Black, I was wearing a cool suit. And just like Edgar, I was not pulling it off.
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lighting me on fire
A notebook with a green cover like a pool table held accounts of trying and failing to spend less money. It landed on the coals with a sigh, and a hundred pages of angst and sadness went up in flames.
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secondhand
I travel a lot, but not because I love it. I don’t have some great passion for exotic cuisine or penchant for historical sites. I do it mainly because it’s something to do. Moving around a lot as a kid instilled a certain level of wanderlust in me, and working a remote job now means that if I see something cool on Instagram, I can usually figure out a way to go there. So I do. And with each trip I add to my stack of interesting anecdotes, but I won’t list “travel” as a hobby. My hobby is people.
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peeking over topsoil
PRINT this storyLushness unfolding Sit still and feel fear’s hot breath. Water fertile soul with saline, nurture tender shoots of self. Let shadows emerge, take shape, begin to dance in the dark. Hang on synchronicity, wring our wounds, let metaphor drip. Trust roots will wrap and hold our guts against the gust. In the misty …
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from the Grand Canyon
Dear enormous family of vacationers, please take up the whole sidewalk. You’re in a national park, this is certainly not the place for situational awareness. And by all means,
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moodboard : september
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from the mall
Outwardly, I feign sophisticated, picky interest, as the possibilities play in my head. Perhaps, I consider, this fresh lamb’s wool sweater will transport me from my current life to that of the adventurous Canadian isle fisherwoman from the catalog. I buy the lie of consumerism and, often, I buy the sweater too.
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brave girls
PRINT this storyI’m watching low clouds pour over the sandstone peaks of the Colorado Front Range from the window of my rented cabin. The grey damp lends itself to a productive day of work at my laptop, letting me get lost in deep projects or skim across my email inbox like a hawk across the …
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from southern california
PRINT this storyThis is why we don’t get too comfortable, was the reminder from my body as I wiped puke drool from my chin and shuffled back to bed. An hour earlier, I’d been enjoying a delightful breakfast at a busy cafe in a Southern California mountain town. Now, I was violently ill and covered …
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Poetry
Sometimes my words come out like poems, and it makes me nervous because poems feel mystical and unruly.
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from boulder
Describe, prescribe, asses, treat, make broad promises and repeat until I’m paralyzed and exhausted.
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homesick
PRINT this storyNo matter where I am currently living, every 6 months or so I am required to travel back to Colorado for a haircut. Finding someone that you trust with your tresses is delicate, vulnerable work. For that reason I am unflinchingly loyal to my stylist, even though it means a $200 haircut quickly …
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from childhood
I was 3 the first time I left home. I’d woken up early to a silent house. Mom was at work. Dad was asleep somewhere after a late shift. I was functionally alone, and I began to pack my things.
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it ain’t rainbows
PRINT this storyA friend who I’d met in an IRC chatroom for people who wanted to stop drinking asked if making it to 3 years was ‘all rainbows’. As I began typing my response, my eyeballs rolled back in my skull and my fingers flew across the keyboard in a lightning bolt moment of inspiration. …
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from asheville
I left that witch shop and North Carolina weeks ago, but those 5 seconds of hot awkwardness ripple the pristine surface of an otherwise flawless excursion.
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new eyes
PRINT this storyI wonder if modern kids subsist on the same diet of extreme excitement and crushing boredom that I did. The teetering balance of anticipation to actual happening was never more lopsided than on the first day of a new school year. Eager new outfits and first-day jitters landed with a chalk-dusted thud against …
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on alienation
a poem about feeling ignored
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Oh, hello.
PRINT this storyRemember those commercials (they for sure came on during Jeopardy) in which some beige spokesperson, leaning casually on their beige desk corner, would break the fourth wall to ask you a specifically provocative question, then awkwardly introduce themselves? Something like, Are you tired of paying full price for your cat’s diabetes medication? Hi, …
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Or Do Go Gently
PRINT this storyThe active ingredient in successful change is not grit or intention, but gentleness. I write this from a vantage of intellectual near-certainty, while under the surface my still-skeptical heart is fluttering in doubt. But hear me out. You’re going to fail. Accept this truth of being a person and suddenly every stumble becomes …