I just walked away from my entire life
on cataclysmic shifts, knowing and unknowing ourselves, and reclamation after trauma
1 // How to Begin
I haven’t known how to begin this post, or even what to write. Silence was easier than having to figure out how to write about the thousands of steps, big and small, taken this past year, all culminating in several cataclysmic shifts in my life, how to figure out where my boundaries are around writing about my personal life after sharing so much of me, so openly and at times, dramatically, since I turned my life into something to consume on the internet a decade ago. I must regularly remind myself to have compassion for the younger versions of myself who only knew what she knew and had the tools she had. Sometimes, as my wife lovingly pointed out, I wasn’t being dramatic—my highly dysregulated nervous system believed that things were dire when they were perhaps not in reality (like the time I thought we’d wind up homeless if we couldn’t pay our rent for one month when our landlords were lovely people who liked us a great deal). At other times, things were that bad, or they were worse than what I was admitting on the internet.
Whatever the case, while I shared a lot of myself, my detail was somehow both intimate and not. Nevertheless, my followers began attaching words to me—gritty, resilient, vulnerable, inspiring. I was a person who ‘overcame’ hardship repeatedly, and I wrote about it, and strangers attached their own meaning when I tied up my pain, sacrifice, and hard work with a tidy bow. They saw their story arc in mine, even when they didn’t know the whole of it or even the half of it.
Which, I suppose, is a good thing in a way, my writing was connective tissue, helped others better understand themselves, and isn’t that one of the reasons why, as writers, we share our words? Yet there was a darker side to this because eventually, I began to feel like something didn’t feel right about the words used to describe me: resilient, inspiring, vulnerable.
Resilient, by definition, implies there is something I need to be resilient from, instead of feeling like I had a community of people willing to help, I (unknowingly) created a following who witnessed my struggle in real time and left a series of sad face emojis, reinforcing my reality. I was alone, or my wife and I were alone in whatever we were facing, we needed help and had so little of it (if none at all). I began to resent being called resilient and inspiring in the same keystroke. I felt . . . used. My pain was fodder for others’ personal growth. The limitations of Instagram were not only character counts—realness was allowed if, and only if, accompanied by a positive ending, a light note, or a transformative call to action for the audience. I knew, when my wife was the victim of second-degree assault in August 2018, when our worst nightmare as lesbians happened, to keep it away from Instagram. No one would know what to do with such a horrific thing. There was no way to put a positive, light spin on violence.
I am a person who has been shaped by trauma and hardship for many of the nearly thirty-nine years I have been walking on this earth. I still wonder why these are the stories that make up my tapestry. There have only been glimpses, and heartbeats, of ease and joy.
Grasping at ease and joy is just that, grasping, for when most of your life has been filled with pain, pain caused by people you thought loved you, you cannot trust ease, or joy, much like that line from that Grateful Dead song that I know I take out of context, the one a former nomad recommended to me in the early days of my nomadism—for when life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door.
I am always waiting for things to fall apart because they always do and in greater quantities than those around me, or so it would seem.
Some people just move and sell their houses without fanfare, my moves and house sales come with buckets of blood and midnight trips to the emergency vet in the nearest big city with just a few weeks to go and a violent storm that downs massive limbs and cuts power to the entire town less than 24 hours before closing. We sign papers in the dark and the buyer doesn’t even show, we don’t know if he will still buy our house for another two days. We don’t know if all our plans are falling apart.
Gave a little bit of my news away there, if you caught that.
2 // The Writer
I wish to be one of those writers who write without giving away the details, but the difficulty is that for a decade, I have been a woman on the internet who wrote but was not considered a writer (and did not consider herself a writer). I shared my homes and travels, renovations, photography, styling, and cooking. I wrote a lot about my same-sex marriage, and just as I did too easily in real life, gave away my red, bleeding, pulsing heart and called it honesty and vulnerability, and it was, but what I wanted in return was acceptance and approval. Belonging.
Being on the internet, and writing, albeit not as a writer, but as a nomad and out lesbian and business owner and designer of pretty homes, helped me remember the part of me that wanted to be a writer as a child and teenager, when I spent most of my free hours drafting stories and taking as many writing classes as I could find.
Who I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do, got lost in a sea of depression during my college years. Then I was married and miserable, and going through a divorce, becoming, like too many mothers who dare leave their unhappy marriages, impoverished. Writing was not top of mind, when there was only survival, working at the library part-time, becoming entrepreneurial and scrappy, returning to college, scraping by while raising a child with the fervent hope that she will only ever know love and security, that I can give her both, trying (and failing) to make up for her father’s abandonment, hoping she never, ever feels it, because, even when I didn’t have the vocabulary or full understanding yet, I know what it felt like for me.
And now, I am trying to be a writer on the internet, having shown up as something else for a decade. I have given away my work for free, I have been accessible to the point of burnout, have given the details of how I live my life so that others may be inspired by it.
I have not asked, not really, to be paid for my writing, am afraid to turn on paid posts on Substack, fearing I won’t have any readers at all, because I have always shared my heart without a paywall. What if my work is not worth paying for?
All of this feels so tangled and bound up and impossible. These last few years, showing up as a healing, growing version of myself, and sharing my writing in new ways, I have watched as thousands have departed from my channels. I feel like my worth on the internet, which is to say worth in the world, was tied only to Airstream renovations, or home renovations. Was that all I was good for to anyone?
I know I am so much more than this, but it seems it will stay with me always, even after I have completely moved on from it. I want to be proud I created something lasting, but how can I be, when it doesn’t release me from its grip, disallows me to be anything but this thing I once was, and anyway, the Airstreams were never me, and I was never them, even when they consumed my every waking minute.
I want to be one of those women who figured out she was a writer before showing up here, who braids her life into her work, but leaves out the strands we don’t need. I know where she lives, but I do not know what her house looks like. I know she wears black dresses, but do not know where she buys them. I know she moved from Nebraska to New Mexico, but never the particulars of the move itself, but the bone-deep why.
I fear I have been on the internet so long as this one thing, I don’t know how to reel it back in. Why do I feel I must give and give when what I want is to write, to craft a story, a poem, an essay, not a tell-all, not content?
And anyway, how do I tell a story without giving context, when my story is so fucking complicated and layered it’s practically ridiculous?
As a writer, how do I want to write my story? What can I possibly tell you that would make you understand the hell I have been through, the hell of healing from horror, and that it feels like a miracle that I am here, a miracle of my own making?
3 // Boundaries
Maybe the boundaries will work if I can figure out where to draw the lines.
I know that I don’t want to share my homes anymore, at least not from a design sense. I wouldn’t mind never doing a renovation project again, let alone sharing about one. I keep my family closer than ever, though I miss talking about my marriage. But I can’t stand when people leave #couplegoals in the comment section, as if my marriage is easy. As if we didn't have to fight for each other when our world was split in two. As if we don’t fight every day for equality, a fight we are losing in the United States.
Years ago my wife asked me to please refrain from writing odes to her, because she said it was unfair, causing all those people to fall in love with her. I didn’t believe I deserved her, that she was good, and I was bad, and she was whole, and I was broken, and this was clear in my writing. I taught a whole slew of people to think I didn’t deserve someone so wonderful.
I do hope you will see yourself in my writing, and uncover parts of yourself you’ve lost or hidden or have been stripped away from you. Still, I think calling people inspirational is dangerous to both you and them because then they feel they must keep being inspirational. You feel you must become inspirational too when all you need is to heal, and sometimes that will look like you’ve come a long way and you’ve done incredible things, and other times, you’ll have so far to go, and that’s okay, it’s okay, it’s more than okay. You don’t have to arrive anywhere either, you can take your time, and you don’t have to emerge triumphant from trauma, but you can, too, though it may not look like you thought, and it doesn’t have to inspire anyone but you.
4 // Staying with Myself, Cataclysmic Shifts
This last year, I have done a great many things, all with the end goal of moving out west, this thing I have been talking about, desiring with such ferocity that it ate me alive, ever since we settled back in Indiana in the early months of the pandemic.
There was work, work underneath the exhausting amount of work it takes to prepare a house to be listed, field showings and offers, pack for a cross-country move, and complete the excruciating physical labor of Airstream renovation projects we’ve been burned out from for years, all while preparing to close the business and struggling with the financial implications of that closure. The utter exhaustion of, in addition to all of that, working as a development director in an unbelievably toxic environment for a pithy salary, taking on every freelance job I could find to make up the deficit, and working, though I once said never again, for more than 15 hours a day, applying and interviewing for better jobs, then holding down another fundraising management role at a much larger nonprofit in a different time zone (read: more demanding), and parent a teenager involved in sports and clubs with a sprawling social life.
The ultimate work was to stay with myself and stay with myself I did, despite the external work, the head down, one step at a time, get to the next thing, the next deadline, to pay the next bill.
I stayed with myself enough to know that the feeling I had about the shack we nearly bought in Joshua Tree was one of knowing, knowing it wasn’t for us, even if it was embarrassing to have gone all in, to have been so sure that we’d even put money down for escrow, to admit that though I thought the desert was always where I wanted to be and I’ve yammered on about it for years, I didn’t want to be there at all anymore. I’d changed, I didn’t want to be chained to a building project for years of my life, not now, maybe not ever again. I didn’t want to raise my daughter there. I rolled my eyes at the L.A.-infused pretentiousness. I stayed with myself enough to speak those words out loud, first to my wife and daughter, who breathed sighs of relief because they were feeling it too, and we vowed then and there that we wouldn’t settle anywhere without everyone’s voice being heard, every vote a definitive yes.
I stayed with myself enough to listen to what came after that decision, the knowing that I needed to take a real break from working like a dog, to rest and write and create, all of which had taken a backseat to everything else that demanded of me, not only this past year, but for a very long time. I want to give my writing a real go, a real shot, to finish the book I’ve been writing and spend more time writing here on Substack. I want to create something else that lasts. I listened to myself, my need to recover from the never-ending work of my entire adult life, the striving and failing and building and growing and clambering, while holding and healing from things I never should have had to hold or heal from.
I stayed with myself enough to listen, to know that moving for a job was not how I wanted to return West, my returning needed to be because I wished to return, not because someone was expecting me to be there for a role I couldn’t do justice anyway, not without taking time to recover first. I knew I needed to reclaim my story, our story, to allow for more healing, to take back what was taken from our family, the choice to move where and when we wanted, not because of an ex-husband's ultimatum (1) or trauma (2) or a pandemic (3), to take our hail-damaged, smashed-up, moldy Airstream that we couldn’t ever bring ourselves to get rid of all these years, spend two harried weeks in the midst of moving, fixing it up the best we could, and head back out on the road, finding a home we all love, just the way we intended to a decade ago, before we knew what would happen to us out there. Before our simple, sweet story became something we never wanted it to become.
I stayed with myself enough to see it all through, even when I became afraid as our departure date drew closer, afraid of leaving our lovely Healing House because it offered me the illusion of safety. Maybe it was safe. We stayed as long as we did because both of us, after the trauma, closely followed by a global pandemic, felt so unmoored, so very vulnerable and unsafe, tossed around in the world as we were by our nomadic lifestyle and the horrors that happened to us out there. Our house was flanked by bamboo, a fortress. Thick trunked trees stood guard as we did deep inner work, circled by safety and stability. The trees stood guard until the storm on June 26th, the day before we were meant to say goodbye to the house, and of course, there are lessons in that, which I’ve written about and will share here next week.
I stayed with myself enough to know that the Healing House had played its role in our lives, it was a place to heal, not a place to spend a life. The work I did there, that my wife did there, that we did together, all of it was so we could stay soft, to stay in love and full of love, and to open ourselves up for living outside of its walls when we were ready, to reclaim our lives, individually, as a couple, as a family.
5 // Reclamation
I had the privilege of listening to Ross Gay at a reading last winter, on the last stop of his tour for his second book. He spoke at Morgenstern Books, back in Bloomington, Indiana, the town Ross calls home and I lived for the past four years. I did my book event at the same bookshop in 2022. On an episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, Ross spoke about one of the many lessons he’s learned in couples therapy. I am paraphrasing, but he says that we must practice witnessing one another change and witnessing that change with love. I believe we must do this for ourselves too, just as much as we must do it for each other. We get in these patterns of believing we know everything about a person we love, or even ourselves, but what happens when we change? Do we keep ourselves boxed in, telling ourselves we can only be one thing we once were, or if we’re being generous, a few things? Love (for others, ourselves) should be, love is, more than this.
We stop asking, we assume, especially when we know a person or in the case of social media and online authorship, think we know a person, but what if they’re telling us they aren’t the same? Do we hold them down, demand they stay the same, because we found them valuable or malleable when they were someone else, or do we let them grow and change and heal and become who they need to be?
What if I need you not to know me, or think you know me, but as Ross says, unknow me? What if I permit myself to unknow things I was or thought I was, and let myself step further into my wholeness?
Ten years ago, five years ago, a year ago, so many versions of myself, and all of those versions are in me, but I am not them, nor am I tied to them, but I am grateful for them, because they got me here, right here.
And as I said above, it is no small miracle, to be here, right here, reclaiming the parts of my story that feel unfinished, while letting go of the versions of myself I have been, and thought I knew, thought would be with me always.
It feels contradictory, to have gone through such a massive transformation these last several years, to be living a life without triggers or constant pain, both physical and emotional, while returning to parts of my life I thought were over.
For a time, I thought my metamorphosis would, or perhaps should, lead me into being content with where I was, accepting that I would never really ‘get’ to leave Indiana, the place of my birth, where so much of my pain resides, lurking in cornfields and deep woods and murky brown creeks, the towns and cities I inhabited from most of my childhood on, at least until I moved to Kentucky to be with Ellen in late 2012, and returned to three times (see above, 1—2—3) despite trying like hell to never return. Maybe I would learn to be grateful for what I had, instead of always longing for something else, as if the only goal in life is contentedness. As if desire or even envy should not be our guides. We are taught that settling is the thing, the only thing, and in fact, I do want to settle, but I want it to be somewhere I have chosen, and not a place I have ended up when choosing from a limited set of choices, or when there was only really one choice to make. There is settling down, and then there is settling, for less than you wanted or hoped for.
When I finally decided to go, and my family was ready to go with me, I mistook my fear of leaving many times, like my fear was a sign I shouldn’t do it, and not the typical fear associated with taking big risks and leaping into the unknown, the way I did when I was twenty-nine, going on thirty. I talked with friends who made big leaps in the second half of their thirties, they reassured me it is different than when we’re younger and the future feels wide open. I supposed it would feel the same because it’s similar, it’s something I’ve done before, except I’ve never quite done it quite like this.
Past versions of my (younger) self were walking away from so little, hoping the act of leaving would bring the more into my life I longed for. I’ve never been days away from turning thirty-nine, willingly walking away from homeownership of the most beautiful house I’ve ever lived (and may ever), my solid, well-paying job, and a lucrative business. I’ve never walked away from so much, knowing none of it was for me anymore, and knowing with such certainty that I won’t be utterly transformed by this summer on the road, or even a place, but because I have and will continue to stay with myself, and listen to my needs and desires. This summer on the road, and finding a home in the West, are what I need and want most right now, and making this choice, driving myself there, will undoubtedly bring something into my life that I was missing because I am present for it.
I will stay with myself even when it doesn’t make sense to not only everyone around me, but sometimes even myself, even when it may look like I am going backward and not forward, which is what reclamation is, taking the parts of our pasts that feel unfinished, lost, cut short by trauma or painful circumstance, seeing them through because if we don’t, we will always wonder, be lost in the longing, feel like we are dying inside, or actually die inside.
Perhaps this is the work, to forever be knowing and unknowing ourselves, to understand which parts of ourselves to let go of, which parts feel unfinished, and which parts we want to grow.
For now, we’re soaking up rest and restoration at the family lake cottage but dispatches from the road, our search for home, and much more writing—coming right up.
From another soul shaped by trauma and grasping at ease and joy, thank you for this piece. Thank you for sharing your heart and words with us, even though you owe us none of it. Thank you for allowing me to feel seen, even though our stories are so very different, but have a connecting thread that is so very similar.
I love this so much. Thank you.