I’m sitting on the beautiful white sofa in my living room. I dreamed of having such a thing as a child; there’s something wildly impractical and magical about owning and actually using a white sofa as your main piece of furniture. It’s audacious, and I adore living in the audacity of weird societal norms— it’s where I feel most at home. My son is asleep, his head in my lap. He asked me to hold him. He slept over at his cousin’s last night, so inevitably, I’m sure they were up late. Now he’s beyond sleepy at 2:00 pm on a Sunday. I hesitated to snuggle with him on the couch, but quickly agreed. The number of years left with this boy wanting to be held by me as he falls asleep has to be limited, and a sleeping Hollis will forever be one of my favorite moments to witness. I walk over to the couch, sit down, and he snuggles in. I have one hand in his hair, my fingers brushing through his long curls, the other on his forehead, massaging it. He placed my hand there as I sat down. I have been massaging his forehead since he was born. It’s the one thing that would put him to sleep and comfort him the fastest as a baby. He doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that when he says he loves it or automatically places my hand on his forehead, it is something I’ve done with him for over 12 years. I love that he loves it.

The rain and thunder are starting now; now this is perfect. Now this is the dream. The outside is cloudy, and I can hear the thunder and see and hear the rain. It matches how I am feeling inside. Not that I feel stormy, but I do feel a rush of many things all at once. This is my haven. I pull out my phone, open my notes app, begin to write.

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38, in exactly 11 days. That is the number I will be at 12:02 AM. I snuck into the 20th day of August in 1988 on a Saturday morning, just barely out of a late summer Friday. Just barely the earliest Saturday morning girl, slightly clinging to the Friday night before, is perhaps the essence I will always embody. My Mom said a few things about me growing up, one of which was, “She’s my early early morning girl; she’s always up before the sun.”

August, you always bring introspection spreading into reflection in my body, brain, and heart. More than reflection, you require feeling that demands transmutation into awareness; integration, optional. Previous years actualized more toll-like, a price to be paid to play. Recent years, the toll is not heavy and is eagerly paid because I want the information and experience on the other side.

The first week of August, 2024, A contract to myself was written and signed by myself for myself. 36 summoned desire, eagerness to examine and redirect, leading into the bleakest birthday I have ever experienced— existential in quality, but intensely felt inside. Introspection, reflection, awareness are grand, and they are theoretical in isolation. Integration, Latin integer, meaning whole or complete, and the suffix “tion” means to act, process, or the result of doing an action. How much forward movement happens without “tion”?

August 2025, I was injured from running, not fully in the amount of motion I preferred, and wrote a lot in a brown notebook. The words included all areas of my life and what I wanted to change, what I wanted to be different; I was specific where I could be, and I was vague in areas that I couldn’t visualize it all. but I knew the “feeling,” so I wrote the feelings.

Prelude or prologue? I don’t know music or metaphors for music. I know that reflections before the actual main event of reflecting on the closeout of August 2026 feels as though it should be either a prelude or a prologue in metaphor format. This coming weekend, August 14th, I will be running 200 miles through the Cascade Mountains in Washington. I will finish days before I turn 38. The final big experience in August to lead me into my synthesis of the last year that will take place afterward. If life is a symphony, as they say, then prelude seems more appropriate. The root definition of “lude” means “to play”. The final lude of closing out this lap around the sun is 200 miles of play, setting the stage to be present, engage, and to experience. Constant movement for days before hours of intentional stillness and contemplation. Hopes of new or updated drafts of destinations, and designs to be written in the brown notebook after. Goals in January? Couldn’t be me; my biological rhythm always creates its own beat. Who wants to dream up and start a new life in cold snow given any choice?

August memories live in my mind and body and viscerally summon waves of my past that crash over me with mixed emotions of joy, nostalgia, pain, life, wild wild life.

August, the month the air distinctly changes, signaling summer to fade into fall, when school returns, the last full month of lying in the sun to be warmed while reading a book, the last month before fall and winter holidays overtake weeks and weekends. The month where I said “I do” two days after turning 21. 9 years later, August 5th, the last 15 days of my 29th year, a paper would officially indicate we did not “I do” any longer.

Mid August, 2013, the month I unknowingly conceived a beautiful boy, who would change all the Augusts following with his own set of back-to-schools and summer endings. The month of my Dad’s birthday, 9 days following mine, the man who instilled in me a love of reading, of writing, and most of all, thinking, always conversing about what he or I were thinking. The month that kicks off College football season, more specifically, Alabama football, while an identity that feels distant to me now, was once a massive part of time spent with my 4 older brothers watching, predicting, and tracking SEC football religiously.

August: my first experience traveling out of the country at the age of 21 to Mexico. August: my first experience in Hawaii at 22 and returning at 32, but solo. August, the month I had sex for the first time, but not the month that I had sex and orgasmed for the first time; turns out, those are two separate things. The month I walked into my first college class, terrified.

August: when I moved to Georgia the day before my 26th birthday, and the month I moved to Southern California 19 days before my 27th birthday.

August, the first month I summited a mountain peak 3 days before my 31st birthday, my 2nd peak on my 31st birthday, and my 3rd peak 4 days after that. My life trajectory drastically changed the final 3 days of being 30. August 13th, at age 33, 7 days before 34, I completed and won my first 100-mile race, much like my final days of being 30, my final days of 33 would change the trajectory again. August 2023, the first time I traveled to Europe completely alone without a partner, days after my 35th birthday; August 20, the month and the very day I shared an exact birthday with a good friend and personality twin, who decided to not be in this life anymore and ended his existence the day after we exchanged texts two months before what would have been his 42nd and my 35th birthday. Each birthday is now marked with rereading our birthday exchanges that we no longer get to have in August, but I still choose to celebrate him quietly every year.

Most of August 2026 is unwritten and unexperienced. Each day presents new possibilities from which to create it. The first 9 days have included 42 miles in the Tetons, learning and relearning lessons with amazing humans, quiet moments snuggled with my son thinking and speaking about life, recording podcast episodes together, laughing at dumb jokes, funny memories, and living experiences we envisioned together. Hours on trails with friends, experiencing nature and each other in vulnerabilities that I never dreamed I would house the capacity for. Hours meditating, a practice I claimed for years was beyond my capability. Shared moments with humans that still feel too sacred to articulate in words. 22 Days are left of this August.

Cheers to living, considering, feeling, and existing within a body that feels more and more mine. Cheers to continuing to live and experience life through it. Cheers to allowing this year to be the one where presence, authenticity, and love of Self collide and reside in my vessel, my soul and mind. Cheers to the vision that embodiment becomes something so innate that I can’t remember how I didn’t know how to not.

37, you’ve been a gift of being the most me I have ever been; thank you for your love and compassion. 38, I am excited to meet you and see how lovely you become the next year

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In this present societal climate, one continuously needs to have an opinion, to say a meaningful thing, a smart thing, the right thing, the controversial thing, the witty thing, the cutting thing, the hottake thing, the shocking thing, the tender thing, the everything thing; contemplation begs to ask if any single one or collective “thing” is aiding or creating more noise amongst an inordinate amount of “things”.

Considering and confronting things is my brain’s favorite hobby; it rarely isn’t thinking about things, solving things, analyzing things, reviewing things, reflecting things, optimizing things, creating things, berating things, deconstructing things, reconstructing things, and repurposing things. The one thing I can’t quite figure out is when does one rest things and let things be? When does one embody and feel things, and that be enough for the thing?

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“Mom,” he says, “Mom, what would you pick?” I am still thinking, always thinking. “Mental,” I say, “I would never leave my fate up to chance”. “I would,” he says, “because I am not as smart as you”. I pause; I reassure him he is and will only be smarter as time goes– I know in my gut that’s wrong, not him being smarter, but that I chose “mental” instead of “chance”. The feeling of knowing something in my body, not in my head, will forever be unsettling. 24 hours later on that cold December night in 2024, it hit my head as my head hit the pillow. Not even the smartest people have control because of chance. We were discussing a game within a reality show, but in my brain, I was discussing reality.

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My body wandered through the mountains for hours today. It was minutes for soul, so never long enough. Reflections weaved in and out of my brain, and sentiments grew in my heart with every step, they always do. Mountain steps hold more wisdom and love than many other “necessary” steps, creating more capacity in the heart.

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“They say”, one of my favorite things to start a sentence with, makes anything following that much more eminent, whoever “they” are, but they do say that people forget so much of what you do, but they remember how you make them feel. Many of Maya Angelou’s words live and speak daily in my brain, and her quote: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”.

“Mom, can I have your full attention!” My brain was actively racing, my eyes avidly scanning my phone, my fingers rapidly typing, and my ears were unmistakably disengaged. I did not hear him. “Mom, did you hear me? I want your full attention.” He grabbed my phone from my hands. “Ouch,” I thought—an Ego ouch. Physical ouches can’t even see Ego ouches—they are not in the same league. Truth? Anxious and stressed? I would take that over the intensity of the last 9 months of my insides insiding in ways I can only recall a few times within my 35 years. Not wanting to even want is next door neighbors with no more. They are not the combo you want talking to each other often.

I turned my head and looked into his eyes. Hollis is my biggest fan, and he was begging to see his. He didn’t know I was frantically searching for solutions to what I believed, and still struggle to disbelieve is an actual crisis. I can’t tell him that. It’s not his crisis. In that moment, I wanted so badly to cry. I wanted to cry and scream, “I can’t do this anymore. I am not good at this Mom stuff, this Life stuff, this weighing responsibility to do it all and also keep-it-together stuff. I am terrible at it, and I am tired of existing like this.” I fear what he saw on my face in that flashing moment. It was not anger, it was not defeat, it never is with him, I can’t recall ever being angry with him, but pain, yes, it was pain. What level of pain did he see? It is better that I never know.

My right hand slowly reached down into my right pocket. I pulled out an invisible object. He was staring, confused— he was very confused. I looked down at the invisible object.

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