As a regular meditator and energetically tuned in individual for the better part of nearly two decades now (who am I kidding, my entire life), I’ve witnessed my fair share of “unexplainable” happenings. I’ve had my dalliances with medicine circles, even opened a space dedicated to energy work.

What gets called psychosis in a some parts of the world gets called an initiation in a lot of the world. In many cultures and traditions, this break from reality is treated like a calling because the mind cracks open long enough for something ancient to get in. I’m not saying everyone who experiences psychosis is undergoing a shamanic initiation. I’m not saying they’re not, either. What I am saying is the same experience gets read two completely different ways depending on where you’re standing. One culture meets it with fear and a diagnosis, as another meets it with reverence and a role to serve in.

Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found exactly this when she interviewed people who heard voices across the U.S., Ghana, and India. The Americans described their voices as violent, hateful, evidence of a sick mind. The Ghanaians and Indians, more often than not, described theirs as playful, relational, even entertaining, voices from God, from spirits, from something on their side.

Among the babaylan traditions of the Bisayans, the earliest signs of being called were similar to what would get you a diagnosis today. Except it wasn’t treated as sickness, rather it was understood as spirits entering the body, preparing someone for their sacred work ahead.

That’s closer to how it started for me. Not psychosis, but songs that led me to a ceremony that clearly showed my path. In 2022, my paranormal and spiritual attunement got kicked up 1,000 notches on what seemed like any other day. During meditations, songs began to come through demanding to be written down (as best as I could as they were often in different languages). Spanish being the language I’m most familiar with. Then came Tagalog and Ilocano, languages my grandparents and other relatives spoke, which I could only translate by way of Google.

These songs even began to come through during energy work sessions. Combined with other formal trainings, they would become the basis for much of my energy work practice.

As I continued to explore and research…what is this, where is this coming from, what is the mechanism it functions through? I collided with the baylans or babaylans, pronounced bah-bye-lahn, though they had many names across the various provinces. Ancient Filipina shamans revered prior to the Spanish colonization in the late 1500s. According to Carlos Villa from the Center for Babaylan Studies, they “were acknowledged by friends and family as possessing extraordinary gifts…having a gift of vision; an ability to see through schemes or situations and later advise on future plans...or the gift for healing; a specific touch or intuited or passed-on knowledge to specific processes of ‘fixing’ and ‘putting’ people and things together. The first priority of all Babaylan [is] her community.”

Baylans were intermediaries between the physical and spiritual world. Pre-colonial Philippines believed that divine power flowed through the feminine.

A Spanish priest wrote to his superiors, “These women possess more power than kings. They speak to spirits, they lead warriors into battle, they heal the dying and people worship them like Gods.” And as any good conqueror knows, you must kill a people’s God to effectively destroy them. Like King Sennacherib on the Sack of Babylon (c. 689 BCE): "My men took hold of the statues of the gods in the city and smashed them...I tore down both inner and outer city walls, temples, temple-towers made of brick and clay."

The Spanish took a darker approach to conquering the Philippines, waging a campaign of total spiritual eradication.

And Fray Gaspar de San Agustín (from early conversion efforts in Luzon): “The religious went about through the mountains and valleys, hunting for these wretched little idols, breaking them into pieces and burning them, to show the Indians the deception in which they lived, and how little those false gods could do to defend themselves.”

The war against the baylans had begun. Though they were pushed underground, the old Gods still remained. Uprisings against the Spanish, calling the people back to ‘diwata’ or the ancestors of the land and sea, would continue for more than 300 years.

Then came the Americans. The flag changed in 1898, but the war on the old Gods didn't end. It just changed command. In 1924, more than two decades into American rule, colonial forces in Surigao left the bodies of spiritual rebels out in public. They didn't just want the baylans dead. They wanted it witnessed, laid bare, that whatever power the old Gods carried couldn't survive a bullet.

The baylans were effectively silenced, pushed out of public life and rewritten into folklore and superstition. Something to be studied, but not feared. By then, colonization had done what it came to do…it hadn't just taken the land, it had taken root, planting itself in how people saw themselves, generation after generation, until they were left to be forgotten.

As I studied more, and even now, I feel that sacred rage burning in me. Here’s an excerpt of a poem I had written before I had even known of babaylans, entitled Colonizers:

That sacred rage didn't stay buried with my ancestors in centuries past. I feel it when I watch a sister anywhere in the world get dragged for doing nearly any damn thing. I feel it in Lindsay Clancy's trial, hearing a mother in crisis beg a broken system for help while postpartum psychosis went unrecognized until there was nothing left to save (like many before her). I feel it every time postpartum care ends the day you leave the hospital. I feel it every time a leader unfit to hold power gets to keep it anyway. I feel it in the war waged on our food. I feel it in the war on our minds. Endless digital surveillance, the slow destruction of our attention and our mental wellbeing, waged through digital media, through AI. I feel it when mountains are bulldozed to build walls. I feel it when communities of color go without electricity for weeks, and no one bats an eye.

Now, I’m not saying I’m Babaylan but I’m also not saying that I'm not. They may have killed the grandmothers, but they had daughters. And those daughters had daughters, on and on. And right now, all around the world, it feels like those daughters have finally woken up.

I have done my best to steer clear of the Clancy case, but of course, on the day of the eclipse, I fell down the rabbit hole.

I want to say this first, three young children are dead, and nothing about the outcome of this trial will change that. Cora, Dawson, and Callan were failed miserably, and that is horrific. If you’re watching this case and treating it like a “whodunit,” instead of letting their deaths fuel real resolve for postpartum reform and social safety nets for vulnerable mothers, you are part of the problem.

I’m not saying the internet sleuths aren’t making a compelling case. I am saying postpartum mental health crisis is very real. It is clear that Lindsay Clancy was unwell. That she loved her children and wanted to be well. That she asked for help, many times, and was failed repeatedly, every step of the way.

In her story, you can hear the echo of every mother who has ever been hit by the full onslaught of postpartum depression, anxiety, rage, and sometimes psychosis. I hear myself in the readings of her journal. It sounds like every postpartum mother who has ever had a baby that was impossible to soothe. It sounds like every mother anxious about the choices she’s making and how they might affect her baby. Those were the exact things I could have written about my own postpartum experience with my son, who is now a little over two.

I am still actively working through the trauma of his first year. I say this as someone who became addicted to prescription medication and alcohol from age 15 to 19, who quit cold turkey to avoid prison, who struggled with severe depression and has been suicidal more times than I could count in the first two decades of my life…that first year of Apollo’s life was, hands down, the worst and most excruciating experience I have ever been through. I was mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually grinded to a pulp.

For over 12 months, I didn’t sleep more than two hours, usually more like 45 minutes at a time. A good night was four hours of broken sleep before being woken, again, by a screaming baby. He screamed constantly. We tried everything. He was just generally discontent. He screamed through every car ride when we had other kids to drop off. I sobbed over simple trips to the grocery store because of how stressful every single drive had become. I was on edge 24/7 with constant heart palpitations, constant anxiety, all from the sleep deprivation. I was completely dissociated.

We were in a low spot financially at the time, so there wasn’t money to hire regular help. Both my husband and I were deep in survival mode. He was working overnight shifts at the hospital to get us back on our feet financially, which meant he wasn’t sleeping either. I had no real support for most of that time.

Unless you have had a difficult baby, you have no clue what that particular brand of hell is like. And when I tried to tell people what was happening, it was met with something like, “Haha, that’s parenthood for ya!” My response was something like…No, I am drowning from sleep deprivation. I am deeply unwell. But mothers are expected to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. “You chose to have this baby. You’re a bad mother if you can’t get him to stop crying. If you don’t have help, or can’t afford it, you shouldn’t have had a baby.” Jesus Christ, don’t even get me started on the economics of that — the entirety of human civilization would collapse if every parent had to wait until they could personally afford to outsource every single form of care it actually takes to raise a child in this country, let alone give birth in it.

Very little support was given, but fortunately, there were a few people who actually heard me, and came to give me a reprieve, so I could sleep and attempt to function another day. The people who showed up? Mothers.

Looking back at that year with a clearer head, I can tell you I hit at least three of the four recognized postpartum conditions, without ever once being screened for a single one of them, even though I said so, out loud, to people close to me and to medical professionals, more than once. Postpartum rage affects an estimated 21% to 31% of mothers or roughly 1 in 4. Postpartum anxiety hits 17% to 20%, about 1 in 5. Postpartum depression sits at 10% to 20%, close to 1 in 7. Those three overlap constantly; postpartum rage is rarely its own standalone diagnosis, it’s usually what anxiety and depression look like once a nervous system running on no sleep finally snaps. Psychosis is the separate, rarer one affecting 1 to 2 in every 1,000 births, and is a full break from reality that requires immediate hospitalization. But rage, anxiety, and depression aren’t rare, they’re close to a coin flip for every woman leaving a delivery room.

It’s unconscionable that when we see someone who is vulnerable and struggling with very real, documented mental health challenges, especially postpartum, we blame them. We make them wrong. I pray to God that neither you, nor anyone you love, ever experiences a mental break. It is hell to be trapped in that place, not knowing if you’ll ever make it out. This society does not make it easy for people to get help. And when we do attempt to get “help,” we see how futile it really is.

Nearly 75% of American mothers with a maternal mental health disorder go completely undiagnosed and untreated. The disparities are worse for Black, Indigenous, and lower-income mothers, who face higher rates and even less access to treatment. Mental health conditions, including suicide and overdose, are now a leading cause of pregnancy-related death in this country. And postpartum psychosis, the condition Clancy’s own experts say was missed in her, isn’t even listed as its own diagnosis in the DSM. When it is caught, treatment works…one line of treatment shows roughly 98% response rates. The tragedy is that almost nobody is trained, or willing, to catch it before it’s too late.

If Lindsay Clancy was struggling badly enough to be hospitalized multiple times, badly enough to be actively saying she was not okay, where the fuck were the grandparents, the sisters, the brothers, the friends, the husband, literally anyone, coming to actually step in to take care of those kids so she could get well?? The truth is, no one wants to be inconvenienced until it’s too late. We are so disconnected from reality that three children are dead (and many more we will never hear about) because people didn’t want to be inconvenienced.

I wrote an article not long ago titled “Just Say You Want Women to Hate Their Bodies.” But I’ve realized it’s not just that. It’s that we live in a country that structurally hates women, and thinks so very little of their experience.

Just so we’re clear…a woman’s entire body gets rearranged. She creates another human life inside her own. She goes through birth (often a terrifying, high-stakes event) then experiences the single most severe hormonal crash a human being can undergo, all while her organs and tissues are still healing, all while she continues to feed and sustain that new life with her own body well past the ten months of pregnancy that came before it. And for that, this country gives her six, maybe eight weeks of maternity leave, if she’s lucky enough to get paid leave at all. It takes up to 18 months, and often longer, for a woman’s body and mind to return to anything resembling normal.

The outcomes track exactly how you’d expect. The U.S. sees roughly 21.1 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births compared to fewer than 5 to 10 across most of Europe. More than two-thirds of U.S. maternal deaths happen in the postpartum period, the exact window where European mothers are getting continuous, home-based medical checkpoints, and American mothers are, for the most part, on their own.

I don’t know what verdict this trial will land on, and at this point, the verdict itself is almost beside the point…it is merely one symptom of a complex, deeply rooted systemic issue.

Nobody wakes up one day and becomes a mother capable of what happened in that house. Something breaks first, slowly, across a thousand small moments where someone could have shown up and didn’t, oftentimes just out of exhaustion, distance, or a plain refusal to be inconvenienced. I know, because I lived on the edge of that same break. I’m not convinced the margin between us was ever as wide as anyone would like to believe.

We are not owed a country that worships motherhood in theory and abandons mothers in practice. We are not owed six weeks of leave and a “you’ve got this, mama.” We are owed the truth. We are owed reform. And every single one of us is owed neighbors, family, and friends willing to be a little bit inconvenienced so the next mother in freefall doesn’t end up on trial for her life, or in the ground with her kids.

This isn’t a rare affliction that struck one unlucky woman in Massachusetts. It’s a slice of the population large enough that when this case broke, the replies filled up with women saying some version of fuck, that could have been me too. I didn’t have a ton of support. I had a difficult baby. I wasn’t sleeping. I was not in my right mind but the world demanded that I be anyway.

That reaction, at that scale, is telling us something we keep refusing to build policy around. We need to treat the postpartum period differently if we actually care about the future of this country, instead of just the optics of caring about it. Somewhere along the way we got so obsessed with individualism…pull yourself up, figure it out, don’t be a burden…that we lost the entire plot of what life is about. Nowhere near enough is done for mothers at the exact moment they are the most physically depleted, the most hormonally unstable, and the most vulnerable they will ever be. That should be the baseline. That should be the standard of care.

This case is a mirror. You can look at the reflection, or you can keep telling yourself this was one isolated tragedy. Lindsay is just one unstable woman, nothing to do with you. I can keep documenting the lack of support. I can keep pointing at the data, the missing home visits, the six weeks of leave, the mother three doors down from you who hasn’t slept in a month and is still smiling in the school pickup line. Or you can actually look in the mirror and see how deeply this is ingrained in you too…in what you expect of mothers, in every “haha, that’s parenthood” you’ve ever said to a woman who was actually pleading for help.

The system built this. We are complicit in it. Look at it, or don’t, but it’s right here, asking us to face it.

For me, the shame associated with this body I inhabit goes back further than I can remember. Somewhere between being a little girl who had just poofed into existence, and becoming a young woman who was taught that the only value she had was in what her body could do. Or rather what could be done to her body.

I remember the childish pudge as an eight year old and the way every single pair of pants I owned scrunched and gaped at the back. My “thunder thighs,” my family would tease not so affectionately. An ass that apparently made everything I wear “slutty,” even when just trying to exist in baggy sweats. But as a kid, I wasn’t trying to be anything. I just happened to have a body. But bodies, it turns out, are never just bodies, not for women.

Capitalism, religion, or really the whole damn patriarchal structure of it all is weighing down the scale of your self-worth. They want you to hate yourself. They need you to or else their whole Ponzi scheme falls apart.

A woman who hates her body is a woman who buys things, injects substances, takes the pills, follows rules, shrinks, and stays manageable.

A woman who loves her body is a nuisance and her self worth must be destroyed.

The cultural messaging is relentless. The heroin chic of the ‘90s said disappear into your low-rise jeans and hip bones to boot. Then came the BBL era, fat injections, thick thighs suddenly celebrated…but only if they’re the right kind, surgically enhanced in all the right places with no cellulite or signs of actual life lived to be found. Kim Kardashian’s curves, aspirational. Yours, not so much. And now the pendulum has swung again, back to thin, except now anyone can participate with a weekly Ozempic shot (and they should if you scroll through social media long enough). Just ignore all the serious health side effects because you’ll soon wither away and your body will be acceptable to all of society!

The goalposts have always moved because you’re never supposed to arrive. You’re supposed to keep chasing.

In my teens, I figured out one thing my body could do, make men (err…boys) want me. And at fifteen, with many other mental health struggles in tandem…it was a survival strategy. I used my body to feel wanted because nobody taught me I had any other value. That carried into my early twenties, this low hum of using how I looked as currency. It took most of my later twenties just to start untangling that.

The biggest shift has come in the last three years and going through pregnancy again. There’s something about growing a person inside you that forces a reckoning. This body that I spent decades criticizing, downright hating, had done something extraordinary. Multiple times. It had held life, rearranged entirely, recovered, changed again. And I started, slowly, to feel something closer to reverence than the hefty resentment I had carried so long.

At some point the cost of hating myself became higher than the cost of trying something else, so I started acting like I loved my body. Dressing like it deserved care. Feeding it from a place of nourishment instead of the familiar cycle: starve, restrict, excess, shame, repeat. Moving, not to change it, but because movement made me feel good and because finally feeling well in my body was a thing I was allowed to want.

The other day, someone approached me confrontationally about what I was wearing. What I was wearing was, not even slightly, inappropriate for the setting. I had been to this same place over thirty times wearing the same exact thing and nobody had ever said a word. Other people around me were showing just as much skin, if not more. And really, the part that got me was I had not been thinking about my body at all. Not even a little. I was just watching my two year old play, having the time of his life.

What felt different this time was that I didn’t apologize, shrink, or reach to cover-up. I told this woman that I heard her and nothing about what I am wearing is going to change. It’s not inappropriate. No one has said anything before. Other people here are wearing the same. So I’m unclear on why I’m being singled out. Also, it’s weird to police women’s bodies so I’m going to go back to soaking in these rays now.

And then I did.

I have been told to cover up more times than I can count. The message is always consistent no matter what I’m wearing. The problem is never the clothing, the problem is the body that I would have the audacity to like.

That particular flavor of policing, cover up, take up less space, stop making people look at you, is just the body version of a broader campaign. It starts early, it’s not so subtle messaging comes from everywhere, and it doesn’t stop.

And what’s wild is it doesn’t have to be this way. We know this because it isn’t this way everywhere.

Go to a beach in Europe. Bodies everywhere. Old ones, soft ones, scarred ones, unshaved ones, and nobody bats an eye. Children grow up seeing what bodies actually look like. They are diverse, impermanent, and totally unremarkable in the best way. A grandmother’s stomach, a man’s chest hair, a woman’s nipples (gasp). Just bodies, being bodies and letting time do their thing to them. The idea that a body is inherently sexual, shameful, and something to manage and conceal is not universal. That’s a choice someone made, and then encoded into our culture, and then handed to us like it was God’s law.

In many European countries, public nudity in appropriate contexts is just another Tuesday at the beach. Children are raised to understand that bodies are not obscene. That seeing a body doesn’t fundamentally damage you. Hear me when I say, nudity and sexuality are not the same thing, and conflating them is the thing that causes harm. It teaches kids that their body is a source of danger, of shame, of something that must be hidden.

What are we so terrified of?

I think we’re terrified of women who aren’t afraid. A woman comfortable in her body, who doesn’t apologize or reach to cover up as soon as an unwarranted remark is made…is totally ungovernable in a way that makes certain systems very nervous. If you’re not ashamed, you can’t be controlled by shame. And shame is the primary tool of this culture that we have all been indoctrinated into.

The American relationship with bodies is so deeply puritanical that we’ve convinced ourselves it’s morality and covering up is modesty. That discomfort with flesh is virtue. That a child who sees a bare breast, the very one that nourished them, is somehow worse off than a child who grows up believing her body is a problem to be solved. We’ll put a bikini on a five year old for the beach but lose our freaking minds over a woman breastfeeding in public. It’s okay to use sex to sell everything from cars, beer, cologne, and hamburgers, but god forbid a woman inhabits her body unapologetically.

Make it make sense?! You can’t. It’s not coherent and it was never meant to be.

Getting older changes things in ways nobody quite prepares you for. Especially as I move further from postpartum. My hormones shifted and my body is doing new and unfamiliar things. What used to be a known science has become a process of starting over. It’s humbling and disorienting, and it would be very easy to slide back into that old relationship with it.

I don’t want to go back there. I’ve worked too hard.

Most days, what body acceptance actually looks like for me now is, I just don’t think about my body much. That’s it. That’s the whole thing! After decades of near-constant monitoring and commentary (my own internal noise, other people’s opinions, the cultural static) I mostly just live in it.

Sometimes I notice my thighs are rubbing together more than usual, or I feel the urge to throw out every piece of fitted clothing I own. Those moments still come but they also pass because who cares. When you make the choice to love your body, it’s not a one and done kind of thing. It’s a practice you have to return to, over and over and over again, all while the world tries to talk you out of it.

But where I’m at now, in this exact body, at this age, having spent too many years on the other side of it…when they tell you to cover up, or eat less, or shrink, or fix it…they are not concerned with your health or wellbeing.

We are all products of this culture: the woman who approached me, the family members, the algorithm, the advertisers, and none of us chose to be raised inside this shame inducing hellscape. But there comes a point where you have to be willing to look at what you’ve been handed and ask who benefits from you believing your body is wrong. To notice that the discomfort you feel about another woman’s body living freely is a signal about what has been done to you, not evidence that she needs to change.

If you’re not willing to do that work, if you’d rather keep policing and pointing and shaming, then just say it. Just say you want women to hate their bodies. At least then we’d know what we’re dealing with.

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I’ve often wondered where my sense of wonder has gone as I watch Apollo rough and tumble his way through the days. I notice my mind immediately darts to cleanliness and safety in most scenarios. Which to be fair, are important to some degree. But there are far more interesting principles to be guided by.

My husband took the boys out of town for the weekend leaving me + my “built in best friend” (as it reads in my most recent Mother’s Day card), aka my now almost high schooler daughter. Along with her friend, we went and saw Obsession. Merely a week after seeing Backrooms. If you haven’t seen these movies, I recommend them, though I can’t put my finger on exactly why. They’re the kind of movies that leave you with a feeling you want to shake immediately. That pull you toward the uncomfortable instead of away from it.

Later that evening, we were running around grabbing burgers, ice cream and other evening essentials, trying to beat a massive storm rolling in, as we hunted and gathered. We get home with the looming thunderheads a couple miles off so I rush to take Nova, our dog, for a quick walk. We live on a nature preserve that begins on a hill and then branches to the left or right. From there, you could see the dark, ominous clouds to one side and the lingering early evening blue, dusky skies to the other. So we quickly set out to ensure her bowels could be emptied for the night.

For those currently parenting toddlers or even those who have had the experience seared into your memory, you know when you’re in the trenches, there is very little space for you. The activities you might enjoy, like sleeping or slow moments or even a quiet corner of your mind are no longer your own. Every moment and thought is constantly consumed with keeping your little gremlin from harming themselves or others, or breaking anything and everything. It requires your most intentional, singularly focused, deep presence. So to have that capacity back even just for the evening…felt momentous.

Me and Nova, we’re walking, and I’m lost in the deep varied green of the trees and how it contrasts with the gray and black of the storm as it begins to overtake the parts where some blueness remained. The cicadas are humming loudly and some creature is traipsing through the brush. The wind is now picking up pretty heavily and I’m still meandering on, noticing the sporadic bikers have long vacated the trail.

This brings to mind a distinct memory of being six years old on the elementary school playground as a storm begins to pick up. Standing alone, looking off in the distance like I’m Helen Hunt in Twister. Wind whipping through my hair as all of the other kids mindlessly scream and chase one another. It was almost as if they were in slow motion as that familiar sense of awe, wonder and excitement, mixed with some fear all bubbled through me.

I wanted to be a storm chaser growing up, though I might have taken it a little too far and became the storm. Storms of any sort, for me, have always produced what the philosophers call a state of ‘sublime’ — an overwhelming experience of greatness that makes us feel our smallness but also increases our reasoning abilities. The atmosphere is on fire, ions swirling, barometric pressure dropping…this really does something for a high sensory seeker like myself (insert neurodivergent diagnosis here).

I’m lost in the experience as the wind starts howling. A murder of crows synchronized, caw from the trees and theatrically take off away from the impending storm as I start to feel the droplets. Small and subtle. I glance up to see the blackness has now overtaken the blue and Nova and I turn to race the clouds back up the trail. And just like that, I’m six years old again, pretending I have to get everyone to safety as an F5 tornado touches down and is moving our way.

My out of runner shape heart beating loudly as we round the corner into our little cove almost colliding with our sweet neighbor standing out admiring the ruckus above. As we make our way to the door, the droplets splat loudly on the concrete and in that moment I am little storm chaser Katie again. Unbrushed hair flying in the wind, dirt lining my feet and a forgotten sense of wonder firing back up.

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Do you feel it? There’s an existential hum that has pervaded every moment, from what I’ve been acutely aware of, for the last three, nearly four years now. I can only assume the whispers of what’s to come have always been there for anyone wise enough to hear. But the elders of our Western world seem to have forgotten …

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This most recent postpartum journey was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. It was suffering. It was bliss. Death. Rebirth. It was all of it. All of the wounds I thought I had so carefully excavated were dug waaay deeper this round.

If you ever start to think you’ve done some healing work, have a baby.

And you really want to find your edge? Or perhaps be thrown off it? Have a baby who is perpetually upset and cannot be soothed (despite the best advice of doctors and deep research/attempts), nor does he sleep because of it.

For over a year and with little to no support, I survived on 2-3 hours of broken sleep a night AT MOST. Far less than what even Navy SEALs have in Hell Week and they break. Not to mention, I had just experienced the most severe hormonal crash one can experience in a lifetime (one that takes nearly two years to recover from) all while my organs had been entirely rearranged and every bit of my life force was being funneled into this tiny human.

Phew, fun times.

But, the one thing that almost always guaranteed quiet, was going for a walk. So multiple times a day I’d toss him in the stroller and off we’d go. When he was old enough, he upgraded to the jogging stroller and little by little, I started to put myself back together. I could barely run a quarter of a mile at first but soon the distance started to add up and I tapped back into the highs I would get when I first started running.

It reminded me of how I got into running in the first place. Over 16 years ago, I was sitting in a court room making all sorts of deals with a God I didn’t even believe in. God if you get me out of this, I’ll turn my life around. I’ll get help. No more drugs and alcohol. Totally straight edge. My lawyer had pulled me aside and basically told me, I might have to do time. Real time. In prison. At age 19.

So, with a body full of involuntary shakes and shivers, I stood before the judge. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I do know that I finally admitted the truth, which was that I was struggling with addiction and I had needed help for a long time. The judge threw me a line that day and not fully understanding the reparations I was about to make over the next 5 years…my immediate thought upon finding out I wasn’t going to prison was that I needed to celebrate by getting fucked up.

That never happened because I immediately started rehab and an intensive drug/alcohol testing protocol. With no quick fixes available to me anymore, I had to find a new way to get that rush of feel good chemicals. Enter ‘recovery-runner girl’ stage left.

Looking back, running has been one of the most consistent things in my adult life. It was there as I moved through sobriety, a tumultuous relationship, first-time motherhood and postpartum experience, moving states, a divorce, eventually starting my own company, and so on. It’s how I’ve navigated the liminal spaces of whoever I was becoming or more aptly put, ‘unbecoming’.

That need to navigate my ‘unbecoming,’ is exactly what landed me here, training for a year of ultras.

If you’re not familiar, ultra-marathons are any distance greater than a marathon. I’ve followed a number of endurance athletes on social media for years and what they’re able to accomplish still astounds me. Think running 250 miles, 32,000 elevation gain, weather conditions variable, all with little to no sleep for multiple days.

But as of late, I’ve found myself getting really excited about this new found edge. What would it mean for me (mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally) to run 30 miles? 50 miles? 100+ miles?

There’s a primal urge that is exponentially satisfied as I push through when my mind tells me to stop…which it does, loudly, convincingly and often. And really, there’s a certain level of masochism involved. A deep, gritty pleasure in the pain of pushing through. Most of our modern world is built to insulate us from even the slightest discomfort, but endurance running forces you to confront it. It’s the alchemy of the “pain cave” (which I’ve barely scratched the surface of) where the ache burns away everything trivial until only the essential parts remain.

The sun beaming down as I sweat amongst the trees, dirt kicked up behind me…I’m transported back to hunter-gatherer days. A remembrance buried somewhere deep in my DNA. Though my current runs turn up very little sustenance, there’s a whole trove of articles and data alluding to our evolution being designed specifically for this. We were built for persistence hunting — an ancient strategy where hunters tracked and chased prey over long distances in the heat until the animal collapsed from exhaustion. We were made to outlast.

Eventually, if you run long enough you might reach a state the French call, la petite mort or the little death, which is often used to describe the sensation post orgasm, but it fits perfectly for how the miles feel when my normal waking consciousness is briefly suspended and I drop into the infinite now…losing my ‘self’ and dissolving back into everything. A brief death that always leaves me feeling a little more alive.

Though this latest dalliance with running came about as a means for survival, it grew into something much bigger, more feral even. A reminder that I don’t just want to endure or survive, I desire deeply to embrace the suffering while remaining whole, heart open and intact (and obviously this expands far beyond running!).

My training, which has mostly been intuitive, open-ended and without much direction up to this point, has finally started to take shape as my fascination with this edge grows. I’m setting an audacious goal to run 100k by the end of 2026, my first 100 miler in early 2027, along with a handful of other ultras starting in February. For the first time in a long time, I feel my capacity expanding again and a whole new frontier opening up before me. I’ve grieved my old life and the comfy version of myself I used to be, and I’m ready to see who I am through this journey.

There’s a moment coming for you (if it hasn’t arrived already) when something inside shakes loose. Not breaks down. Breaks loose. Like a tether snapping, sending you flying off in the ether!

It’s the moment you stop giving a fuck.

Not in a nihilistic, burn-it-all-down way – though I’ve done that many times. But in the…

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I’ve always thought of my grandmother’s death as the moment I developed a severe allergy…

In 2015, intuitively knowing that she was going to die soon, I flew out to be with her for what would be her final days. I was 6+ years removed from drugs and alcohol (and 6+ years into learning how to actually live life) so it was the most conscious I had ever been for someone nearing the end of their life.

When people say grandmother, they often think cute little ol’ granny but that was not my grandmother. She was sun-kissed, bleached blond, and could rock a bikini better than anyone even half her age thanks to daily bike rides and swimming laps. Everywhere we went, people would wave her down and she would hug them, asking knowing questions about the happenings in their lives. Though no saint, she was also materialistic, allergic to jobs, a professional gossip and was always spending money that she didn’t have.

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I’ve spent most of my life running.

And in brief moments, I gather enough awareness to recognize that it has always been me that I’ve been running from.

There’s this perpetual, low-humming fear just beneath our conscious awareness that keeps us from truly settling down, whether it’s in a place, a career or a relationship. Like when a relationship ends, we throw our hands up and write them off, “Oh, they weren’t the right person,” or “The chemistry was off.” And maybe they weren’t and maybe it was. But the real fear most likely didn’t have anything to do with the other person leaving – it was the moment they got close enough to show you the parts of yourself that you’ve desperately been trying to avoid.

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We often run from intimacy, not because we fear the other person, but because we fear the person they are reflecting back to us.

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At certain points in my life, I have acted like a terrible person. In some moments, a monster. My protection mechanisms and defenses would lock into place, preparing for war, even when there wasn't one to be fought.

For a long time, I didn't believe I deserved to be loved, or that I was even capable of it. Everything was polarized. There was no in-betwe…

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Stewarding a life into this world is such a bizarre, all-consuming experience. That woman you used to be? She’s dead. There’s no reviving her, no possibility of it. And this isn’t some doom-and-gloom pronouncement. It’s a powerful and necessary death, found only in giving yourself over to the maelstrom of hormonal shifts, endless …

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There’s a question I’ve been mulling over and working with for the past few years. And I’m sure most people have wrestled with it at some point in their lives.  

How do I know if something is aligned (with my soul) or not?

That job.

That relationship.

That decision.

Usually, it goes one of two ways. We feel fear and don’t move towards it. Or we feel exciteme…

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So…as it turns out, having a baby takes a lot out of you. My wild little boy celebrates his 1st birthday at the end of this month and my brain just kicked on maybe two days ago. I’ve wanted to write so many times but sleep deprivation coupled with a very demanding (tiny) co-worker leaves little space for creativity. 

This isn’t my first rodeo as I have a…

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I’ve started writing this edition many times over the last year, but I couldn’t ever get it to make sense. It was like my voice had gotten lost somehow. Maybe it’s partly because I spend so much time writing for other people or because I’ve been deeply sleep-deprived because of a tiny (now 6-month-old) little babe. 

But I’ve missed sharing the nuanced intricacies and raw bits of myself while simultaneously enjoying being faded into the digital background, immersed in living life – shedding version after version of myself as soon as it no longer fits comfortably. The thought of re-emerging as this newest version of me, one that I barely know feels even more challenging but here goes nothing…

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I have always loved the idea of love in all its forms, but I have also had a completely warped relationship with it. 

What we actually desire from love is intimacy, but we're conditioned to believe that intimacy is reserved only for romantic relationships. I subscribed to this until the past couple of years when I saw it come to life in every single intentional relationship I have, and it only happened when I released the old notion that intimacy could only come from a romantic partner.

I've heard intimacy described as "into me see," and I prefer that to the shallow version of it just being physical. Intimacy is a deep closeness. It is to be seen in your full expression while simultaneously seeing another in their fullness.

My childhood home was chaotic, and that environment instilled in me coping mechanisms that have hindered me for a lot of my life. The relationship modeled to me as love was toxic. I learned that love was painful, that it was abusive, and that it was giving everything you had in exchange for scraps. 

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There is a phenomenon that is hyper-present in the Zeitgeist that we need to talk about. Many of the women I am speaking with are on the receiving end of this particular brand of "quiet abuse," and many of their partners or previous partners are utterly unaware that they are abusive in this way. These Paris Paloma lyrics do a great jo…

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There seems to be a lesson we are learning within the Collective because I’ve been hearing it all around me. I even had to share with my daughter, who has been dealing with bullying and, not to pathologize, but manipulative and sociopathic behavior that seems deeply embedded in our culture.

If you have kids, please check in with them. Create a safe space and listen. The level of things they are dealing with is astounding and completely new. Every humiliation is public and uploaded to TikTok, and no one tries to stop it. They just have their phones out recording.

I digress…but this feeling of “something must be wrong with me because when I show up as myself, people tear me down” is so common. I wish someone had shared what I am about to share with you when I was ten years old, but alas, I don’t think our collective awareness was anywhere near where it is now.

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We all have a dream life. One that is far beyond our wildest imaginations, and yet, most people unconsciously opt for mediocrity. God knows I have. We settle for work, partners, friendships, hobbies, and situations that are “okay” or “good enough” because it feels safe. We (our egos and other internal protective mechanisms) love for us t…

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Nothing like Spotify Wrapped to remind you that you went through it this year. My top song was Sit Around the Fire by Jon Hopkins, Ram Dass, and East Forest if that tells you anything. Thanks to Wrapped, I was also reminded that I listened to it on a loop on July 19th.

My physical health was tanked a month or so prior (which is a whole other story), and then worsened by the ‘vid a few weeks after that. Woo, good times!

The strange thing is, I intuited why everything was unfolding as it was - on a physical level, yes, but deeper than that at the spiritual development level.

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Please note, when I reference higher self, inner knowing, intuition, or God, for me, it means the same thing. Use whatever context makes sense for you.

I used to daydream about doing what I actually wanted to do and being who I truly was without constantly worrying about and contorting myself into what I thought people wa…

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