welcome back to what’s helpin’ — a collection of small things helping me come back to life. may they breath life into yours as well.

onwards—

m

a few field notes:

+ the green zebra tomatoes are a water color splash of yellows and greens

+ the zucchinis are BIG! bigger than big. gigantic, even. it’s very exciting!

+ the backyard is mostly crispy, dead grass. one purple clover is waving in the wind

+ the romas are ripening!

+ the string beans will not be stopped. they are weaving around the lilac above their trellis.

a body ritual:

this might seem simple. that’s the point.

i’m giving you permission to be intentional with just one half hour every day this week. at the same time every day, i want you to take your body on a walk. take the same route every day this week. leave your phone and headphones at home.

go slowly, you have nowhere to be. your only work is to pay attention.

notice what you see as you move.

notice how your legs, belly, lungs, neck, eyes feel.

notice what you smell.

notice what you are tasting.

notice any textures of plants, trees, water, sidewalks- touch them with your hands.

do your best to make absolutely no meaning of these walks. just allow your body to be where it is and experience the world through your senses. if you find yourself focusing on things besides your senses, like work, or a to-do list—come back to your breath and begin noticing again.

a restorative writing practice:

unfortunately for nobody, i am “one of those women” who knows about the moon. i blame things on her. thank her for things. ask her questions. rely on her. i also love to remind people that our bodies are made up so primarily of water that there could be absolutely no feasible way that we were not effected by the moon in some way. i mean, she moves the literal oceans?

this week, on the twelfth, there was an eclipse in the sign of leo. i don’t really know what that means, but someone once told me that an eclipse was a cosmic turning point. and i think i run with that. this eclipse is offering us the space to recon with our egos. it is melting us into our authentic self-expression. and questioning the ways in which we want to show up as leaders in our lives.

i offer you this writing practice with the eclipse close at heart. now, close your eyes and sink into your body, ask yourself gently:

+in what ways do i catch myself constantly performing for approval?

+can i become curious about the rooms i am seeking applause from—instead of judging myself for looking in the wrong ones?

+in what corners of my self can i feel the lights have been dimmed? whether by myself or others.

+what does this dimness feel like in my body? can i describe it? where in the body is this sensation coming from? after naming it, can i offer it compassion?

+make a list of all the things in your life that invite you back into the light—where your creativity, heartfelt self-worth, and unbridled play are paramount.

+how might you incorporate one of those things into your week this week?

remember to allow yourself to answer with openness. don’t edit. try not to judge. allow whatever flows onto the page to surprise you. witness yourself.

ps. if you’re looking for a journal to hold this heavy work—wilde house paper is perfect.

a deeper reading:

so much of the healing that i experience flows through me from the books that i read. i’m not sure if anyone else has this kind of enspirited relationship with books but somehow, they seem to show up at exactly the right time in increasingly magical ways.

this month, i’m focusing on francis weller’s book: the wild edge of sorrow. this is one of those books that i will look back on and think, that changed the course of my life. this book is overflowing with compassion, oozing with wisdom, and absolutely enlivened by spirituality. if i were in charge of anything, this book would be required reading.

friends don’t let their friends by books on amazon, so get these on bookshop.org for 20% off using this link here: support independent bookstores

magic words:

a few weeks ago, a friend and i were raging over the way discipline has been weaponized against us to the point that nobody has any agency over their own lives anymore. somehow, we see our shortcomings, or, the things we haven’t learned to do yet, as a failure.

but then, ann patchet reminded us that discipline and disciple share the same Latin root. discipulus, meaning “pupil” or “student.”

when we understand that a disciple is someone who learns from a teacher and works to share the daily habits of a mentor they respect. that the word habit, is linked to the word habitare, meaning to dwell. then we can understand that it is not discipline we are lacking but the devotion to ourselves as a disciple of the spaces we want to dwell inside of.

the homes we wish to inhabit.

how loving this devotion.

a little support

a project has fallen into my lap and burst open my heart. my grandfather turned 94 last week. he has chosen to honor me with his life story as he nears the end of his years. together, we’ve been working on both a timeline and a narrative of his life including anecdotes and personal archives of photos and other bobs he’s collected over his lifetime.

he will never know what this experience means to me.

here’s a tiny piece of one of the transcripts of one of our conversations:

until next month, may you find one thing worth paying attention to—

with so much love,

m

-Ocean Vuong

I am wary of my father as he sits across from me at the high-top table near the bathroom. His hair seems more gray than the last time I saw him but his eyes, brighter, in a way I can’t quite place. It is the third time I’ve seen him since sending the letters to my mother and brother and the first that I feel a sort of acceptance over losing my family completely.

I’m trying to keep my self inside of the body that sits across from him. Aching to breath. Straining to hold my seat so I can say the things little me needs me to. His words are as deafening as the last year of his silence. It would have just been so much easier if you’d said something when you were a kid.

I let him talk first. My edges are slip fast.

I’m so sorry that this happened to you, he begins. I know that there was no way you could have had the language to tell.

I whisper, “thank you.”

I ask him the questions I’d written in my journal on Saturday morning, then rehearsed in the shower on Sunday, then repeated in the car on the way there. I know how he is going to answer them, but I ask anyway. He does not say what I think he will. The shock kicks me out of my body entirely without ceremony and I look down on the crystallized edges I had sharpened that weekend in preparation for the loss. It feels like someone is pouring ice cold water over top of my head while the rest of me burns from the souls of my feet up, up, up.

I am numb all over.

The pepperoni pizza between us grows cold and I slug on my lunch beer.

“Anything, anything,” I beg, silently, “keep me in this numbness.”

I thought that seeing my dad for the first time after sharing what had happened to me as a child and then as a teenager would be the hardest part. Invisibility was the safest place. The way it worked in the gnarled knuckles of my psyche was this:

He knew me as one thing and now, he knew me as something else.

Would his eyes on me in the after make me the monster I still believed myself to be? Had I—all this time—been rejecting his tenderness out of fear that it was the very proof reflecting back to me that I was ruined?

I wish I could say that I remember more of the conversation. Instead, I can tell you that the plaque for the bathroom was stuck to a stained two-by-four with knots that looked back at me with unblinking eyes. The wood was golden, in need of a refinish. The sign’s edges were ridged and five-ply, sides textured like pages of a book. It was new, ish, maybe three years old, if I had to guess, based on the very thin layer of grime that shone off the matte gray when I shifted in my chair. My dad kept looking over to see what I was staring at.

I had been protecting little me for as long as I could remember. Had kept myself safe inside the idea that my parents resented me as proof that what happened to me had made me unlovable. To be seen inside the story I had built around myself to survive was aching and stark.

Days later, without telling me, my partner would talk with my dad about the year we had just lived through. The aftermath, the estrangement, the grief. Sometimes, men can only hear what other men are saying.

I’m in her corner one hundred percent, my partner said.

So am I, my dad said back.

Somewhere, there is a girl, lying stock still in a twin bed in her basement bedroom, holding her breath. She has learned that nobody will come when she cries. She just waits and listens. She is not worth saving.

So she must not be worth loving, either.

She does not know that one day she will be seen so entirely and loved so completely by another person that they will speak on behalf of her to the people she most fears being seen by.

She does not know that this gift that her partner has given her will illuminate the pitch of her life in a way that shines light into the blindness of her own collusion in experiencing only things that prove her unlovability.

She does not know that she will spend her life controlling everything around her like some grand puppeteer, only to be given the proof that she was lovable the whole time in a way she could not have dreamed if she’d tried.

And at twenty-two, when she flees to the west to save her own life, she will be given a hand-bound book with the line from Mary Oliver:

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Not knowing that the unimaginable would be the exquisite loss of control over the strings of her own life.

And the thread that would stitch her back into the joyful web of the family of all things—

bitterness turned to honey on her tongue.

i read somewhere, online probably,
after midnight that gardening can
help with depression. so i caught
my mania in a butterfly net and
wrangled it into two, two by four
raised beds in the corner of the yard
next to the peeling, gray-wood fence
and the leaning over lilac.

my lover and i, with muddy spring
fingers filled each tub with earth
then water then earth then water.
then i asked the women that i trust,
“what should i grow?”
while my grief built thunderheads
on the eastern horizon,
my depression called, “down here!”

a younger me would have said,
“not to brag but i can’t keep anything
alive” so no love could find me there
but all this grief has made me wild.

so i sow my seeds
with grandmother hands
with a tiny, tender hope
with a whispered prayer for their burial—

live. live. live.

and then i wait,
not entirely trusting
what i can’t see underground
but knowing that i’ve been

putting my faith in
the darkness since before
i’d lost my baby teeth.
and i wait

and i water and i cover when
the frost comes and
i say things like
“my garden is so happy” when it rains

and then the first reaching bean sprout
blasts its head from the churned, brown
earth as if to say,
“up here!”

and in her image i remember the greek,
blastano: meaning, to germinate—
meaning this sprout is in the process
of making room for all that is to come.

there is a rhythm to the tending so i hum
the song the plants are singing, not catching
the tiny growth spurts until the tomatoes are
tickling my belly one morning in july
and i am singing their song by heart.

who would water the garden? walk the dog?
sweep the porch? depression demands so much
attention on everything but those things we
call normal but we also call a life.

it’s august, so the sun golds and sweet millions
are growing sweet on the vine. the most delicious
part of growing tomatoes is not what you might think.
though, yes, biting into a ray-warmed gusher is
exquisite—giving a bowl to someone without a garden
of their own is even better.

by now, i see that in devotion to this tiny
bit of land, this wild grief has ripened
into something nourishing
enough to give joy as a gift.

**blastano: meaning, to germinate, in the process of making room for all that is to come. - this beautiful idea comes from Abigail Rose Clark and her book Returning Home to Our Bodies: Chapter: The Somatics of Trees

all my love,

m

welcome back to what’s helpin’ — a collection of small things helping me come back to life. may they breath life into yours as well.

onwards—

m

a few field notes:
+ the peas have outgrown their trellis and are reaching for the lilac tree overhead
+ kale, lettuces, mint, and radishes have all been harvested and continued to bloom
+ the rain has kept the rivers from dropping to seasonal lows, the valley is green, green
+ all tomato plants have fruit on them, except the romas—i trust in their becoming
+ zucchini leaves are larger than my head, nasturtium leaves larger than my hand

+++

a body ritual:
when we experience sexual trauma, whether as a child, adolescent, or adult—we become estranged from the safety of our own bodies. it can take years to reclaim a sense of sovereignty inside of ourselves. it is safer to deny our own pleasure than it is to open ourselves up to the possibility of harm. avoidance becomes a delicious game of self-isolation that pulls us out of relationship with everything good. after all, we cannot be selectively numb.

it has taken years, hundreds of hours of therapy, and a very patient partner for me to be able to enjoy sex after experiencing sexual abuse in my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. the trust that i have built with my partner is absolutely part of the magic that has aided in my healing, but my own relationship with my body has changed the most.

there is a slowness essential to this kind of healing process. let it be tender.

so why talk about sex?

put simply, in this most recent season of grief, it became glaringly obvious to me that in every way i could cut pleasure out of my life—i did. i felt like i was falling backwards into patterns that were familiar to an old version of myself. i was losing touch with my body and it’s sensations left and right. i was freezing over to get through the pain.

as i move towards a life that honors this grief, allows space for a deeper tenderness, and opens my heart to love instead of the expectation of loss—i have learned that i need to be in touch with my body. in contact with my feeling self.

we experience touch through our bodies. when we touch something, it touches us back. to remind myself of all the delicious sensations in my body outside of the pain and numbness, i have introduced a practice of self-touch this month.

working from my feet to the top of my head, it goes like this.

with a dry brush, i work in short soft brushes from my feet up towards my hips, touching all sides of my legs. then, i do the same for my stomach, back, arms, and chest. on each stroke, i am focused on the sensation of the brush as it wakens my skin. i notice how my skin prickles when the brushing is done.

next, i use the osea undaria algae body oil and rub this elixir into my skin from ankles to chest. again, going slowly. paying attention to the warmth of my hands, the sureness of their movements, and anywhere i might feel tenderness on my body. as my hands touch my body, my body touches my hands. there is a togetherness in this connection and in the attention i use to inhabit these sensations.

next, i spend a moment looking in the mirror at my face. as someone who has struggled with acne her whole life, this has often been anxiety inducing. however, since holding the boundary of estrangement with my family, my complexion has become less breakout prone and brighter. the irony isn’t lost on me. using the mad hippie antioxidant face oil and a rose quarts gua sha, i then move through a facial massage offering love to my face, eyes, lips, nose, and any breakouts. i offer my lungs a deep breath after each section is finished.

finally, i brush out my hair. one of the deepest forms of intimacy i’ve experienced at the hands of other women, is hair brushing. their is something ancient about the movement. i take the time to work through every tangle with care until the gold is shining through next to the silver.

each movement allows me to feel connected to my body in a way that offers intimacy without sexual touching. as i return to the sensations of my body, i return to a deeper experience of my self.

+++

a restorative writing practice:
find a quiet place with your notebook and pen. offer yourself the space to move through these questions with openness. keep writing and try not to edit yourself.

close your eyes and sink into your body, ask yourself gently:

what have you been conditioned to protect other people from at the expense of your own safety?

what does it feel like to finally say this out loud?

what sensations are coming up in your body after acknowledging this truth?

imagine a younger version of yourself is sitting across from you—just witness her, then finish these sentences:
+it was never your job to…
+you deserved…
+i want you to know…
+from now on…

what would it look like to stop protecting everyone else… and begin protecting yourself instead?

allow whatever comes up through these prompts to be enough. there is no goal of this writing but to witness ourself. to recognize the places we’ve been so zoomed in on that we might let go of our grip.

ps. if you’re looking for a journal to hold this heavy work—wilde house paper is perfect.

+++

a deeper reading:
so much of the healing that i experience flows through me from the books that i read. i’m not sure if anyone else has this kind of enspirited relationship with books but somehow, they seem to show up at exactly the right time in increasingly magical ways. this month, abigail rose clark’s returning home to our bodies and kelly mcdaniel’s mother hunger, are the texts i keep returning to when i’m feeling adrift in the grief, disconnected from the collective, or teetering somewhere on the edge.

friends don’t let their friends by books on amazon, so get these on bookshop.org for 20% off using this link here: support independent bookstores

+++

magic words:

deepening into the power of language this month has been essential for me as i enter into new relationships with my estranged body and work to reconnect with parts of myself that have gotten lost in the grief.

in abigail rose clark’s book—returning home to our bodies—she refers to words as spells and spends time exploring the origin of the words we have used to name our bodies. i want to offer you a few powerful words (or spells) in her words to explore as you constellate yourself into these greater webs of connection this month.

somatics

“somatic comes from the greek soma, meaning, “of the body” or “of the whole body.” in comparison, anatomy comes from the latin ana, to cut, and tomia, pieces. literally, “to cut into pieces” somatics focuses on the whole; anatomy focuses on the parts.… in somatic practice the whole is always the set point. we study the parts to better return to the whole; we study the various systems of the body like they are watersheds and mountain ranges, unable to be completely isolated from the whole that contains them if they are to be thoroughly understood.” (from chapter 2: language for a living practice)

i offer you this word as a touchstone in the online world we live in where words like “somatic therapy” and “somatic practice” are thrown around to help us “heal our nervous systems” etc. it’s all very nebulous, don’t you think? might this touchstone give you pause any time you see someone trying to sell yourself back to you. might this touchstone remind you that if you are experiencing pain in a part of your body, tending to that pain is an offering of balance towards the whole. might this touchstone remind you that you are made of rivers and mountains and moon dust and sunlight—an entirely interconnected web of relationships exist within the house of your body. you are never truly alone when you remember this.

discomfort

“discomfort contains the word comfort, which comes from the latin confortare, “to strengthen much.” the prefix dis has one of those long and winding histories that linguists love to travel. it can mean “lack” or “not” and so discomfort would be a “lack of comfort,” which would be a “lack of strength…. but travel down the winding path liguists have cleared for us, and dis is related to the latin duo meaning “of two ways.” the word discomfort becomes its own riddle of paradox": discomfort is “two ways of strengthening much.” reading the spell of the word in this way, discomfort is not separate from comfort; it is the mirror image of it. in discomfort, we find comfort, and in comfort, we find discomfort. no separation, but also not the same. much like the cell is not separate from the other cells in the body, but the body is only possible because the cells are not the same.

to recognize our comforts and discomforts as two sides of the same coin might offer us space to reorganize in our fluidity rather than meeting our discomforts with fear and control.

++

a little support:
while reading kelly mcdaniel’s book, mother hunger, i realized there were three major ways i was struggling to show up for myself.

nourishment
protection
guidance

this revelation offered me new insight into the ways that i could be gently giving more to my self without over doing it and ending up even more exhausted than before. because the universe shows up when we do, within a week, i had found an incredible dietician to work with, covered by my insurance (through nourish). a coach that was open to working with me through the summer in order to stay organized and oriented. and i set up a recurring appointment with my long-time therapist who’ve i’ve only seen sporadically over the last few months.

within days, i had gathered a team of women who could offer me nourishment (dietician), protection as i grieve (therapist), and guidance going forward (coach).

the magic is impossible to miss when we open up to it.

until next month, may you find one thing worth paying attention to—

with so much love,

m

** this post contains affiliate links, meaning i may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase at no extra cost to you

years later, the river taught me another language.

by becoming water-literate, i have slowly learned to become body-literate, too.

it’s early june, on the yellowstone river, the cataraft dances over the 5 o’clock glow of the current. oranges, blues, greens, and browns kaleidoscope off the scrolling texture of the river as the sun sinks deeper over the western horizon. at first, the water is hard to read behind the glare—the crests of waves dazzle as they crash into pillows of cascading gleam and the horizon line is dazzling in the way it hides the sloping pour overs lurking just out of my line of sight.

i am glad to know this river well.

my hands grip the rubber oar handles as i push forward with sure, strong, strokes—the little boat shoots forward and carries me with ease through the swells as we move down canyon. my shoulders are screaming—it’s my third lap down the river today and my body isn’t used to the rowing yet. the lactic builds as i navigate the moves of the upper river—the oars are an extension of my arms. i don’t need to tell them what to do, they seem to just know.

i put them both in the water together and push. just the left one for a quick move to the right. the right one a bit deeper than the left to keep my angle. it’s a dance that changes with the water, but the shape of my body remembers.

i move with the river. the river moves with me.

farther down canyon the river looks as though it’s been painted by monet—clay colored, like pouring cider embroidered into motion by honeyed ridges of sun reflected back from where it came. i push down the ramp of water and pick up speed, splitting the recirculating holes at the top of the rapid, i face the nose of my boat towards river right and ride the laterals down, keeping my oars in the water so as to not get thrown off-line. i know exactly where the water is going to push me and exactly when to take two strong pulls on the oars to slide left of the last hole at the exit. i spin around to watch the other boats pass through and the sun warms my back.

put simply, a river is a body of fast moving water flowing at a downward slope. gravity pulls the water down creating the current, rocks and larger boulders make up the riverbed and effect the surface of the water where rapids form. when reading water, the goal is to stay looking downstream and scanning for any potential hazards.

hazards include holes, pour overs, strainers, sieves, or undercut rocks.

as you learn to read water, you learn to identify these hazards and steer your boat to avoid them. steering a boat is a matter of angles. a ferry angle is the angle at which you point your boat that allows you to move horizontally across the current. the slack water sections that line the river banks are called eddies, where the water recirculates upstream and creates a place to rest your boat outside of the current.

there’s never just one right way through a rapid. depending on the guide, the path changes. there is no perfection on the river, only participation. there is no correct line—only the one you see, the one you take, and how you navigate what you meet along the way. often, the safest line is right through the most tumultuous water. trying to avoid the hard line can steer you into even more dangerous hazards.

one thing i’ve learned from guiding is that fear doesn’t disqualify you from being good. if anything, your fear is a reflection of your understanding and respect for the power of what you’re stepping into.

over the years as i have gotten on other rivers, read and run class four rapids, and continued to participate in these relationships with rivers, i have learned that i can stand on the bank and scout a rapid for as long as i want to, but eventually, i have to get back into the boat and push.

when i first learned to read water on the yellowstone, i mostly followed other people. i would try and move my boat exactly like they did. i would second guess. i would go back on commands. i would monitor every choice i made.

i based my own decisions on what everyone else was doing, convinced i couldn’t trust my own perception of the water’s features, my own judgement calls, or strength to get through the rapids.

as a rookie i was told that because, as a woman, i was less strong than the male guides, i would need to learn to read water better. i would need to work with the water instead of against it.

hitting a wave a certain way will either typewriter you all the way into the feature you’re trying to miss, or into the slow moving water behind it by hitting that wave in different ways. you only learn by doing. when features like that show up on other rivers, your body remembers how the river moved you, so you might move with this new water in a way that allows your boat to continue down river.

growing up, i learned that i would need to read my mother’s body language better than anyone else, too. i became aware that looking downstream and anticipating what could happen or what could go wrong could keep my mom’s emotions more balanced. if i stopped asking for help, maybe she would be less overwhelmed.
if i stopped crying for her before bed, maybe she would be nicer to me in the morning.
if i hid all my own big feelings, maybe there would be more space for hers.

the summer i was reading the boxcar children was the same summer i became attuned to the crunching sound of gravel as my mom’s car pulling into the driveway when i hadn’t cleaned the bathroom yet. my mistake would cost me her love for at least a day.

that winter i learned to read the thin line of my mother’s lips and the way they would press together just so before she would go inward, shut down, and then go upstairs to her room and cry. i guess i only knew she was crying because dad said we’d made her cry.

i was afraid to ask my mom if i was allowed to shave my legs, or wear deodorant.

afraid to tell her when i got my period.

my family could win an award for looking the other way.

hyper vigilance became my invisibility cloak.

—

years later, i am learning that there are many other ways to read the world.

photo by the beautiful maisy hoffman on the lochsa river in idaho <3

thank you for walking beside me as i learn the language of my own rivers. i hope you find some language here to navigate yours.

all my love,

mimi

-mary oliver

when you finally say the thing out loud, you do not feel the liberation you expect. after a while, you will even begin to convince yourself that it wasn’t that bad. when the flashbacks finally go away, you will think you must be making it up because your brain is no longer forcing you to remember. you think how much easier it would be if you really did make it up. you could go to your family and say, whoopsie, what a mistake i have made! and they would be glad you’ve finally come to your senses and you could all forget the way they chose to protect the cycle over their own daughter.

yes. that.

would be much easier than this.

the yellowstone river is the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48 states—her headwaters begin in run-off springs high in the absorka mountain range cascading into yellowstone lake—for almost 700 miles this water pours north, embroidering paradise valley, montana in braided channels before culminating into a high-volume waterway flowing into north dakota where it meets the missouri river and one day empties to the atlantic.

said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

you are likely carrying grief that will be a part of you forever.

i don’t say this to deter you from feeling it, working with it, or moving with it. but i caution you in believing that one day you will be healed from the things that happened and free of the shadows that dance in your periphery.

linearity has been sold to us as the way through.

lately, i’ve been wondering if the way through is the only way because there is no way out. one day, maybe, the water of our life’s river meets the sea and instead of spending our lives trying to get rid of the ache, our life just gets bigger than that hurt ever could be.

said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

in 2022, the yellowstone river surged in an extraordinary flood where water levels exceeded all previously recorded streamflow maximums. roads were destroyed, houses pulled from the river banks, and the contours of the surrounding landscapes were redrawn in the receding floodwater. in her wildness, the yellowstone river and her tributaries were at once transformed and transformative. in a flood, water overflow seeks out new ways downstream, moves massive amounts of sediment and gravel, and rearranges terrain. like forest fires are for forests, floods are an essential part of a healthy river’s ecosystem.

the riparian areas of these riverbanks are essential landscapes for ecological diversity. cottonwood and willow trees line these areas and can only seed new trees when the soil is richly damp and sandy—new life thriving only after floods. healthier trees means cleaner water, means stronger fish, means more nesting birds, means richer air.

what at first glance seems devastating is, when looked at through the eyes of ecology, the beginnings of a more interconnected way of being between species.

humans are the only species we know asking for resolution.

the river asks only for new ways of knowing the depths of our relationships.

said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

i have not fully stopped looking for closure. there are days when i still catch myself dreaming of that one day in the perpetually near future when the heartbreak is less sharp. and most days, it is.

while floating the blackfoot river last week, it took until the sun dipped over the ponderosa pine speckled horizon line to realize i had spent all day watching the silty blue green water flow over the rainbow rocks and the light rippling off the waves winking gold dust through the shoreline willows—not drowning in the hurt of it all.

when my hands gripped the hot rubber oars and i angled us out into the current, my whole body flexed against the power of the water and in two strong pulls, we were moving downstream. i understand then, that the opposite of closure is not grief but participation.

as i move my boat through the flow i feel the sun lapping at my skin, the familiar roar of streaming water seems to sing into my own blood. i am enrivered with the spirit of this place. the bilateral paddling lulls me into a dreamlike energy. inside the enchantment i think,

if i am an oar, let me never forget what i can do.

said the river: imagine everything you can and then keep going.

thank you for walking beside me as i learn the language of my own rivers. i hope you find some language here to navigate yours.

all my love,
mimi

after a breast reduction consultation on wednesday, i thought i would feel a sense of elation and excitement for what was to come. instead, a brain fog set in so heavy, i was almost paralyzed by it.

soon after the appointment, my period came.

right on time, but with a different kind of pain than i was used to. my womb bulged with the familiar feeling of fingernails being raked along the insides.

but then my hips began to ache—dull and deep and radiating down the outsides of my legs. my lower back felt heavy and hard to hold. the sciatica that i have been dealing with since february turned into pins and needles down my whole backside. my arms became tender to the touch and in my wrists, a stabbing sensation kept me from attempting to lift or move anything. a dull headband headache made it hard to keep my eyes open.

i was irritable in a way that felt fragile, as if, i was a hurt animal trying to lick its wounds in a bush so my predators could not hear me crying. the pain was confusing and frustrating.

down into the spiral i went.

when have i ever felt good in my life?

when was the last time i had one day that i wasn’t in pain?

will i ever feel good again?

am i worth loving if i am this broken?

and on and on and on.

* * *

once, on our second to last day down the colorado river in the grand canyon, my partner and i got off-line in a big wave train and ended up in a roiling eddy on the right side of the river. all five of the other boats and the kayakers had ended up either staying in the wave train or getting bumped left. the eddy line was strong as it butted up against six-foot waves that curled in breaks towards the left.

at the bottom, a towering, sandstone boulder caught the current in a pillowing wave. the perfect pin-rock.

about ten feet from the top of the eddy was a smaller rock, peaking out just enough to get a boat caught. it proved impossible to get around.

my partner tried getting us out first. he set the nose of the boat near the shore and pulled us up towards the top of the eddy, just below the smaller rock. trying as hard as he could to keep his upstream angle, his arms flexed against the oars. as soon as the back of our boat hit the current, we spun like a tiny top back into the eddy.

over and over and over we tried. Him, then me, then him, then me.

once, we even sat face to face, all four of our hands gripping the hot black rubber of the oars. Him pulling me pushing back and forth to try to get as much power as we could.

still, we ended up in the eddy.

we screamed at the water.

at the rocks.

at the sky.

at each other.

we had been stuck almost an hour. our crew was long gone downstream.

after what felt like our hundredth try, we sat panting in the heat of the august afternoon. our whole bodies trembled as we looked up and down the river for something we hadn’t yet tried. some other avenue. we could smell the fear on one another.

then, seemingly at the same time we looked at the pin rock at the bottom of the eddy and watched the pillowing wave flush. our ticket out. the water had been telling us the whole time, we just hadn’t slowed down enough to listen. of course, we couldn’t fight the current.

we cued up one more time at the top of the eddy, my partner pulled, keeping us in a delicate duet with the line. i got on the downstream side of the boat near the bow and wedged my thighs between the frame and the floor and stretched towards the boulder from my waist—we were headed broadside into the rock and just as the left-side front tube crashed into the rock, i pushed off as hard as i could, spinning us down stream and back into the current.

our crew had been right there waiting for us the whole time.

we had just been too focused on ourselves to know it.

* * *

after finally taking some ibuprofen, the grip that the pain had taken over me began to wiggle free. i began crying from the familiar wound that i hadn’t realized would open after a breast reduction consultation.

i wanted my mom. but just, not MY mom.

i needed a woman who could hear exactly what i was saying and understand from a place of unconditional love. a lap to rest my head in. sure fingers to comb through my hair. a steady voice saying, we don’t have to decide anything right now. to know that i wasn’t alone.

my period wasn’t so painful as was the grief of feeling hungry for a mother i do not have.

i curled up on the couch with the dog pressed into my chest and took the rest my body had been begging me for all day.

grief has a way of spiraling back on itself until we can slow down enough to listen to where it is leading us.

when i stay open to the possibility of grief as a fluid and changing thing, i am less likely to become frozen in the fear of that pain pulling me under. instead of isolating myself inside of the ache— i texted my girlfriends and asked for help.

their reassurance is the soft lap where i lay my head. their understanding, the sure hands braiding my hair.

their reminders of, “you don’t have to make a decision right now,” my reorientation back towards participating in the relationships i do have, instead of hiding inside of the grief of the ones i don’t.

* * *
my crew was just around the corner the whole time.

i think maybe healing has never been about erasing the wound, but learning how to remain in relationship with what hurts without abandoning ourselves in the process.

thank you for walking beside me as i learn the language of my own rivers. i hope you find some language here to navigate yours.

all my love,

mimi

in the spirit of connectedness, community, and the knowing that sometimes, we just need someone to tell us: this is helping right now—i’m adding a monthly letter here on touchstones called: what’s helpin’

this is going to be a simple, round-up style letter that offers my own field notes from a toes in the dirt life being rebuilt and constellated inside of while navigating trauma, estrangement, and grief.

field notes:
the peas have grown over two inches this week.
i harvested my first stalks of kale on sunday.
the rivers peaked in volume ten days ago.
three strawberries have begun to ripen.
the nasturtium are starting to climb with gentle training.
i have identified three different types of grasses on the trail i walk daily.

rituals:
in sophie strand’s memoir: the body is a doorway, she shares a morning practice that has turned into a relational prayer. i have adopted it as a prayer of my own while moving into summer and it looks something like this.

each morning when i wake, i step outside as soon as possible, even in the rain. i address every living being i can see from where i stand with my feet in the wet grass. there is the giant spruce, the lilac trees, the mountain ash, and apple trees.

there is the grass i am standing in, the robins, the magpies, the mourning dove, and chickadees. my dog.

now, there are the radishes, carrots, peas, pole beans, tomatoes, marigolds, zucchini, kale, lettuce, chard, onions, shallots, cucumbers, strawberries, nasturtium, chamomile, yarrow, basil, and parsley.

i take special care not to forget about the beings we so readily write off as inanimate—there is the sky, the morning stars, often the moon still shining, the sun rising over the spruce, the clouds. i turn to say good morning to the little house i live in and love.

and finally, i turn upon my own body, and begin to say hello. i say it all out loud and move my body as i do. good morning feet. good morning legs. good morning back. good morning womb. good morning belly. good morning arms. good morning chest. good morning lungs. good morning hands. good morning heart. good morning head. good morning mind. good morning spirit.

to call all of these beings by name invites me into relationship with the entire animacy of the world as i am experiencing as soon as i am up and moving. after, my whole body buzzes with aliveness. my awareness has roamed over every inch of my self. now, i can choose to embody that perception however deeply my participation will allow today. by addressing all of the beings that my body is constellated with allows me to remember my family in the place of all things before i lose myself in the nebulous screen world we have been conditioned to live within.

suddenly i see how the gold in my hair is enlightened by the rays of sun. how my blood rushes like the river. how my own morning song mingles with the birds. who’s to say this life matters more than all the other beings intermingling in this ecosystem? what could i learn from this kind of relational embodiment?

restorative writing practice:
find a quiet place with your notebook and pen. offer yourself the space to move through these questions with openness. keep writing and try not to edit yourself.

close your eyes and sink into your body, ask yourself gently:

what is the one thing i can’t seem to ever “fix” about myself?

why do i want so badly to “fix” this part of me?

when did i learn that this part of me was “broken”?

what would it mean if i didn’t have to spend all of this time trying to fix this brokenness?

what if this ache never goes away?

allow whatever comes up through these prompts to be enough. there is no goal of this writing but to witness ourself. to recognize the places we’ve been so zoomed in on that we might let go of our grip.

reading:
so much of the healing that i experience flows through me from the books that i read. i’m not sure if anyone else has this kind of enspirited relationship with books but somehow, they seem to show up at exactly the right time in increasingly magical ways. this month, lisa olivera’s when the ache remains and sophie strand’s the body is a doorway, are the texts i keep returning to when i’m feeling adrift in the grief, disconnected from the collective, or teetering somewhere on the edge.

friends don’t let their friends by books on amazon, so get these on bookshop.org for 20% off using this link here: support independent bookstores

magic words:

my hope with this monthly letter is that you can begin building your own practices of relationality within the ecosystems you live inside. whether that means more days than not you take your coffee outside instead of staring at your phone when you wake up. or, walking the same path each day without headphones and paying attention to the ways the landscape changes over the course of a week, a month, or even a year.

one of the most powerful tools we have as humans for nurturing these relationships is the language we use to talk about them. i want to offer you a few powerful words to explore as you constellate yourself into these greater webs of connection.

grammar - in robert mcfarlane’s, is the river alive, he explores the power that our language has to put in into relationship with the animate world we live in. he writes,

“grammar is that which orders the relations between things… in middle english, ‘grammar’ also meant ‘magic’— a grammarye was a book of spells or sorcery. a good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. to imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. new possibilities of encounter emerge—and loneliness retreats a step or two.”

just like when i address all living things in my backyard and each part of my body—using this grammar to acknowledge this kinship enchants those connections further into a sense of true aliveness.

spell - david abram explores how human language and writing has developed inside of the natural world over centuries. his book, the spell of the sensuous, encourages a grammar of animacy, too.

he writes, “to spell, to correctly arrange the letters to form a name or a phrase, seemed thus at the same time to cast a spell, to exert a new and lasting power over the things spelled. yet we can now realize that to learn to spell was also and more profoundly, to step under the influence of the written letters ourselves, to cast a spell upon our own senses. it was to exchange the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world for the more concentrated and refined magic of the written world.”

language has always felt enspirited to me in a way that is beyond my own explanation—this understanding of the meaning of spell is part of the explanation i’ve been searching for. to be under the spell of our relational ecology is to be in relationship with them in new ways and therefor moved by that reorientation.

support:
i get a lot of dm’s on tiktok asking where to even start with this kind of work. people share about their deep grief, the experiences they have survived, and the ways in which they feel they are broken. the bravery with which they share is unmatched. i am left always in awe of the courage that this community carries with them daily.

when i get messages like this, i am reminded that when we are traumatized, one of our biggest fears is going it alone. one of the biggest things that reminds me that i’ve never been doing this alone is my therapist. my relationship with her is one i return to no matter the season of my life, no matter the issue that is coming up for me.

when i get dm’s like the one’s i mentioned earlier, my first suggestion is always a relational return through therapy. finding a licensed therapist who can begin holding space for you and unpacking the layers of trauma that have built up over the years is one of the first steps in participating in your life again. it’s the first place you can acknowledge, hi, i need some help.

over the past few months, i have been working with rebound health. they are an online resource to find licensed trauma therapists in all 50 states and they take most major insurance companies. if you’re looking for somewhere to start finding some professional help, rebound can help you get there.

until next month, may you find one thing worth paying attention to—

with so much love,

m

i’m careful not to lean too hard into the shovel and take extra time to bear down my core muscles before lifting so i don’t add extra stress to the sciatica that has been plaguing me since february. i’ve never once had a garden but i seem to be possessed by some backyard mother who is insisting i grow peas from seed, harvest my own lettuce, and grow juicy, fat tomatoes on the porch.

what i don’t realize until weeks later is that this is the same part of me that is orienting my springtime body towards learning the names for the birds in the backyard where my garden grows. and listening for the robin’s distress calls as they chase the magpies out of the lilac trees or the chickadee’s sing-songs as they munch seeds from the feeder or the drumming of the downy woodpecker on the telephone pole.

this is the same part of me that can’t stop paying attention to the emergent bloom patterns of the springtime wildflowers—from the shooting star-like glacier lilies, to the sly trillium who poke out in the underbrush, to the fireworks display of the arrowleaf balsamroot that seem in a race to cover the hillsides of local hiking trails, to the fresh scent of the new sage growth on cooler, overcast mornings, and the sticky unfurling of purple lupine.

the same inner voice that is calling me back to the river in reverence.

as i allow the rigidity of winter and the last semester to melt away into the oncoming summer, i recognize all the ways i have been cutting myself off from the connections of all things. from choosing screen time over time on the trail. to wearing headphones instead of listening for the tinkling wind in the aspens that are just now growing out their fresh, tender leaves, glittering like quarters. from bailing on plans once again instead of showing up when i don’t feel “good enough,” to the nights i chose to cry silently next to my sleeping partner instead of waking him up to hold me.

each day i spend waking up with sun in my eyes to water my garden, or refill the bird feeder, or to stop and smell the same lilac on the way to work—is orienting me back towards connectivity. not only to other human beings but to the natural community i live inside of, too.

i am in no rush to unfurl.

i know my own roots are growing into the places i return to again and again, like a network of mycelia that i can’t see but can feel as their energy links me back into relationality.

when we become estranged from our families, in a sense, we become estranged from ourselves. even just the language of estrangement is disorienting. if we look back to the old french roots of the word; estrangier, meaning: to treat as a stranger. or the webster’s dictionary definition that lists the word alienate as synonymous, meaning: to make something or someone other.

to make something “other” creates a boundary for empathy. yet, what stumps me in my own estrangement is how i can “other” my mother when i was created inside of her body. was made from her. does othering her mean othering myself? or is this boundary that sits as a barrier between us offering a chrysalis for our entwined hurts to be alchemized into a metamorphic relationship entirely different than what we’ve known?

perhaps this return to relational living that seems to be aiding in my own unfurling into nature is the reorientation i require to conceptualize a new kind of relationship with my own family. or, to see that i’ve never once been as alone as i feel i have been. but rather, i am a node in the constellation of the living web of human and non-human beings that coexist in the ecosystems we share.

lisa olivera writes of weaving the web of support in her book when the ache remains. she says, “but the work it takes to unlearn doing it all alone and giving yourself over to togetherness is worth the relief of remembering you’re inherently part of the human and nonhuman family. the work it takes to unravel from aloneness is worth the gift of feeling witness, of witnessing others, of finding shared humanity.”

perhaps, my estrangement from my family is an essential piece for quieting the scream of hyper-individualism and going-it-alone culture. perhaps, it is in this new quiet that i can listen for the ways that i might belong in this world, among all things. like mary oliver writes, “the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

perhaps, estrangement has not only been a breaking apart, but a reorientation toward the wider ecosystems of care, grief, and belonging that have always existed beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family. perhaps, this perspective could offer all of us a step in the direction of understanding ourselves within the family of all things.

in closing, i want to remind you that the ways we tend to our village do not have to be grand. there is simplicity in raising our awareness to the ecosystems of care that are already surrounding us. and leaning in. tiny things like, covering up your seedling plants before a springtime freeze, or caring for your neighbors herb starts while they are on vacation, or having a friend mend your pants to keep them in rotation instead of buying something new.

maybe healing has never been about erasing the wound, but learning how to remain in relationship with what hurts without abandoning ourselves in the process.

thank you for walking beside me as i learn the language of my own rivers and gardens. i hope you find some language here to navigate yours.

all my love,
mimi

spindly lodge pole pines litter the steep hillsides of the winding canyon, punctuated by craggy aretes of gneiss that shoot skyward into the low hanging mists of cloud. it’s spitting rain and 40 degrees.

i’m driving south towards a fishing access point on the gallatin river called moose flats, where i’ll spend the weekend in a swiftwater rescue class. swimming, throwing ropes, and practicing whitewater rescue scenarios. it isn’t the first time i’ve taken this class.

on an early may morning in 2018—my car was packed with everything i thought i might need to move to montana and learn to be a river guide. my shame sat shotgun and my grief was tucked in somewhere between sleeping pads, capaleine layers, and my brand new chacos. at the time i didn’t know i was running, all i knew is i had to be at the raft company i’d just been hired by. 8 am on the second saturday in may.

memory is funny in the way some strands are easier to pull on than others. weaving from the past becomes an art in the same way a painter might portray a sunrise as it changes minute to minute from horizon line to cloud to then never see the same one again. so many of mine are smudged by grief and the effects of the dissociative haze that i can’t pretend to be a reliable narrator—but around the time i arrived in montana and plunged headlong into the wild gallatin river, things come into focus like the aperture of a camera set just right for the light to finally shine into the darkest corners of my remembering.

i remember pulling an itchy-farmer-john-neoprene wetsuit over my capalein leggings, hoisting it up by the velcro shoulder straps, wriggling the reinforced knees up inch by inch, reaching back up to the shoulder straps, squatting as i pulled up on the top and hopping just a bit at the end to make sure the crotch was as far up as it could get. satisfied and uncomfortable, i repeated the same steps with a second wetsuit, realized i had to pee, promptly ran towards the row of porta-potties near the office and undid half my progress.

i remember layering a hand-me-down fleece, a blue raincoat, neoprene booties, someone else’s helmet, and a firetruck red PFD on top to finish out my look, then feeling like ralphie’s little brother in a christmas story who can’t put his arms down. no one was there to tell me i looked cute, there was only an old guide who’d been there too long yelling at us to not leave our gear on the ground and look sharp.

i remember learning about the strength of the current and the angles at which to swim if you ended up in the current and to never, ever, stand up in the river.

i remember throwing a throw bag (a bag with 70 feet of rope coiled inside) and thinking surely, i’d never be in a situation where i’d need to use one of these things and then being convinced that likely every time i would ever be on the river would result in a situation where i’d need to use one of these things.

i remember the penetrating iciness that overtook all sensation in my body the first time i jumped into the river and the 40 degree water filled the sleeves of my splash jacket, plummeted down my neck hole and soaked my fleece through.

i remember shivering so violently that i thought i might pull a neck muscle.

i remember thinking it couldn’t get any worse and then laughing hysterically at the absurdity of it all when it started snowing on the second day and we still had four hours of swimming to do.

i remember the shallow breaths that bordered on panic attack territory as i walked the gang plank line to swim the class four rapid. i remember jumping in, immediately swallowing water, continuing to panic, and all the strength that could have gotten me to shore being zapped entirely from my body from the shock of the freezing water. i remember the two hands that yanked me to the rocks at the bottom of the rapid, not being able to catch my breath, not wanting to cry but knowing that trying not to cry would definitely make me have an asthma attack.

i remember that i cried and also had an asthma attack.

i remember sitting in my car at camp later that night, cup of noodles in my left hand, still freezing, still crying, staring at the paper card that listed “mimi ewald, swiftwater rescue technician” in my right and thinking who the fuck do you think you are?

i remember a little voice in the back of my head that i hadn’t heard in a very long time whispering back: you’re that bitch.

in the same parking lot eight years later, i’m layering up inside of a dry suit after eight seasons of boating rivers in the west. i move through the same current, in the same body, on the same river. but i am not the same person i was before.

i spend the day swimming, floating downstream, and participating in rescue scenarios. i dance with the rookie guides, shivering in their wetsuits, and i tell them how brave and strong they are. i hope it’s what they need to hear. i hope they learn to love this river in their own ways. i hope it returns pieces of themselves that they didn’t know they’d lost back to their whole selves.

later that night, instead of curling up in the back of my car, i’m swaddled in dry cotton and tucked into flannel sheets in my king-sized bed. i bury my face in the perfect, blonde down of my dogs long back and know that i will sleep soundly.

before i’m pulled under, i notice a rocking in my body. a water-like wind seems to be rushing through my veins. somehow, i’d left the river, but the river hadn’t left me. a day spent in the current had temporarily reorganized my insides, reminding me that i could step out of the river but i will always be moved by the river.

in the dream-time-river-space just before sleep, i become the river.

what i have learned in the years since that first weekend of swiftwater rescue training is that you can’t be selectively numb. to survive my childhood and finally find freedom in the west meant becoming a disembodied version of myself who was floating surface level through every experience, relationship, and moment. this was my body’s way of keeping me safe before i had the tools to excavate the core of what was numbing me.

i used to think it was my own failure that kept me from being able to be fully present, to feel things fully, or to show up in the ways i wanted to. really, this was just a symptom of my own existence in a broken system that lauds individuality and personal healing over relational existence and constellated understandings of complex people.

my body was, in a sense, my first estrangement.

where trauma had taught me to attenuate my own interiority and to disconnect from sensation in order to survive it—the river requires participation.

current demands responsiveness.

embodiment becomes less a turning inward and more a full-bodied relationship with force, temperature, movement, risk, and trust.

perhaps the river keeps calling me back because it is one of the only places where my body cannot disappear from itself.

to be numb in swiftwater is to risk floating away from yourself entirely. to orient yourself within the ecology of the river and to build trust within your own relationship to the river, is to be carried into embodiment and enrivered by the spirit of the water.

as i reorient myself to the river this spring at the same time i am navigating estrangement from my family, i can’t help but find compassion for both myself and my family.

estrangement is a type of relationship. a disembodied connection between two silent participating parties. when i listen into this silence, the grief is as loud as a flood stage river in early june.

the relational embodiment that the river requires has drawn me back to the grief that rages inside of me. when i arrived in montana eight years ago, i was drowning in it.

after eight years of swimming swift water, learning, practicing, and honing the skill of reading water, and navigating new rivers—all i know for sure is that grief moves like water.

there is a difference between trusting yourself to be carried and being pulled under in the current.

maybe healing has never been about erasing the wound, but learning how to remain in relationship with what hurts without abandoning ourselves in the process.

thank you for walking beside me as i learn the language of my own rivers. i hope you find some language here to navigate yours.

all my love,

mimi

pine forests seem to melt into the towering devoto memorial cedar grove who fringes crooked fork creek, a tributary of the lochsa river. this ground has been home to the red cedars of this stand for over a thousand years. camphoraceous spice tickles the back of my throat as it rushes in through my open windows. sun filters down through the canopy of evergreen, dappling the unfurling carpet of lady ferns that bow as they shed their morning dews. the wind whispers an ancient dance into their fronds and they move in waves as if to sing, the river is this way.

less than twelve hours before i’d turned in my final piece of work for my first semester back at school in eight years. the grief of mother’s day was mounting as i moved through my first year of estrangement from my family. the numbness that i had gotten so comfortable with over the last few months seemed to be softening around the edges. the part of me that is made of rivers knew that the place i needed to go to fully feel it all was a raging river in idaho, surrounded by cedars, friends, dogs, and a living, breathing ecosystem of aliveness.

returning to aliveness through landscape

the next time i tell you i want to die—

take me to the river in may and throw me in. allow me to choose my own breath and crawl to the shore where i might lay horizontally on the rainbow rocks, watching as the nymphs scuttle up my arms and between my toes.

let the clementine rays of the sun’s first long days dance over my familiar numbness— thaw me out inch by inch until my red blood sings back tot he river in it’s rushing.

maybe, i will chew the aliveness out of the silt stuck and slick between my teeth, spit it out and see my saliva sludge is just glittered sediment—

a whole galaxy.

flowing and orbiting and remembering

we are all mere dust dancing off the windowsill of the vastness.

body memory

i realize i am in my own drought the closer i get to the river’s edge—the thirst becoming almost unbearable as my body aches further still for the movement that lies therein.

the river is still, the only medicine i know that gives every single person exactly what they need every single time.

natalie diaz writes, “how can I translate—not in words but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?”

when i moved to montana nine summers ago to learn to be a river guide, i had no idea that this choice would change, well, everything. looking back, i see how i have been pulled by the current of the rivers that flow in the west for longer than i have been learning to read them. my water-body remembered something long before i knew it was something i might never name.

the act of guiding a boat down a river is known as reading water. there is no right way to read water, there is only what you see and how you move your boat with the river to either pass through that section, or not. either way, you learn for the next time.

you do not learn to read water as an individual. instead, an elder who knows the ways of the river teaches you how to see the water, how to work with the current instead of against it, and how to face what looks impassable with bravery. the only parenting i have known in the years since i came west has come from my relationship with older river guides. their guidance, the allowance that has moved me to cultivate my own relationship with rivers.

when i became estranged from my family earlier this year the greatest fissure was not my relationship with them—but the hope that i harbored for the potential of a new kind of relationship with them.

this summer, i will return to the yellowstone river, where i learned to first read water almost ten years ago. i trust that the river has something new to teach me.

what i have learned in the time since i first became a river guide is simple—

it is okay to let life changing things change your life.

it is okay to be moved by a grief so deep you fear you may never come up for air.

and as robert mcfarlane says,

hope, is the thing with rivers.

in returning to the yellowstone this summer, i know i am returning to the origins of my own story. reaching backwards to my own reclamation.

when i first arrived in gardiner in the early days of may, 2018, i felt in my bones that something was wrong with me though what it was, remained nameless.

in robert mcfarlane’s book, is the river alive? he writes, “to be silenced is not the same as to be silent; to go unheard is not the same as to be speechless. no landscape speaks with a single tongue.” i had become so disconnected from my own body that the hurt trying to speak through me was in a language i hadn’t yet learned to speak.

as i learned to read the river, i learned the language of my own body.

the yellowstone river is the longest un-dammed river in the lower 48 states. running over six hundred and seventy miles from high in the absorkee mountain range into the missouri river in north dakota. she has yet to be reduced to that of “service provider” like so many other rivers, subdued by servitude, to use mcfarlane’s words again.

patriarchy teaches women that it is our job to be in service to everyone but ourselves. our own rivers of creativity and desire are dammed the first day we are cat-called on the street and over and over again until we marry into “a good family,” and onwards until we die. we are conditioned to swallow our shame, keep quiet about the harm, and be the good daughter who can read a room before we can read our own feelings. the landscapes of our own bodies become a final frontier that we dare not venture into for fear of getting lost forever.

i believe all women cower in the face of their own wildness until they learn to attune to their own seasonality and stream outwards from that unrestraint. from the spring run-off and flood stage times, to the emergence of flourishing ecosystems, to the drought-times, and winter freezes. may we all return to the rivers, may we all return to our bodies, and know our headwaters are the same.

hanging out on the bridge:

standing on the bridge that splits gardiner, montana in two— i wonder how long i have been waterproofed. this bridge allows easy passage over the yellowstone river. from the bridge you can look down and watch the river flowing below your feet, it’s continuous motion is both relentless and a home. river otters slide in from the rocks on the banks, mallards and dippers ferry across the current towards slower waters, eddies roll back on themselves, welling and flushing what can’t yet be released downstream.

through years of therapy i have been able to name the years i spent floating.

anyone who has experienced trauma likely knows what it feels like to disassociate. a common trauma response that i experience mostly as floating above my body. my self fully releases itself from the physical experience of my body, thereby disconnecting from the pain that my body is feeling. overtime, this numbness became my default for protecting myself from everything haunting. only to become a ghost in my own life. only to name dissociation as another thing that was “wrong” with me. another thing in need of fixing.

if i name every one of my personality traits as a trauma response:

hyper-vigilance
avoidance
fawning
rage
exhaustion

then suddenly i am a gigantic heap of wrongness in need to fixing. then suddenly, healing is linear and i will never arrive to the end of it.

i’ve started to see these responses as brilliant instead of bullish. as my body knowing exactly what it must do to keep me safe.

what if these kinds of responses aren’t the avoidance or abandonment of my self? what if they are a moment of hanging out on the bridge outside of the forever forward motion that a life in this world demands? could i stand on the bridge with this part of myself and offer her curiosity, instead of force? in this bridge-space, i can listen to the undertow below me and take a moment to reorient before i get back into the run.

lisa olivera writes, “the willingness to come back might reveal the parts of you that do really want to be here, that do want to face the present moment, that do want to stay.” in this moment, the river becomes my partner in witnessing what is hurting, what is holding.

hanging out on the bridge means there is nothing to fix here. to rest is to reclaim. to rest is to return to our own life-stream with renewed vigor.

where the river widens

i posted on tiktok this week that actually, i don’t want to make healing content anymore. and that couldn’t be any more true. to post healing content in a capitalist world on a gigantic social e-commerce platform like tiktok is to try to sell the linear messaging that grief is something you can heal from.

i have been feeling stuck in the smallness of the parameters of the content i have been sharing for the last few months. i think, slowly, i have been realizing that some aches may never go away and what a gift that is.

healing has never been linear and the presence of grief is only proof that a deep love exists in it’s equal.

i am more interested, now, in what it means to inhabit a life after the rupture. of what it means to coexist with grief in non-resistance.

to allow my own self to be changed by grief, to be changed by love.

this orientation feels new to me, yet more like remembering than discovery. i am turned towards this ache with an open heart and following the threads of my own story back to the river.

back to my headwaters.

back home.

maybe healing has never been about erasing the wound, but learning how to remain in relationship with what hurts without abandoning ourselves in the process.

thank you for walking beside me as i learn the language of my own rivers. i hope you find some language here to navigate your own.

all my love,
mimi

i know this letter may find you today with a tender, aching heart because i am here, too.

for every instagram story of a snuggled-up mother and daughter with the tag “my best friend,” or grid post of a smiling family captioned, “to the woman who sacrificed everything for us,” there are hundreds of women watching from the wings with an ache for something they never got to experience. a close and loving relationship with the woman who gave birth to them.

first, i want to honor your being here. i want to honor each day you’ve continued to show up for yourself, your family, your community. and i want to honor everything you’ve been carrying. the weight of it all is unbelievable to anyone who isn’t walking with you. we are all walking with you. you are in good company here.

—

one thing i know to be true is that the grief will keep showing up.

it will show up when you see a dear friend with her two sisters, mom, and dad at dinner. the easy way they laugh and touch and exist around one another will tug at a thread of intimate honesty you’ve never known.

it will show up when you’re planting your first garden and you’re not sure what plants you can grow together. your mom has been tending to beautiful crops for as long as you can remember but that phone line has been dead for months or maybe years.

it will show up when you finish a semester of school and feel proud of yourself for the first time in a long time but your mom doesn’t even know you went back to school to begin with.

it will show up when you see any young mother with her daughter. the tenderness between them is enough to tare you into pieces made up of every single simple way it is to love that baby girl, reflected back to you.

but, i also know that love will show up, too.

i know that the depth of your grief is a reflection of the depth of your love.

and your capacity for a grief so deep is only proof that your capacity for love is deeper still.

i ask you today to turn towards the hurt you are harboring with the loving eyes of a mother love you may not have received before. to reach, with palms open, towards the little version of you, sitting on the curb with a skinned knee and a quivering chin and tell her how brave she is. dust her off, put a spiderman bandaid on her booboo, and challenge her to a race in the backyard that you already know she will win. you’ll never get the grass stains out of your overalls and that’s okay.

today might be loud. it might feel like you’re drowning in the guilt of resenting your mom. but please, hear me when i say, that resentment is often just grief with nowhere to go.

to name it is to begin to know it.

slowly, i have been coming to the understanding that the ache i have carried for as long as i can remember has been grief.

grief was a seed planted in me at the same time my innocence was taken from me before i knew it was something that needed protecting.

my five year old body took that spore and lodged it into the space behind my left-side lungs—where my heart sits like a little spoon, pumping out my blood. as i grew, its root took hold in the very place my life force filtered through and i contorted my own development to keep it hidden there.

i believed i’d packaged this hurt into a tiny box of darkness, rendering myself invisible in the process. when in reality—every unmet need, assault on my safety, stealing of my autonomy, and ache for a closeness with my mom, was a new rhizome making its home inside the cells of my being. the tendrils of everything i disallowed began to weave their hairy fingers around my heart and lungs, up into my brain, down my spine, and through my pelvis.

before i’d even had a name for grief, it had taken over my body entirely.

years later, after hundreds of doctors visits, blood tests, herbal remedies, and a therapist who told me i needed to find jesus—i ran away to montana and never looked back.

i built a life for myself guiding on the yellowstone river where nature stepped in as the mother balm i so longed for. through every castilleja identified, giant sagebrush breathed in, unintentional swift water swim taken, sun-shower turned double rainbow drenched in, and season changed—the courage in me that was buried behind all the rot, glowed brighter each night under the mountain’s milky way.

since then, i have spent more than seven years excavating this root system of grief, only to find it’s resilience unshakable. in the words of lisa olivera, author of when the ache remains, “it is through this small act of naming that a bud of transformation grows.”

similarly, throughout my experience of becoming estranged from my family, i carried an ache with me for months before the panic attacks, brain fog, exhaustion, and nightmares became debilitating. when i finally sat back down on my therapist’s couch, she reflected my grief back to me with such clarity, i was stunned i’d not seen it before.

“i did not think i was allowed grief,” i’d said.

i see now, this was the bud of transformation leading me towards the question that has stumped me this spring:

what if the ache remains forever? what does joy, wholeness, and freedom look like if it means i am still carrying this weight?

i don’t have an answer yet, but for the first time in a long time, i feel like i have the space to explore this with curiosity and compassion.

a ritual for grief:

if you have the space tonight, take yourself to the river, to a steam near your house, or anywhere there is running water. gather stones for your deepest aches. i chose:

one for my mother

one for the childhood i’m mourning

one for little me

yours may look different, whatever you choose is the right thing for you. you can’t do this wrong.

next, feel your feet on the earth and hold the stones in your hands. imagine the millions of years they are made up of and the galaxies they contain inside of their earth cores.

one by one, take the stones of your grief to your heart. with two palms, stacked on one another, press each stone gently over your heartspace.

name the ache and allow the protective layers that have calcified from the carrying to melt away.

thank it for the lessons. breathe in, breathe out. offer it deep, deep love. breathe in, breathe out. allow your own soul’s river to flow from you as you honor the space that this ache has taken up inside of you and when you feel ready, release the stone into the river. let it go with love.

if you live somewhere you can’t get to running water, you can do this by writing down these things on a piece of paper and burning them somewhere safely.

these hurts are a piece of your story but they do not make up the entirety of who you are. through your honoring of them, you are allowing yourself to be moved by the experiences that have shaped your, but not moored by the gravity of all it took for you to survive them.

this is a deep kind of courage.

rest, dear one. rest.

resources:

if mother’s day and the weeks surrounding it have been feeling crushing, i want to offer you a few things that have helped me as i navigate my own grief on my first mother’s day spent estranged. as always, take what you need and leave the rest💌

when the ache remains by lisa olivera — a book filled with lessons on tending to the unfixable and finding beauty anyways

the great divide (the last of the bugs) by noah kahn — for when you need a really good cry and maybe to disassociate for a while

it is my hope for you that as we root down into spring, you can find ways to begin honoring your healing- noticing your growth- and offering yourself a soft place to land.

thank you for being here.

no matter if you’re in the thick of it, the edge of it, or somewhere in between — i hope this offering reminds you that you’re not alone in your healing.

if this found you at the right moment, pass it along to a friend who may need someone to carry the torch for a while.

all my love,

mimi

in this moment i wonder, aren’t we all just aching to be mothered?

to have someone call to us to sink our tired bodies into bath water drawn from sparrow hands. tendrils of steam weaving into the tapestry of care we are able to finally rest inside of. a return to the womb. all goodness and goo, one heart inside another.

our scalps are sore from the ways we want our mothers to take their mother’s silver plated brush to our hair. detangling the worry then weaving the lengths of honey brown into spiderweb plaits with the stories of her childhood that we can climb like monkey bars. knowing her, knowing ourselves.

our skin, weathered from cold winters and harsh sun is tumbled smooth in the eddies of river water and boulders, she kneads the weight of the world from our shoulders with the wisdom she carries in her own. stiffness goes out with the bathwater when she pulls the drain, wraps us in sun-dried cotton, and presses chamomile tea to our palms.

she sweetens life’s bitter with honey and softens it with milk. she is careful. full of care. you are cared fully for. the nectar she offers is balm for the hummingbird soul at home in your bones. she lights the beeswax candles in the fading light. sweetgrass wind blows in through the open windows pulling at the curtains, lacing her lullaby voice in the song that once built your homebody.

you wink out into dreamless sleep with the fireflies as night light. she leaves the door open—just in case.

if you are estranged from your family, you have likely become acutely aware of this tender spot. the cold water ache that you seemed to have gotten used to. the numbness so familiar. for many of us, there is no person in our lives that can offer us this. and. on the other hand, there is still one person who can offer us this.

ourselves.

i don’t say this to encourage your hyper-independence or to make it seem like you don’t need other people to care for you sometimes. but i am saying, that if you look down into your lap right now, you can find the compassionate hands you hunger after.

it is ritual to turn them upon your own body with care. sit and listen. ask her, what is it that needs most tending to now?

if it is a bruised heart, then lay them there. a pounding head, then lay them there. an all over ache, then lay yourself in your bath and float.

practice being the home you remember, even if you’re not sure it ever existed. lay flowers at your own feet. savor the sun as it filters through trailing honey into a warm mug. though you may have to shake the snow from your own boughs for some time, this practice will be your reorientation.

bending again, towards the light.

light a candle for your journey and try this journal prompt:

if i paused and listened closely, what part of me feels most tender right now?

how can i place my own hands there with care?

it is my hope for you that as we gently emerge into spring, you can find ways to begin honoring your healing- noticing your growth- and offering yourself a soft place to land.

thank you for being here.

no matter if you’re in the thick of it, the edge of it, or somewhere in between — i hope this offering reminds you that you’re not alone in your healing.

if this found you at the right moment, pass it along to a friend who may need someone to carry the torch for a while.

all my love,

mimi

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one particular road, here in our valley, is closed to cars from the beginning of april to the beginning of may. the pavement winds up into the mountains, following a rushing creek that is milky with runoff silt for only a few weeks of the year. this is one of those weeks. about eight miles up, a reservoir opens up into sprawling foothills backed up to the serrated mountain range slicing through the hollow. still frozen over, the ice stretches across the expanse between banks, like a frosted mirror, muting the movement of water and life waking in its depths.

water freezes from the top down. as the weather gets colder, the water on the surface of the lake becomes less dense than the water below it so as it freezes, it floats. the colder it gets, the thicker this layer of ice becomes. eventually, this layer of frozen water provides insulation for the deeper layers in the lake, keeping it from freezing all the way through and allowing the plants and animals dwelling in the muck to slow down and survive the winter.

as i look out over the expanse of frozen water, i realize, grief is a lake in winter. starting in your head and freezing you to the bottoms of your feet, until you’re floating on the denser parts of who you were before. your bones are keeping you standing but what used to be you is suspended in the freeze. in over one hundred and fifty years worth of study and experimentation, no one really knows why ice is slippery.

grief is a slippery thing.

in the year of magical thinking by joan didion, she writes,

looking out over the frozen reservoir, i see the unthawing of winter’s deep freeze in real time. the ice is receding from the rocky shore. grief is melting away at the edges. i have turned my attention now, to mourning.

this was the first christmas i was estranged from my family and they sent me a bird feeder. in a text to my partner they told him there was a big bag of seed waiting for me at the local hardware store. reluctantly, we went to pick it up. in another text to my partner they told him that there was a book waiting for me at the local bookstore. reluctantly, we went and picked that up, too.

i put the birdseed with the bird feeder and the bird book on the back porch. out of sight out of mind. i didn’t give a shit about birds of montana. i wanted to be understood for once.

that bird feeder with the bird seed and the bird book sat outside through a snowless winter until one morning last week while i sat on the front porch with my cup of tea. there in the towering pine, whose branches shaded our home i saw the first chickadees of spring. my mom’s favorite.

in the backyard, the lilacs were already budding.

in my sock feet while the dog slept inside, i filled the bird feeder to the brim and screwed on the cap. i padded out into the yard and hung it from a stubby branch on the middle lilac tree. reluctantly, i went to get the book.

i waited.

if grief is slippery, then mourning is how we learn to dance inside it’s trickery without getting lost. mourning is putting up the bird feeder. identifying a starling. being astonished by what you learn about the way they can mimic over twenty different bird calls and human voices. and telling about it.

it’s hoping you’ll see the chickadee again. remember one of the good times. watch a new nest be built from rowan tree twigs and a red piece of string.

grief does not only find us in winter, mourning does not always walk hand-in-hand with spring. but if you find yourself unthawing, do not run from the rawness of the sunshine on your springtime flesh. allow your crystalline-grief-body to melt back into water. remember your liquid dance. swirling, ebbing, flowing.

honor the springtime as she comes. look to the daffodils for their free-giving of joy. to the starlings to call you back into the wild places you feared you might have forgotten. to the rushing rivers whisking away winter’s deadness from their banks. to the sun, kissing gently over your nose freckles. there is something here for you.

light a candle for your journey and try this journal prompt:

write about something that still feels frozen. write into the sensation, allow the story to come through.

it is my hope for you that as we gently emerge into spring, you can find ways to begin honoring your healing- noticing your growth- and offering yourself a soft place to land.

thank you for being here.

no matter if you’re in the thick of it, the edge of it, or somewhere in between — i hope this offering reminds you that you’re not alone in your healing.

if this found you at the right moment, pass it along to a friend who may need someone to carry the torch for a while.

all my love,
mimi

last night was one of those magical evenings where a blizzard rolls in and it feels like you’ve stepped into a snow globe until you go to sleep. the sky takes on this eerie glow as the lights from the city reflect off the white and 11 o’clock looks like four o’clock during stick season. after a snowless winter in montana, this felt gently jarring yet somehow exactly right.

i’ve been reading stephanie foo’s book, what my bones know, where she describes an exercise her and her therapist work through together. it goes like this:
draw a circle. on the inside write all the feelings she’s allowed to feel and on the outside write all the feelings she isn’t allowed to feel. the inside read: smart, competent, happy, productive, angry (when it’s warranted) and sad (but only for a day, not any longer) **these are my edits based on my own allowed emotions. the outside read: sadness, deep fear, abandonment, and unworthiness.

in seeing this on paper foo realizes her attempts to control and “regulate” her emotions has lead to the shame spirals she’s trying to avoid.

in the world of healing, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that to be regulated is to be right. we’ve been conditioned as women to see our emotions as unpredictable and something we must controlled. yet, there is dissonance in the messaging that feeling our feelings deeply is wrong—for—what is joy without its equal in days of despair? or deep love without the dull ache of indifference?

in other words, of course if feels wrong to bridle your intuition and then wonder why your wildness feels choked to survive in this made-for-men world.

instead, dear one, let us look to april. let us allow spring to offer us poetry where we least expect to find it. in poetry is not a luxury, audre lorde writes, “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.” if we are looking at ourselves through the lens of restriction—of what is allowed and what is not—we risk dimming our own becoming.

in other words, the world is not as it is, but as we are.

so i offer you this, dear reader, as we move into spring together.
open your eyes to poetry this month and be astonished when you stumble into it somewhere surprising.

if you find yourself swallowing stones this month instead of speaking what is true.
or thinking you might avoid your shame by hiding inside of it.
or desperate for the summer, when we are here to rest in the springtime tumult.
then look for the robins egg on the power line and you will remember that a new life can begin anywhere, at any time.

be in praise of the ordinary and let the wind fan the ember you’ve been kindling in your chest. here’s your reminder that there will be no trumpets when your hope returns:

instructions on not giving up
by ada limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

light a candle for your journey and try this journal prompt:

where in my life am i trying to rush past a season i am meant to be inside of?
what would it look like to trust that something is growing here, even if it’s slow or unseen?

it is my hope for you that as we gently emerge into spring, you can find ways to begin honoring your healing- noticing your growth- and offering yourself a soft place to land.

thank you for being here.

no matter if you’re in the thick of it, the edge of it, or somewhere in between — i hope this offering reminds you that you’re not alone in your healing.

if this found you at the right moment, pass it along to a friend who may need someone to carry the torch for a while.

all my love,
mimi

so here we are.

the funny thing is, it’s not that i’m not inspired to write, it’s more that this newsletter’s format is no longer sparking joy. i’m wondering about the impact it’s making, i’m wondering about my ethos behind writing it, and i keep asking myself: is this what i want this to be?

at first, the limiting nature of this letter was helpful—a container for me to fit my writing into as i pulled it from the nebula. but now, the limits feel, well, limiting. a cage i built that i can see myself outgrowing in real time but am blind to unlocking it.

that being said, a change is coming for this weekly letter. i find myself dreaming of writing that is more interactive. my hope is that as this substack evolves, so too can the space that we are creating here together. i ask for your grace and understanding as i move through this process, for i cannot entirely see the path,

yet, i trust myself enough to know i am heading in the right direction.

a past me would have abandoned ship entirely, berating myself for building this community and then deciding i need to show up differently. a scandal! but on it’s most microcosmic scale, this is exactly what life is: having the courage to dream of something bigger than yourself, working towards that thing until you yourself have grown out of it, and having the courage to recognize this not as failure but as evolution.

the magic arrives barefoot in the reflective in-between where you can see yourself as an ever changing being amidst the constant flow of life. or, rather, to quote heraclitus, you’ll never step into the same river twice.

i’ve been reading a lot of writing about writing, so maybe, that’s contributing to the paralysis that i’m finding myself in. each piece written by writers i admire, some about their craft, some about their content, some about their process, and others about creativity in general. i see myself in each of their stories, threads of my own woven into their experiences of storytelling, finding the bravery to write, and the joy that comes from sitting down and doing the thing.

in addition to substack writing paralysis, i’ve found myself with a different writing floodgate open: the grief of being estranged from my family. the absence of my mother. the fear of time lost as my parents age. the fear of the size of the fissure that’s rupturing between us through this time and space. an invisible ache for something i never had to begin with. dreams of the illusory moments of false closeness i shared with them over the past thirty years.

it took me four months of estrangement to come face to face with the depth of my grief, to realize, the incredible loss it is to not have made the choice myself but to have the choice made for me when the options demanded were: lie, or leave.

i guess, i was already gone.

it’s just that when your hope shatters and has nowhere to go, you’ll find it again in spilled sugar on a black bar top and suddenly realize your place in the wild galaxy of grief.

it goes on and on and on.

but you still have to go to work. to hand in your assignments on time. to keep the house clean. walk the dog. be excited when your partner gets you a bike. cook dinner. remember the set the bins out. drink water.

i want desperately to be a voice of hope in the community i’m building and i believe some days i am—but at the expense of my pride, it wouldn’t be honest for me to pretend like i have any to give right now.

though much of this online community was built from speaking of my experiences with estrangement and grief funneling from tiktok to this publication—writing it feels more tender than a six second video that a hundred thousand people see. the dissonance of a generation of digital natives? perhaps. or, the confirmation that to be seen is far less scary than to be known.

summed up perfectly by, d.w. winnicott, a british psychologist who said, “it is joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found.”

as i look for myself in the darkness of this grief, i am buoyed within the constellation of each of your stories. thank you for offering your kindling to my own fire in a moment where my hearth has grown cold.

as always, i hope this week’s letter has something in it that feels like sharing a cup of tea with an old friend. and if it doesn’t, i hope you will take the chance on the journalistic nature of this writing once more when it arrives again next week.

light a candle for your journey and try this journal prompt:

where in my life am i carrying grief that i might be ignoring? what are the sneaky ways i avoid these feelings and how might naming them offer me freedom from this self-abandonment?

it is my hope for you that as we sink deeper into winter, you can find ways to begin honoring your healing- noticing your growth- and offering yourself a soft place to land.

thank you for being here.

no matter if you’re in the thick of it, the edge of it, or somewhere in between — i hope this offering reminds you that you’re not alone in your healing.

if this found you at the right moment, pass it along to a friend who may need someone to carry the torch for a while.

until next time,
mimi

ps. if you want to support my work even further, consider becoming a paid subscriber by clicking the button below.

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like the truth is cracking you open and your chest can’t hold your heart any longer.

like the bones of your life have become too big for the skin that you’re in.

like you’re in the middle of a rapid and realize the line you took might not be the right one but it’s the one you’re in and now you have to run it like you mean it.

- - -

we talk about courage like it’s something people choose-to be or to have.

but i think courage is listening to that voice that keeps saying, “not this.”

i think courage is refusing to stay quiet any longer in order to be a good daughter.

i think courage and fear feel like the same exact thing. only courage is the one that keeps going.

last week, i whispered to my partner, in a voice so small i wasn’t sure he could even hear me: “i think i’m ready to stop having to be so brave all of the time.” then i closed my eyes and cried.

i believe there comes a time in all of our lives where a truth has to be told or we risk losing ourselves under the weight of carrying it alone. the fear is not that by saying it out loud it will become real- but that by saying it out loud everything will be different.

telling your truth- especially the kind that shatters a 20-year-winter kind of silence does not come forth from the absence of fear. this kind of truth is told by snatching fear in the night and running with it far enough so that once it wakes up there is no turning back to the safety of silence.

a few months ago, i sent a letter to my mom, telling her for the first time that i had been sexually abused as a child

the letter started like this:

I wasn’t sure I would ever write this. But I’ve come to understand it’s a piece of my healing I can no longer ignore.

This letter may be difficult to read. I want to honor the impact it might have on you — and I say this with love — but it’s no longer my job to protect you from my truth. I’m not writing this out of anger or blame. I’ve sat with those feelings already. I write this in hopes of building a bridge towards a connection that we’ve never had and for the healing that only truth can offer.

there are no truer words that i have written.

she responded with love. with compassion. with a desire to understand. but next week, she’s coming to visit me and we will talk, face-to-face, about the truth of my past for the first time in both of our lives.

and i am terrified.

it’s a strange thing, to be holding such an enormous, aching truth while also trying to be a normal person moving through the world.

people ask me how i’m doing and instead of saying:
“i’m breaking generational chains of trauma that run through the female lineage of my family and uprooting everything i tried to keep secret for the last 25 years of my life,”
i just smile and say,
“good. and you?”

this doesn’t feel like something a “normal person” goes through.
but you do not choose to be the cycle breaker.

to be the cycle breaker will be the loneliest role you will ever have to play.
it means grieving the love you wish you had while building the love you deserve.
and choosing truth over silence — even when nobody is standing beside you.
and standing in the fire of the pain, and saying, this ends here.

burning it all to the ground so that one day you might stand in the wreckage of the life you thought you would have- look around and say, but the healing begins here.

nobody chooses this path.
i think one day, you just look up and realize:
by simply existing, i’m sticking cogs in the wheel.

you realize you’ve followed the truth so far, there’s no turning back.
you’re sprinting off the cliff, your entire being is screaming at you to stop but there is something you can’t quite name is whispering:
keep going.

as i write this- it isn’t just to process my own fear, but to speak to yours too.
it is likely you’ve carried something heavy, too, maybe for a few weeks, maybe for a few lifetimes. and, if you’re facing a truth that might change the scaffolding on which you’ve built your life- you’re scared and showing up anyway…

then maybe you are already braver than you know.

maybe courage doesn’t look like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
maybe it looks like turning your face to the sun. crying in the bathroom. or lacing up your shoes and taking the first step.

maybe being brave doesn’t feel like bravery at all- because mostly, it just feels like breaking.

and yet, you keep going.

and that, is courage.

thank you for being here.

whether you’re in the thick of it, the edge of it, or somewhere in between — i hope this offering reminds you that you’re not alone in your healing.

if this found you at the right moment, pass it along to a friend who may need someone to carry the torch for a while.

until next time,
mimi

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my grandma, wanda used to smoke marlboro reds at the kitchen table.

she’d wiggle them out of the top of the tall, red leather, cigarette case with the change-purse closure on top.

we would watch QVC on the tiny kitchen television and i’d take her cancer wigs out of the closet, put them on her head, and use an entire bottle of hairspray to give her a mohawk or to tease it into a gray afro.

one summer, she taught me that writing thank you notes wasn’t something you should do- it was something you must do. i wrote one to the neighbor lady for something i can’t remember now and then went back to pretending i was reggie from rocket power.

she would drum her long, hot pink fingernails on the table, click-clacking a morse code that only i could understand. we’d laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

the only times i’d ever get up early were the mornings i could spend with her- padding out onto the patio to find her in her moomoo with her cup of coffee. we’d sit and listen to the cicadas build as the heat of the day rose with the sun. she would hold my hand.

we would laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

it wasn’t until i lost her that i began to wonder- why she left her first marriage, her young daughter in tow, and where she found the strength to do it.

if she were here now i’d ask her, grandmother- were you scared?

how did you know you had to do it anyways?

—

today, i’m honoring my grandmother’s death — fifteen years later.

i remember being so scared that when she died i would lose her forever. my soulmate. my partner in crime. the one person i ever felt truly safe around.

but the thing about our people is they never truly leave us.

fifteen years later, my relationship with my grandmother is the strongest it’s been since her passing. i ask for signs from her — and she gives them to me often. letting me know she’s still here with me, she’s protecting me, and she’s guiding me.

it’s in her gardenia perfume that i smell on strangers.
it’s in the hummingbirds that show up in the most random places.

a few months ago, while deep in a season of healing work, i was feeling alone — lonely, empty, and burnt out from walking this path that only i can. i decided to ask for a sign. i was called to a memory box that i keep — it’s filled with pieces of my past:

burnt cds from summer camp
jewelry from old lovers
photos from my childhood
letters from friends i used to know
a tiny pig figurine from my childhood best friend
a handmade wooden spinning top gifted to me by a german man
and a hundred other things that remind me of the meaning in my life.

when i opened the box, the first thing i saw was a note from my grandmother. i’d ripped it from an old greeting card that she sent me years ago. it says: do you want to go for a bike ride with me? — love, gram (an inside joke between the two of us).

holding it in my hands, i flipped it over. on the back of the paper were words i had never noticed before: believe me, i am.

i gasped. i’d looked at this note a hundred times before and never seen those words. i was overcome with a rush of energy.

earlier that same day, i had been cleaning out my basement and found a stack of old tarot cards my mom had gifted me years before. i hadn’t used them in years, but i suddenly felt called to pull a card.

i grabbed the cards, ran to my bedroom, and began to shuffle. on the first shuffle, the hummingbird card fell out onto my bed.

i looked up to the ceiling and whispered, hi gram.

i share this story not to convince you of anything “woo-woo,” but to maybe offer you some peace. our people don’t leave us. they change form, they speak in symbols, they remind us of their love in ways we can’t always explain.

they show up for us when we can slow down and get quiet enough to hear them.

wanda’s life still leaves me with questions. i wish i could ask her what gave her the courage to leave her marriage, to start again with her daughter, to choose a life she hadn’t yet seen. i wonder if she was afraid. i wonder if she doubted herself.

but maybe her answer is already in the signs she leaves me. maybe she’s telling me that courage doesn’t mean the absence of fear — it means moving forward anyway.

i think she shows up for me to remind me that the same courage that lived in her lives in me too. the courage to leave behind what breaks me. the courage to write my truth. the courage to choose life, even when i’m scared.

fifteen years later, i still feel her holding my hand. and when i whisper my questions into the silence, i imagine her pink nails drumming on the table, laughing with me, reminding me i already know how to do it anyway.