Three of us sat on the concrete beach on Lake Michigan.
We warmed our bodies and ate deli sandwiches,
while we talked about what it meant to be thirty.

I stayed back to watch you two shuffle hand-in-hand
to the edge and launch your bodies into the water—
the light breaking and returning on every wave.

At the lip of concrete, I looked down at you both,
bobbing in the break and beckoning me to join.
I don’t know what I was afraid of,

Maybe it was the temperature of the water,
or the strange idea of forgetting how to swim,
but I hesitated for half a second more,

Just long enough to watch you both tip your heads
back and laugh in unison, my two beautiful sea birds,
before I leapt into your outstretched, sun-kissed arms.

I’m sitting on a park bench at dusk.
It’s a mild night, and the flies aren’t biting.
For the first time in I don’t know how long,
I didn’t think of you or what it felt like
to fall out of your focus. 
Tonight, there are so many other things 
to think about: Like how the lightning bugs 
are returning to Brooklyn, or how
72 degrees is the perfect temperature, 
or how nice it is to be still.
But then all the park lamps flick on 
at exactly the same time, and I’m thinking 
about how much you’d love that:
The order and synchrony and beauty of it all. 

This is something I’ve thought of often. Which one of us will outlive the other? My brother always jokes that he’ll long outlast me because I used to smoke cigarettes and have barely slept a full night in the past decade, though I’ve since cleaned up my act. In every version that plays out in my head, I hope he’s right. I don’t know a life without my brother, Michael. He is my first memory, my first friend.

Quite a few years back, I came across a poem by Matthew Dickman (also a twin). The poem is called “Slow Dance,” and about halfway through it, Dickman writes:

The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.

The first time I read that poem, I cried so hard, I almost threw up. It was the first time I saw my greatest fear play out on the page. I know that one of us will die first, and the other will suffer. More recently—perhaps due to the mini-existential crisis I had around turning 30—I’m reminded more and more of that thought. One day, one of us will be twinless.

People often ask what it was like to grow up with someone who shared everything with you—every class, every birthday, every milestone. While I cherish a lot of that now, there was a time when I hated it. When we were younger, we were always a package deal: Sara and Michael. It was rare that I was addressed on my own. At that age, I craved an individual identity. I wanted my own friends, my own hobbies, my own life.

I would get so angry when my mom made me invite him along to things. Not because I didn’t love him, but because I so desperately wanted to be known as just Sara. I used to daydream about him going off somewhere far away and becoming his own person, so I could finally be mine.

That day eventually came. We decided to go to different colleges and be apart for the first time in our lives.

I can still remember standing in the driveway as my parents pulled out to take him to Michigan to start his freshman year. I was excited to embark on my college career as an individual, but as soon as the car was out of view, I crumpled in the driveway and wept. One of the most precious parts of me had broken off, and I wouldn’t have the quiet comfort of starting this new experience with him.

Until that day, I’d always had someone to pioneer things with. Starting a new school or meeting new people was never scary, because he was always there. If I wasn’t having fun, I could retreat to whispering with him about how we’d rather be anywhere else. For the first time in my life, I had to walk into the classroom or the party alone. In a way, I was microdosing what it would be like to be twinless.

At university, people were stunned to learn I was a twin. They often assumed we were identical, and when I explained we weren’t, they’d say things like, “I still can’t believe there’s another one of you out there.” In a way, I couldn’t either. I had someone who could finish my sentences, who spoke our own made-up language (Ps were Bs, Fs were Vs, Ss were Zs), and who knew when I was hurting without exchanging a word. Though we were apart, those things were still true—but we were becoming different, distant.

That distance, as it turns out, is something psychologists have long noticed. Eric Turkheimer, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Virginia, has spent much of his career studying twins. In his research, he found that twins often start out strikingly similar—mirrors of one another in temperament, intelligence, even small habits. But as time stretches on, something curious happens: those parallels begin to fade. Environmental factors, chance experiences, and choices accumulate until the twins’ lives diverge.

Turkheimer once described this drift as evidence that “a substantial portion of variation in complex traits is not accounted for by genes or families.” I think about that a lot—how we became ourselves through the thousand small decisions we made when we weren’t together. We began as a unit, but adulthood gave us individuality. And yet, underneath all that differentiation, there’s still that inexplicable, constant thread between one another’s lives.

A few weeks ago, we celebrated our 30th birthday together. I never thought the two of us would end up in the same city again, let alone living in the same apartment. The year we lived together was special. At first, I was embarrassed to admit I lived with my “adult twin brother.” It made dating awkward—to bring someone home and have them immediately meet part of my family. He also had habits that pissed me off so bad, e.g., watching Instagram stories on full blast at 1 AM.

But none of that mattered because we were becoming closer than we’d been in years. We fell back into our made-up language without thinking about it. I’d wake up anxious at 3 AM and find him already awake in the living room, and we’d sit there in the dark, not needing to say much to one another. We found our way back to being a unit.

In the film Twinless, Dylan O’Brien’s character, Roman, is removed from his twin. He hasn’t seen him in years, but he still deeply regards their bond: Rocky was his best friend. In the wake of losing his brother, he attends a “twinless” grief group. At the emotional crux of the movie, Roman chokes out through sobs that he doesn’t know who he is without his brother, he has never known a life without him.

In the theater, I clutched my brother’s hand and cried. I have never known a world without him, but I might one day. One of us will die first and the other will suffer. Maybe that’s the strange mercy of being a twin: You grow up measured against someone else, shaped beside them, and spend the rest of your life trying to prove you are your own person. Then one day you really are on your own.

I’ve spent my life caught between those two truths: Wanting to be seen as myself, yet always comforted by being part of a pair. When I finally had the separation I thought I wanted, I was both relieved and a little afraid. Maybe that’s just how it will always be.

Still, I have my own identity, I’ve built a life that’s mine. And for now, I get to share it with the person who’s known me since before I knew myself. That feels rare, and beautiful. We’ve lived thirty years side by side—different, separate, and still somehow so very similar. How sweet is that.

I put my body through this trauma every weekend: a few bottles drained with some friends, some shameful fumbling in a stranger’s apartment, the shakiness of sobering up, and, finally, dragging myself to the back of the church on Sunday morning—the strains of a headache accompanying the groaning, creaking organ.

What did I know of God? And what did God think of me—a miserable sinner?

I had meandered from the bathroom to my bedroom and stood before my open closet. I reached out and plucked a tie from the rack. It reminded me of my old school uniform. Back then, God was mystical—magical, even. Ask and you shall receive1—like some sort of genie. At that age, grief hadn’t touched my life yet, and I was blissfully unaware of suffering. I could still recall Vacation Bible School and singing songs about what an awesome father-figure God was. I buttoned my collar and slung the tie around my neck.

In high school, Neil Campbell hanged himself. We weren’t close, but he lived a few doors down. People always wanted to know why when it came to suicide. There were two sides of the coin: either Neil didn’t want to live or he simply didn’t know how to live. The people at church whispered about it constantly. Some thought he was rotting in hell for his decision, while others imagined him sitting at the foot of God, finally at peace. The thought of Neil burning in hell cemented religion into me. I had to be good. I had to be saved. I had to rebuke myself of every evil, human thought or so help me, God would make me atone.

I knotted the tie and pulled it toward my neck. A bout of nausea bubbled up from my stomach. It was 10:28 AM. I had to move if I wanted to make the second service. I pulled a sweater over my head and looked at myself in the mirror one last time. I often wondered what the people I ended up with at the end of my alcohol-induced nights thought of me. What did they see when I stood in front of them—pale and unclothed? I always felt strange after a night with someone new. I could ignore the inner running dialogue and switch on a bit of charm when the occasion required. But there it was, the morning after—the anxiety. What did they think? Why did I do this? Sometimes, my own body repulsed me.

The first time I got drunk, I was twenty-one. I’d waited until I was of legal age. My childhood friend Serena held a green bottle of gas station wine to her lips and winked at me. We were in her college apartment, pre-gaming a house party. She started laughing—I don’t remember at what—and streams of liquid poured from the corners of her smile. It was disgusting, but I thought it was beautiful. She took my hand and put it on her cheek.

“You wouldn’t kiss me even if I asked you to,” she said softly. It burned like an accusation. I nodded.

“See? That isn’t even a real answer,” she laughed. “What are you so afraid of?” She hiccuped. “You’re my friend,” I said. My hand was still on her cheek. I pulled it away, but she grabbed it and placed it on her chest, right between her breasts.

“Exactly,” she nodded. She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, her lips wet with cheap wine. “That’s all,” she whispered, then stood up and left the room. I was hard and ashamed.

I turned away from the mirror and collected my keys from a dish on my dresser. My limbs felt heavy, my body urging me to stay home, to crawl back into bed. I thought about that one prayer from St. Augustine2: Oh God, make me good, but not yet. It touched a very specific part of me. I knew I couldn’t escape the emotional and spiritual bindings of religion—my conscience would never allow it—but I wasn’t ready to be a model Christian. I wasn’t even sure I really knew what that meant.

The first church my family attended had been divided after the head pastor’s affair. He abandoned his flock—and his wife and four children—for a woman he met on the internet. I hadn’t been old enough to fully grasp the drama of it all at the time, but as I got older, I started to understand that men of the cloth were just that: men. Human. Driven by either pleasure or the avoidance of pain. If a real “man of God” could so easily unravel the idea of a model Christian, what hope did I have of becoming one?

I walked the eight blocks to church with my head down. When I’d first moved to the city, I opened my Maps app and typed “churches near me.” At first, I just wanted the one closest in proximity, but when I saw it was a Catholic church, I balked. I’d been raised with the idea that Catholics were all ritual and no faith. “Creasters,” they called them: People who only showed up on Christmas and Easter. But the next closest church required a bus ride, so I figured I’d try this one.

What I decided I liked about the Catholic mass was that it didn’t involve anyone else in my faith—or my wavering lack thereof. I could just sit there and wait out my hangover while the priest mumbled prayers in Latin, never having to breathe a word to anyone else. When I was a teenager, I’d spent Wednesday nights at Youth Group, where the leaders always asked for prayer requests or for people to share what they were struggling with under the guise of “accountability.” It felt like putting myself on the stand. How could I admit, “Last night I masturbated, and now I want to kill myself, but I’m too afraid to burn in Hell” to a room full of people saying, “Please pray that I get an A on my Chemistry test, and that my grandma’s cold gets better”?

At least with the Catholic church, confession was private and optional. When I first started attending this church, I fantasized about confession. Not in the way that gets me off or anything, but rather in the humiliation ritual kind of way. I wondered what would come out of my mouth, sitting there, staring at the latticed wooden screen that separated me from the priest on the other side. Would I purge myself of all the things that made me feel guilty, or would I take the route of asking the priest all of these questions I wrestle with day in and day out, like, why do I have so much shame?

That shame drove me to think about giving up on this ritual often, but then my mother would call and ask how the church service had been. I couldn’t tell anymore if it was my fear of God or my fear of disappointing her that brought me back each week.

I entered the church with its high ceilings and the smell of old carpet and nodded at one of the greeters. My mother had been a greeter at her church. She loved that job. Now that she didn’t have kids at home anymore, I wondered if church had become more about not being alone than about cultivating faith. The last time I’d visited home, she swore loudly after closing her hand in the front door. I’d never heard her curse before.

I slid into the very last pew. Sweat collected on my collar as I peeled a hymnal from the seat pocket. Maybe she felt just like I did—like she had to keep showing up every Sunday because she wouldn’t know what else to do. Maybe she was afraid of Hell, or maybe she’d stopped believing in God years ago but didn’t want anyone to know. Maybe she was lukewarm3 too. The organ suddenly bellowed out and my breath caught in my throat as the chorus of sinners around me began their song. My lips parted, but nothing came out.

I like resolutions; they’re a challenge.

In 2023, my resolution was to take up a new hobby or skill for the entire year. I had to pick something and stick with it long enough to become more than a novice at it. So, I picked up Tae Kwon Do and worked my way to an orange belt.

In 2024, I resolved to run a half marathon. I ended up running 2.

Coming into 2025, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. At dinner with some friends who were visiting from out of town, I joked that in 2025, I would stop second guessing myself and go with my first instinct when ordering at restaurants. While this would lead to happier meals out, it’s not something I can really track the progress of over time.

Resolutions don’t necessarily need to be studied, but personally, I like to take note of the changes and benefits that come from sticking with something over the entire year. I like to be able to point to something and say “well would you look at that, it’s different/better/improved now.”

This year, I decided to try out two different resolutions—one for my personal life and one for my writing:

1. Be brave.

2. Write a poem a week.

I’ll get more into resolution #1 at some point, but I used to write so much poetry, and I’d like to open that part of myself up again. That part of me is softer, more observant, more vulnerable, and I think it’s ready to make an appearance again. And since this is a writing platform, I figured there’s no better place to keep myself accountable and post these weekly poems.

Stay close for the new work, but until then, I’d like to share two poems from 2024.

#1

Just this past week alone,
I’ve come across three dead birds— 
each of them flattened to the pavement
in pantomimes of permanent flight— 
and I can’t help but feel like it’s some sort of sign
to call my loved ones or repent 
or decipher some internal truth 
that is known but so often ignored:

All fear is fleeting, all pain is passing,
And that thing we know, this too shall pass,
into this life or the next,
for the joy of something nearer.

#2

I am falling asleep on the couch
in my parent’s sun room.
Somewhere, far off, a lawn mower hums,
and the birds are building their nests.
I can almost hear the screen door open then close, 
a warm hand on my cheek. 
How lucky I am to be loved. 

As I try to stick with my resolution and create 52 new poems, I’m going to need some inspiration. Please, leave a comment with a prompt, a theme, or anything you can think of. I want to hear from you.

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In my near five years in NYC, I have happened upon three dead bodies.

I often tell this as a sort of joke to people at parties when they say things like, “you’re not a New Yorker ‘til (insert whatever status rank they think is suitable).” I ask, “does seeing a corpse in the wild count,” to which they laugh nervously and ask me if I’m serious. Unfortunately, I am serious. And each one has stuck with me, the nameless ghosts in the furthest reaches of my mind.

Nothing confronts you with your own mortality more than something like that.

Before these encounters, mortality was an abstract concept. Death didn't terrify me—I've lived a very full life in my 29 years—but it felt about as welcome as stumbling upon an unexpected spider: startling, but manageable. When I came across these bodies, who had died seemingly alone, outside of the context of a funeral, I found myself needing to make sense of my mortality. It didn’t take the shape of an existential crisis or a dramatic pendulum swing to living more indulgently, it was something more quiet. It was the turning of pages alone in my room.

I have often turned to literature to make sense of things, and poetry has always been at the forefront of these explorations:

• For when I thought I was in love: At the Clothesline by James Tate, The Orange by Wendy Cope, quite a few poems by Billy Collins, Black Ice by Matthew Dickman.

• For when I was mourning love: The Afternoon Sun by CP Cavafy, Anniversary by Louise Glück, I have to tell you by Dorothea Grossman, In Winter by Michael Ryan.

• For when I was figuring out who I was: The Wasteland and Prufrock by TS Eliot, nearly anything by W.H. Auden, In Celebration of my Uterus by Anne Sexton, the tender words of Mary Oliver.

Poetry, for me, is a pinprick on the fingertip: it’s surprising and painful. I’ve said to friends in the past, “I like poems that make me hurt.” There’s something about deriving such a strong sense of longing from a few simple lines that’s completely intoxicating. There’s a German word for it, “sehnsucht.” The word has no real, concrete translation for it, but the closest we can get is something along the lines of an inexplicably strong sense of yearning for something known or unknown.

In this case, I felt a deep longing to understand what I was feeling after seeing these bodies, and experiencing death so abruptly, through the written word. During the height of lockdown, a very dear friend emailed me Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” amidst the news of the dead piling up in the hospitals.

Aubade is, unsurprisingly, about death. The speaker works all day, gets half drunk at night, and wakes at 4 AM to soundless dark, where the anxiety of their mortality lingers in their peripheral vision. But the coming of morning and another day, with all its banalities, rolls on, as inevitable as death itself.

***TW: After this warning, I describe one of the instances where I found a body.***

I was reminded of this poem on a very hot, early summer morning—one where I woke early because I could not sleep. I decided to take a walk, anything was better than lying twisted in a heap of sweaty sheets. At the end of my street, I turned a corner, and there was an elderly man face down on the pavement. A box of cat litter and other groceries were at his feet and his glasses were in the street a foot from his head, an accidental halo. I rushed to his side along with another man, who checked him for a pulse.

The man, while pressing his fingers to the stranger’s neck, cursed at someone who decided to film the situation and told them to call an ambulance. He looked at me and lowered his voice, “there’s nothing, I can’t feel anything.” I placed my hand on the stranger’s arm and sat there until the ambulance came. I waited with him until they deposited his body in the back of the ambulance. That morning he had gone out to get some things for himself and his cat, perhaps perfectly healthy, perhaps not, but he never made it home. He died alone on the sidewalk.

After the paramedics thanked us for handling the situation before their arrival, I walked back to my apartment, shaking the whole way. I kept thinking, ‘one minute he was going about his day as usual, the next he was gone.’ While his life had just ended, everyone else was starting their day: the delivery trucks rumbled past, people took a wide berth around us as they continued their morning commutes, the subway kept running along the tracks below us.

The final stanza in “Aubade” reads:

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Someone dies and the world continues to spin on its axis, the planets around it, and us upon it. It’s part of the natural order, but it feels so cruel. For those who witness it, this contrast can feel unbearable—a moment of profound loss colliding with the steady hum of daily life. Edward Hirsch, in his book-length elegy Gabriel, reflects on this dissonance after losing his son, writing: “I saw people buying coffee from trucks / And ordering breakfast in diners / Exactly as if nothing had happened.”

In the stillness I experienced after finding the stranger, I wondered whose day would come screeching to a halt after the news of his passing? Who would miss him? Who would say his name aloud for the last time while sharing a story or memory? There’s little reverence, except for the dead fortunate enough to be eulogized or elegized by those who remember them. But how beautiful it is to become immortal through a collection of carefully selected words. I found myself returning to poems like Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break,” “The Boy Died in my Alley” by Gwendolyn Brooks , and “You Were You Are Elegy” by Mary Jo Bang.

“I loved you. I love you. / You were. And you are,” Bang’s poem repeats. The past and present tense are so starkly at odds in this poem. Poetry has a way of holding those contradictions, and I think that observing this juxtaposition was another step in grasping my mortality: You are and then you’re not. It does not have to be frightening. Humans created the idea of an afterlife to make the shift from present to past tense less terrifying (see: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy). We can comfort ourselves with platitudes like, “they are in a better place,” or “they aren’t gone, they’re watching over you.”

We have always sought ways to soften the blow, to stretch the thread between presence and absence—whether through ideas of an afterlife, rituals of mourning, or the quiet, enduring act of writing. I think Camus said something like, “come to terms with death, and thereafter anything is possible.” Poetry is how I have come to terms with that fragile thread we walk. It’s also how I’ve acknowledged the lives of the dead I have found, even in their anonymity, while learning how to settle with the simple fact that I am here until I’m not. I am loved before and after. I am remembered until the last memories of me fade.

Poetry, for me, is the bridge across that soundless dark—it transforms death from an abrupt end into something you can hold, examine, and, in arguably the most important way, understand. It turns fear into reflection, loss into art, and mortality into meaning. Larkin’s morning light strengthens, and the uncaring world begins to rouse. But in these words, we take a brief pause; what is gone can linger a moment longer. In turning these thoughts and moments into writing, perhaps this essay is a small attempt at giving the people I have found a collection of words that hold their memory, too: every crack in the pavement is a song to the stranger. “I am living. I remember you.”

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Back in September, I trudged (and I mean trudged) 54.37 miles through Wyoming’s Wind River Range with two of my friends. When I say that place was beautiful, that’s a gross understatement—I’ll post some photos below for you to see—but for all its beauty, the trip got ugly at parts. This had nothing to do with going unwashed for six days straight, rather it was about how ugly it got in my head. Removed from work or social routines and distractions, I was forced to sit with myself for the first time in I don’t know how long. And what I sat with, I didn’t like.

I grew up in an evangelical Christian environment, so I know what it means to really hate myself. As a child in Sunday School, I was taught that I was evil and a sinner; I was unworthy of God’s love or grace. The only way that I could win this love was to be pure, blameless, and without sin. Imagine what that does to a little one who doesn’t have the critical thinking skills to understand that you can mess up in this life and still deserve to be loved. And so started the cycle of slipping up, resenting myself for not being better, and living in fear of both those things.

This self-hatred was further exacerbated in my early 20s with an anxiety and panic disorder diagnosis. I hated that I couldn’t feel normal, that I couldn’t go to crowded places or do the things I used to without the fear of a panic attack coming on. This disorder ruined life as I knew it and me along with it. A boyfriend I had at the time told me, “It is so exhausting to love you in spite of your mental illness,” and that has never left me. I was now unworthy of both God’s love and anyone else’s because I was such a mess.

As I moved through my 20s, there was a lot of talk about “self-love” and “being good to yourself.” I hated my body—how it gained weight from the drugs that I took to quiet the panic. And I hated my brain for reminding me every day that I was difficult to love because of this disorder. So, excuse me, but how the fck could I love something that I felt couldn’t be loved by others?

If this feels like piling on, it’s because it was.

Lying in my coffin of a tent on the first night on the trail, I was finally without the mindless scrolling, the television, or even the comfort of conversations with friends. There was a river nearby and the stars were abundant. It was idyllic. Things, at this point in the trip, were feeling positive. I was calm.

I took my headlamp, a tiny field notes book, and a pen out, and I decided I would try to write down what I wanted from this trip. Looking back on this moment makes me laugh. What did I want from nature? More like what would nature demand from me? And it demanded so much more than I was prepared for physically, mentally, emotionally, nutritionally, etc. Anyway, I wrote down that I wanted to be in better physical shape after this trip LMFAOOOOOOOO.

Over the next five days, I got my ass kicked.

Our route was challenging—it was technical, and at points, dangerous. We were navigating long days and extreme elevation gains with 45 pounds of gear strapped to our back. We would go to bed when the sun set and wake up when it rose, all the while, sleeping in freezing temperatures. We were burning upwards of 3,000 calories a day and existing on dehydrated meals and the saddest, ugliest, smashed up PB&Js I’ve ever seen. We were digging holes to sh*t in, and filtering water from creeks, constantly wondering if this was the batch that would finally give us Giardia.

There was one day, where we completely missed the trail and proceeded to rock scramble through a wasteland of boulders for upwards of four hours. During that scramble, I fell down multiple times, I was the slowest in the pack by a long shot, and I cried—hard. At this point, I needed my physical body to perform and my anxiety was shutting everything down. I was terrified that one of us was going to slip and fall the 15-20 feet down between these giant boulders to a broken femur. “I can’t do this,” I wept to the other two in the group. “You don’t have a choice,” one of them fired back.

All I wanted to do was hit the damn SOS button on our GPS device.

I don’t know what carried me through, pure adrenaline or divine intervention, but we made it through that boulder-filled pass. While we set up camp, I noticed that my heart rate was pretty high. I usually sit at a resting heart rate of about 50 BPM, and my watch was telling me that I was still over 100 BPM even though I was just sitting down. As soon as I noticed that, I onboarded a panic attack. Any normal person would be like, “Wow, I just went through a stressful event, my adrenaline levels are probably doing this,” but I immediately turned to self-hatred.

I brought medicine along in the event that I had a panic attack, so I took it. Rather than feeling relieved, I was pissed off. I kept thinking, why am I like this, why couldn’t I just get a grip, why did I need medication to be normal, why did my body fail me like that today, why am I so slow, why did I miss the trail, why am I so stupid—just a full-on verbal assault on myself. I went to bed feeling absolutely pathetic, which carried on into the next few days.

I continued to move slower than the rest of the group and then would internally berate myself. I would feel nauseous from the altitude and get angry that I was so weak. My knees would ache and I would blame myself for not being vigilant enough to get in better shape before the trip. Nothing I did was enough for myself. Since there was no one else around to be exhausted by me, I became exhausted of myself.

Our last night on the trail, we stayed up a little bit later than usual to stargaze. The sky is so clear out there, you can see the Milky Way. It is unreal. While we were sitting out there, with our heads tilted upward, I had an overwhelming sensation come over me: pure gratitude. I was so sincerely grateful to my body that carried me all of this way to experience this scene. I was grateful that I had kept myself safe. I was grateful that I somehow overpowered my anxiety on that scramble and didn’t hit the damn SOS button. I was grateful to be here, now, with my body and my mind.

And I know, it’s so cliched to feel all of this under a sky full of stars, but nature really will be doing that to you!! When you feel the most insignificant is when you finally can start to appreciate the things you often overlook: and in this case, I had overlooked my capabilities, my strength, and the capacity to sit with myself and begin to like myself. I’d spent so long being cruel that I didn’t really even know I could be gentle again. That night I held myself in my own arms and began to repair the damage I had self-inflicted for so long with a single sentence: I forgive you.

That forgiveness extended to a lot of things—myself, my younger self, my exes, my family, my religion. I realized all of it could be forgiven. I know that there’s no way I can forget all of these things that have accumulated over the years (they’re part of me at this point), but at the very least, I can try to separate what is really worth paying attention to and what is piling on more unnecessary self-loathing.

Now that this trip is over and we’re out of the wilderness, the challenge is to not let that realization just be a one-off epiphany that happened while I was malnourished, tired, and scared. It’s been hard to hold on to the clarity I felt out there in the Winds. This trip was more than just a physical test; it was a confrontation with my innermost struggle, repackaged as a difficult but necessary lesson under that vast sky. Now, the distractions and social obligations creep back in, the habits, the tendency to be hard on myself. But at least for now, something’s shifted. The part of me that used to really needle at myself has gone quiet. I’m more patient and more proud of my mind and body.

And in an insanely roundabout, soul-searchy, naked-and-afraid, Cheryl-Strayed-headass-way, I got exactly what I wanted from that trip—I lost 8lbs.