April 30th- April 1st came and went so fast, much like the eleven years that came before it.
For ten of those years, I’ve held a quiet habit: I write a dedication piece on this day. Not out of nostalgia, but because this date marks something more profound than a memory. It was a transformational turning point that forever altered the person I’ve become.
The great mystery of it still lives in me — wondering what would have happened otherwise, though maybe there was no alternative. Maybe it was always destined.
This year, for a moment, I almost didn’t write it.
I’ve lived in one place for nearly a year now, with only a cumulative ten weeks of travel. By many people’s standards, that’s a lot. By mine, it’s small enough that I genuinely feel like I can’t claim the word nomad right now.
“Heck, am I domesticated?” I wondered while strolling the city’s river walk after yoga, clean enough to ask myself when I’d last gone a week without a shower. Which, half a decade ago, was more common than I’d like to admit.
But it’s still been eleven years since the day that sent me swerving down a path that dared me to become everything I could be — a path that has strengthened, strangled, and supported me in a way that no person ever really could.
So I’m writing.
2025 was the hardest year I can remember. I questioned my life on the deepest levels — everything I thought I believed. I felt, at times, like the entire game of life was a scam. I thought previous years were tough, but this one took it a step beyond.
Somewhere in it, I stepped into the shoes of people who genuinely struggle. Not poverty — though in some ways poverty is better because it forces you to change. But something close in feeling.
You work hard.
You have good people around you.
You exercise sometimes, maybe even get outside.
And what you want still feels impossibly far out of reach. So far that you start living for the dopamine hits.
For friends, for the weekend, for anything that gives you momentary relief. Because you’re so exhausted that even when you know what you want, you don’t have the energy to do the million things a saturated, distracted world requires just to be seen.
I’m not outside of that. I lived it this year. And it gave me a compassion I couldn’t have manufactured.
It started as a weird feeling of giving up.
But I lingered in it long enough that it began to feel more like letting go. And when that happened, I stopped worrying so much about myself and started actually seeing people — their struggles, their weight, the quiet things they were carrying.
I burnt out. My health suffered from pushing myself in every direction while making no visible progress. I withdrew for almost a month. Then, after sixty days of intention, healing happened overnight.
I got my light back.
And with it, something stranger happened: I remembered.
Not something new. Something old.
Everything my seventeen-year-old self had believed — but hadn’t yet had the life experience to prove true — turned out to be correct. It just took enough lived experience to come back around to it.
The teenager who lived in the forest. Who climbed walls and surfed dark oceans and believed that was enough. Who found worth in the doing, not the being seen. She knew something that, for years, society has tried to beat out of me. And quietly, in the aftermath of the hardest year I can remember, she came back.
The light I found wasn’t an epiphany. It was smaller than that. Just a voice I could barely hear again.
And then, quietly, something arrived.
Not what I’d been reaching for. Not the opportunity, the open door, the connection I’d been scanning the room for. Something quieter than that. Something that showed me what it feels like when life moves toward you instead of away.
I guess you could say it all works out.
But God — why is that so hard to believe in the moment?
Which brings me to why I almost didn’t write this year…
I have mixed feelings.
Enough that it took a full month to finish this piece.
I long for the road. Late nights on empty highways. Waking up in the forest with no idea what the day might hold. When the going gets tough, I find myself staring at the keys to my truck, wondering why I don’t just go.
And yet, here in Bend, I’ve loved what’s grown. The friends and communities, the skiing, the mountain biking, the adventure climbing. The special few I’ve come to know along the way.
These two things are both true. And I’m learning to let them be.
I genuinely don’t know what comes next. And for the first time in a long time, I’m okay with that — not because I’ve given up on knowing, but because I’ve been here before. Standing at the junction without a plan. Trusting the road anyway.
Seven years ago, I vaguely remember this time we were heading north on I-15. It was a cold, windy day, the distant mountains icy, the grass yellow. We couldn’t decide whether to go to Salt Lake City or Colorado. My mom didn’t have a plan. She never really needed one. So as we’re flying down the highway, she looks at us and says, “Which way?”
We didn’t know. She pulled over at a rest stop and we sat there for five minutes just lingering in the not-knowing. No decision made. Then we got back on the highway.
Flying down the road in near silence, just the soothing hum of the Class C engine in fifth gear, we saw the green signs approach overhead.
Just as they were about to pass overhead and the road split in two directions, my mom turned the wheel on the fly and whipped the RV onto I-70.
We cheered. Not because of the decision. Because of the fun of not knowing.
I’m in that rest stop right now. I don’t see a green exit sign yet. Google Maps is out of service. And I’m trusting that — like my mom navigating without a plan — I’ll know the junction when I hit it.
Because eleven years of taking unknown roads taught me that all roads eventually lead somewhere beautiful.
I think about that day a lot lately.
Because honestly, I’m not sure what the right road to turn down next is.
I don’t see a green exit sign yet.
Google Maps is out of service.
And I’m trusting that, like my mom navigating without a plan, I’ll know the junction when I hit it.
Here’s what I actually want to say, eleven years in:
Suffering is inevitable. Staying stuck in it is optional.
The road I took wasn’t easier. But it gave me something I couldn’t have found in a classroom, a career ladder, or a five-year plan — the ability to look at life with new eyes.
To sit inside uncertainty without needing to resolve it.
To dare to believe in something before I have proof.
To hear a voice inside myself that is louder than the noise outside.
I didn’t learn that in school. I learned it on empty highways, dark oceans, and walls that scared me half to death.
I learned it from aloneness, from letting go of approval, from doing hard things for no reason other than wanting to see what I was made of.
That seventeen-year-old was right. And I’m done apologizing for the road she chose.
You don’t have to live in an RV. But you might want to ask yourself whose road you’re actually on and whether you chose it… or just never questioned it.
Eleven years. Still going.
