I recently returned from ten days in Alaska. I went there knowing that something significant was waiting for me when I came home. Human Recovery was preparing to launch, and with it, I was approaching the culmination of a journey that began long before I knew this program would exist.
So, while I was away, I made an intentional decision to unplug.
I unplugged from work, planning, building, and the constant pull toward what needed to happen next. I allowed myself to be fully present—with my wife, my daughter, extended family, and the incredible wildness of Alaska. I was present for the laughter, the conversations, the quiet moments, and the vastness of the landscape. I let myself be held by nature without asking it to teach me anything.
And, of course, it taught me anyway.
One day, we were hiking through a beautiful Alaskan rainforest, chasing waterfalls and looking for fairies. We were in what felt like the middle of nowhere, surrounded by moss, water, trees, and a kind of aliveness that cannot be explained—only felt. As I walked, I began thinking about the journey of the past five years. I thought about all the places grief has taken me, the work it has asked of me, and the trust I have slowly learned to place in myself.
I thought about how much of healing has been learning to love myself—not as an idea or an affirmation, but as a daily practice. Learning to know myself, listen to myself. Learning to trust what I feel and honor what I need. Learning to take the hand of the little girl inside me and walk with her toward the edge of everything we have known.
The Life I Thought I Was Supposed to Want
Before loss shattered my life, I believed I was doing everything right.
For decades, I worked as an emergency room nurse. I raised my children. I built a career, a home, and a life that looked successful from the outside. We had the house, the cars, the trips, and the things we are taught to work toward.
I checked the boxes. I was a mother. A wife. A nurse. A caregiver. A problem-solver. I was the person who could walk into chaos and know what to do. But….beneath all those titles, I had done very little of my own inner work.
My identity was built around the roles I carried, the people who needed me, and what I could accomplish. I knew how to take care of everyone else. I knew how to stay calm in a crisis. I knew how to compartmentalize pain, move through exhaustion, and keep going.
What I did not know was who I was beneath those roles. I did not know how to be with myself when there was nothing left to fix.
Then I lost my son Johnathan to suicide.
In an instant, life divided into before and after.
I spiraled. I had no grounding on which to fall. I had spent years building my identity around what I did and who I was to other people. When the unimaginable happened, none of those identities could hold me. I did not know how to sit with grief, how to listen to my body. I did not know how to remain present with pain that could not be solved.
And then I discovered one of the cruelest truths about loss: life simply continues.
The sun rises. People go to work. Bills need to be paid. Groceries need to be bought. People laugh, make plans, and talk about ordinary things. The world continues moving even though your own world has been eternally changed.
When Grief Has Nowhere to Go
I also learned how deeply lonely grief can be.
We live in a society that avoids discomfort. We do not know what to do with grief, trauma, addiction, or pain that cannot be wrapped up in an inspirational lesson. We may show up immediately after a loss with food, flowers, cards, and kind words, but it does not take long before the grieving person begins to feel the unspoken pressure to return to normal.
Only two months after losing Johnathan, I was advised to go back to work.
Get busy. Take your mind off it. You’ll feel better.
What my I heard was:
Distract yourself. Become productive again. Make your pain less visible. Return to being the person everyone recognizes.
In other words: numb.
So I did. I returned to the emergency room 8 weeks after losing my son. My first case back involved a resuscitation of a six month-old baby who had experienced suspected non-accidental trauma. I stepped into the room and did what decades in emergency medicine had trained me to do. I assessed. I responded. I managed the crisis. I did not miss a beat.
From the outside, it looked as though I was back to my old self. But I was not healed. I had simply returned to the familiar rhythm of moving from one crisis to the next, caring for everyone else’s pain while avoiding my own. I fell right back into the cadence of the familiarity.
The emergency room gave me somewhere else to place my attention. It allowed me to remain in motion so I would never have to become still enough to feel what was happening inside me. Eight months after losing Johnathan, I lost my son Jace to an overdose. He had been in sober living and he relapsed.
This time, I could not return to who I had been.
I not only lost my sons, I lost the identities around which I had built my life. I no longer knew what it meant to be a mother when two of my children were gone. I could no longer be the nurse who moved effortlessly from crisis to crisis. I was no longer the woman who could hold everything together. I had spent my life believing that strength meant enduring, producing, caring for others, and continuing forward no matter what.
Eventually, my body and spirit could no longer carry what I had not allowed myself to feel. I lost my way and did not know if I even wanted to find my way back.
The person I had known myself to be died, too.
It was a metaphysical death—the death of my roles, my certainty, my way of moving through the world, and the illusion that I could control life if I simply worked hard enough and stayed busy enough.
And somewhere within that death, another journey began.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Shortly after Johnathan died, someone gave me Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking. I tried to read it, but I could not. It was far too early in my grief. I could not enter someone else’s experience of loss while I was barely surviving my own. The words were too close, the pain too immediate.
Over the years, I eventually returned to the book. And as I walked through that Alaskan rainforest, chasing waterfalls and fairies, its title returned to me in an entirely different way. I began to think about how healing has brought me back to a different kind of magical thinking.
Not the magical thinking that denies reality or tries to bargain with what has happened, but the kind that makes room for living again.
It is the willingness to believe in what we cannot always see, explain, measure, or prove. Learning to trust the quiet voice within us. Noticing synchronicities and allowing ourselves to be moved by them. It is finding messages in nature, meaning in ritual, and connection in moments that others might dismiss as coincidence.
It is remembering that the world can still hold wonder, even after it has shown us unimaginable pain. Grief stripped away many of the structures through which I once understood life. But in doing so, it also opened me to another way of seeing.
When you have been brought to the edge of life, you begin to recognize what is sacred. You become more aware of what is real and what is merely performance. You begin to question the expectations, identities, and conditioning that once directed your life.
You understand that darkness and light are not opposites. They belong to one another. I had to learn to love my shadows rather than fear them. I had to stop abandoning the parts of myself that were angry, grieving, frightened, ashamed, or lost. I had to sit beside them, listen to them, and understand that they were not trying to destroy me.
They were asking to be loved.
And as I learned to love the parts of myself I had once hidden, I also became less afraid to step into the light.
Learning to Come Home
There was not one practice, one treatment, or one moment that saved my life. Healing came through a collection of small, intentional practices repeated over time. I began learning how to breathe again—not simply to survive, but to inhabit my body. I returned to movement. I practiced meditation. I did yoga, art, breathwork, and nervous-system regulation. I went to
therapy, tons of therapy. I followed the recommendations of my therapists and doctors while I also did somatic work.
I learned to become still and listen. I learned to allow my emotions to be present and how to move with them.
I learned that my body was not betraying me. It was communicating with me.
These practices did not take away my grief. They did not return my sons or restore the life I had before them. They gave me a way to remain in relationship with myself while carrying what had happened. They taught me that healing is not about “getting over” loss or becoming the person we were before. Healing is the daily devotional practice of meeting ourselves honestly, tending to the pain, and learning to live within a life that has been forever changed.
I began to understand that we are all recovering. From trauma and grief. From roles we have outgrown, and identities constructed around achievement, productivity, and caring for everyone except ourselves. We recover from the conditioning that taught us who we were supposed to be.
We recover from the ways we have abandoned our bodies, silenced our needs, and disconnected from our own truth.
We are all recovering humans.
The Birth of Human Recovery
Human Recovery grew from this understanding.
It grew from my grief, but it is not only about grief. It grew from my years as a nurse, but it is not a medical program. It grew from losing everything I thought I was and slowly discovering the person underneath.
Human Recovery is the culmination of everything I have learned in my 57 years in this human experience.
It is the support I needed when my life fell apart.
I needed more than advice to stay busy. I needed somewhere my pain would not be treated as shameful, inconvenient, or uncomfortable. I needed practices that could meet me when words were not enough. I needed people willing to sit beside me without rushing to fix me. I needed a community that understood healing is not linear and grief does not follow a socially acceptable timeline.
Most of all, I learned that recovery is an internal job. That we can ask for support, but that support needs to be parallel to our healing journey. I learned that we must feel to heal. I learned to build a relationship with myself. To love myself and to trust myself. Most of all, I learned to not feel alone when I am by myself. I had to build a relationship with myself strong enough to hold both grief and living this crazy, wonderful life.
Human Recovery exists to help others build that relationship.
It is an invitation to bring recovery and healing back to the places they have always belonged: within the body, within the self, and within community.
As Human Recovery launches, I feel as though I am standing on a precipice. This program is the culmination of years of grief, searching, learning, unlearning, practicing, trusting, and becoming. Sharing it with the world requires me to step beyond the safety of what I have known. But I am not standing at that edge alone.
In my mind, I am taking the hand of the little girl within me—the one who learned to survive, perform, caretake, and become whatever other people needed her to be. Together, we are walking toward the edge. We are not stepping into nothingness.
We are stepping into everything we have learned together. We are stepping forward with trust.
With love. With grief. With wonder and curiosity. With the belief that a life can be shattered and still become sacred.
In Alaska, surrounded by rainforest, waterfalls, the people I love, and the possibility of fairies, I realized that this journey has brought me full circle.
I once tried to survive by separating myself from pain. Now I understand that the deepest pain can become a doorway—not because suffering is required but because meeting our pain honestly can awaken us to parts of ourselves we might never otherwise know.
Grief did not make my life smaller. Eventually, it asked me to become large enough to hold sorrow and beauty at the same time. It taught me that I can miss my sons and still laugh. I can carry grief and still experience wonder. I can honor the darkness and still step toward the light. I can accept what I cannot change and still believe in magic.
We were never meant to carry our hardest experiences alone. We were never meant to hide our pain so others could remain comfortable. And we were never meant to measure healing by how quickly we could become productive again.
The practices that became Human Recovery helped save my life. Now I offer them to others standing at their own threshold—those whose lives have changed, whose identities have fallen away, or who know that simply surviving is no longer enough.
There is another way forward—not by leaving your story behind, but by learning to carry it with truth, compassion, courage, wonder, and connection.
This is the journey of coming home…of remembering the beauty and magic that lies within.