After the Fire
At the start of this year, the slow-burning nervous breakdown I’d downplayed scorched its way through whatever composure I had left. I thought the exhaustion would pass, and that the haze would clear. I thought I could stave it off if I just worked harder, if I just pushed through. But when April arrived, I could no longer keep up the appearance that everything was fine.
I wasn’t fine.
I had been in education for ten years—my mid-twenties through my mid-thirties. I genuinely thought I would teach until retirement. My favorite age group was high school juniors, because with them, each day felt like sitting in a room full of the most fascinating people in the world. I learned just as much from them as I hope they learned from me.
But inside, I was slowly dying.
Stress clung to me like smoke, following me to school and back home in equal measure. I couldn’t shake it before unlocking the door to my classroom, nor could I set it aside in the evenings. I just couldn’t leave it behind. And the tasks that once gave me energy in my classroom became burdens. Everything took more effort than I had to give.
At home, the smallest tasks became impossible: I stopped exercising. I stopped writing. I stopped playing guitar. Even watching TV felt like too much. My depression wasn’t improving like I thought it would—not after months of EMDR therapy, nor after over a year of medication adjustments. Despite my doctor’s care, despite my husband’s tenderness and patience through my cycling of mood swings, like a storm of seasons in flux—feeling angry and irritable and breaking down in tears, sometimes within minutes of each other—I felt like I was slipping away.
And then came the fire.
It burned through the disguises I’d carefully constructed: the calm and collected teacher, the overachiever, the one who keeps it all together. The reality was I couldn’t teach—not like this. My students deserved better. I couldn’t perform that I was okay. I couldn’t numb my way through another semester with some drinks every evening. Bills piled up. Our rental house began to feel less like a shelter and more like a cage.
But the worst part, the part that cut deepest, was the wreckage of a body I had ignored, and a voice I hadn’t heard in what felt like years. The things that mattered the most to me were slipping away. My career. My sense of purpose. My art. My sense of self. My ability to move through a single day without shaking. But what I really lost was the lie that I could keep going as I had been.
The collapse left me emptied out—raw, ashamed, terrified. And yet, for the first time in a few years, I could see the truth of my life without distortion. For that, I felt relieved.
There was no grand epiphany. Just the silence that follows a fire, and the slow realization that if I kept disappearing, there would be nothing left of me to burn.
I didn’t yet know what would come next, but I knew the silence was sacred. That’s where the work began.
I slept for what felt like days. I wept, but no tears came. And slowly, I began to tap into something deeper—an aquifer of thoughts, dreams, and fragments that had been waiting beneath the surface. I started going back through the Notes app on my phone, through old sketchbooks packed away, through half-finished poems. The yellowing pages of notebooks I’d carried with me through college, through six years of sobriety, and through some of the darkest days of me and my husband’s still-young relationship.
There were nights when I thought we wouldn’t make it. My husband and I had hurt each other in ways that stripped us bare. We became strangers to ourselves. Strangers to each other. For a while, it felt like we were clawing at the curtains of our own spirits, shredding them in the dark, no light left in the room.
But these fragments I found—these notes and sketches and memories—became a map and a record of what I had lost and what I meant to find.
I wouldn’t ignore what my soul was revealing to me, not like I had these past years. There was weight to this, an aching to it. I would call it The Reclamation Plan. My reclamation.
There are moments in life when the ground gives out—not all at once, but slowly, like a quiet erosion you didn’t notice until you’re ankle-deep in the wreckage. This past April was such a moment. My time on medical leave gave me the first chance in years to pause, to listen, to begin again.
When I set down the old selves—teacher, overachiever, fixer—I didn’t know what came next, but I felt it. I felt a pull from something I had left behind long before I realized it was missing.
I didn’t want to rush into yet another version of burnout. I needed rest. Deep rest. And I wanted something different, a life that felt truer.
The Reclamation Plan wasn’t a “plan” in the traditional sense, not like years of easter eggs for future projects planted in advance a-la Taylor Swift. There were no steps, no goals, no deadlines. Afterall, it was those very things that hollowed me to my core.
The Reclamation Plan was a way to listen. To trace the faint outline of a self I could almost—but not quite—touch. I could feel the stubborn pulse of something still alive beneath the collapse.
It became a living document—or at least I hoped it would be—part memoir, part compass, part creative prayer...Including this site you’re reading this on now, where I’ve decided to document the unfolding, to send it into the aether, an archive of memory, like the Voyager’s Golden Record, a signal, without any expectation of a receiver.
I thought back to one of my favorite collections of personal essays—a book I found one gray day in the Boulder Public Library so many years ago—Dwellings, by Linda Hogan, and what she says about the Voyager:
“In 1977, when the Voyagers were launched, one of these spacecraft carried the Interstellar Record, a hoped-for link between earth and space that is filled with the sounds and images of the world around us. It carries parts of our lives all the way out to the great Forever. It is destined to travel out of our vast solar system, out to the far, unexplored regions of space in hopes that somewhere, millions of years from now, someone will find it like a note sealed in a bottle carrying our history across the black ocean of space. This message is intended for the year 8,000,000.”
She continues:
“A small and perfect world is traveling there, with psalms journeying past Saturn’s icy rings, all our treasured life flying through the darkness, going its way alone back through the universe. There is the recorded snapping of fire, the song of a river traveling the continent, the living wind passing through dry grasses, all the world that burns and pulses around us, even the comforting sound of a heartbeat taking us back to the first red house of our mothers’ bodies, all that, floating through the universe.”
Hogan goes on to discuss the limited scope of a Golden Record. How do we decide what parts of our humanity to show, what parts to hide? Do we cover the parts that ashame us, like Adam and Eve after they’ve left the garden? “There is no image of this man nailed to a cross, no saving violence,” Hogan writes. “There are no political messages, no photographs of Hiroshima. This is to say that we know our own wrongdoings.”
I thought about my record of being. What parts have I hidden in hope of threading a narrative of wholeness? Would I hide more? I was so good at hiding; I had years of practice with some of the most essential parts of my being. What would I show? The bits and pieces of thought scribbled in cursive in the margins of an old notebook, the poems I wrote as a teenager and 20-year-old, the paintings gathering dust in the gap above the closet and beneath the ceiling. Out of sight. And out of mind. What record of mine from the past was spinning in some lost universe of myself, waiting to be discovered now, by the 36-year-old me who could no longer get up off the couch, sinking in quicksand? How could I have known then that all of it would be the very thing to help me stand again?
I started mapping the questions that mattered more than any answer:
What does a life rooted in authenticity look like?
What rhythms nourish rather than deplete?
How do I reclaim the parts of myself I abandoned in the name of survival?
Maybe it would take shape in phases. Or maybe it wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. But first: witness the truths that had surfaced. Then: name the life I wanted to build, the one I had abandoned. Finally: live into the slow, imperfect work of return—through creativity, through spirit, through rest.
I’m sharing my Reclamation Plan here not because it’s finished—it isn’t. Maybe it never will be, maybe this is a lifelong unfolding. It’s still coming into focus, and that’s what matters. It’s something shaped by every season, every slip, every small act of devotion.
I read recently that we need to begin thinking of everything in the universe as a unique, individual processes—not a collection static objects floating in space. Just as the universe continues to unfold, so do we. We are a collection of unfinished processes, an infinite unfolding.
I’m sharing my Reclamation Plan here because I believe we all have something to reclaim. And maybe it’s not even a reclaiming, but an archaeology of sorts—a recovering of the self, each precious memory, each act of remembering, each bit a slow reconstruction, a dusting-off of histories and doppelgängers of ourselves in alternate paths, an ultimate understanding, a revealing of the spirit that spreads and connects us back to ourselves like a mycelium that networks below the surface of a ground we tread and destroy and build back again.
And maybe, in tracing my path, you’ll feel permission to trace your own.
Here are the seven truths I arrived at.
I’m reclaiming my voice.
I’m reclaiming my time.
I’m reclaiming my definition of work.
I’m reclaiming my body.
I’m reclaiming my queerness.
I’m reclaiming my spirituality.
I’m reclaiming my right to change.
And here’s where I start the dig. An archaeology of myself.
___
Some fragments from my notes, April 1, 2016, 11:47 am:
Month of the Blue Heron
Recovery is like archaeology.
You slowly unearth a mecca—the lost city of yourself, buried long ago, forgotten until now. At first you dig into the earth with heavy machinery. But as you pinpoint that lost city, you begin to delicately dust away at the details, until, bit by bit, you are left with the story of your own becoming.
As I lay each night, drifting off to sleep, I imagine the slow, rhythmic blinking of the sleep light on my Macbook, a documentation of my precious time, like Cash’s saw from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, “stirring the dying light...an expression of listening and of waiting.”
Cora, the nurse, at the ICU while my brother detoxed. I never would have though twice about the nurse’s name, but it seemed like such a strange coincidence when she told my Mom and me that she graduated from Pine Grove High in ‘05. That I was reading As I Lay Dying, that there’s a Cora in those pages, too. Another Cora, Jen’s daughter, Jen who always stops by to see the chickens with her daughter, and to bring scraps from the Vitamin Cottage for them.
The night my brother was in the ICU, my mom and I went to see Joanna Newsom at the Boulder Theater. Not only did I feel lucky to get the chance to see Newsom, one of my favorite musicians (if not my absolute favorite) but I was glad I got to see her with Mom. I was probably the only one to bring my Mom as my date, but I felt proud of that. The tour was called The Strings/Keys Incident (I loved the play on words, iykyk). Newsom played a new arrangement of “Peach Plum Pear,” and it brought tears to my eyes—it was miles more beautiful than the album version.
April arrived and I was invited to interview with Vista Ridge. “Maya” by the Incredible String Band came on shuffle, as I buttoned my pale blue Oxford, tied my navy blue tie, and laced up my dress shoes.
I drove through the canyon, and as I merged onto I-25, “Cherokee” by Cat Power came on shuffle. I felt at peace and confident. My interview went well—I could sense it in the room. I was confident. Calm. Myself. God has answered my prayer from the night before. After communion between body, mind, and spirit on a run in Red Rock Canyon Open Space, I drove home. And as I wound down Sleepy Hollow, “Rising Greatness” by Alela Diane came on. The principal called me just before I pulled into the driveway at my parents’ to welcome me aboard that night.