“If you love someone, set them free.
If they come back they’re yours; if they don’t they never were.”

– Richard Bach 

Today marks the two year anniversary of our return to California.

If you followed along with our travels, then you’ll recall our story didn’t go as planned and instead after 24-months of continuous travel, our adventure ended in broken dreams as well as hearts, and I published what would become the final post on our blog… Spoiler Alert: A RTW Adventure Doesn’t Save A Marriage.

That was the last chapter of Wild Child Travels and our family as we knew it, and to say we were devastated doesn’t begin to capture the depth of our destruction.

But the human heart is an amazing thing.

It’s more resilient than we think, and contrary to conventional wisdom, rupture actually expands our capacity for love if we allow the pain to teach us what we need to know. This is not to gloss over and say this process of heartbreak is an easy journey. In fact, quite the contrary.

Grief will take you to your knees figuratively and often quite literally, and you will likely feel as if you have died.

And in a way, you will have. At least parts of you. Grief is a portal that will force you to reconcile parts of yourself you’d be happy to leave in the dark. And you will meet parts of yourself you don’t recognize and likely will do your damnest to look the other way.  You will also realize you have a strength you didn’t know you had, until you needed it.

For the personal growth junkies in the crowd, you may recognize this concept of personal discovery as the Johari Window. Life gives us circumstances where we discover things about ourselves, that were previously unknown, even to us.

In my own journey through the forest of loss and grief, I met parts of myself I would have prefered to have let lie in the darkness (holy shit yes, it would have been easier to let sleeping dog lie!). However bringing my shadow self out of into the bright light of reality, was in the end for me a true blessing.  Shame can no longer breed in silence. By naming my demons, I was able to tame them.  This became an all powerful mantra during my forage into the wilderness of my own being.

I kept repeating to myself, “This is happening FOR me, not TO me,” and I believed that with all my will.

I anchored into the truth that my true nature was that of love, and that the universe had our backs no matter how stormy the ocean of our emotions got. That in the end, if we stayed true, what was meant to be would prevail. We would all be okay, even though at the time it felt as if nothing was okay. Something I have struggled with for as long as I can remember, was embracing my own worthiness. Seems so simple, and yet it had always been just of my reach.

When Glennon Doyle Melton released her raw and deeply personal memoir, Love Warrior, about her failing marriage, she made a statement that seared me to my core (ironically I was sent an advance copy right around the time we landed at home, talk about omens. The above link is a book review I wrote at a time my own marriage was in dissolving).

Write from the scar and not the wound she advised.

“Love Warrior is intensely personal, but it’s not a diary. I started turning it into a memoir two years after it all happened, and I had enough distance to look at all of it somewhat objectively. I wrote the book and rewrote it, and with every paragraph asked myself: How is this not just about me, but about the reader? About all of us? How can I turn my personal story into something universal I sifted through my own pain and mined it for gold to share with others.

When we truth-tell widely in real time, it’s alarming to people because it can feel more like a cry for help than an act of service.You have to be still with your pain before you can offer it up and use it to serve and connect with people you don’t know.”

Those words, rattled around in my head, write from the scar, not the wound.  There was an electricity of recognition in my being, and I knew as I read them that one day I would write publicly about the experience, even though at the moment I was unable to formulate a coherent thought, much less a sentence.  And why did I feel so called to share the details of such a personal and painful journey?

Well, I am hardly the first woman to go through a divorce or a separation, and being a person who is able to articulate emotions into words, was a talent I was blessed with. I cannot allow my ego, and worrying about if I’m good enough or not, stop me from sharing the unexpected gifts that came from my own unraveling. My own destruction and rebirth. I’ve heard other writers say they name the things others find difficult, so that we all may know none of us are alone.

Funny, it’s been two years, the same window of time it had taken Glennon to process. When lost in the wastelands of pain, it is deeply, deeply personal, and it is a lonely fight back to reclaim our place in the land of the living. And yet if we can surrender to ALL OF IT, we are brought down to the place where there is nothing left but grace and gratitude for the simplest of things, and we are no longer afforded the luxury to take for granted.

There is so much of this story I want to share, but a blog is not the format for a story of this depth. I’ve committed to writing a memoir. That is scary as shit to say in a public space, and yet I know it’s something I have to and will do.  If you’d like to know when it’s ready, you can sign up to be notified here.

In the meantime, I’m happy to report that our family is once again intact and stronger for the time we spent apart, each of us reconciling the things we were trying to run from. We don’t for a moment regret the adventures we had, and we’re not done with our shenanigans by any means. But for the moment, being stationary and focusing on one another and our healing journey with no other distractions is exactly where we need to be. Funny how our big adventure led us right back to where we started, and yet somehow it’s not the same at all.

May we all remember that behind every picture of a smiling family is a narrative that we can never fully know.
Here is my family, warts and all, showing up for each other despite being imperfect, in process and without all the answers.
We’re so grateful for another chance to love one another, faults and all.

A wise person once said, you can’t write the next chapter, if you keep re-reading the last.

So here we go. Writing the next chapter. We realized happiness is not a destination, but rather a state of mind. One that has to be cultivated and never taken for granted.

I loved the process of sharing on a blog, and will begin writing here once again after the hiatus I’ve been on.

Moving forward I’ll be writing about living life as the artist of our days and being intentional with how we choose to spend our time. I share many of the creative (and not so creative, hello Whisky old friend!) tools of transformation I used in my own healing journey, which I believe is a lifetime practice. And if you’re already one of those perfectly zen humans, well this likely wouldn’t be your jam (insert eye roll to all the perfect humans out there!)

However if you’re also a human being in process, exploring and searching for the meaning of it all, just doing your best on any given day, and having as much fun as possible along the way, then check out my free heART & Soul Cafe.  It’s a free community for dreamers and doers to connect with and support one another in the sometimes scary process of making dreams real. You can check it out by clicking on the image below.

There are no guarantees at the start of an adventure, and that’s what makes it all so exciting. How boring would it be, if we knew how it would all turn out? You wouldn’t call it an adventure, that’s for sure!

Click here of the above image to join our free community

Thank you for following along on this wild ride with us. It’s been a delight and pleasure to have met so many of you along our way. Your support through the peaks and valleys has been humbling and appreciated.

In the end, ours is really just another true account of “Happily Ever After.”
Here’s to real. And all the feels that come along with that.
May we always remember our inherent worthiness,