This is the process of how I am moving from being in the story to holding the story.

In college I took snowboarding trips out of Colorado every winter break and often in the spring as well. Even after college I continued to take road trips with friends out to the mountains. We would spend 16 hours driving to get five days of riding and then head back to Minnesota. My friend Renee was a big part of these trips. She was always down for an adventure and made them all unforgettable. We did crazy stuff at 3am on our roadtrips, they always brought out the most unfiltered sides of ourselves.

Renee and I were in the same sorority in college. Our sorority for lack of a better way to describe it was for the ‘weird’ girls who wanted a likeminded sisterhood and community. We had two chapters and were not a national sorority that had to follow strict rules. We organized around our own rules and we were able to make space for many sisters who wouldn’t have fit in the national sororities on our campus. Joining that sorority in college was really important for me, but Renee was the only sister I stayed close with afterwards.

We stayed close because of snowboarding, because of adventures in the outdoors.

She was the friend who planned a road trip with me around officially moving to the Pacific Northwest. She drove with me the whole way, her flight back to Minnesota was the final stop. I think it is special to have people in our lives that will drop everything to go on an adventure with you. Since losing her I am remembering just how rare that actually is.

We had another sister who loved Colorado and every time I returned to Minnesota for a short trip she would tell me how she NEEDED to move out west. She finally did it and a few months later was killed in a hit and run in Denver. Her and I had a lot of fun times together in college, we hadn't stayed in touch as much, but I thought my time with her was a lot longer than it actually was.

I’ve never lived in Colorado. It has always been a place I move through. It holds a lot of memories and feels like home, but it has never really been my home. It feels like a place that holds things. The mountains there just feel like they hold things for you.

Now they seem to be holding a story that I didn’t ask for and that likely is still actively unfolding. But I am feeling stuck by this story and it needs to live outside of me. I need a different relationship with it and hopefully to give it less power over me. The power it is holding right now is that I feel simultaneously stuck and like I need to shift my life. It’s disorienting.

I stayed at a friend’s house in Colorado in January watching her dogs. This winter wasn’t very snowy so I only made it out snowboarding a few times. But one of those weekends was the only weekend we got snow. I felt stuck. It meant I had to drive a couple of hours, lift tickets were expensive, and I wasn’t sure what to do with my dog. The logistics were sort of coming together, but my decision still felt frozen.

It made me think of all the times I just went for big trips out west without thinking. Every time I had a thought about an adventure I just took steps towards it without thinking and they always worked out better than I could have imagined. It made me think of Renee and how if she were with me in that moment it would be a no brainer. So I called her that Friday night (this was in January before she passed away).

She echoed a bit of my indecision and explored how making decisions to prioritize snowboarding and adventure felt different than it used to. There was something I said in the conversation that made her tell me I had to go. Then we talked about all the fun we used to have and how we needed to get together soon. Kind of classic reminiscing conversation with a friend from college.

I woke up the next day to snow and my dog being very upset I was leaving him behind. He actually tried to chase me down the highway. He seems to know the moments when we shouldn’t be separated. But while hindsight can point to choices we could’ve made differently, there are still pieces of that decision I would never take back.

Three pieces of this interconnected web of story played out that weekend:

1. my college friend encouraged me to go for the adventure

2. I had an insight that a family member would die and it was somehow connected to a pot of gold

3. one of my friends dogs died unexpectedly and tragically

As I write this in July, an aunt has passed away from an unknown cause, that same friend who told me to go snowboarding passed away tragically, and I still see no pot of gold. I am afraid that means there will be another loss. And because I have that fear I am frozen.

Going to Colorado in January meant my friend’s dog died under my care. And a quick visit to Colorado in June was followed by news of my friend dying. I am terrified of Colorado at this moment. My friend Julie wanted to move there and was killed months after she did. My friend who I shared memories with in the mountains of Colorado is dead. And simultaneously I know I need to move through whatever this loop is. It’s not complete yet, because if it were I wouldn’t feel so stuck by it.

On one level this looks like depression and grief, it is painting the picture of someone too afraid to move because of the amount of loss around her. And on another, I know I am not afraid of loss and death. I know I am more afraid of not living. I am more afraid that I know what it looks like to live and I am frozen by my fear of doing it wrong or that it will be taken from me. I am afraid of not living. Which is ironic because it feels like that is exactly what I am not doing, living.

Logically I know that I must move to step out. And mentally it feels like I am truly trapped. Writing this is a way of processing it, to put the power out a little bit. I know what it is like to move through an emotional process and not get stuck in it. I’ll admit that I am stuck. But it also feels like the only way out is to move through it even deeper.

I still see that I am closer to my big dreams and vision by going into this deeper. I know that the life I left at the beginning of the trail that brought me into this dense forest is not the answer. I know that physically we experience restriction before expansion. But I also quietly wonder if that is a lie the healing community told me, that it is its own limiting belief dressed up as insight.

All I know is something needs to change. I need to find my self agency for that, but no one told me how hard it is to find that agency when you feel like you are at zero.

Before committing to staying in Baja for the summer I wondered if I was on a spiral leading to ascension or stuck in an eddy looping around to the same scene over and over. I believe the answer is only revealed by how I get out. Does riding the spiral eventually take me to expansion and reveal something new? Or do I have to find the strength to fight against the current strategically to get myself out?

Maybe it’s both.