Life Beyond the Rocky Roads: Learning to Live Wild and Quiet Along the Way

When I started this blog, I wasn't trying to build anything. I was trying to get something out of my chest before it did damage staying in.

There were things I couldn't say to a single person I actually knew. Not because they were scandalous. Because they were mine, and I hadn't figured out yet how to hand them to someone without also handing over the right to judge me for them. So I gave them to strangers instead, into the anonymous dark of the internet, which is a strange thing to admit — that it was easier to be honest with no one than with someone.

Maybe that's true for you too. Maybe there's a version of yourself you've only ever shown to a page, or a search bar at 1 a.m., or someone you'll never meet. I'm not going to tell you that's sad. I think it's just where a lot of us start. It's one of the reasons I started writing fiction, to live through those words.

I've kept my anonymity. I haven't kept much else hidden. Whatever's underneath the not-knowing-who-I-am has always been the realest part — what's actually in my heart, what I've wanted to hand you, even without a name attached to it.

Here's the part I didn't say out loud for years: I had ideas. A lot of them. Ideas about the life I could actually be living instead of the one I'd more or less agreed to by default. And I sat on almost every single one. I called it being responsible. It was closer to obedience. I was falling in line because falling in line didn't require me to know what I wanted — it just required me to keep up.

I used to envy people who chased things and didn't stop. I thought it was their drive I wanted. It took me a long time to admit that wasn't it. What I actually envied was that they knew. They'd done the harder, quieter work of naming the thing before they ever had to fight for it. I hadn't even gotten that far when I began this particular journey.

If you're in that place right now — going through the motions of a life you can't quite name — I'm not going to pretend I have the fix. But I'll tell you it's not the same as being lost. It's more like being unnamed. And that's a different problem, with a different way out.

I didn't know it at the time, but creating this space was the first small act of building the kind of life I had been longing for.

This blog began as Life Beyond the Rocky Roads, and it still is, because the rocky roads don't stop showing up. I've made peace with that. What has changed is where I put my attention. I used to spend almost all of it on the terrain—bracing for the next bad stretch, managing the stress, getting through. Somewhere along the way, I started paying more attention to the other half of the journey: Wild Quiet Living. Not as a reward waiting at the end of the hard part, but as something I could begin building right in the middle of it, while the ground was still uneven.

It stopped being about making the stress vanish and started being about something slower — resilience, built out of the ordinary, unglamorous choices nobody's around to witness. Not so I could become someone who never struggled again, but someone who could carry struggle differently.

When I'm on rocky ground now, I don't think the goal is to get the rocks to disappear. I think it's smaller than that, and steadier. It's the choice you make on an ordinary Tuesday that nobody will ever know took courage. It's not about outrunning the hard road. It's about growing into someone who can walk it without losing yourself along the way, and coming out the other side into something that actually feels like your own life. That will look nothing like mine. It shouldn't.

I used to think there'd be a point where I'd arrive — done with the rocky parts, fully myself, finished. I don't think that anymore. This has been a journey and I expect it to keep being one for as long as I'm around, and I suspect the same is true for you. I've stopped finding that discouraging. It's the whole thing, actually. The learning. The giving away of what I've learned. The slow becoming. Looking back at who I used to be and feeling something closer to tenderness than embarrassment. Looking forward and knowing I'm not done yet, and being okay with that.

Whatever's come before you — the ideas you kept quiet, the version of your life you agreed to instead of chose — none of it cancels out who you can still become.

I'm still figuring mine out. I'm glad you're here while I do.