It All Begins Here

When I first began this journey, I believed things would look different from what they do today. I had a movie in my mind. It featured the same characters from my real life, but the story flowed with greater coherence. The plot was vague but understandable. Challenges appeared, were confronted, and resolved. The arc made sense.

I imagined a scene set in a wide, granite-countertop kitchen. Clean, but lived in. The kind of space that suggests control without rigidity. My notebooks were left out on the counter, but neatly stacked beside a scented candle in a pretty glass jar. Morning light. Fresh flowers. Order.

The main character was recognizably me, though improved. Healthier. Fit. Perfectly bronzed. Hair slightly tousled in a way that required no effort. Pajamas rumpled from sleep that had actually been restful. The bed itself was impossibly comfortable, the kind you disappear into rather than resist. I suppose I imagined myself as the grown-up version of one of the Sweet Valley High twins, the books I devoured obsessively as a child. I read them while feeling acutely uncomfortable in my own skin. By twelve, I was five foot nine, all long limbs and angles, braces and thick glasses, hyperaware of my body and how much space it seemed to take up. Those books offered an escape. I could read and write and daydream my way into becoming the beautiful girls on those pages. Tall, blonde, effortlessly desired. A perfect size six, driving a sports car to school. In the quiet and private way children do, I believed that if I imagined it hard enough, rehearsed it long enough, I might someday step fully into that version of myself. That was what I thought you were meant to become. The glossy magazine version of happiness.

That version of beauty didn’t exist on its own. It came with a setting. With a life that matched the body. The home was part of the transformation, proof that everything had worked out the way it was supposed to. In that imagined kitchen, there were no dirty dishes in the sink. No cabinet doors left open. The space itself reflected a woman who had arrived, who moved through the world without friction. The kitchen was always full. Not just stocked, but full in a broader sense. Full of food, of ease, of continuity. A life that didn’t feel constantly interrupted.

I think I expected my life to resemble that version once the journey began. I say began, though I know now the beginning came much earlier. It was the moment I checked myself into the hospital and stopped drinking. When survival stopped being theoretical and became a daily practice. That was when I entered the work of healing, even if I didn’t yet have language for it.

At the time, I was living beneath a dark cloud. That period remains indistinct. Much of it is fogged over. I remember sensations more than details. Fear, confusion, a persistent sense of being unmoored. But something had already shifted. The story had started moving, even if I wasn’t yet able to follow it forward.

I was trying to construct a version of myself that made sense. Emotionally, I felt newly born and deeply unstable, more like a teenager than an adult, possibly even younger than that. I was attempting to orient myself without any real internal footing, trying to reconcile who I had been with who I believed I was supposed to become.

At that point, I lived with one foot in St. Louis and one in Florida. I moved between them not just physically, but psychologically. Each place held a different version of me. Florida had always existed in the background of my life, even though I grew up and settled in the Midwest. My father grew up in a town just outside Philadelphia, in a world where people spent summers at the shore and retired in Florida. Florida came to represent warmth, escape, and the possibility of starting over. It felt less like a location and more like an idea I had inherited.

I carried that idea with me, even when I did not fully understand it. Florida felt like an alternate life running parallel to the one I was already living, a place where I might become someone lighter, more intact. So I moved between places while trying to move between selves, unsure which version of me was real and which was aspirational.

At the time, I was still living beneath a dark cloud. That period remains indistinct. Much of it is fogged over. I remember sensations more than details. Fear. Confusion. A persistent sense of being unmoored. But something had already shifted. The story had begun to move, even if I was not yet able to follow it forward.