Hello love, can I call you that?
I’m writing from the road and I wanted to try something different for this post. A challenge to myself of sorts.
I want to write without editing myself as I go. I want to write from my heart to yours without a carefully formulated beginning, middle and end, and without checking with ChatGBT to make sure all the dots are connecting inside my post.
What’s inside me these days just desperately wants to FLOW, and yet, I have this editor who’s been there my entire life checking everything I’m about to say or do before it happens and making sure it’s appropriate, polished and perfected first.
I know the editor has been trying to keep me safe, but it also stifles my voice and expression and it makes writing a post take days, maybe weeks. I don’t have time for that on this trip, and honestly, I don’t have time for that in my life anymore.
Nor do I have the desire, because this chapter of my life is about being FULLY expressed.
So, thank you for joining me for this little experiment. I love that this community is a safe place to grow into who we are becoming.
Writing to you from Boise, Idaho
I’m currently sitting in my camper van at a park in Boise, Idaho eating my dinner - gluten free, protein pasta made with lupini beans (have you heard of that?! I just discovered it) and a delicious marinara sauce that my husband made for me to take on my trip.
The drive so far has been very windy. So windy in fact that the highway was shut down yesterday due to extreme blow over risk. So I didn’t make it to my destination last night, which threw off my plan to spend the day working on my Substack and going to the gym here in Boise. Instead, I’ve been driving all day. But I’m finally here now, so all is well.
Except for the vertigo I’m experiencing.
The morning I left on my trip, I woke up with a clogged ear, which is a pretty normal occurrence for me every time the weather gets socked in where I live in Boulder Valley.
It makes me feel disoriented and dizzy but I have this magical little onion trick that I use that usually clears it up: I boil an onion for 10 minutes, slice it in half and hold the open end to my ear. A naturopath I worked with years ago told me about this and I’ve been using it ever since. I don’t really know why it works so well to clear up my ear - something about the vapors in the onion seem to magically pull out the clogged feeling and give me my head back.
I only had time to do one round of the onion trick before I left. And it seemed to help. But after driving for 12 hours on the windy highway, gripping the steering wheel as my van swayed back and forth, I now feel like I’m going to fall over every time I try to walk on solid ground. And when I park the van, I still feel it swaying even though it’s not.
The dizziness is really intense when I’m not driving, but it goes away when I’m driving, so at least there’s that. Fingers crossed it clears up soon, because it’s really, really disorienting and I want to ENJOY my trip!
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How this trip became a tradition
I’m on the first leg of my annual 3-week road trip from Colorado, to Portland, to San Francisco and back to Colorado. This is the 3rd year now that I’m doing this trip and it’s become a tradition that I look forward to every year.
But it didn’t start out that way.
When I first took this trip 3 years ago, it was because I was struggling in my marriage and I needed to get away to clear my head and gain some perspective on my situation.
That year, I traveled the opposite direction around the map, and when I arrived at my first destination in California and got my campsite set up next to the beautiful lake where I’d spend the next week just BEING, I remember sitting in my van and sobbing. Then I pulled out my journal and wrote and wrote until everything inside of me that needed to come out was on the page.
It was a much needed clearing that allowed me to relax into my time there, which ended up being really healing. I spent my mornings sipping coffee, meditating and doing yoga on the lake shore, and my afternoons napping in the sunshine or paddling on the water.
One day I paddled across the lake to a sage field where I made sage bundles to carry with me on my dashboard. I also made friends with a dragonfly whose wings had gotten wet, and it rode with me all the way back to my campsite while its wings dried.
Once my time at the lake was finished, I made my way to San Francisco to visit a good friend from college, then to southern Oregon to attend a women’s gathering in the woods with 700 beautiful souls, and then up to Portland to visit my dad and my best friend from 6th grade.
That trip filled my cup in so many ways. It gave me back my confidence that had dwindled during the identity unraveling I experienced during my first years of perimenopause by showing me I could travel by myself, and take care of all of the details of being on the road. Things that I would usually default to my husband to handle for me.
It reminded me how much I love, and am loved, by my friends and how grateful I am to have spent years showing up for and nurturing my friendships. And that having a meaningful relationship with my dad as an adult is possible when I take responsibility for my part in it.
It also reminded me of how brave, adventurous and spontaneous I am - to show up to a big 5-day event by myself where I knew NO ONE, that I’d only heard about the week before.
And because the trip filled my cup in so many ways, I decided to do it every year, until of course, I decide not to, because that’s how I live my life these days - by feeling into what feels right and following that.
So that brings me back to where I’m sitting now, in my campervan in Boise, after a long day of driving in the wind. Tomorrow I’ll be headed to Portland to visit my friend, Ashley, and that will officially begin year 3 of my West Coast campervan adventure.
Each year there are new lessons and big magic that unfolds and I can’t wait to see what this year has in store. My intention is to stay open and receive what’s here for me and I’m excited to bring you along for the ride.
I’ll be sharing everyday in my notes and doing my best to squeeze in time for weekly posts on the road (because I WANT to share this adventure with you, not because I think I have to!)
So thank you for being here in the unfolding with me. And thank you again for making this a supportive space to practice new ways of writing and expressing. It feels so good to write from this messy, unedited place and allow my inner editor to take the day off.
And one final thought before I let you go.
This trip is one way that I’ve been able to come home to myself during the past few years of my perimenopause unraveling and reinvention.
I know that everyone doesn’t have the flexibility to just pick up and leave your life back home for 3 weeks, and I also know that there are many paths to coming home to ourselves.
What helps you come back to yourself? What fills your cup? And is there a way you could make a little more room for that in this season of your life?
We were never meant to walk through perimenopause and midlife alone.
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I am from Idaho!!!
I just read several of your pieces and sincerely enjoyed them. I’m trying to describe but keep getting an error. I’ll keep trying!