My name is Bryce Campbell. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina — homeschooled, barefoot in the marsh, never quite learning how to sit still.

When I was seventeen, two things happened in the same year. My father was diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer and given months to live. And I was taken advantage of by someone older. I spent those months driving my dad to chemo and sitting at home not knowing what to do with any of it.

Then I booked a flight to Geneva and walked through the Alps for two weeks. I'd worked fast food overtime to save $4,000. I needed somewhere to put it.

Coming home, I borrowed my dad's truck and drove west. I was somewhere in rural Idaho when my mother called crying. My younger brother had taken his life.

I flew home and spent the following months in the only place that made any sense — the wilderness. Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, wherever I could put a tent up and be alone with it.

And under the canopy of an Appalachian forest one evening, I prayed to someone I wasn't sure existed. That was the beginning of something.

My dad, against every odd, is still alive. He talked about dying but never suggested he was going to die. He made it past five years with terminal Stage IV pancreatic cancer — something that happens in less than one percent of cases.

I've been writing about all of it ever since. First photographs with no words, then photographs with hidden messages I hoped someone would hear, then letters. People started writing back to say I'd put something into words they'd been carrying. That felt like the window being opened.

I drove 12,000 miles to the Arctic Circle. I've been to Alaska, New Zealand, Canada, the American West more times than I can count. I recently married Grace, a New Zealander, and we're still figuring out what a life looks like between two countries.

I found peace and I found God in the wilderness. I think others can too. That's why I write, and that's why I write publicly — so that whoever is in the back seat asking for the window to be opened might know they're not the only one.

— Bryce