Essays from the wilderness
I go into the wilderness.
I write about what I find.
When I was seventeen, two things happened in the same year. My father was diagnosed with terminal 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. 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.
I found peace and I found God out there. I think others can too. That's why I write — and why I write publicly. These letters stay free. If any of it helps you breathe, that's enough.
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A letter
I was six years old, it was the middle of a brisk South Carolina winter, and the heater in the back of my parents' Chrysler minivan was slowly drowning me.
Not dramatically. Just thoroughly.
A thick wall of hot, stale air pouring out from the front, and by the time it reached me in the back it wasn't air anymore.
I tried to say something and the words didn't land.
I tried louder.
Nothing.
It felt like yelling into a room that was already closed.
But finally, my dad looked up into the rearview mirror.
He saw me. And without saying anything, he reached over and cracked the window.
I shoved my face into the small opening.
Cold air hit me and I remember thinking — I can breathe.
I had been heard.
I think about that moment more than I probably should. Because so much of my life since has been a version of it. Trying to say something true out loud. Waiting to see if anyone looks up. And every so often — not often, but enough — someone does.
That's why I write.
Not because I have answers to the world's most pressing questions. Not because I'm trying to fix anything in myself, or in you.
But because I've come to believe that when one person cracks the window, the whole van breathes a little easier.
I write here when I need to exhale. If that's useful to you, come along.
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