An Unexpected Dismantling

Lessons from hospital hallways on the direction I wanted vs. the direction I was given (and how they’re actually the same)

Things I haven’t done this year:

wear real pants / do my hair or makeup / work / exercise / post on Instagram (besides a few stories) / socialize outside of my family / drink alcohol / create online (until now)

If I was to have read this list just a few weeks ago before 2024 took its bow, I would have thought that the start of this year was a colossal failure. And maybe it has been based on everything I thought I knew then.

My word for the year – one that kept dancing its way into my field towards the end of last year – is ALLURE.

Allure is defined by the Oxford dictionary as:

(noun) the quality of being powerfully and mysteriously attractive or fascinating

(verb) powerfully attract or charm

To me, allure brought to mind an emanation of radiance – a certain level of embodiment that magnetized aligned people, opportunities, & experiences from the inside out. It illustrated the inside creating the outside in a beautiful, almost you-can’t-quite-put-your-finger on it kind of way.

This sparked a desire to reclaim my style this year along with a greater devotion to my beauty and wellbeing – aspects of this physical reality that I’ve always loved but haven’t felt very connected to in the last year. Much of what I envisioned ‘allure’ to be, I realize now, was the outside stuff – it was the result of the inner work. Effortless style, everyday beauty, grounded spirituality, down to earth energy, practical wisdom, natural wellbeing, laid back living. I was picturing the physical expression of the inner embodiment (illustrated in the mood board at the top).

This is why I can only laugh at myself from a few weeks ago. Because at first glance, that list up above of everything I haven’t done this year seems like the complete opposite of everything I thought this year would be. Without context, that list makes me sound like a lazy bum holed up my bed – which wasn’t exactly that far from the truth up until the beginning of this week.

On the evening of New Years Eve, the ceiling of the hospital trailed through my view like the green fields normally do outside my window when I drive the farm to market road into town and I couldn’t help but think ‘I feel like I’m in Grey’s Anatomy’ as I was rolled into surgery to have my appendix removed. Did not see that one coming.

A laparoscopic appendectomy is a fairly common and only 30 minute surgery so I don’t mean to be dramatic about it, but as someone who (thankfully) has had a very boring and uneventful medical history and, other than giving birth (which isn’t truly a medical event, but that’s another conversation), has never really experienced any medical event of any kind, I felt sideswiped at the fact that all of a sudden I was in the ER having a surgery to remove an organ, even if it’s one I ‘don’t need’. What the hell happened?

I went in for surgery the evening of December 31st, was sent home that evening an hour post surgery, and opened my eyes to 2025 in my bed on pain meds and antibiotics. The next day was my 36th birthday.

Let’s just say I didn’t plan on starting the New Year or my birthday feeling like I was 86 vs 36. It felt like the antithesis of everything I wanted, intended, and had felt so deeply. I felt so far away from myself in the gap between the desire I had held and where I now was. Was I not actually listening to my intuition? Was I operating from a place of ego? Was I supposed to want something else? What was actually happening? What was I supposed to learn here?

It all felt worlds away from everything I had just been feeling days prior.

In the week that I spent mostly horizontal tucked into my bed (I’m not gonna lie, the recovery was longer than I ever anticipated…because it’s a common surgery, I mistakenly and naively expected to be back on my feet in a day or two), I had a lot of time to reflect, meditate, journal, and think. I began looking at things a little more closely, being even more honest with myself. Truthfully, I didn’t even know I needed to be more honest. But perhaps that’s why these things happen – to show us things we couldn’t see before. Not because we weren’t trying or were ignoring them, but because we needed a moment to truly stop.

When we originally planned our move to Texas from California, one of the motivators was living further away from convenience. Yes, further away. We had always dreamt of having a few acres, but it wasn’t anything we could have afforded in CA so when we decided to move, a whole new world of possibility opened. I envisioned us on a little piece of land with our home as…well, our home base. When I say home base, I mean I envisioned our life lived primarily from our own home – homemade meals around the dinner table, coffees & warm beverages made at home, a garden with fresh herbs and veggies, work done from my laptop tucked into a cozy or light filled corner, freshly chopped wood lined against the house at the ready for the wood burning stove. Essentially, I envisioned a life akin to a homestead but without the fully homesteading part – I’d love to consider that one day but it’s something I’m willing to move very slowly towards in whatever ways actually feel aligned and true for us because let’s be honest, this way of living doesn’t come the most naturally to me. It stretches me and teaches me and shows me I’m actually much more than the limited identities I’ve been wearing.

Many pieces of that vision have been part of the last three years of living here. And trust me, I still love a cute coffee shop, a delicious, well-designed restaurant, independent boutiques and good shopping. I find beautiful places, thoughtful design, and a considered ambiance all so creatively inspiring. I knew I didn’t want to live without that – it’s all still available to me about 30-60 minutes away – it’s just something I don’t need or want as part of my daily life because when it is, I find I get pulled too far outside of myself and too far into a world of consumption and quickness that ultimately feels misaligned. Despite that pieces that were alive and present, this experience has showed me where we slowly drifted a little too far from what matters most to us.

Since about a year after our first daughter, Talie, was born eight and half years ago, our health baseline has been pretty solid – we eat organic as much as we can, don’t eat fast food (except for the occasional In N’ Out because we’re not monsters!), don’t buy anything with artificial ingredients/dyes/etc, live a very low tox life in terms of personal, home, and cleaning products – you catch my drift. We’re a bunch of all natural California turned Texan hippies, k? I can hear you either cheering or rolling your eyes.

When I started to look at the last year a little more closely, however, it’s easy to see the areas we started to veer off track. More snacky foods from boxes, rushing to figure out what to make for dinner each night, skipped meals or a bowl of organic cereal or scraps from kids, wine a few times weekly, multiples coffees a day, snacking after the kids went to bed, way more sugar, treats, and “clean” candy/desserts. None of it was that offensive, but it all accumulated over time. My husband, Seth, and I were both focused on work last year and I can see now how it took a toll on our health and home life overall.

For almost all of last year, I felt something has been off my health and I suspect that it’s my hormones. At the beginning of 2024, I was 6 months postpartum so I knew there was still plenty of hormonal chaos happening but as the year went on and my body clung to the extra weight no matter what I did (along with other signs and symptoms that things weren’t what they normally were), I kept thinking to myself that I needed to reprioritize my health, get my hormones checked, and help myself return to a healthier state. I worked out and lifted weights more consistently last year than I have in my entire life – I became someone who was actually consistent. While my moods felt uplifted, I felt stronger and built muscle, and I was proud of myself for how dedicated I was, I also felt puffy, inflamed, and tired. Looking back now, I can see how although my intentions were in the right place, my approach was off. I was depleted and, much of the time, stressed. I needed a deeper level of nutrition and cellular wellness that I kept putting off.

An email synchronistically landed in my inbox on New Years day about a functional detox hosted by a woman I knew in Santa Cruz who was a functional medicine practitioner. I laid there in bed reading about everything I knew I needed – everything I had been feeling for the last year. It was a gentle detox with a simple, tiered approach based on a foundation of whole food nutrition with targeted supplementation. I leaned in and even though it’s only been a little under 2 weeks, I feel reconnected to my food, excited about our meals, and like part of that original vision for our life here has been reawakened. There was a moment last week where I felt as if I was fully living the vision in real time despite everything else feeling like it fell away. It was a piece I didn’t even realize I was so desperately missing and needing.

This detox program has taken me completely by surprise in that I found myself enjoying my time in the kitchen. I was the one planning and cooking our meals and actually enjoying the process. Who even was I? What on earth was happening? There’s always been a running joke in our family that I can’t cook. And truthfully, that was true for awhile and I never particularly enjoyed it. Over time, though, that became more and more untrue. Even though Seth is a much more natural cook and has historically done most of the cooking in our home, I would cook every so often and it was always good. But here I was, continuing to wear this identity that I wasn’t a good cook because it didn’t come as naturally and I needed a recipe. Most people I know cook from recipes so I’m not sure why that was the deciding factor of my cooking abilities.

The delight and intrigue – and dare I even say empowerment? – I’ve experience within my very dated and ugly kitchen this year has sideswiped me as much as being wheeled through the hospital hallways has. It’s sparked a desire to hone my cooking skills with more practice, reprioritize our family’s nutrition & wellness, finally start the garden I keep putting off because ‘I don’t have the time’, and just return part of my attention to our home and the role it plays in our daily lives and sense of vitality.

Most of all though, it’s made me seriously consider what other identities I’ve been unconsciously carrying around that might actually be outdated and ready for their retirement. Where am I holding myself back because ‘that’s not me’? Where am I staying small because ‘that’s just how I operate’? Where am I stuffing down my true desire because it doesn’t fit with the identities I don’t need to wear anymore?

While I still don’t know why the appendicitis happened, what I can see is that the unexpected start to this year is exactly what was needed. (Isn’t it always?) The surgery, the downtime, the recovery, the pulling back from the image on the outside and leaning into the feeling on the inside, the reprioritization of my health – it’s all the very thing moving me towards those desires, intentions, and visions I originally had for 2025.

It’s like the universe smacking me upside the head saying you can’t have the beautiful, intriguing part of allure without cleaning up the inside first and ridding yourself of everything that is not that.

The wildest thing to me is that I thought I had cleaned up the inside. And truth be told, I had in may ways. My inner world is one I tend to often, but there were, in fact, things I had been glossing over because my attention was in too many places at once and what I really needed was to actually come to a full stop for a minute to look around and see what no longer belonged.

I’ve been in this situation – one where the unexpected, and often unwelcomed, happens that totally and completely throws you for a loop only to give you exactly what you never knew to even want – enough times to trust the process. This, to me, feels like a very big and necessary stripping away. A invitation into simplicity, slowness, and subtlety. A recognition that to feel that sense of allure, I have to let things fall away, change, and evolve in order to become the next version of myself.

This whole year so far has felt like a dismantling and excavation of sorts – one that although was catalyzed by the physical, has felt mostly mental, emotional, and spiritual.

I have this deep, intuitive sense that this year is about learning less and living more. It’s about integrating what I’ve already learned and know. It’s about fewer things and less information. It’s about expanding my physical and energetic capacity to hold more goodness and abundance (not more things). It’s about scaling back and simplifying in order to, paradoxically, have more impact and create more value.

Alongside the functional detox, I’ve also been doing somatic exercises from The Workout Witch to regulate my nervous system, feel a greater sense of safety within my body, and reduce my cortisol. If I’m honest, I’ve never been great about weaving in one thing at a time to measure its affect. This felt like the perfect complement to the detox and healing post surgery and when I say I feel a greater sense of peace, safety, and stability than I don’t even remember when, I’m not exaggerating. Is it the somatic exercises? The nutrition? The supplements? The slower pace? The simplified focus? The not working yet? I can’t pinpoint one over another, and I suspect like most of life, it’s an intricate web of it all.

I didn’t realize how wired my system had been until it wasn’t.

I didn’t realize how hypervigilant I was actually being until I wasn’t.

I didn’t realize how fucking rushed I was until I wasn’t.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t have beautiful, spacious, inspired moments or periods of 2024. I absolutely did. I just didn’t realize how much of that wired, rushed, hypervigilant energy was actually contributing to my baseline.

It doesn’t make any sense to my brain, but the spaciousness – emptiness, even? – I’m sitting in now has created this upswell of peace, calm, and safety within me that feels difficult to even put into words. It feels paradoxical to say that even though I haven’t done any work yet (and hence created any income) and we have a stack of medical bills that wasn’t there before, I feel weirdly more abundant than I have in a long time. The feeling that there’s something to find, become, or discover has dissipated to the extent where I feel wholly okay with where I am. I don’t feel the need to be a particular thing, to prove myself, to achieve something. My mind can’t understand it, but it feels as if the space created with all that’s been stripped away is abundance. It’s not about more. I don’t really even know that it’s about less so much as it’s about finding safety and peace in the now.

I suspect that the sticky point going forward will be to allow the action that wants to come through without clinging to the identity of ‘slow’ and to channel a big upswell of inspired, alive energy that I know will inevitably return in ways that aren’t scattered, distracted, or diluted. It will be how to go about the doing, working, and creating in ways that continue to contribute to this feeling. My mind wants to figure it out, but intuitively I know it’s more about getting out of the way and following the flow of energy.

Even though my incisions are still healing and time will only tell what all of this actually comes to mean and what unfolds from here, I’m thankful to be redirected, recalibrated, and reinitiated in the way that I have. It’s not what I expected or what my mind wanted, but I can feel that it all really is leading me to those initial intentions and visions for the year. Just because it doesn’t look the way we expected doesn’t mean it’s not taking us where we truly want to go.

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