Some mornings, you don’t wake up so much as you surface—pulled out of a half-dream, half-memory place where the weight of the past is heavier than the day ahead. Today was one of those mornings. I woke up already sad, already somewhere else, and I let it happen. The playlist was Bear’s Den and Bruce Hornsby, nothing else—the kind of songs you don’t pick unless you’re ready to hurt a little. Some days, you don’t fight the current. You let it pull you where it wants, even if that place is somewhere you’ve spent years trying to outgrow.

Yesterday, I went back to the town where I first learned how small dreams could be, and how big a heart has to get just to survive there. I wasn’t going for nostalgia. I wasn’t looking for ghosts. I was going back to introduce Amelia to Darlene—my best friend, the one who knows the map of my heart better than anyone still walking this Earth. Some bonds don’t need constant maintenance; they just hum quietly in the background of your life, like a song you know by heart even if you haven’t heard it in years. It took less than an afternoon for Amelia to understand what Darlene means to me, and maybe even what she has always meant. As I backed out the driveway of Darlene’s house, without prompting, Amelia turned to me and said, “You should prioritize her, immediately.”

What she didn’t know—or maybe what she knew too well—was that I already had. A very long time ago. The real ones don’t need a holiday card or a calendar reminder to know where they stand in your life—they just know.

When I was a little girl, eight or nine years old, I told my teacher that I was going to be a firefighter. She laughed. Not cruelly, but dismissively, the way adults laugh when they’ve forgotten the shape of their own childhood dreams. She told me to pick something more realistic—something better suited for a “girl like me.” That was the first time I realized some people aren’t teaching you—they’re passing down their own regrets, hoping you’ll wear them like hand-me-downs. There will always be people who confuse the size of their limited imaginations for the size of the real world. Most of them stay exactly where they are, rooted by their own fear, while the rest of us build the lives they never believed were possible.

At eighteen, I stood at the crossroads that most people don’t even recognize until it’s too late. I could stay—fold myself into the same tidy life they all seemed so eager to live, marrying someone for stability, working a job that barely made a dent in my hunger to matter. Or I could leave. And so I left—and I ran headfirst into the fires that were supposed to scare girls like me into submission. At some point, every woman faces a choice: live the life she imagined as a girl, or live the life that keeps everyone else comfortable.

I didn’t just choose the first—while others bought houses two blocks from the ones they grew up in, I was already a medic and firefighter, already knee-deep in a career that questioned every sterile piece of credentialism they clung to like a badge. They traded their dreams for mortgages and backyard BBQs. I became wilder, messier, freer. I became someone they don’t even recognize.

Coming home now feels less like visiting and more like archeology. Every corner, every diner, every cracked sidewalk is a relic—a place where a version of me once stood, bright-eyed and bursting with too much hope for the size of the town that tried to contain her. Every visit strips away another illusion I didn’t know I was still clinging to. It seems every time I return, I lose another friend. Some loss happens loud, some quietly, but it happens all the same. Outgrowing the place you came from is lonely—but staying would have been lonelier. Survival looks different than I thought it would when I was a child. Sometimes it looks like walking through streets that no longer feel like yours, knowing that the only thing more heartbreaking than leaving would have been staying.

I think about a day I had at work when I was twenty—a relatively new medic, determined to save everyone—when I was called to a scene that still haunts me even now. It was reported as a motor vehicle accident involving two vehicles. Multiple casualties, and no evidence of survivors. A kind of wreckage no words can soften.

It was not a routine call. It was a call that nobody wanted to answer, and because no survivors were reported, they sent me by myself with a driver, and an ambulance—the bare bones of a response crew. Before we even arrived, the driver handed me a box of triage tags. No words of encouragement. No speech about what I was about to see. Just a battered cardboard box handed to me along with a quiet look that said more than words could ever manage. It was my job to account for the victims—to move from body to body, tagging them like misplaced luggage, writing down their names, if I could find them, their approximate ages, their physical descriptions. I was supposed to leave only the black tag attached—the one that meant there was nothing left to save. And I was instructed to stay there until the coroner removed the last victim.

It sounded simple in the sterile language of protocol. It wasn’t. When we pulled onto the scene, it was as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of the road. Bodies were everywhere—strewn across the pavement, twisted in ways that human bodies should not twist. Some missing limbs. Some so battered it was impossible to tell, at first glance, where one person ended and another began. I started moving through them—doing the thing I had been trained to do, despite being told that this is the one module of training I’d likely never use. This experience was the thing that split my mind in two equal parts—the minds way of processing something nobody should see, yet does so in the hopes that one could still function. Half of my mind was the medic part of me tagging and documenting, the other half was my deeply human part of me, screaming silently into the void.

I moved from casualty to casualty, trying to piece together the traumatic aftermath of what had happened. It took all my strength to try and not to think about the fact that just hours ago, these people had been alive—friends who were laughing, arguing, and making plans they would never be able to keep.

And then, a hand grabbed the back of my fire boot, a few inches up from the heel. I froze, the world tilting sideways.

There was one survivor.

He was mangled, barely recognizable as a person, yet somehow still holding on with whatever scrap of life hadn’t been stolen from him. Using what little breath he had left, like fuel burning quickly on an empty tank, he rasped out two words I will never forget: “Help me.”

I broke protocol. I didn’t hesitate. I tore off my gloves, dropped the box of tags right there on the pavement, and radioed for a helicopter immediately. I started working the code, stabilizing him enough to give him a fighting chance—hands moving on muscle memory, heart beating louder than the sirens.

He lived.

He spent months in the hospital, recovering in a body he barely recognized anymore. Eventually, he went home in a wheelchair, still carrying the broken pieces of the life he lost that day. About a year later, when the noise of survival finally grew too loud to bear, he took his own life.

I think about him more often than I admit. I think about the way his hand found my boot in all that wreckage, the way his voice reached out for mercy when the rest of the world had gone silent. I think about how survival isn’t always a blessing, and how saving someone doesn’t always mean you get to keep them.

Some things don’t heal. Some things become permanent residents in the places no one else can see. Some memories are stitched so deeply into your bones that no amount of time, distance, or success will ever pry them loose. You learn to carry them anyway, because that’s what survivors do.

That morning, I learned a truth that would mark me forever: some things don’t heal. They don’t fade or soften; they calcify inside you, forming the quiet architecture of the woman you eventually become. Every strong woman has at least one story she never tells—because putting it into words would mean living it twice. Some battles aren’t fought out loud. Some are fought quietly, stitched into the spaces between heartbeats, carried every single day without a sound.

Success is a strange, brittle thing. In the beginning, they cheered for me. They loved the idea of the scrappy girl making good. But when I made it further in my career than they could follow, when I started building a life too far away from their reach, the cheering stopped. The hands that used to lift me up began tugging at me instead. We live in a world that pretends to celebrate success—until it threatens the excuses we’ve all been taught to protect. They will celebrate your ambition until it threatens their excuses, and when it does, you find out who was really rooting for you, and who was only rooting for themselves.

I’m in a good place now. A fragile place, but a good one. It’s the kind of happiness that doesn’t erase the loneliness—it sits next to it, holds its hand, and passes the time quietly. I built a life I’m proud of, even if most of the people who knew me when I was young pretend not to see it. Maybe they never understood because I never really lived in the same world they did.

I have always believed in, and in my own mind, lived among the stars and the moon.
Some of us were never meant for low ceilings and short distances. At this age, I stopped needing everyone to understand me. And when the music plays—when Bear’s Den and Bruce Hornsby drift through the kitchen late at night—I let myself cry for a minute, because it’s safer now. I wipe my face, pour another cup of coffee, and I keep going. Because I always have, and because I always will.