Rising
and finding my ending
It’s been a while since I’ve written here, but so much has unfolded in the month or so since my last reflection on the complexities of medical gaslighting. During this time, I’ve been swimming around in the intricate process of editing my manuscript, Side Effects May Include, refining it to a place where I could release it to early beta readers without feeling entirely mortified by its incompleteness. The feedback has been generally positive. There is still a lot to adjust, but it’s been affirming to know that the central themes resonate deeply. Amidst the constructive critiques, one insight lodged itself in my consciousness: the ending isn’t there. Not even close.
In part, the abrupt ending exists because of my near-desperate desire to just be done, to complete the work and move on from the intensity of the writing process. After a year of pouring myself onto the page, learning the craft as I stumbled through it, I thought, surely, this must be enough. But then another voice insisted, No, it’s been merely a year. A heartbeat in the lifespan of meaningful creation.
The ending left my early readers suspended in the midst of a still unfolding narrative, emotionally unmoored, with a little glimmer of hard-won peace that I had only begun to uncover. This was not how I wanted to make my readers feel. Despite the weight of the challenges I have chronicled, my intention has always been to leave readers with a sense of resilience and inspiration. I’ve wanted to provide a more nuanced understanding of the intricate tapestries that shape our health, wellbeing, and therefore, healing journeys. And to explore how our personal journeys are enmeshed within the complex fabric of generational trauma, social conditioning, and cultural narratives.
While I acknowledge that I denied my early readers a resolution that they deserve, I have come to realize that I hadn’t arrived at a sense of resolution myself. I was still living, still navigating, still finding my groove within the very story I was trying to tell. In other words, I couldn’t write an ending that I had not yet experienced.
As I’ve written and edited my book over the last year, I’ve also been grappling with what to do with this next phase of my life. With the uncertainty of my condition and the potential for relapse, I knew that any job I engaged in needed to be part-time, not contained to a desk or computer screen, flexible, and deeply aligned with my passions and purpose. As I describe in my book, the work I’ve engaged in to recover and heal from this condition hasn’t exclusively been physical. It has been mental, emotional, spiritual. I’ve had to delve into childhood trauma to understand adult behavior patterns, learn how I’ve held stress and anxiety, how I’ve chronically self-silenced and ignored my body and then connect it all to a vaccine-induced autoimmune condition that has still not been identified. Over the course of it all, I’ve leaned into my coaches, mentors, colleagues, friends, family, and medical team for support. Finding my place in this world was very much part of my healing journey. For a frustratingly long time, I experienced starts and stops, interviewing with amazing teams and then pulling out of the process when I felt it wasn’t right, or coming up with an interesting idea but not being interested enough to be propelled into action.
Until now.
My new venture, Unbridled Rising, is a culmination of the insights I’ve gathered along my healing journey, where I’ve interwoven research and experiences from my career in social impact and public health. At the highest level, Unbridled Rising intends to cultivate a sense of belonging amongst young people through the intentional recognition of each individual’s inherent worth and potential contribution to the collective experience. It is a manifestation of the profound truth that healing and purpose are not solitary pursuits, but are intricately components of our shared humanity.
As I devote some of my energy to bringing this vision to life, I feel aligned, purposeful, and so damned excited. This work is the natural outgrowth of my own journey of recovery and rediscovery and a step towards creating the kind of world I want to inhabit: one that honors our interdependence, celebrates our resilience, promotes gentleness, and nurtures the seeds of authenticity within ourselves and each other.
Unbridled Rising sits at the intersection of mental health support and enrichment for youth aged 8-18. The organization is built on the science behind the human-equine connection, a science that, while still developing, demonstrates improved resilience, self-awareness, and gentle assertiveness. It’s a modality that is especially useful for young people today who are so reliant on digital interfaces for self-assurance and a sense of identity.
The vision for Unbridled Rising goes beyond individual transformation; it is fundamentally a public health intervention. By working with youth to develop and teach the tools they need for emotional regulation, interpersonal connection, and purposeful living, we aim to interrupt the trajectory of chronic illness and mental health struggles that so often take root in early life experiences.
How are horses the ending of a story about recovery and healing?
The science supporting equine-assisted interventions has shown that engaging with horses can lead to measurable improvements in emotional regulation, social skills, and overall well-being. The embodied experience of connecting with a horse can settle the nervous system, reducing anxiety while improving emotional regulation.
As I dig deeper into the research and connect with experts in the field, I am increasingly convinced of the critical role initiatives like Unbridled Rising can play in addressing the growing mental health crisis among young people. By intervening early, by providing a screen-free space for authentic connection with peers and horses that can lead to self-discovery, we have the potential to change the trajectory of countless lives.
This is the work that has consumed me in recent months, and, as it turns out, the ending that I need to write for my book. It connects the themes of the body keeping score, of existing in the inbetween, and of redefining strength that help me to tell my story as I intended it to be: a story of resilience, of transmuting pain into purpose, of recognizing that our deepest healing often emerges from understanding our strengths, feeling ourselves as an integral part of a collective, and learning how to best apply our special talents to the betterment of that collective.
As I sit with the unfinished pages of my manuscript, I am no longer daunted by the incompleteness. This is my ending and I also know this ending is not a fixed destination, but an ever-unfolding journey of discovery and transformation. It might be uncomfortable at times but it feels peaceful, in sync with a deep understanding that this is the start of the next chapter in a story that is still untold.
And so, to you, I offer this glimpse into my unfolding, at once deeply personal and inextricably linked to a larger, collective story. One that imagines a world where every young person has the opportunity to discover their own strength, be confident in their voice, and find their place in our delicate ecosystem of belonging so that they can chart a course towards a future of their own design.