The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Joy Can Survive

June

I can hear the faint song of a stream outside the open mesh window of my rooftop tent. It’s why we camped here, nestled between bald hills on the side of something so potholed it could only generously be called a road. I want this pilgrimage to begin with water.

I reach toward my toes to stretch my sore legs and sigh with contentment. I woke up before dawn to leave home in Colorado to make it to the Salt Lake City airport in time for my friend Sarah Southern’s arrival from San Diego. Sarah lies beside me under a striped Pendleton blanket, raking her wavy brown hair into a messy bun. My eyes are bleary from the long drive, but I crack open the fresh yellow journal I bought to record this journey and write in the glow of a headlamp.

A warm breeze wafts the scent of wild sage through the tent window. The aromatic sagebrush matches what it feels like to be well enough to be here in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada, with one of my dearest writer friends, driving to national parks I haven’t been to since long before my body ever broke. Pure. Sweet. Grounded. Perhaps even medicinal.

I spent the last month unpacking moving boxes, making Ryan’s and my very first house a home. We had to move from Denver to Colorado Springs to afford it, but the joy of having a house far outweighs the sadness of leaving the city we’ve long called home. For the first thirteen years of our marriage, buying a house seemed impossible. Between the burden of my high healthcare needs and the ruin of leaving behind careers in abusive churches, a down payment seemed like a dream everyone else could see come true but us. But the dream did come true.

And it’s funny to leave a place you just reached, especially after more than a decade of struggling to believe it was possible to get there. But I sense that to keep receiving joy and goodness as possible for me, not just everyone else, I need to explore the landscapes where I learned to look for them in the first place. In revisiting these national parks, I am returning to the roots of my resilience.

I can’t stop smiling about the delight today held. When I finally reached Sarah, we were like giddy schoolgirls. We found a restaurant near the airport and shoveled down giant bites of chicken shawarma while plotting our plan for the night and spilling all the tea we could about the ridiculousness of the writing and publishing world. Then we drove-danced westward, our bodies crackling like lightning to the beats of Remi Wolf and the Doobie Brothers and Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” grinning and laughing at the good fortune of getting to go on this epic writing trip together. One year ago, this would not have been possible.

One year ago, I graduated from a program I never wanted to enter. I spent that spring in cardiac rehab beside people twice my age or more, training my body to walk again after spending months completely debilitated from a virus that tried to pit my heart and brain as enemies. Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) was one of many new diagnoses I received that spring, on top of what was already challenging. Names of diseases and disorders I could barely pronounce kept stacking up beneath mine like a brick wall. The list was so large I could barely see over it to a life that could still be both long and good.

The day I started cardiac rehab, two minutes on the NuStep was all I could handle without collapsing in exhaustion. There were so many days when—as with the house I wasn’t sure we would ever be able to buy—I also wasn’t sure my body would ever feel like a home instead of a holding cell. Yet today I drove twelve hours, dancing in the driver’s seat most of the way.

I’m trying to trust that this home will hold me. I drove westward not simply to explore places from my past, but to explore the possibility of joy that pain often obscures.

On the last stretch of our drive, roadside grass glowed fluorescent as light streamed through thick clouds in slants over the vast water of the Great Salt Lake. Right as the pale blue sky began shifting to amber and umber, the lake shone like a sea of crystals. We came upon the Bonneville Salt Flats without knowing they were there and pulled over. Sarah and I sprinted onto the salt, speechless in surprise at the beauty that just happened to be along our route. Waves of cotton-candy colors reflected in shallow pools of water over thick-grained salt stretching to the horizon, where massive mountains encircled the flats like a mother’s outstretched arms.

It was as though we’d stumbled into a gift. We only expected to drive until dark to arrive at our free campsite for the night. Observing an orchestra playing across salt and sky was beyond what we had imagined for the day. But that’s what joy does. Often, the most beautiful sights are the ones we didn’t plan to find.

Stripped

Sarah and I wake to sunlit warmth and unzip our tent to find verdant hills slathered with butter-yellow wildflowers, dripping color before a nearly cloudless azure sky. I wander off to find a secluded spot to pee and am met by patches of yellow bush lupine everywhere I look. Lupine, my favorite wildflower, greets me here at the beginning of a journey into my past. It is quiet, save for the chirping of birds and the gentle exhale of a warm breeze.

I didn’t know Nevada could be so green. In my mind, this place was all desert.

After finishing the last sips of strong coffee, we pack up and decide to brave the bumpy road a little farther to a hot spring that supposedly sits at the end of the road. We come to a crossing, and instead of risking drowning Reepijeep—the ridiculous name my husband and I gave our Jeep Compass (shoutout to Narnia Nerds)—Sarah and I roll up our pants and wade to the other side of the fast creek.

Right in the cleft of two nearly neon-green hills, yellow arrowleaf balsamroot and purple penstemon flank the trail, leading us to the steaming water ahead. I set down my water bottle and phone next to some low-growing golden flowers and make a declaration. “There’s no way I can be in a spot this stunning and this secluded and not strip!”

Sarah laughs and shakes her head at me—my skinny-dipping antics are clearly unsurprising. “That’s fine,” she says, “as long as you’re fine with me keeping my suit on!”

I am learning that joy waits for our willingness to be stripped of societal expectations and norms. She nudges and tugs, asking us to be fully present to the magic of being here.

I smell sulfur and sage, and no one but Sarah is in sight. So I strip down to my skin and step into the steaming water, smiling bright with the memory of my younger self and her spark. I want to sense her defiance from head to toe. I want to channel her freedom. I want to remember what it is like to be naked and unafraid.

Scars

We drive all day through the arid expanse of eastern Oregon and eventually wind our way into a thick forest. After a day in the desert, the sight of a waterfall is like a welcome mat. I pull to the side of the road, and we cross the vacant highway to take in the view.

For hours, Sarah and I have been talking about the freedom to take risks. From taking a road trip across America partly solo, to changing careers as an adult, I’m realizing that my own capacity to tolerate the fear of risk was forged in childhood. There are some risks I move toward like a dog to a bone because I was given free range to roam as a kid in a way that rarely happens today.

The forest surrounding my childhood home was my friend, with whom I played every day until Mom rang the dinner bell to call us kids home. I explored beneath the boughs of big ash trees, inspecting worms in the soil or resting my back against bark with a book in my hands. Across the dirt road at my grandpa’s, I filled winters sledding down the steep, snowy hill, screaming in delight and swerving before hitting the frozen lake at the bottom.

The forest was also the place I was unsupervised and unprotected from my bully. I never knew when play would turn into pain, when walking through the woods would turn into being chased with a BB gun or sledding would end with my face shoved in the snow until I couldn’t breathe. What I’m saying is, in my childhood, joy was often invaded by terror, and that volatility left invisible scars across my nervous system. For me, delight and danger are tangled.

This trip is more than an adventure—I’m on a pilgrimage into my past. I’m traveling to some of the national parks my parents brought me and my three siblings to as kids, so I can untangle trauma from love.

I don’t remember vast stretches of my childhood, a hallmark of complex childhood trauma that I didn’t recognize as dissociation until I was well into my studies to become a therapist. But I do remember many of our trips to the national parks. And I sense that revisiting the places where I most recall feeling wonder, joy, and safety as a child will help me hold the pain that remains in my adult life differently.

Complex trauma is not primarily living with a library of terrifying memories; it’s living with the felt sense, held in our bodies, that at any moment love and goodness can and will hurt us.

And that we will end up alone with that ache.