ABOUT

Hi!
I'm Rae.

I've built a career at the crossroads of sustainability and storytelling, having worked as a creative director, communications strategist, and social entrepreneur. From co-founding an outdoor industry Bcorp to building grassroots movements, I’ve made it my life’s work to shift hearts and minds towards regenerative models of care. Storytelling has always been my tool of choice for advancing these initiatives. Combining this with a sharp eye for design, strategic thinking, and a deep understanding of public health and communications, I help organizations expand their reach and deepen their impact.

I'm currently the founding Executive Director of Unthinkable, a nonprofit tackling the mental health crisis within the climate crisis. We are building the movement towards public awareness of how to cope, connect, and make change amid escalating climate distress. Our goal is to build millions of resilient mindsets in ways that co-benefit climate action and healthy ecosystems, enabling future generations to thrive.

Photo: Jo Savage

My Story

I revel in taking raw ideas and transforming them into compelling brands and campaigns. I've been featured in Outside Magazine, Forbes, B the Change Media, and I'm the co-founder of Wylder, the first female-founded benefit corporation in the state of Utah. I love working with artists and entrepreneurs, and I've often marveled at how any of us build resilient businesses, form effective movements, and endeavor to create a more just and sustainable world when failure seems so imminent. I think the real wonder that lies within all humans, found in our very DNA, is the propensity to mess up slightly. To blunder. To mutate. And then, to adapt. Without these attributes, our species would still be anaerobic bacteria, so it's imperative that we confront issues head-on with an adaptive approach in order to truly grow and learn. The most effective rebels and changemakers seem to be those dedicated to constant evolution and continued iteration.

When not hustling on a project, you'll likely find me attempting to hold a two minute handstand, soaking at my family's hot spring property, or listening to science and philosophy podcasts as I make my way into the wilderness.

Photo: Tory Treseder

A friend told me this week that of course the fires in LA caused trauma but the ashes raining down afterward were total anguish. Floating shards of worlds combusted. It’s hard to wrap a human brain around. These impacts will linger for years and decades in lungs and hearts and communities. Climate and environmental upheaval is a shadow we can’t outrun, stitched to our heels, waiting for the moment we finally stop and turn to face it.

For many months now, I’ve been building one of the most important things I’ve ever built. I’m so incredibly lucky to have collaborated with my brilliant friend and colleague, Dr. Britt Wray. Here’s the most important thing I’ve learned: the work of tending to our climate distress is essential for ensuring we have the resilience to confront this crisis over the long haul. The platform we’ve built is called Unthinkable (link in bio) @unthinkable_earth_ and our Resource Hub has a ton of curated tools like courses, therapies, programs, books, podcasts, meditations, experiences, professional organizations, and more that are emerging all over the world to protect mental health and wellbeing.

Transformation often springs from disruption. This is the stuff that draws us together. I hope your distress will open the door to love. I hope your love will fuel your outrage. I hope your outrage drives you towards justice and care for this miraculous blue marble and all of her species.

I’m swirling in a lot of despair and disenchantment. What follows might be a little strange, or maybe I’m just trying to get a poem out of my chest. Or trying to make sense of our current moment and the rupture of our families and the rupture of our democracy and a rupture in understanding why good and decent people I love favor this mess.

It’s been making my head hurt and my heart harden.

I was driving today and a baby fox appeared in the sage. It held my gaze for a full 10 seconds. Then I looked to my left and a whole herd of deer stared at me from a soft yellow field. I tried to restrain the tears but my hardness caved in.
I exhaled and realized I haven’t exhaled in a week.

A wave came. A consolation of softness. It stayed. And so did mercy, or something like it.

For myself and for you, and all the nameless more than human things involved in this tangled story that we did and didn’t see coming. That we don’t know how to handle. That we may not be able to fix.

I took a picture at sunset with the polaroid camera. I wanted to capture the pink streaks. Hold onto some of that warmth. I watched the fuzzy outlines develop and all that surfaced was black.
But I can see the moon.
It looks like a pinhole to some faraway light.

And I woke up thinking

We don’t have time for portals to elsewhere. We don’t have time to fix it all before we begin.

My birthday was a few days ago and I’m just now figuring out what to write. I’ve reached a new thing called “mid-life” and wow is it a weird place. Not young. Not old. Clear-eyed enough, yet so often confused it makes my head spin which is confounding to me because aren’t adults in the middle of life the people that have it all figured out by now?

If the last year has taught me anything at all it’s that life’s externalities, including how other people feel about you, are always and forever elastic and unreliable. Most of us still cling to the idea that it’s not supposed to change. It’s not supposed to hurt like it hurts, suck like it sucks, be awful or wretched or painful.

We want the next new thing already, the next feeling of excitement or stability or the satisfaction of having arrived somewhere because maybe the next new thing should be able to retroactively heal what has been broken. Transmute all that pain and hard-earned living into a sturdier set of bones. A new and better Self.

Finally.
Healed.

I’m out here beginning again and again probably like some of you, eyes a little wider open with each rotation around the sun. I don’t know about becoming better or more successful or healed with every turn, but I do know the biggest thing I’m celebrating is that I am SO MUCH gentler with myself than I was in the past.

Tectonically more charitable.
Impermanence a reality, not my enemy.

Go easy.
Be good to yourself for no other reason at all except that it’s all the reason you will ever need.
Love you.

It’s 10 years today since we lost Brad in Yosemite. In those early days, no one could explain how to accept, without terror or hysteria, the possibility of dying at such a wrong age. I was certain that those events would destroy me. But I know, and you know, and every animal and plant and living thing on this planet knows, that when things end it forces new life to emerge.

We live in a time dominated by extreme forms of numbness, cynicism and disenchantment; a kind of armor against hope and vulnerability. To be cynical is to close the door to the possibility of disappointment - to the risk of being made a fool by optimism.

Brad was so appreciative of the world. You really couldn't wipe the smile from his face. He seemed to walk in a glow of his own making. I realize now that the most precious thing he gave me was an example of how to live with that stubborn kind of optimism. He was a dreamer and a lover and childlike and goofy, sometimes to an absurd and even dangerous degree. He beamed hope and confronted risk with merciless delight.

He believed in me. He loved the people around him purely.

I want to carry this way of being forward. What an absolute goddamned treasure of a gift that I will never, never let go of.

Humans are evolved social apes. But in our siloed little worlds, we forget this impenetrable fact. Sometimes all it takes to remember is a little ceremony, a spontaneous dance party, or being with people in hot springs. I don’t quite know what “Spirit” is, but I do know something magic was there with us in Ecuador. It shook me up and calmed me down in equal parts.

I got to watch Jordan experience a love bomb of appreciation from his @choiceorg team, plus read all the love letters from so many friends on his 40th birthday 🥳! One of the best things about being in a relationship is watching your person experience a wider love than just the one you share. And he deserves it. A homemade fireworks show put on by the locals, then eruption of 90’s dance music sparkled across the valley that night. Ooof it was some white hot joy. Through rain and mist and mud we painted a community center, built a reservoir, and settled into an intensely absorbing present. Travel like this tractor-beams you out of the world of pressurized productivity and relentlessly ticking clocks. There were so many conversations, so many tears, and so many nodding heads as people shared things they’d never allowed themselves to say out loud, much less express in a group of relative strangers. It was intense. But raucous and disarming and tenderizing, too. It gave me a brain full of thoughts about the sickness of hyper-individualism, the realities of religious trauma, the human longing for community care, and a walloping remembrance of the shift that comes when you allow yourself to cut loose.

One of my close friends texted me the other day and asked if I was done with that program I was doing. Oh yeah. That program! I did finish it and am now popping my head up from many months of immersing myself in research and writing and learning about the health impacts of climate change.

I’ve been porous. I have often felt my heart swell up and split like an egg. And I’m left with more questions than answers because how does one respond intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, to an unraveling predicament that seems both impalpably slow and viciously fast? How are we expected to comprehend and react to the unthinkable and indiscriminate collapse of ecosystems and billions of creatures in our lifetime here on earth?

But there’s something else swirling in me now. A buoyant, invisible energy that feels… a little startling. Booming like a drumbeat just below the surface.

I know this force.

It binds love to grief and grief to love. It propels and compels us to care for and fight for our human and more-than-human living systems. This work has been hard but utterly clarifying. And the deeper I get, the more I see that our mental health is inseparable from planetary health; that resilience is rooted in relationship; that daring to pay attention, refusing to numb out, of contemplating the stakes and then acting with the ferocity and velocity needed, we can wake up and act like our lives depend on taking the necessary actions to prevent the worst impacts.

Because they do.

If you’re not making flower crowns and worshipping the spring then what are you even doing.

When I bring up the conversation around how people feel about their name, a little confession booth door cracks open. I did not expect that. What I also didn’t expect is how many people have told me they have wanted to change their name forever, if only it didn’t feel so insurmountable, annoying, or difficult.

For many years now I’ve grappled with a nagging sense that I have outgrown my given first name. It feels… juvenile. Not right. Like a wet polyester jacket. The truth is, our identities are not static; they evolve over a long winding road of changing seasons and temporalities. For this reason, and many more that are deeply personal, I’ve decided to start going by my middle name, Rae, and have added a new middle name of the mountain range where I was born - Oquirrh (pronounced o-kur).

So… hi. My name is Rae Oquirrh Dial.

You might not understand my decision for such a change at this point in my life. You might not even agree with it. But remember this please: everyone deserves the right to invent, pivot, bury, resurrect, or re-establish and re-imagine their own identity. You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to approve of it. But you do have to honor it. I don’t take for granted that I can simply ask my people to adopt this change without fear of harassment, bullying, or worse. This is not the case for many of my trans/queer/non-binary friends for whom it takes actual bravery.

Respecting someone’s chosen name is a liberating gift for them. Since making this change, not once has anyone said to me, “No. I met you as Jainee, so I’m going to keep calling you Jainee.” Can you even imagine what a lousy personality you’d have to have?

And so, with utmost love and thankfulness for your considerate adoption, please call me Rae. It’ll take awhile, but that’s okay. Life is long. I’m probably about halfway through it in a best case scenario, which seems to me like the perfect moment to begin.

I arrived silently into the world, a dark purple little lump. The umbilical chord was wrapped around my neck, and I can only imagine the wail I unleashed when they finally got that thing off of me. These days, I’m still trying to find a voice. Trying to get free. Trying to harness hope. So here’s my yearly birthday post of reflections on the weird, wild ride I’ve been living, and some of the lessons I’ve been handed along the way:

First, this is temporary.
Everything. All of it. The good stuff. The pain. The joy. The job. The relationship. Childhood.
Me.
You.

There is no set of conditions that leads to lasting happiness. Lasting happiness doesn’t come from conditions, but from learning to flex and flow with conditions. If you don’t train your mind to appreciate what is good, you’ll continue to grasp at the illusion that better is out there, when it might, in fact, be right in front of you.

Hope will shape everything about your life. We all live under a sun that will explode someday, but that doesn’t mean we should ever stop basking in it. Hopefulness is a hard-earned muscle. It demands constant flexing. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we might come to find that it is so.

Lastly, please know it’s okay to fall apart. I read recently that in order for a star to be born, a gaseous nebulae must collapse.
So collapse.
Crumble.
This rough patch is probably not your ultimate destruction.
Who knows.
Maybe it’s your birth.

Bikepacking like this can be both completely exhilarating and beyond-words exhausting and it’s also relationship-deepening and world-enlarging and poetry-making and eye-opening. And that’s just Tuesday morning. Wheels on gravel or concrete or dirt connect you to the world as it is—remarkable and raw. You see and breathe it all firsthand.

I could tell you about…
The 2-mile unlit, black-as-night womb of a tunnel that made me hyperventilate a little.
The defiant rattlesnake that would not move an inch to let us pass.
The holy green/blue watering holes urging us to plunge.
The massive elk herd that ambled across the river in front of us, my chest so awe-filled I almost couldn’t breathe.

But the churning story that keeps rolling around in my heart, even after returning home, is that this ride was hot—staggering hot as we made our way into central Washington. I found myself struggling with and negotiating the difficult exploration of what it means to inhabit a world that is dangerously warming; what it means to be a parent in this time of possibility and upheaval; and what it means to allow for strange joy with every passing mile amidst a transforming inner and outer landscape.

Me and Jordan and Bird—we’re world-makers on our bike trip. Portals open and awe surpasses thought. We have a deep connection and front row seat to every passing thing, and a willingness and ability to stay present, and the energy to share and to wonder out loud and in our heads, together, as a family. There is nothing more important and real we could ever do and be.

I met my biological father last year on a balmy August day in a park. I brought my dogs, who have never been so patient in all their lives. They laid at my feet, more sanguine than ferocious. I was nervous, but a dense calm surrounded me.

I told him I had always wondered if perhaps he had felt a twinge of curious shock on the day of my birth, that somewhere, in a place where he wasn’t, his daughter was taking her first choked breath of air. We watched each other closely. Blood-Relatives. Oddly similar features.

Strangers.

My questions were piercing. I did not flinch. I felt somehow in command of myself. Freedom was what mattered to me. Truth. I could take it.

Hours passed. Our lives deconstructed, then put back together. I did not tell him:

You are a deadbeat. I cannot fathom the cowardice required to walk away from a child.

I did tell him:

I played a game where I’d pretend we were telepathic because I wanted you to know I was okay; that things happened the way they were meant to.

I left the park slowly, as though I had disappeared, but in the most pleasant way possible. A dead story called abandonment was piled on the grass behind me, a new space constructed in its place with all the windows open.

Something in me broke with joy that day, and that joy has a name:

Liberation.

HELLO! Welp. It’s been awhile. I have found it reassuring to take long breaks from this little dopamine machine. For the most part, the things I have to say about my Grand Life Experiment™ are reserved for my close buds and fam these days, but I did want to at least come say hi. So hey everyone. How are you doing?

A few little life updates:

I went to Ecuador and dug trenches with people I love and my spirit grew leaps and bounds in directions that no one will ever see.⁣⁣

I went on a writing retreat with a hero @jedidiahjenkins and came out more committed to writing that book.

I have a basil cell carcinoma, aka skin cancer, but not to worry - it will be removed and I will go on. Getting a call from a doctor’s office that you have curable skin cancer causes both a deep exhalation and also the reminder to be in constant conversation with the reality of one’s own disappearance.

Also, the daffodils in my front yard broke through the weed tape and for some reason it made me cry.

In general, I hope for you all what I am daring to hope for myself: to know it’s okay to live a big, loud life that’s constantly on display, chasing and hustling and burning at both ends. But it’s also okay to live a quiet life. A life that doesn’t require affirmation. It’s actually better than okay to do nothing of note outside of laying down your life for the people you’ve been given to love. ❤️

In a crowd of 8,000 people rallying for Bears Ears National Monument we somehow found each other. He looked at me and I felt a fuzzy sting of attraction that sent my stomach up into my throat. He was with a little girl and an even smaller dog. My dog, Hawkeye, started playing with his pup, and at one point our leashes wrapped us up together like spaghetti around a fork. We laughed. I looked at him again - a little longer this time - and there it was.

That electric, whole-body yesness.

Meeting Jordan and Bird helped me remember that life has brutal endings, for sure, but it’s also filled with extraordinary beginnings. Heartbreak can’t seem to kill off what’s always waiting in that reservoir of love and hope and possibility that sits deep down in the basement of our guts yearning to be found again.

I'm so thankful for this mixing bowl of messy, weird, glorious love. Everything is included, nothin' left out. Just the way it should be.

My journal entry from late 2018 reads:

“On many days I feel totally beat down by how much energy is required for us to simply stay afloat. Or maybe I’m just so used to feeling anxiety that my only response is a kind of merciless indifference. I’m not sure how any of this is supposed to feel…”

I went into owning and operating a business with grit and hustle and passion and fire. What I didn’t understand, and what so many of us can’t foresee, is the extraordinary emotional toll all that burning takes. We idolize and celebrate blazingly fast growth and acceleration in our culture. And don’t get me wrong—hustling and heightened stress are part of the game of entrepreneurship. But I can no longer get behind the mindset that burnout is an inevitable cost of success. What if instead of burning out and blowing up, we learned how to engender agility, creativity, and resilience in the face of pervasive uncertainty? How might the upsides of risk-taking and living into your purpose be maintained and celebrated to fuel future growth?

I’m honored and thrilled to bring these themes into a day-long workshop @maplegrovehotsprings alongside my brilliant partner, @jordaninthepool, and dear friend, @sarahebetts on Friday, January 27th.

The Decelerator offers business owners and entrepreneurs the rare opportunity to slow down and experience the space needed to think expansively in a digitally-detoxed environment. Participants will have personal time to relax and enjoy the hot springs alongside facilitated workshops. You'll leave with:

Specific skills and practices for combating burnout through nervous system regulation

A strategic roadmap for where to place time and energy with clarity and precision

A process for creating, evaluating, and implementing an organizational mission statement

A toolset of resources, relationships, and frameworks for traditional and non-traditional project financing

A peer community of psychosocial support and new resources

A rejuvenated body + mind

Hope you can make it! Link in bio for more details. xo

A drying up not-so-great-anymore lake.

A toxic dust bowl.

An environmental nuclear bomb.

This is my backyard. I know the sticky, ghastly smell of brine shrimp. I know the sound of salt-dust kicking up under horse hooves in July. I’ve seen these bison from up so high that they look more like ant colonies on concrete than ruminant beasts on hillsides. This Great Salt Lake has breathed me and I have breathed it, so I suppose now we inter-are.

Did you know the Bear River meanders almost 500 miles from its headwaters in the Uintas to its mouth at the Great Salt Lake? It’s the longest river in North America that doesn’t enter an ocean. Instead, the Bear River serves as the main source of fresh water for the lake. Water shaping water. Bodies feeding bodies.

On Friday, I attended a brilliant symposium examining the ecological crisis we’re facing. The lake is drying up; Utah’s water cartel has been discrete about a nefarious project called the Bear River Development, hoping to keep it alive by keeping it hidden. The project will include at least 3 new dams and a 90 mile-long pipeline, costing a staggering $2.9 billion just for construction. The stupidity makes me seethe. My chest tightens imagining the future. Water, as they say, is life. This feels like murder.

After the symposium, I made my way north to Maple Grove for a celebration on the shores of the life-giving Bear River. Music bounced off the rocks and skipped into eyeballs, twinkling. The music made me vibrate. This riverside joy is palpable, breathing, alive. But I hold the grief and the rage just below the surface because they belong here, too.

The world has ended for many things, many times, but this era, this now, is a never before known time to create, to investigate, to listen, and to invent together. And not because we have answers, not because we know the way, but precisely because we don’t.

I believe abundance sprouts up in strangely improbable places. I will be fighting alongside these organizations for many foreseeable years, and I hope you will too.

@saveougreatsaltlake
@uofuehum
@nhmu @gslinstitute
@sustainableuofu
@utahriverscouncil

Birthdays can be sort of melancholy after age 25 or so 👵🏼💀. Although I do have to say that this has been one extraordinary trip around the sun. Not because of any massive success or skyrocketing wealth. Haha. No. But if I had a dollar for every time Jordan and I looked at each other this year and uttered (giggled) the words, “we are so lucky”, I would have about a hundred thousand million dollars. The most surprising lesson from this year?

I learned it is okay to just be.

It is okay to just be, outside of the manufactured pressures of our hyper-individualistic subjectivities.

It is okay to just be, period.

I have learned to rest, but not quit. There is only so much that each of our soft, animal bodies can bear. More and more, I’m firmly rejecting the idea that every human must come up with some unique, transcendental purpose and guiding narrative to their individual lives. I believe this is one of the main sources of both ubiquitous anxiety and paralyzing discontent for many of us.

And so…

On this next big go ‘round, I’m just gonna commit to living a simpler, connected life. A reciprocal life. An interdependent life where my material things and my productivity and even my creative endeavors pale in comparison to the way I walk with my friends through heartache; where those external measures are laughably insignificant compared to to the unwitnessed kindnesses and between-the-lines love that permeate just about everything in this long, miracle walkabout. I love you, friends. I’m so thankful.

Bikes are replaceable. Humans are not. Thank you to the random photographer who captured these sweaty but happy as hell faces on the last day of our bike trip in Bend, OR. We’ll pick up our next leg summer ‘23 🖤🚲🔥 Yay for human-powered adventures. Yay for love. Yay for one of the most remarkable summers of my life. Boo to despicable bike thieves who stole my all-time favorite wheels last night. Ah well. Can’t stop won’t stop with this crew💜 [update: I got my bike back thanks to the Next Door app and good humans!]

Happy birthday to my dad, the most extraordinary, generous, tough as nails but soft as straw cowboy in the world. 🖤

Oh hi, just bursting with joy over here. Wanted to say thank you for all the generous love notes and congratulations. My heart feels naked as a baby and happy tears keep streaming.

I have done my best to hone and wield my spirit against a darkness called doom that said love wasn’t possible. I’ve reached out and in with all the humor I could muster these last few years. But the deal is, you cannot control anything. You cannot control or demand or expect any goddamned thing. You cannot be sure of employment or health or even sanity, so I’m savoring and basking in this chapter like the chubby harbor seal I saw a few days ago soaking up sunshine like her life depended on it.

It’s good to remember we are all broken and small and brief. And also huge and vast and whole, capable of enormous potential.

Most of what I do know is that I hardly know anything, which cheers me up wonderfully. The world is still stuffed with astonishment beyond my wildest imagining which is humbling and lovely and maybe the only way we are going to survive ourselves and let everything else alive survive us too.

I laid my bike down and looked up, beads of salty sweat still fresh on my face from the last 40 miles of riding. I noticed a blanket lined with flowers on the grass. Confused, I glanced over at Bird who had her hands curled close to her chest (she does this when she’s nervous). She looked up, smiled slyly and said, “Papa has something to ask you.”⁣
⁣
It will be shocking to no one that I said ⁣
YES⁣
HELL YES⁣
yes yes yes⁣
a thousand times YES⁣
to marrying my absolute favorite human. ⁣
⁣
What a bottomless miracle it is to meet your match. And every day I wake up wide-eyed and wonder-struck at this gift of not one, but two beautiful humans I get to share life with. Bird is extraordinary. Just like her papa. ⁣
⁣
Jordan - my favorite compadre, my partner in all things creative, weird and wonderful - I love you yesterday, today, and as far as this wild life takes us. You are the most fascinating, brilliant, brimming-with-energy human I’ve ever known. I’m so, so lucky. ⁣
⁣
I will listen to Cat Stevens with you always. ⁣
I will play Settlers of Catan with you and Bird every time you ask. ⁣
I will even go to Costco with you on Saturdays. But not IKEA. I have limits. ⁣
⁣
Here we go ❤️

The hardest part of anything huge and daunting and crazy and weird and wild…
is simply starting. Day 1 of our family goal to bike across America complete!

When I was younger, I lived to travel. Saved every penny to travel. To smell the sweet fragrance of newness and strangeness in foreign places. I think I was eager to build a cathedral of memories inside myself. I traveled to be filled up. To find out who I was.

But now, something else happens when I travel. There’s no more grasping for pleasures or seeking for what… isn’t. It feels really cool to experience this grand but simple gratitude for what… is. For my life as it is. For a sense of home that’s been constructed in the sinew and gray matter and marrow of my older, softer, crack/pop-ier body, heart, and mind.

I love how liberating getting older feels. I love that aging causes a leaning in to the steady goodness and wholeness of life and humanity. I no longer feel I have anything to prove. I can be realer. A true listener. Relaxed. So relaxed in fact, that I can dance my face off to Madonna with new travel buddies shakin’ it in the rain on a boat with joy bursting out of every pore.

Like. A. Prayer. Baby.

I’ll take this older body and brain all day every day until my last day thankyouverymuch.

Huge thanks to @emilytayloryoga for organizing a beautiful trip to Santorini, and big love to all my new frenz ❤️

I couldn’t even begin to imagine anything remotely more appealing than spending my precious existence with this man and our kiddo, architecting a life that we don’t need to escape from, building and growing and learning and hoping in dirty, stained overalls. This big ass love feels hard-earned and richer somehow, because it’s an older, scarred-but-wiser-kind. I wouldn’t trade anything for our failures and crises because in the end we’ve chosen to give each other the only true and real thing we have to offer: the living minutes of our lives.

I highly recommend declining small love.
I also recommend falling in big love with your hero.

I had hair down to my waist and she had a shaved head. We went to disco night every Saturday at the rollerskating rink and worked that scene like teenage nightclub hustlers. She was a dude magnet. I was awkward miss congeniality.

These days we dork out on archery. We hike a lot. We nod and gesture and speak and move in a secret language that can only exist between girls who became teenagers who became young women who became... us. This friendship has been 28 years (!!!!) of radical, constantly evolving platonic love. What a gift.

At an event a few years ago, a woman asked me how to make female friends as an adult. She reported that she had tried but still didn’t have any. I think she must have probably seen my face crumple up like I’d eaten something sour. I was totally gobsmacked. I realized then how unbelievably lucky I’ve been. I made an internal oath to never take for granted the depth of true friendship I’ve known in this life. I suppose this little ramble is really a love letter to all of the women who have been my safety net, my teachers, my safehavens and sisters in this wild walkabout filled with both the hardest suffering and wildest joy. I love you 🖤

A young woman came running up to me in a park in Portland last week, and for a split second, I though she was going to punch me in the face. I turned away from her and glanced down at my clenched fists. When I looked back up, I saw her staring into space, a moment of respite from her drug-induced fury. The lines in her face were too many and too deep for a person so young. Her scabs and scars told me everything. I noticed the intensity of emotions in my own body. I admit—it was exciting. Everything awoke in me. All systems pulsing, pounding, ready for violence or a quick retreat. For all of its downsides, conflict causes remarkable focus. She walked away and I sat down on a bench, a flood of memories entering my body.

Conflict, whether it’s the threat of violence or interpersonal friction, causes roughly the same set of emotions. Everything in me feels designed to be able to make it stop, yet I know from some deep, awful learning that some interpersonal discord simply cannot be fixed or transformed or healed.

No relationship is tension-free. Also, your progress forward does not depend on someone else’s apology, and in fact their lack of accountability might be the the exact sign you need to hasten moving on. But if you must work with someone or desire to free yourself and them from stress and anxiety, the first question you might want to ask (if you aspire to be a decent, compassionate, rational human) is, “what is my role in this? How have I contributed to this mess?”. And then, the bravest thing that you will have to do, is listen. Close your mouth and lean right in and try, try, try to drop the idea that you’re right. Or at least try to remember what a threat righteousness is to true understanding.

Taming, enduring, and dealing with conflict requires new and different pieces of our body and heart breaking open. That is never comfortable. Nor should it be. In fact, it will inevitably feel shitty and difficult. Which might mean you’re onto something. You might find that in every moment, in every relationship, there are blank pages. There is no past and there is no story on a blank page, and I guess that possibility keeps me hopeful.

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Photo: Jo Savage

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My Story

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