When the Fire Becomes Light

For most of my life, I wore survival like a second skin.
I knew how to hustle through grief, how to hold everyone else’s pain, how to build a life out of sheer grit and self-forgetting.
I knew how to carry the weight of others — children, patients, partners, stories that were never mine to begin with.
But I didn’t know how to carry myself.

And then, somewhere around the edges of midlife, I began to burn out — not just in my work, but in my bones.

It didn’t happen all at once.
It was a slow undoing —
a quiet forgetting of who I’d been before the world demanded so much.

That unraveling, painful and necessary, is what led me here.
To Savage Grace.

My memoir is not a tidy tale of triumph.
It’s a reckoning.
With trauma.
With silence.
With the lies I told myself to keep going.
And more than anything, with the longing I buried beneath competence and care.

I wrote Savage Grace not just to look back,
but to speak directly to the woman — maybe you —
who has spent decades showing up for everyone else
and now finds herself wondering:
Who will show up for me?

What I’ve learned is this:
there comes a moment, often after midlife, when the masks begin to slip.
The old roles stop fitting.
The titles — mother, nurse, partner, provider — no longer tell the full story.
And the voice we once silenced begins to stir, whispering:
There’s more.

Not more to do.
More to become.

Savage Grace is about that becoming.
It’s about remembering the girl inside who once danced, or dreamed, or dared to speak.
It’s about healing not just from what happened to us,
but from the way we learned to disappear inside of it.

In these pages, you’ll find stories — raw, poetic, sometimes hard to tell.
But they are true.
And my hope is that in reading them, you will remember your own truth.
Not the polished version.
The holy, unfiltered one.

This memoir isn’t a map,
but it is a mirror.

It’s for the woman on the edge of reinvention.
The healer who forgot she was human.
The artist buried under the weight of duty.
The survivor who is ready to become more than her scars.

If you are standing at the threshold of your second half —
not sure whether to leap or retreat —
know this:
you are not alone.
Your voice still lives in you,
your fire is not gone,
and grace — even the savage kind —
is waiting for you to rise.

Welcome.

From ICU to Inner Peace: What a Lifetime in Medicine Taught Me About Grace

I used to believe grace was something reserved for Sunday mornings — something quiet, polite, draped in stained glass and whispered prayers.
But I found it in far stranger places:
in sterile hallways under fluorescent lights,
in the chaos of code blues and the stillness of holding a stranger’s hand as they took their last breath.

I found grace in the ICU.

But not at first.

At first, I found adrenaline.
And exhaustion.
And the strange exhilaration of being needed — constantly, relentlessly.
For decades, I lived inside the machinery of medicine, where every shift was a test of endurance, every chart a record of someone else’s suffering.
And somewhere along the way, I lost touch with the quiet hum of my own life.

Like so many of us in healthcare, I became very good at disappearing.
I disappeared into scrubs, into shiftwork, into showing up for everyone but myself.
I knew how to triage trauma, but not my own.
I could comfort a dying man’s family, but not speak the grief building in my own bones.
I could restart a heart — but I didn’t notice mine was slowly closing.

The truth is: medicine taught me a thousand things about the body.
But it took burnout to teach me anything about the soul.

There came a point, sometime after COVID, sometime after the weight of one too many losses,
when the part of me that had kept going finally said,
“Enough.”

It wasn’t dramatic.
No collapse, no great scene.
Just a quiet, internal knowing that I couldn’t live like this anymore —
hypervigilant, hollowed-out, haunted by the perfectionism that used to keep me afloat.

And that’s when I began to search, not for a new career, but for something deeper.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was searching for inner peace.
Not a bubble bath.
Not a day off.
A real reckoning — the kind that invites you to look at everything you thought made you valuable,
and ask:
Who am I without the role? Without the badge? Without the stethoscope?

The answer, it turns out, is both terrifying and liberating.

This blog — and my podcast — is not about leaving medicine.
It’s about finding yourself inside it, or after it, or somewhere between what you gave and what you still want to become.

It’s about transformation and about grace —
not as politeness,
but as power.
The kind that whispers, “You’re allowed to choose yourself now.”

To anyone who’s ever lived in the chaos of caregiving and wondered if there’s life beyond medicine…
there is.

And it’s waiting for you —
in stillness, in beauty,
in the sacred act of becoming more than what the world once asked of you.

The Geography of Escape

I didn’t move to Virginia.
I ran.
I ran from the heavy breath of a broken system that once called itself healing
and now only seemed to profit from suffering.
I ran from fluorescent-lit hallways and whispered hypocrisies in white coats.
But more than that—
I ran from him.

There was a man.
And there was dance.

And there was the quiet unraveling of a woman
who no longer knew how to say no to either.
Not when the music started.
Not when he looked at her like she was a secret worth keeping.

I told myself it was a job change.
A sign-on bonus.
A fresh start.

But it was exile.
I exiled myself from a love that had grown sick in its silence,
and from a city where my boundaries had grown too soft,
where my desire to feel alive outweighed my discipline to heal.

Yes, there was work I could’ve done in Florida.
Easier work.
Closer to the sea and the sun.
But I couldn’t stay and resist the pull of the past.
So I left.
With boxes packed in a rented truck,
a poodle in the passenger seat,
and heartbreak wrapped in denial.

Now I live in a small apartment
where the walls echo with absence
and the floor beneath me creaks like an old memory.
I miss my house,
the one I painted with hope.
I miss who I was when I thought love might save me.
But most of all,
I miss the illusion that leaving would be enough.

Because it never is.

The truth is,
your pain comes with you.
It rides in the backseat.
It sleeps on the floor beside the bed.
It waits for the quiet
and whispers when the lights go out.

But here’s what I’ve found in the aftermath:

You can’t bury your ghosts in a new zip code.
You can’t buy freedom with a bonus check.
And you can’t heal by pretending the wound doesn’t exist.

What you can do—
is begin again.

In the stillness that follows the storm,
when the noise of the world fades and you are left
only with your breath and your choices,
transformation begins.

Not with fireworks.
Not with fanfare.
But with a whisper that says:
“This isn’t working. Something has to change.”

And so I sit now,
not in victory,
but in surrender.
In the rawness of knowing that rock bottom
is often the sacred ground
where reinvention plants its roots.

I still mourn the loss of him—
of us—
of the woman I was when I believed
that dancing might be enough to carry me home.
But grief, too, has its place in the wild.

And maybe that’s the grace of it all.
Not that I escaped.
But that I survived the running.
That I am still here.
And still—becoming.

I Still Hear His Silence

It was 2009, and I was working for a neurosurgeon, covering clinic as his PA. It had been a long, grueling day—one of those stacked afternoons where you're just trying to keep your head above water. We had just finished when the call came in from the ER: STAT consult. Cervical trauma. Young male. Diving accident.

The details would unfold quickly and painfully.

A 21-year-old boy—because at that age, they're still boys in so many ways—had dove headfirst into unknown water and struck something hidden beneath the surface. The impact severed his spinal cord high in the neck. He was now a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic. No sensation. No movement. No future, at least not in the way most of us define one.

His history was complicated. Raised by his grandmother. His parents were alive but estranged, completely absent from his life. A few arrests as a teen. A turbulent path. But recently, he had been trying to pull himself together. Trying to make something of the wreckage.

And then—this.

When the neurosurgeon reached his grandmother, she said flatly, “He's 21. He can make his own decisions. I won’t be coming.” His parents were unreachable.

He was alone. In every sense of the word.

And in that loneliness, he made a choice.

He told the surgeon he didn’t want any intervention. He didn’t want to live as a shell of his former self, attached to machines, no chance of recovery. He said the world would be better off without him. That his life hadn’t amounted to anything good.

And so... he died.  Alone.

No one held his hand. No one whispered words of comfort. No one stroked his hair or said, “You matter.” He simply... left.

I found out the next day, and my heart ruptured.

I wept in the breakroom. I wept at the thought of my own son, who was the same age. I wept because I couldn't shake the image of this boy—barely a man—slipping away without a witness.

There was a Carly Simon song playing on the radio around that time. It haunted me then, and it still does now. The first verse echoes him in ways that language alone cannot:

“Oh my boy, what have you done? 
Did you go out surfing on a frozen sea? 
Did you scare the livin' daylights out of me? 
Did you go too far to drive away the demons? 
Did you go too far to know what love really means?” (From Hold on to Your Heart, Carly Simon)

I’ve carried his story like a stone in my chest all these years. Not because I failed him. Not because anyone did anything “wrong.”  But because something sacred in his death was missing, and I still don’t know what to do with that absence.

There was no hand to hold. No voice to say “you mattered.” No one to sit beside him in the moment when his soul left his body and maybe that’s why this story doesn’t have a takeaway.

Maybe it’s not a lesson, but a lament.

A reminder that for all our knowledge, all our procedures, all our rounds and consults and clinical notes—we are still just human beings trying to catch each other as we fall.

I don’t know what that boy needed in his final moments.  But I know what I needed: for someone who loved him to have been there.   Someone to say, “You don’t have to leave this world unseen.”

I still see him.  I still hear his silence.

And maybe that is the only truth I can offer here:

That some stories don’t resolve.  Some stories just live in us, shaping how we hold the next patient, the next sorrow, the next soul who wonders if they matter.  This one taught me to stay close, even when there’s nothing left to fix.

Especially then.