What Happens When the Life You Built Falls Apart?
I recently joined Melissa Minnich on the High On Life podcast for a conversation about collapse, surrender, resilience, and what it means to flourish when life no longer looks the way you planned.
Melissa and I talk about the meaning crisis that can come from doing everything “right,” the difference between success and fulfilment, creativity as a healing path, transformational coaching, and why surrender is not the same thing as giving up.
I talk about The Other Half of My Smile, my upcoming memoir of walking the Via de la Plata, a little-known path on the Camino de Santiago. The journey stripped away many of the roles, rules, and credentials I had used to define myself and asked a different question:
Who am I at my core?
One idea from the episode feels especially important to me:
Acceptance isn’t accepting the thing you don’t want. It’s accepting that life may be much bigger than what you can see from where you are standing right now.
And perhaps my favourite reflection from the conversation:
“I fell in love with who I was on the path — not at the end of the path.”
You don’t have to walk 1,000 kilometres across Spain to walk yourself home.
If this conversation speaks to where you are right now, I hope you’ll listen.
In this episode of High On Life, Melissa and I explore:
- why I chose to walk the Camino precisely when walking had become almost impossible
- the strange energy of an ancient pilgrimage route
- Finisterre — “the end of the earth” — and my fascination with what exists beyond the edge of what we can imagine
- the meaning crisis that can come from doing everything “right”
- surrender and why it took far more than affirmations or rituals for me to understand it
- shadow work and the identities we build around competence and achievement
- creativity as a path toward healing
- open-water swimming, writing and coming home to myself
- what transformational coaching actually means
- the difference between success and fulfilment
- why asking for help can be one of the hardest practices of all
- and what it means, for me, to be truly High on Life