08/30/2026
I Ran Before I Knew Why
Every August, my life breaks open.
Some years it arrives as joy. A flight to Greece. Other years it arrives as rupture. A stroke in a Wegmans parking lot. A conscious decision to become a business owner, trading security for the unknown. This year, it arrives as a question: what does it take to finally call myself a writer?
The pattern started when I was seven.
I was on Livingston Street, playing with my childhood friend, Jeannie Connors. Her mother stood in the kitchen mixing a glass of Tang, the orange powdered drink every kid on the block seemed to have in their cabinet that summer. And then, without a sound or a word from anyone, something in me stirred. I found a strong, wordless pull toward home.
I slipped out of Jeannie’s house quiet as a fox, running past the row houses to Ontario Street, where a red, white, and blue barber pole spun near the curb. Anxious, something I couldn’t yet name, I looked both ways, making sure no cars were coming, and crossed. I ran into our two-bedroom row house, seven hundred sixty-seven square feet in all, modest but ours.
As a seven-year-old, I had no explanation for what I sensed about my dad. Some may call it intuition, others a gut feeling. My dad had attempted to take his own life that afternoon. I hurried into my parents’ bedroom, past the rusty orange s**g rug, to grab the black rotary phone and dial their number at the pizza shop they owned.
Decades ahead of studying Ayurveda, years short of sitting with a single client or having language for the gut-brain axis and the nervous system’s early-warning signals, I lived the thing I’d eventually build a practice around: the body perceives first. The mind catches up later, if it catches up at all.
August kept the pattern going.
In 1995, it was the courage to step away from a desk in a well-respected real estate company’s commercial division, where I’d worked as a marketing executive for high-rises, office buildings, and investment properties since high school, and begin something of my own. Colleagues and mentors who’d shaped how I saw myself in the field kept me on as a consultant for six months, proof of how much they believed in me even as I flew the coop with nothing but a modest savings account and a last paycheck. I was too young for fear to take hold.
In 2007, riding a train toward Berlin, I read an article that rearranged something in me. Weeks later, back in Philadelphia, I got off a bus headed from Rittenhouse Square to Old City, my cargo pants split clean down the back from months of travel, Southeast Asia to Berlin to Prague and home again, saved only by the strap of my bag slung across my body. Right there stood my landlord, my assistant Nicole beside him. Words rose from somewhere deep in my belly, from the deepest part of my soul, and left my mouth before I ever registered choosing them: “I won’t be renewing my lease. I’m moving to New Mexico to study holistic medicine.” Nicole witnessed the entire exchange. I stood there a beat behind my own voice, unaware of what I’d just said until it hung in the air between us.
A full year passed, given over to handing my business, intact and entrusted, to the team who’d earned it. Only then did I act. In August 2008, my mother and I finally loaded a silver Honda CRV and drove the whole country to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a city where I knew no one.
Then came 2016. I experienced a stroke in a Wegmans parking lot. My dear friend Robin was beside me. The body simply stopped negotiating and spoke.
Two years later, in 2018, Bella Magazine printed my first piece, about wellness travel and recovering from that very stroke. I was a writer already. I just hadn’t claimed the title out loud.
Now it’s 2026, and I’m preparing to publish a book. Strange thing to admit: driving across the country with my mother, starting over in a state where I knew no one, felt easier than saying the word “writer” about myself.
I share this because I doubt I’m alone in it.
Your pattern might skip August entirely. It could show up instead as a season, a birthday, a smell that returns you somewhere your mind isn’t ready for. The particulars are mine. The mechanism belongs to all of us: a body that reads danger, grief, or a turning point the mind takes longer to name.
The invitation isn’t to relive your hardest month. It’s to ask what your body has been trying to tell you first, all along, and whether you’ve been willing to listen prior to a crisis forcing the issue.
At seven, I crossed a street alone without asking anyone’s permission first. At fifty-something, I’ve hesitated for years over one word, afraid of who might judge me for claiming it. The body that ran toward danger without flinching somehow grew cautious of naming itself. Maybe that’s the work still remaining in me, letting that same instinct that got me across Ontario Street carry me over this smaller, stranger threshold. An emerging writer. Said out loud, finally, without waiting for anyone’s permission.
Every August, my life breaks open.
