I’m wearing my new western sweater. I’m calling it western because there’s a cowboy hat on one side and a boot on the other. It reminds me of a Christmas sweater I had as a kid. The ones where it looks like your grandma knit it. A Santa’s face on one side and a candy cane on the other. I guess it’s always Christmas when you live in Montana.

My Grandma said I can stay here until the end of August. That’s huge. When I first got here, I thought I’d be here for a week and then go somewhere else. Then I got a job at a hat shop, a motorcycle, and I’ll be here for two months. There’s something I have to see play out here.

Leaping into faith

I’ve never done something where you truly took a leap of faith and let God catch you. One into the uncalculated. One where you honestly did not know what you would do a week later. One where your money wasn’t flowing, and characters were changing fast.

I always wanted to do it, though. What’s a life lived if not to take big risks with yourself? I always thought I would go WOOF, or work on a salmon fishing boat, or trim weed with my top off in Humboldt (true story, I got offered to do this after high school). To do something that felt truly wild. And then, I went to college. What a lame fucking thing to do. What a practical, non-romantic option. I actually don’t recommend going to college.

And, I almost didn’t go to college. I applied to one school and one school only. Which was unheard of for the kids of Northern Virginia who spent years crafting their applications, becoming president of Model UN clubs, and making a list as tall as they were of ‘reach, guaranteed, and safety’ schools. The friends I had applied to 30 schools. Trying to get into the best places they could. Their parents ready to pay whatever cost they had to have their kid at Duke or Yale. Don’t worry, they’ll take UVA if they can’t get anything else. I don’t remember the percentage of kids who went to Ivy Leagues, but they published it in the school newspaper. The entire institution I grew up in was a factory for prestige, and that was just public school.

If you can imagine a kid, whose parent was transitioning to a woman, who wore short Doc Marten big black fancy shoes in the homecoming parade (because I listed myself as a princess nominee and then actually got the signatures to become a homecoming princess but then I didn’t have a dad to bring to the crowning so my sister was my partner in front of the entire school), and was in some sort of in-school suspension about every 4-6 months since 7th grade, this was a living hell. I looked around at everyone and just said, I’m not like you, and I don’t know how to be.

While most kids were just focused on sports and, I don’t even know, whatever drama you make as a teenager (?), I was smoking weed laced with PCP. I was taking seven blue bars and driving into DC. I was trying to save a 17-year-old heroin addict who I would sneak into the tool shed at the back of the house because his parents kicked him out of his. He hid his serious drug use from me the whole time. He wrote me love letters from rehab. I was a senior in high school by then. This was the era when Virginia became one of the epicenters for opiate use. We didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the middle of it.

But, at the same time, I was on the high school crew team that was winning every race. That was surrounded by family. That was supportive and beautiful. I would show up some days just a total mess, and these people were my lifeline. I think I’m alive from that phase because of the crew family I had. And my coach, I know he knew what was going on, but he never made a big deal of it. I don’t think he said anything to me once. He just kept everything moving forward. Maybe it was out of need (there were like 50 girls on the team), but I think it was perfect. It allowed me to just show up somewhere, in a place where I didn’t have to wear the Albatross of my family on my neck. Where if I worked hard, I saw results. Where my ability to show up not high, well-fed, and on time affected nine other girls who wanted to put their energy into something that mattered. I’m crying thinking about it. I love those girls so much, and the skills that the crew team taught me have carried me throughout my lifetime. There’s no other team sport like that one.

I know teenagers are supposed to hate their lives as teenagers. They are. They’re supposed to want to age out of maturation. The ‘hate your life’ is a rite of passage. Mine was just a dark, deep void of more than one painful thing. I didn’t see other people going through it like I did, or at least not girls. No other girl I knew was arrested twice by the time they graduated high school. I know they all were struggling, to some extent. I know I'm not the only fucked up, dysfunctional family in my community. Unfortunately, we had one young man take his life, Matt Cooper. I didn’t know Matt, but I still remember his name. Matt’s family honors his legacy with a scholarship through Vienna Youth Soccer that you can donate to.

I think what’s wild is realizing that this—this unfathomable, quiet chapter in Montana—is the life I wish I could have shown that struggling teenage girl. Hey, guess what, it gets a lot better. We’re gonna get to ride a motorcycle through Paradise Valley every morning. We’re gonna wake up to put our feet down on the grass, look up at the mountains, and see the sun rising in our eyes. We live in an RV and we’re still painting. That girl is moved and healed by what we’re doing now.

I wonder how much our past still moves us into the future. If I had been a kid who had a calm, loving family, would I even need or want to be doing this? Is this just how life would have been? Quiet and slow. Connected to nature. Unintense and no sign of it coming. Back then, I didn’t realize the leap I always wanted to take would be this. Back when everything was chaos and heartbreak, and I was trying to survive a life I didn’t choose. I used to dream about doing something radical, something free, something untethered. I just didn’t know it would look like a hat shop and a motorcycle and a borrowed cabin in the woods.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the leap isn’t always wild-eyed and cinematic. Maybe it’s slow mornings and sweaters with cowboy boots on them. Maybe it’s choosing, every day, to not go back to what broke you, even when you could. To not chase prestige or comfort or even certainty. But, just to stay. To stay a month longer when it’s good. To let it be good for as long as you can.

At least, that’s the leap I’m taking now. Not to run, but to root into a life that has God at the center, that is slow and meaningful. That has more than one part of the day that makes it the best day ever. Where I don’t know where money is going to come from and by September something else might change. But, to see what faith looks like when you finally have the space to receive it.

Love,
Valerie