Solo on Purpose

A personal account of cold injury, nerve recovery, and learning to let the body lead. My first ski day of the season. The second run of the morning. And everything changed. It was around 19 degrees at the base, colder as the lift climbed higher. A typical New England winter day. Nothing I hadn't handled before. What I didn't account for was stillness. Unlike normal skiing, where your body is constantly generating heat through movement, I was suspended, unable to move, unable to warm myself. Prolonged exposure without movement is a completely different animal. Cold is cold. A mechanical failure left me stuck on that chairlift, in cold, wet conditions, for about two hours. By the time ski patrol reached me, I wasn't okay. At the time, I didn’t realize this would be my last full ski day... What surprised me What I didn't expect was that it didn't end when I was rescued. In the days that followed, my body was still processing what had happened. T...

There was a moment when everything felt like it ended at once. Loss Change Silence The kind of silence where a home no longer feels like home, where the next chapter isn’t clear, and where even the simplest decisions feel heavy. I remember packing up my life into boxes, sitting in the quiet, and asking myself one question: What now? I didn’t have a plan But I had a pull Something inside me said go. Not to escape, but to find something I couldn’t name yet. That’s what brought me to France. And eventually, to Portugal. There were moments that didn’t look like healing at all. Putting gasoline into a diesel car the day before Christmas. Navigating unfamiliar streets, languages, and systems alone. Wondering if I had made a mistake. But then there were moments I will never forget. A cold, damp morning at a gîte in France, exchanging quiet smiles with strangers through a kitchen window. A woman on the beach in Sesimbra who shared parts of her story she had never told anyone before. Mor...