Katie Rethman

I’ve been turning this over in my mind for months now… how to begin, where to place the first word in a story that still feels warm from being lived. There was a season this past year I’ve come to call my “dark phase”. A stretch of life where mornings felt like something to survive rather than something to start.

Sometimes I would get as far as opening the fridge for food and then slide down to the cold wood floor, heart pounding, air trapped somewhere beneath my ribs, tears rushing. My hands would go numb. My legs felt like sandbags. Words caught in my throat like rocks. Some days, my then four-year-old would ask me something simple, something ordinary, and I could hear myself trying to answer while the world narrowed into a pinpoint. My own body felt foreign, like a house with lights flickering at random.

I’m not here to tell the whole story today. I’m not ready for that yet, or maybe the story isn’t ready for me. But this is where I want to begin: with the knowing that I went somewhere deep and shadowed, and I came back. Not intact. Not unchanged. But here, writing, breathing, learning to inhabit myself again.

I don’t have a thesis. I don’t have advice. What I have is the truth that becoming isn’t always light. Sometimes it breaks you open in the dark first. Sometimes the body speaks in alarms before the mind understands the danger.