Things that healed me
After two years, here's what has changed.
Last week I announced that I am starting Michigan Girl Magazine, and the response has been huge. I am so excited!! And while that post explained some of the reasons for the new pub - this post is a deeper look into what happened and how I’ve changed in the two years since closing my first pub and starting this new one.
For starters, here are the things I was telling myself back then: That I couldn’t do it alone. That I couldn’t give up the business I had built for 18 years (!). That I couldn’t change my career in my 40s.
There was so much that happened, but the details don’t matter. What matters is that I knew something had to change. My inner voice was shouting, and I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I had to move into my own life. As painful as that would be.
The endless pressure of having to keep step, to stay even, and to never be an individual, was too much. There were things that I wanted to do with my gifts, my days, my life, that I couldn’t even consider doing back then. It was so hard to watch every step I took professionally.
My husband would try to convince me that what I wanted was normal – to write, to create more, to have a peaceful home, to step out of what was no longer working.
Honey, please, he said, you can do this on your own.
And he was right. I can do this on my own.
And life has become much more peaceful.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t cry and beg and grieve and try to fix what wasn’t working with others a million times. But it does mean that as time passed, my “other” life started to happen.
I wrote more than I have in my entire lifetime. I opened my new business. I started my MiGirl hiking group. I built a charity walk to remember my sweet mother. I got a new puppy, then another. I planned new trips. I set up my writing studio. (Tim built it for me. Again, trying to show me what was possible when I let go of the impossible.)
Instead of measuring my decisions against how others would respond, for the first time in my life, I was decidedly in my own space. It took time, but I eventually quieted those voices in my mind – the “they won’t like this” voices. In the quiet of being alone, I started listening to MY voice. I did and said and wanted and pursued and enjoyed things of my own choosing.
It was wild.
Leaving the industry was also part of my healing. To step away and let things settle. To let my heart detach from all things “GTWoman” and instead reattach to all things “Kandace.”
I remember pulling out of Culver’s once on a beautiful spring day. I was taking lunch to my boys. I suddenly got this feeling like I was looking down from above – and I was just a woman. Just a wife. Just a mom. Just a writer. Driving with fries and a couple Oreo mixers in the cupholders. There was something surreal about the moment. The clarity of the sun, the stolen fry in my hand, the simplicity of it all. And nary a soul to answer to (except those two hungry boys). I almost cried with joy.
Fries at Culver’s, who knew?
I know it makes no sense, but of course, it makes perfect sense. I was under my own volition, my own direction, my own power.
At last.
The next shift happened when I took the Michigan Girl group on a new trip I had put together to Mackinac Island.
One morning, I caught sunrise on the island, and the view was stunning. The moments before, though, are ones I need to back up and show you.
I had gone to bed in an empty hotel room. One overlooking the beautiful evening bay. In a series of mishaps – lucky breaks I see now – I had ended up with an extra room I couldn’t cancel and so I took it as my own – a suite. I could do cartwheels in there. It was decadent. A room of one’s own, as they say.
But that first night, it was big, too big. Too lonely. I called Tim: I can’t do this. It’s too much. I am too alone. There are too many ghosts in everything I do.
Sleep, he said. Tomorrow will be new memories made, no ghosts, just new friends.
He was right. (Again.)
By the time I went to bed that next night, I had explored the island with new friends. Every experience had been fun and brand new – and mine. It was a start.
But it was on the last morning, on a whim, when I decided to get up early and bike around the edge of the island to catch the sunrise, that it really hit me. I sailed down the road – alone – and perched on a rock to watch the sunrise – alone – and took in the view – alone.
And to my surprise, it wasn’t like the sunrise at home. The beams reflected off the water, but, to my delight, off the curve of the island, too. The combination was breathtaking. And in the wild unexpected beauty of that moment, I realized this:
That I hadn’t seen everything I was going to see, nor heard all I was going to hear, nor done all I was going to do.
Of course, I already knew that. But in that moment, I was DOING it. Sunrise on Mackinac Island! Yet, it had taken a series of horrible events to get me here…
The lost business, the betrayals, the heartbreak, the room mix up, the lonely night, the buffaloing along through all the new stuff the day before, the month before, the year before. The endless marching forward for two years. Then the last-minute bike ride at dawn – where I stood there, alone, on the shore, absolutely taken aback by Mother Nature.
Something turned over inside me. A reckoning. I knew then that I would continue to find beauty, happiness and people throughout my life – that I couldn’t begin to imagine it all or what was to come.
That was in May. Something shifted at that sunrise. Some kind of switch. I came home renewed, empowered, energized. Suddenly I felt that I was moving toward something, not away from something. I didn’t know quite what yet. But that was ok. I was willing to keep going along to see.
I continued to freelance, teach writing classes, plan trips, and host MiGirl hikes and bikes. I let things ride, and I let things come. I journaled and biked and walked and waited. What was coming?
By then, in all the in-between moments, I had been working on Michigan Girl Magazine for over a year. I would get it out and work on it for a week or two at a time, then put it away again, swearing it off.
It never felt “right.”
I wanted to create something new, but instead I created dozens of covers that I hated. The content I came up with was old. The format nothing special. I felt like I was retreading what I had left behind. I didn’t want that. I wanted something more. I couldn’t and wouldn’t go back to publishing until I found my way, until the energy felt right.
Then, one day, at Tom’s in Interlochen, about to go in and buy ice cream I’d sworn off, I was filled with – there’s only one word for it – resolve.
The setting wasn’t too spiritual – black asphalt and a lady wrangling her kid into a car seat next to me – but it was like a bolt of lightning, unexpected and explosive came through me and I spoke it out loud. In that stillness after the engine turns off and before you open the door: KANDACE, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? YOU ARE A WRITER!
And with that proclamation, came something very close to peace. An acceptance. Permission to do what I loved, regardless of what or who or when or why. At last, I felt I could return to my OWN publication. It was a quiet inner knowing (shouted into that empty car!) that I was ready.
And I knew that my return couldn’t have come without the two-year wait, the sunrise healings, the changes within me.
That night, I got home and pulled out Michigan Girl Magazine again and this time, I did have the right ideas for the covers. I was flush with fresh content. I realized with sudden joy that I didn’t NEED my old ideas that I thought I had “lost.” Instead, I had new ideas, and they kept coming!
It was like a fog had lifted. I was two years farther down the road and that made all the difference. The moments that had come, the things I had done, the hurdles I had cleared? They had rebuilt me for the better. I was awake again.
Which brings me to today. When I could do anything, could take a job, could build more events, could freelance for others - my inner voice says to get back to what I love doing most.
The woman who wrote this post today is not the same woman who started GTWoman in 2003… and definitely not the same woman who closed her magazine in 2020. This new publication has a woman at the helm who grew and conquered and grieved and healed. A woman still doing all those things. A woman who no longer defers to others’ ideas. A woman who built a happy, loving, muddy new friendship circle – one hike and bike at a time. A woman who learned her worth. A woman who knows it comes from within - who knows that no one can take it away.
I hope that you’ll come along with me on this next chapter. This new journey. This new pub. I will post more as things unfold… just know that Michigan Girl Magazine will include outdoorsy stuff and healing stuff and getting your sh!t together stuff and doing your own thing stuff.
Finally!
❤️
Good read. Glad you healed and are go getting! get 'em!