The Night I Thought I Might Be a Good Person

We Sold Everything | April 2026

I was nineteen years old. I was lying on the ground next to a campfire somewhere in the mountains between Eugene and Bend, looking up at a night sky so full of stars it felt like an argument for something I couldn't quite name yet.

My dog Shasta was next to me. I had my hand in her fur. My friends were nearby — Brittany and a couple of others, good people, the kind of people who drive up into the mountains looking for hot springs and have a great time anyway when they can't find them, which we didn't. We had eaten mushrooms earlier and explored around the campsite and now we were settled, quiet, the fire doing what fires do.

I was thinking about my life. About my friends. About who they were and what I saw in them when I looked clearly. And what I saw was: good people. Genuinely good people. People with something real in them.

And then, very quietly, a thought arrived that I was completely unprepared for.

If they are good people, and they like me — maybe I am a good person too.

I lay there with Shasta and the stars and let that thought sit in me for a long time. It was not a loud thought. It did not arrive with any fanfare. But it landed in a place that had been empty for as long as I could remember, and it has stayed there ever since.

That was the first time in my nineteen years of living that I had ever genuinely considered the possibility that I might be okay.

I want to tell you what had to be true about a person before that thought could feel like a revelation rather than an obvious given.

I grew up in a home where scolding sometimes went beyond scolding. My mother was afraid — deeply, genuinely afraid — that my sister and I would end up like her family, a family carrying damage that ran deep and wide and had shaped her in ways she was still reckoning with. I understand that fear now. I understand where it came from and why she felt it so urgently. But the way it expressed itself was in a kind of damning — not just of our behavior, but of who we were as people. The message, received early and absorbed completely, was that something about me was fundamentally wrong. That I needed to be driven toward goodness through fear because left to my own devices I could not be trusted to find it myself.

I believed that. For a very long time I believed it completely.

I grew up willing — almost eager — to accept that I was in the wrong if anyone thought so, at any time, for any reason. It was easier than defending myself. Easier than risking the possibility that they were right and I was what I feared I was. I had no framework for being okay. I had no evidence that okay was available to me.

I spent hours in my high school counselor's office. Talking, sharing, looking for something I could only call hope. I didn't have a word for what I was looking for then. I just knew I was looking. I knew there was something more than what I had been handed and I was desperate to find it.

The low self-esteem created a ceiling I couldn't see clearly but ran into constantly. I could move — God, I could move, I was good at moving, at picking up and going somewhere new and starting over with a clean slate. But I could only go so far. The semester I started but couldn't finish. The relationship that ended at eighteen months because something in me didn't know how to stay past the point where being truly known became possible. The yes I wanted to say but found a no coming out of my mouth instead because wanting something and believing you deserved it were two completely different things and I had only ever managed the first one.

My theme songs in those years were Ramble On and Rambling Man. Later, once I found Widespread Panic, Driving Song. I wore these songs like a philosophy. Movement as freedom. Movement as identity. I told myself I was someone who didn't stay put, as though that were a character trait rather than a coping mechanism. As though the running were chosen rather than compelled.

It wasn't until much later that I understood the difference.

Krista understood it before I did, I think. We met in Yellowstone — she was everything I was not. Bold where I was quiet. Unafraid to say exactly what she was thinking or feeling while I was still measuring every word against what people might think of me. She valued academia and committed to it completely — four-year degree, then her master's. She wanted children and had two extraordinary daughters. She knew what she wanted and moved toward it with a directness I could only watch and quietly marvel at.

We had the same wounds underneath. The same complicated mothers, the same difficult childhoods, the same things we were both trying to outrun or overcome. But she had found a way to move through the world as though she was allowed to be in it. As though she had already settled the question of her own worthiness.

I was still trying to find the question, let alone the answer.

The gift certificate to The Curiosity Shoppe came a little later, and it cracked something open. The books. The herbalist. The astrologer. The community of women who met me exactly where I was and didn't suggest I needed to be anywhere else first. The Alchemist told me to follow the signs, to trust what I felt, to have faith in the path even when I couldn't see it. I held onto that with both hands.

And still. Still the ceiling. Still the semester I couldn't finish. Still only able to go so far before something in me called a halt and I moved on instead of through.

At twenty-five I started working with at-risk teenage girls at a wilderness program. I devoured every training, every manual, every framework I could find. I knew — I knew in a way that was almost uncomfortable — that everything I was learning applied to me as much as to them. That the girl who emerged from the tent each morning with new light in her eyes was a version of the girl I had been. That the work I was doing with them was also the work I was doing on myself, one conversation, one campfire, one five-mile graduation hike at a time.

I kept reading. I kept going to therapy — a few months here, two years there, always returning when life got loud enough that I needed the container of it. I kept using every tool I could find. Mushrooms, in those years, as both recreation and something closer to ceremony — always spending time alone first, opening myself up to possibility, hoping I would learn something I hadn't known before. Slowly, slowly, the ceiling lifted.

Then I found Brené Brown. Her story resonated with something so deep in me I can still feel the first time I encountered her work — the shame research, the vulnerability, the radical idea that the thing you think disqualifies you is actually the thing that connects you most fully to other people. That the story you tell yourself about being fundamentally broken is not the truth. That worthiness is not something you earn. That you were allowed to be here all along.

I read her the way I had read The Alchemist. With both hands. With relief.

I am still in this work. I want to be honest about that.

I have made progress that is, by any measure, tremendous. The girl who lay by that fire at nineteen and had the terrifying quiet thought that she might be okay has come a long way from that campsite. But there are still fundamental lessons about self-love and boundaries and how I see myself that I have not yet fully learned. It is complicated and messy and ongoing, the way real growth always is.

And then came the RA.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune condition — which means, in the most literal sense, that my body is attacking itself. When I received that diagnosis, alongside the devastation and the relief of finally having an answer, something else arrived: a recognition that hit me somewhere very deep. I had spent my entire life learning about the psychoneuroimmunological link — the connection between emotional pain and physical illness, between chronic stress and inflammation, between the stories we carry in our nervous systems and the ways our bodies eventually respond to them. I had read Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk and Candace Pert. I had done the somatic work and the therapy and the meditation.

And still. Still my body had found a way to make the inside visible on the outside. Still the pain and the fear and the exhaustion of a lifetime had expressed themselves in the most direct language a body knows.

I am not saying this with blame. I am saying it with compassion — for myself, finally, more and more. My body was not betraying me. My body was communicating with me, the way it always has, the way it always does for all of us, in the only language it has available when we haven't yet heard the quieter ones.

The RA became a crash course in healing at a level I had not previously considered. And Spain — the warm dry Mediterranean climate that is genuinely better for autoimmune symptoms — is not just a dream. It is part of the prescription.

This blog is the journey to Spain. But it is also — it has always also been — a healing journey. The two are not separate. They never were.

That is what Field & Frequency is. Everything I have learned and am still learning, offered to other women who are living some version of this story — the ceiling, the running, the body that finally says enough, the long slow beautiful work of becoming the person you always hoped you might be.

It began at a campfire at nineteen, with my hand in my dog's fur and the stars overhead and a thought so quiet it almost didn't arrive.

Maybe I am a good person too.

I have been building on that thought ever since.

Next — Kelly's story. A different kind of becoming, told with the same honesty.