Let's Talk About 'The Chasm'
has the ground ever split open beneath your feet?
I made a better quality voice recording for this one, should listening be more your style!
I recently imported subscribers from the Going On A Bear Hunt Family WordPress blog so those readers could join us here on Substack. If that is you, please consider this an invitation to join me in this space where I am inspired to share more consistently, freely and authentically than ever before.
We will get to The Chasm in a second, but first I wanted to introduce myself to new subscribers, or to any old friends who are just tuning in.
Hi, hello
I’m Steph (or Anie). I embrace slow living and good lattes. I wear comfortable clothes and I only own a few pairs of shoes. I am in surgical menopause, raising a twelve year old, working on life and everything about it after it all crumbled into a great black hole two years ago. I am embracing joy and goodness everywhere I can, while also holding space for the hard, because all of it matters.
If I quit something, there is a usually damn good reason for it, because I am a fighter, even to my own detriment at times. We used to live in a bus, but more on that in a minute.
In addition to writing, my other creative outlets are needle felting and music (I’m a drummer and my band released a song last fall! You can listen here. I hope it meets you in your hopes and in your longings).
I suffer from chronic pain and fatigue. More on that in a minute, too.
It took a while for me to see, but religious trauma had a bigger impact on me than I was interested in admitting for a long time, so I write about that sometimes here.
Childhood trauma shaped my baseline way of interacting with the world, as it tends to do for everyone... Mine still haunts me when it comes to conflict. I hate conflict.
Adult trauma in my early 30s sent me and my family into a spiral we have been navigating our way out of ever since.
The Chasm
My family lives in a place I like to call “The Chasm”. The Chasm is the space between what was, and what we hoped was coming. It’s where we were when the earth broke directly beneath our feet and we fell so far down we could barely see the sunlight in the sky above.
We stopped longing years ago to get back to our original path, but there have been several times we thought we were almost out, and it turned out to be a mirage.
From my essay Self-Care of Suffering?
July 2024
We’ve come to a place some might call “rock bottom”. It is quite literally at the bottom of the chasm I’ve alluded to (and more on this soon, once I wrap my head around these new developments). We’ve heard so many times “healing isn’t linear” and it is so true. There have been lovely glimmers along the way, but nothing could stop the momentum of us free falling to the bottom.
The Chasm has revealed things to me that urgently needed addressing before we could move forward (like blood-gushing puncture wounds, for instance). I didn’t recognize them for a long time, though. Initially I thought the best way out was the quickest way out. Scale the walls if we must! But now I understand that the slower, more steady and sure-footed way is not only much less scary, it might be even more beautiful than the path we were originally on. Of course, that is a matter of perception, though.
From my essay A Season of Acceptance
October 2024
From here at the bottom of this life-chasm, “the sky is the limit” seems trite and simply unobtainable.
And yet, if I pause long enough to ponder a little more intentionally, I see that the sky isn’t as far away as it appears. It’s right at my fingertips. It’s the air I breathe. It’s all around me. I have the opportunity in this moment to surrender to acceptance, to let go of what I thought would be and allow the gentleness of the present moment to wash over me. To take in the sweetness of today, even while I yearn for a more stable tomorrow.
It’s like accepting manna from Heaven as a gift, even though it wasn’t what was desired or expected. Yeesh.
Life looks so different right now than I ever thought it would.
We are “taking the backroads” now, which, truth be told, is painfully slow at times.
From me essay Beyond the “Bare Necessities,” Part 4
July 2025
The chasm is the place where we learn to breathe again and regain our strength to face whatever is next. And I’m beginning to think that maybe the chasm is where we can learn to thrive, too (having the right tools at our disposal helps a lot).
From my current vantage point within The Chasm, I can not only see, but I can even feel the warmth of the sunshine on my face now. It is actually quite breathtaking from where I sit in many ways. And that isn’t to say things are perfect, because they definitely are not. It is just that I am learning to appreciate the goodness that surrounds me. Which just leaves me in awe, actually, that I have made it this far.
So this is the place for musings from The Chasm—if you are a fellow Chasm Traveler, I welcome you here with open arms. Navigating this terrain is so much easier with companions. We can dress each other’s wounds and share stories and wisdom over campfires and good cups of coffee (we only have good coffee in The Chasm. It’s an underappreciated survival must-have).
From here, I seek to shed light on this main point: taking care of our mental and emotional health is just as important as having our physical needs met.
What happened to Going On A Bear Hunt Family and the bus?
Bus Life lasted a little more than 2 years. It was amazing and super hard. If you are new here, you will find two years worth of essays to read which may help answer some of your questions. The Beyond the Bare Necessities series sheds a good amount of insight on what we learned from living in a tiny home and the years leading up to that decision.
Recap
We spent the winter of 2023 in Washington State. The situation there did not materialize as planned and it ended up being quite hurtful and damaging. While we were there, my husband’s dad died in prison, too. So by the time we left Washington, our nervous systems were SHOT. And we still had to drive all the way across the country.
Wanting to be around comforting friends, we headed to the safety that Chattanooga, Tennessee promised. And on that cross-country trip, just a few weeks after his dad’s death, my husband’s grandfather passed away.
We had a very hard landing in Chattanooga.
We did, however, make great progress on the bus and reconnected with friends and had sweet community for over a year. But my husband’s suffering only worsened, which meant we all were suffering. We thought it was ADHD paired with extreme anxiety, grief and depression, but it was more than that.
Unbeknownst to us, there were more serious mental health things going on and we had to abruptly leave Chattanooga because… I needed to be with my mom after all that trauma, and so that is what I did.
I thought we would just take a few months to get him well and then come right back in our bus, but it did not work out that way. Because as fate tends to do fate-y things… the bus actually broke down on that drive from Tennessee and couldn’t be easily fixed. It got towed to where we live now, and still sits idle, waiting to maybe one day be worked on again. Or maybe not. Time will tell.
When we don’t know to (or aren’t able to) take care of our baseline mental health needs, we leave room for traumatic events to become all the more traumatizing to our nervous systems (and the nervous systems of the people around us). That is pretty much what happened to us.
I have a difficult time looking through bus-build related videos and photos from those days because so much of that time was blanketed in mental health issues I (we) didn’t understand. I was traumatized. There were many beautiful moments along the way (as you can see in the photos I’ve shared here), and I justified every hard thing with how worth it it was because we got to see so much of the country and be together.
Just because someone may be bleeding out doesn’t mean they can’t see and experience beauty at the same time.
One day I hope I can look back on those build out days without feeling any sort of swell of sorrow or regret for how catastrophic it was for our family. I am not there yet, but considering we are talking from The Chasm, I tell myself my own advice: take it slow and steady. No need to scale the walls.
Five months ago we moved out of my parents home and into our own place, which I lovingly refer to as “Blueberry Cottage.” Living on our own is going much better than I expected, which is a huge relief.
Hindsight shows me that ultimately living in a bus was worth it, even though it was very difficult, very often. It allowed me to see clearly that it wasn’t only the clutter or the big house or Atlanta or my father-in-law’s incarceration that contributed to our initial plunge into The Chasm. It was also the chronic issues we didn’t know were serious, or even problems. Looking back, I would do it all a million ways differently if I could, but living in regret and guilt over things I just didn’t understand at the time does nothing except keep me in shame.
When we set out for adventure, we called ourselves “Going on a Bear Hunt Family” and even through everything, the name still suits us. The following was on our Wordpress and I want to share it here, because even though it was premature and naive of me to suggest that going directly into adventure was the best way out of trauma, it did eventually force the clarity we have now.
Oh no! We’ve got to go through it.
It’s probably not shocking that a favorite story when our daughter was younger was “We’re Going On A Bear Hunt” by Michael Rosen. We love the poem, the onomatopoeia, the images… But most importantly, we love the recurring message of Courage and Gumption—to face obstacles head-on and not give up.
It’s a message that has stuck with us through our own obstacles, as we continually remind ourselves that the only way to carry on when things are so hard is to go through it.
In discussing names for this new phase of life we’re embarking on, we wanted a name that would encompass both where we’ve been and where we’re going. After all, isn’t that what makes a good story? The lovely, the horrible, and the mediocre.
This name just fits now that we find ourselves sort of in the middle of our own story. We’ve been on a beast of a hunt for something else for four years and now we are going on a “real” bear hunt in search of a reset, a breath, and healing.
We Are “Going On A Bear Hunt Family” and we hope you’ll join us to find out where this unusual story takes us next.
January 2022
That “unusual story” took us deeper into The Chasm than I ever cared to experience, but gosh, I learned so much. Most importantly, I learned that We are the bears we were looking for, it just took scaling the walls, falling, trying again, multiple cross-country trips, mental illness, and a whole heap of trauma to realize it.
Personal Update
I have struggled with chronic pain and fatigue for a long time. But the last two years have seen some answers for those issues: Anemia, Endometriosis, Fibromyalgia and Rheumatoid Arthritis. I still have some things to track down, but I have been so thankful to gain insight into why I have felt so chronically awful for the better part of 20 years. And also… damnit. So much of my pain I hoped was “simply” trauma-induced. As in, I thought I could heal my body out of it with therapy. Some of my pain may still be direct results from years of trauma, but I have come to accept that some things are just hereditary. Some genes you can’t heal your way out of.
And also, some things can have easy fixes and treatments (like iron infusions for anemia!) But others are more complicated and difficult to pinpoint.
And before anyone comes at me with “you’re so young!” “you don’t look sick!”… I know this very well, which is partly why I think it took so long for me to accept I may have autoimmune things going on with myself in the first place. Truth be told, I didn’t even realize Rheumatoid Arthritis is an autoimmune disease. My MeMe’s hands were deformed because of it, but I thought it was just a regular part of ageing.
It isn’t a regular part of ageing…
Getting to the point of receiving any diagnoses at all has taken a bit of a fight, because I present as a healthy person. Doctors don’t usually see me on my worst days. And, I have a high pain tolerance. Or maybe childhood trauma taught me to ignore pain and keep going anyway… either one isn’t ideal when trying to scale yourself on how bad your pain is today from 0-10. I hate that question, and I tell them often.
In Summation
All of this to say… Life has been shit but lately, things are stabilizing. Over the last year and a half or so, I have gained so much peace and clarity of mind. I have even tapped into my own personal ambition a bit, and I am empowered to intentionally chase things for myself again, which feels so hopeful and good.
Being as vulnerable and open as I have been on this platform has facilitated more personal healing than I could have ever expected. And you all have let me know time and time again that my writing helps you feel less alone in your own struggles, questions, chasms, chronic illnesses and more, which really encourages me to keep sharing.
The individual components of my story aren’t all that unique (maybe the exact combination of everything is), but I think that is what makes it relatable… there is probably something here for almost everyone. I write here because I know how alone I felt through many of the worst days of my life, and while there may be some big author out there who can give you “20 Steps to Fast-Track Your Thriving”, sometimes the biggest help comes from hearing someone else say “this was shitty, and it still is,” which helps the rest of us feel a little less alone in The Chasm.
Perhaps it is simply the writing sphere in which I have found myself, but I like to think that society is interested in moving toward more self-awareness, more empathy, and sharing real, honest thoughts than it was maybe even ten years ago. Of course, this raw honesty could just be another fad we will all cringe at in twenty years. But I hope we will actually see the benefits that came from collectively encouraging each other to heal and grow. After all, even though we each have our own unique terrains to navigate, we are all on this human journey together at the same time, and that means something.
“Planet Earth, you are a crew.”
Astronaut Christina Koch
See you soon,
<3,
Steph/Anie
P.S. I refuse to let “<3” die, so you’ll see it a lot around here. #proudeldermillennial
