I love Trader Joe’s. Though the snack section and crowds can keep me away, there are a few products I can’t live without. The tea tree face wash and wipes are two beauties I like to keep in stock.

I rent a little house in Woodfin, NC—an artist’s home I adore. It’s a small, older 2/1 with a redone bathroom: a toilet, sink, and a standing shower with a window. Thankfully, for the neighbors’ sake, there’s a curtain that cannot be breached. My neighbors, Emmie, AJ, and of course Rosie—the visiting dog who stops by for her morning bone appetizer—make this place even more special. The home itself is a charming, peaceful retreat, adorned with the owner’s pottery, wooden tables, and lamps. The lighting is perfect. I can see the mountains from both the front and back, where the sun rises and sets in a sherbet sky streaked with purple. Birds chirp coded messages outside my kitchen window as I work, watching them gather at the backyard feeder. Lush greenery and hostas surround me. Squirrels, rabbits, and even red-headed turkeys make me feel like Cinderelli indeed.

The other night, I took my tea tree wash into the shower. Later, before bed, I went to wash my face, only to find it missing. I searched everywhere—through my shampoos, under the sink, the garbage can, even the refrigerator. Round and round I went, retracing my steps through the house. Where in the hell did I put the damn face wash? Gremlins? Had it come to this?

Defeated, I sat down to scroll through Hulu, my mind still turning over possibilities. And then, it struck me. I had placed it behind the curtain on the windowsill in the shower. Hidden in plain sight. Just like everything I had been searching for my entire life.

It was the perfect analogy for my life. Round and round I went—12 steps, medicine, doctors. Never able to put Heidi Dumpty back together again. I was trapped in a pattern of self-loathing and unmet needs, my mind repressing what it wasn’t ready to see. Instead, I created a story I could live with—one that brought safety and balance to an unsafe, imbalanced world. Hot pink elephant hook rugs and all.

Dr. Shepard, my beloved psychologist and addictologist in my first decades of sobriety, used to say, “Heidi, you look at things the way you’d like them to be, versus the way things are.” Bingo. Pin the tail on the donkey. A massive gold star. A home run over the Green Monster for Peter Fonagy and mentalization issues. I had spent my life seeing myself and the world through a broken lens, shaped by childhood feelings and memories—my blind spot, the story of me.

I had been lost in a maze of evergreens, heavy with snow, taller than the ones from The Shining where Jack Nicholson met his frosty end. I didn’t know anything existed outside of that icy wasteland—I had never known anything else. The answers had always been in what I could and could not see.

I had mistaken the cause. I wasn’t born broken or defective. Any good medical coder will tell you: you can’t have a manifestation without an etiology. The external manifestations were only clues to the self-hatred that lay unseen beneath the frozen waters.

Deformed, I ran a short track riddled with holes the size of craters and chunks of asphalt big enough to take down a Clydesdale—and my children—for over fifty years. Only in losing what truly mattered did I finally see the truth.

4o