When the Landslide Came

Last week, my cousin took me to the Stevie Nicks concert in Oklahoma City.

But a Stevie Nicks concert isn’t the place to go to escape the ghosts in your own mind.

At around 8:30pm the lights went out and the crowd that had previously been chattering away at each other erupted into a roar, eager for their queen to take the stage. And she didn’t disappoint. I was on the edge of my seat (look, I’m old, okay, and we had great seats with an unobstructed view), hands clasped in front of my face and a broad smile breaking across it when I saw her curly blonde hair and black cape making their way to center stage.

One of the first shows I ever went to was The Black Crowes at the Farmer’s Market in Oklahoma City in 2005. I was eighteen years old and there was a pit. My friend and I got there early to snag the front and center spot on the railing, which we aggressively held on to all night. The show wasn’t over until after midnight and the two of us didn’t get home until about 2am. I had to be at Starbucks at 4:30am the next day for training. Somehow, I survived. It felt like nothing then.

I’m 38 now and the thought of pulling an all-nighter for anything fills me with an unspeakable terror and a despair so palpable I think about walking into oncoming traffic just to avoid the possibility.

At some point in the last couple of years, it’s really hit me. The fact that I’m middle aged. Probably past middle age unless I live to be 80. And even then, I only have two more years left of the front half of things.

It’s led to a lot of reflection on younger days and just how fast it’s all gone.

This Christmas, my dad will have been dead for 19 years.

When he died, I was 19. I’ve existed on this planet with and without him for an equal number of years now.

The pain and rage I felt when he died—or left us, as I think sometimes—seemed unending. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to breathe again. And yet, somehow, I survived and ended up here. 38, still with a Dad-shaped hole inside me, but with years of experience navigating around it and only falling in when I let my guard down.

Stevie Nicks played “Free Fallin’” and a slideshow of her with Tom Petty over the years played on a giant screen behind her, the black and white photos accompanied by beautiful animated clip art evoking the decades in which they knew each other. In a way, parts of the show reminded me of a funeral.

For the last two weeks I’ve listened to nothing but The Life of a Showgirl.

Somehow, imagining the most traumatic or gut-wrenching moments of my life as some kind of cinematic montage makes them easier to digest. Or maybe just easier to romanticize.

And I thought about that while Stevie Nicks sang “Landslide.” About my age and the experiences I’ve had. What I’ve romanticized and what I haven’t. How we’ll never actually know how other people see us. We’ll never really know what role we play in the life of another. We might have an idea. They might tell us. But not really. And ultimately, we’re trapped inside our own experience of this life, strapped in tight behind our eyeballs, stuck until the Grim Reaper comes to get us.

The past year has been especially hard. Financially, mentally, emotionally, physically. I’m hoping 2026 will be gentler.

All of those thoughts I had at the concert made me realize something about this past year, too.

I’ve spent so much time mourning what my life was prior to October of last year. I’ve become bitter, angry at the whole world. I’m resentful. And it dawned on me that I don’t really recognize myself anymore, on almost any level. That maybe this hard year has marked a before and after in my own evolution. There was a point at which I even very seriously considered completely giving up writing.

I don’t want to spend the last half of my life bitter, angry at the world. But I also don’t want to be enslaved to the past, constantly trying to make today my best yesterday. I want to move on. Past. Through.

I want to come out on the other side of all this blackness and sparkle again.

It dawned on me that all this bitterness could be burned as fuel to get me there. And that the one thing I know how to do is the thing that will help me move on, past, and through.

Writing.

My life won’t ever be what it was—before death, before earth-shaking loss, before sickness—but it can be something else. Something new. And being at rock bottom is a pretty good place to build a foundation. I’ve spent so many years unconsciously grieving the life I thought should have been mine that I think I’ve failed to live the life that is mine.

A life where the good days don’t outnumber the bad when it comes to mental health. A life where we do things at the last minute because bipolar disorder isn’t compatible with concrete future planning. A life where I like being at home with my dogs more than I like being with other people. A life where my passion was and will always be the written word. A life that isn’t exactly what most people think it should be, but this is what it is and it’s mine.

I think one of the reasons I hate being made to feel my own feelings is because they’re deep and dark. So deep and dark that standing at the edge of them, I’m reminded of gnarled roots and twisted trunks, reaching skyward to a cluster of limbs and branches obscuring even the brightest sun, all coming together to form an archway leading into the darkest, blackest, coldest forest you’ve ever imagined.

No one can hurt my feelings more than I can. No one can wish anything for me that I haven’t already thought I deserved. And no one can invite a darkness to my doorstep that I haven’t already walked through and survived, crawling with broken fingernails, chipped teeth, and blood on my tongue, hauling my broken frame back over the threshold to relative safety.

The concert made me reflect on my age. On what has already come and gone. And what the future might hold and how I’ll meet it. Who I’ll be when it comes and if I’ll be ready when it does.

But time doesn’t wait for us to be ready. The hands of the universal clock wait for no one, not even you or me. On the way to my cousin’s house, I caught sight of my reflection in the harsh sunset light. The wrinkles on my forehead are deeper than they were just a year ago. My skin is showing imperfections that never used to be part of my porcelain complexion. The seats at the Paycom center made my back—aged early by gymnastics—hurt furiously. And I was glad when the show was over at 10pm.

It was a magical experience, the Stevie Nicks concert.

It touched something in me.

No one is coming to save me. Time marches on. And I’m more than capable of getting past. Through. This time more than ever. Because I have a track record of surviving 100% of the things that have tried to kill me.

And I’m going to write my way out of the dark.

Read the unabridged essay on Substack here.

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