What I Found on the Other Side of Losing Everything

The moment my hands hit the mat and my feet lifted off the ground, I felt something incredible. I was nine years old, on the front lawn with my best friend Deede, and the world made perfect sense. Her dad was a gym teacher, and their basement was a treasure trove of cartwheel mats. Every afternoon we'd drag them outside and flip until the streetlights came on.

Moving my body, flipping upside down, testing my limits — it felt like the most magical thing in the world. Like I had reached the beginning of the rainbow with so much more to discover.

I had no idea how much that feeling would cost me. Or how long I'd spend trying to find it again.

November 16, 1983

I was sixteen and alone at the competition. No coach in my corner, no teammates beside me. Just quiet determination and the belief that I had done the work. I was there to qualify for the state level, representing Sayville High School by myself.

The uneven bars were set to the highest, widest configuration — one-size-fits-all. For someone my size, it wasn't ideal. But I'd trained under worse conditions. I reminded myself: I could handle it.

I couldn't.

I fractured my spine. The pars interarticularis — a small but vital piece of vertebra. The condition has a name: spondylolysis. I didn't know that word then. Even if I had, it wouldn't have meant much. What I knew was pain. And the slow, quiet realization that the thing I loved most was gone.

I was told "no more gymnastics for you." My mother took me to the chiropractor, hoping for a different answer. He recommended traction therapy three times a week. But the verdict didn't change. Going back carried real risk — risk nobody was willing to take with a sixteen-year-old's spine. And just like that, the door closed.

I didn't get to say goodbye to gymnastics. It was just over.

The Fragmentation

When gymnastics ended, it didn't feel like a transition — it felt like a complete fragmentation of my life. I wasn't stepping into another dream. I was learning how to live without the thing I loved most.

I leaned on what constants I still had: Bobby, my family, school, my friends. I started going to parties on weekends. I let myself have the teenage experiences I'd missed during years of training. It was both freeing and heartbreaking — like learning to walk in a world where the ground had shifted beneath me.

Years later, watching a gymnastics meet with my family, it hit me all at once. We walked into the gym and it just about took my breath away. I tried to put on a brave face, but the reality of my situation crashed over me. I got up, running out of the gym crying. I couldn't bear to witness what couldn't be — what would never be again.

That grief didn't go away. It just learned to be quieter.

What Grew in the Gap

Here's what I didn't understand at sixteen: losing the thing you love doesn't erase who you are. It reshapes you into someone you haven't met yet.

I threw myself into building a life. Bobby and I started a construction business from nothing — crafting homes, fascia, windows, decks, custom woodwork. There was a thrill in watching it grow. Each day we were carving out something solid and real. Then the financial crises came and tested everything we'd built. We survived that, too.

I became a mother to three children — Jarad, Jake, and Jenna. I managed investments. I faced health scares that forced me to leave a job I loved. Each time life knocked me sideways, I got back up. Not because I'm extraordinary, but because I had already survived the thing that scared me most — losing my identity at sixteen — and nothing after that could break me the same way.

The resilience I built during those years wasn't wasted. It was preparation. I just didn't know what it was preparing me for.

The Low Hum

For thirty years, I carried this low hum of something unfinished. Not a dramatic wound that demanded attention, but a quiet absence. A space where something used to live. I worked around it. I filled it with purpose and responsibility.

But in still moments, it was always there.

That ache turned out to be a compass. It was pointing me somewhere I hadn't been brave enough to go — back to a gym, back to movement, back to the version of myself I'd buried at sixteen. When I finally followed it, at nearly fifty, I discovered that everything I'd survived in between had made me stronger than the girl who fell off those bars.

And the joy that was waiting for me on the other side? It was bigger than anything I'd lost.

For Anyone Carrying That Ache

If you lost something important — a career, a passion, a piece of who you were — the grief is real, and it deserves to be honored. Don't rush past it.

But don't let it be the ending, either. The ache you carry might not be a wound. It might be a compass. And where it's pointing might surprise you.

Start from exactly where you are. Give yourself time. That mountain that feels so steep? You'll look back and realize how far you've come.

This post is adapted from themes in Broken to Unbreakable: The Comeback I Never Saw Coming, available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover.