Boxing From Mountains (And Valleys)

Again? Already? Fine. 

For twenty years, I’ve sent out Boxing Day greetings. And after twenty years, longtime readers will recognize my musings’ mechanics have become so predictable that an AI model could generate the entire champagne chalet experience (hallucinations on the house):

• Self-deprecating welcome (if you've landed here after googling "champagne chalet" and mistakenly slipped into this realm of reflection, welcome to the repartee!) 

• Fauxpologetic explanation for newcomers and anyone expecting this to actually arrive on the 26th (This email, like time, is a social construct. And as it turns out, I was ahead of the curve in using “day” generously during this lawless liminal state of festive leisure – it’s boxing week now, profanity’ers.)

• Narrative hook or scene that flows from personal anecdote into broad reflection (the more cliché the better) launching into a year’s worth of disparate observations I attempt to wrangle into cohesion

• Meta-commentary (oft presented in annoying parentheticals of sesquipedalian shorthand and obscure asides I alone find funny) 

• Alliteration (often always) 

But see friends, there’s safety in ritual. In predictability. In structure. The repetitive cadence helps individuals feel connected and grounded, providing a sense of stability even when the broader environment feels chaotic. Rituals serve as beacons to guide us through life’s liminality, anchor points in a fall arrest system when shit hits the fan and you’re faced with catastrophe's inevitable "now what" phase. Subtle foreshadowing secured, let’s begin.

In late October, I was on a conference stage in Banff, delivering my standard deck to a crowd of 1500. I intentionally selected the talk track I can nail in my sleep – a tight 20 evangelizing community, espousing humans’ collective power, outlining why most community strategies fail (fwiw, it’s because leaders won’t risk relinquishing control, opting instead to varnish over authentic humanity with that telltale corporate sheen.) In other words, I was up there in full boss mode – heels high, guns out, delivery locked-in – looking, sounding, faking that I had it all together.

All the while, avoiding the macabre irony hiding under my curated polish. I spent the last 20 years becoming an expert on community, espousing its transformative power and value. And I’d spent the last 20 minutes chiding educating the world’s biggest brands: passionately laying out the case for vulnerability. Championing courage to let your community help where you can’t do it alone. Yet here I was, silently suffocating under the weight of my own impossible advice. So at minute 21, I stopped. Sat down. Took a breath. And said: "On October 4th, my big brother Travis died of suicide. I didn’t know whether to start or end with this. Or whether to share it at all. Because this? This is so heavy. But here we are." (Heads up that I reference suicide throughout. If this topic is sensitive for you, please do whatever you need to be kind to yourself in this moment and always.)

Travis was one of those magnetic humans – the type who couldn't get five feet without attracting followers. The type you look at and earnestly think: Yeah, that one could start a cult. When Trav was around, adventures (and competition) were never far behind. He'd nod at a hill in the distance: “dude, let's go climb that” – somehow convincing you it wasn't just an idea, but the best idea. Researchers in Virginia found that if you’re looking at a mountain that you need to climb by yourself, your brain perceives it as 10-20% steeper than it would if you were standing next to a friend who is going to climb it with you. Wild, but not surprising, our perception of the world changes depending on whether we think we’re going through it alone or with someone else. Our brains are more resilient when we’re together. Travis was that person for so many – the one who made mountains look climbable, who made the impossible feel possible, just by being there with you.  

When I found out, my instinct was to be strong. (Side note: I quickly learned that if you want to bring any conversation to an abrupt and awkward halt, you can hardly do better than to mention your brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.) So I began redacting Travis from conversations – not to erase him, but because I can't always shoulder the weight of others' genuine care. There's a cost to watching someone's heart break over your loss, and each sincere reaction requires I somehow hold space for their shock and sadness. So I find myself performing this delicate calculus before sharing: weighing their right to care against my capacity to carry it, measuring the authenticity of connection against the cost of emotional output, balancing the relief of being held up against the burden of seeing others hold my pain. Some days, this quiet labor requires more emotional reserves than I possess.

But there's something else; something that catches in my throat: I'm the goalkeeper. The resilient one. The person who always, always shows up strong. Talking about Travis means letting them see my walls crumble, means watching their image of me shift from unshakeable to shaken. In their eyes, I see not just sympathy, but surprise – as if grief doesn't belong on the face of someone they've come to count on for strength. And below it all, a whisper: Have I failed them by being breakable? Have I let them down? Have I let you down? But when I couldn’t hold it together any longer and my facade cracked wide open (I recently quesopomorphized myself as an oozing lump of burrata), people didn't aggressively sniff around like 2010-era foodies at Neal's Yard. Instead, people met me there. They responded with raw vulnerability, revealing their own hidden universes of loss. The unity around my precise pain would be comforting if it weren't so heartbreaking – 47,000 annual deaths by suicide, each touching 135 lives directly. Six million people carrying this specific grief each year – in the United States alone. 

My favorite new word is sonder – the profound awareness that every human carries their own complex universe of hopes and heartaches as vivid and intricate as your own. In revealing my brokenness, I've found myself part of a community I never wanted to join, yet one that makes the weight more bearable. Not lighter, but less lonely. Now when I scan faces around me, I see stories untold, grief unspoken, strength unwitnessed – invisible threads that connect us all in our most human moments. That person taking too long to order a coffee may be calculating, as I have, whether they have the emotional reserves to answer "How are you?" honestly today. 

Perhaps true grace lies not only in understanding but in acting upon the fact that none of us are truly experiencing any of this alone. And though I've admittedly grown weary of performative grief rituals (the vocal pitch of pity haunts my nightmares), one solace in this mess has been observing the quiet ways people have authentically shown up for me. The understated times someone has seen, then silently handled the small things to lighten my load. The miracle of being loved for merely existing, regardless of my state of wholeness or dissolution. Because that's what we're all doing really – dissolving and reforming, breaking and mending, over and over again.

I recently learned that when caterpillars transform into butterflies, they don't just grow wings – they disintegrate inside their cocoon and rebuild themselves. Their entire body digests into soup before becoming something new. I can't quite believe that we live in a world where creatures can dissolve and reconstruct themselves. How ridiculously brilliant all of this “living” is that happens around us every day. All my life I’ve been conditioned to be disgusted by everything about my body that makes me… not dead. Every fluid – my sweat, my blood, my bile, my breastmilk, my tears – gross, right? The brokenness, the mess, clean it all up before others see! But our bodies are so ridiculous and incredible. Take tears: that we can think about something, and if that something becomes too overwhelming to hold as a thought, somewhere behind our face our body turns that thought into water, packed with a blend of pain-relieving endorphins and oxytocin that the normal dust-clearing, onion-cutting variety don’t contain. It turns out, we’re all constantly breaking down and finding our way back to solid form. Different. Changed. Alive. 

So this Boxing Day, my gift to you is not my opinions, but my truth: regardless of the optics of my life, or my job, or the facade I present, I'm not always on the top of the mountain. Right now, I'm in the valley. And saying that out loud is such a relief. I get to be who I am. Human. Maybe I spent all this time telling everyone else to embrace human messiness but was not willing to embrace it in myself. And maybe Travis wasn't, either. But what life taught me in 2024 is that every single person you encounter is staring up at their own mountain, experiencing their own metamorphosis, thinly held together by blood and luck. So give like earth. Be flexible like water. Protect yourself like fire. Let yourself be boundless like air. But most importantly, be here. Stay here. Let others be here with you.

I love you, Travis. (p.s. you’re so vain, you probably think my grief is about you.)

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Poet Hollie McNish inspired my wikipedia rabbit hole into caterpillar disintegration and so much more, so I dedicate this to all of your incredible faces and the wondrous tears behind them.    

butter knife

my heart has pumped for forty years 

without me even asking

and you tell me to keep my elbows off the table

use a different knife for butter

caterpillars don’t grow wings

they disintegrate completely

re-emerge with hieroglyphics at their backs –

meet me there, in this world

where caterpillars disappear themselves

and teardrops can be conjured out of thought

we are all magicians here,

so lay your head upon my shoulder

tears do not run out any more than kisses do

so kiss me, 

the body is a wizard

and rain today is pounding on the streets

and there is air inside our lungs 

as ancient as the first oak, and fireflies 

make light inside their abdomens,

and you,

you once fed through your belly button

so do not tell me not to laugh

one teaspoon of a neutron star 

could balance the entire human population

and once upon a time, inside my savage skin

in a room made of blood and luck

i grew a whole human child from compliments and kisses,

who now stands as tall as me, gigantic

and every day chameleons are changing colour

and flowers, stronger than cement 

burst through cracks in pavements

where man made explosions once obliterated 

every living thing, so do not tell me 

to stop dreaming, as if it’s too late,

our eyes, from the very second we are born,

know exactly how to form water out of hope