Lesson of the Year

*You can also listen to me tell the story by pressing play!

This Substack has, in many ways, saved my life.

I started writing here one year ago because of a friend who was going through an incredibly upsetting situation. Her three-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with brain cancer. The news was thrown at her while she was already a caretaker for her elderly father and her mother, who has dementia.

This friend, one I am incredibly in awe of, had just learned about my More Good mission of sharing stories of human kindness last winter. She found out I was writing a book to eventually donate to hospital waiting rooms once it was completed. “Where is it?” she would ask jokingly, yet impatiently. “I need it now, Mary! I am in the waiting room right now!”

Her request didn’t just hit me with urgency. It also made me wonder. How can I get her these stories sooner? Why is it so hard to complete this project and figure out a publisher? Can anyone please come hold my hand and help me get this done sooner?

Then I was hit with the realization that I didn’t have to wait to figure out all of these answers. I could start publishing some now. On my own. A few stories from the book, from the road, from my travels. Stories of how I think, and why I think the way I think.

I am not sure whether this is a gift from my mother, from life, or how I came to be wired this way, but I truly do find joy in so many small things. In so many little moments. In every person I meet. Even the ones who I give too many chances to.

That way of thinking was something that I refused to let go of when my mother died. But it was definitely tested. Finding the joy in each moment and focusing on the good became a challenge when the person I loved the most had disappeared. And for a while, it made me want to disappear, too.

Instead, I chose to keep her alive by heading out into the world and searching harder for the good she promised me was out there.

Along the way, I met a man named Sal.

In 1988, Sal was living in Houston, heading to work at IBM one morning on Route 610 when an 18-wheeler struck his car. The truck had been changing lanes and clipped him hard enough to spin his vehicle around, leaving him facing the grill of the truck as it pushed him another hundred feet down the road. By the time the truck stopped, Sal’s ribs were bruised, his car was wrecked, and paramedics were tending to him on the side of the highway.

The truck driver was apologetic at first, until the police arrived.

“He changed the whole story,” Sal told me as we sat outside a coffee shop in Florida. The twelfth state of fifty on my journey. “He said I cut him off.”

Lying on the roadside, his blood pressure climbing, Sal listened as the accident he had just lived through was being told falsely to the police officer.

Then, a few minutes later, a young man showed up at the scene.

He told the police he had been driving his mother to work. He said he hadn’t stopped right away, but he’d seen the entire accident. He described exactly what happened and how the truck had cut Sal off. He gave his full statement and his personal information in case the police needed it later.

By the time the paramedics cleared Sal, the young man was gone.

“I never got to thank him,” Sal said. “I never even knew his name. He didn’t owe me anything. He went out of his way and came all the way back to help someone he didn’t know. And he has no idea how much he saved me from. Lawyers. Court. Years of stress. All because he chose to get involved.”

Thirty years had passed when Sal told me this story, and he spoke about it as if it had happened days ago.

“People don’t forget kindness like that,” he had said to me. “I hope wherever he is, it’s come back to him.”

That story is one of the reasons I keep writing. Because these stories deserve to be shared. To be remembered. Kindness has become so fragile and so easy to miss when we don’t notice it. One small decision in our day, to witness something, to turn the car around, to speak up for someone who can’t, to follow a pull towards something that we can’t even explain, can change the course of our lives. Or others.

It’s what’s happened to me on Substack over the last year. With you. My reader.

You didn’t just read my story and disappear. You came with me. You believed in the stories as much as me and chose to keep reading. And some of you have even paid to do it. Something that has given my words an ego for the first time, that you would support them monetarily, on top of the time you already gave them by subscribing in the first place.

Mostly, it has made me even more careful not to waste your time. To only leave you with a hopeful thought when you’re done taking time to hear or read my words.

As I celebrate one year of writing here, I am also packing up my bags again.

I am heading back to Alaska, my favorite stop from the fifty states I drove through on my trip. I am going to finish my book for the hospital waiting room. I’ve been working on it quietly alongside writing these Substack stories.

That book will hold stories like Sal’s, stories that acknowledge the moments that matter when one person pays attention. Stories of incredible resilience. Stories that remind us that even with the darkness that sometimes is too hard to fathom, light finds a way back to us.

Recently, I met with a friend who offered to do my Astrocartography chart. We both laughed when Alaska was a place where things aligned for me. It was something I had known for years.

Arriving in Alaska at the end of my journey reset my nervous system. I had never felt anything like that before, let alone on a three-year, 50-state road trip, in and out of homes, collecting emotional stories.

The reading of my map and Alaska aligning with my birth chart that day was all the validation I needed for something my heart has long felt. My friend’s reading simply gave a language to something I had learned to trust years ago when I got in the car in 2016. When something keeps calling you, it is worth listening to.

It is how my entire life has been lived since my mother died. One small, brave yes after another.

I’m not going to escape, or find myself, or get my butt frozen to an outhouse seat. (Albeit any of these things could happen.)

I’m going to finish something.

Something I’ve been steadily working on for a very long time. Something that I’ve been able to write more clearly ever since I came to Substack. Because this outlet has allowed me an audience. It has given me you.

Experiencing the three-year road trip, writing the book for the hospital waiting room, and writing my own story of the journey have been among the most beautiful gifts I’ve ever received. It has also been one of the most isolating.

But here, on Substack. I feel like I’ve come alive again. I am no longer writing and speaking to a void with the two books I am working on. Here, I can write something and share it immediately.

This year of writing has taught me the urgency of sharing these stories. Of reminding people that a single moment of attention can change a life, as it did for Sal. Kindness is fragile, and it can disappear if no one is paying attention.

Sal never learned the man’s name who helped him that morning, but the story survived because Sal chose to keep retelling it. Thirty years later, the kindness had stayed alive.

Ever since I got off the road, I have been doing the opposite. I’ve been carrying many of the stories alone. I kept telling myself they weren’t perfect yet, rewriting them constantly.

Meeting my friend, Melissa, reminded me that these stories don’t need editing as much as they need witnesses. I’ve realized that the stories don’t have to be perfect. For so long, I’ve written and rewritten them, terrified that I am not giving them the justice they deserve. I was letting myself and my stories disappear into a project that kept stretching further into the future.

But writing here changed that for me; it reminded me that my stories don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be told. Now. While they can still help someone feel less alone.

So, thank you for being here.

Thank you for listening.

Mostly, thank you for keeping these stories from disappearing.

Thank you for keeping my voice alive.