Fall 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 4

Part 1

When I was 7 years old, I was, for the first and only time in my life, grounded by my father.

The incident for which I was punished began when my best friend Ben and I decided to rappel out of his second-story window on a rope tied around a bedpost. Ben and I both

had parents who worked in wilderness education, and we considered ourselves to be more or less experts in all matters of adventure. Being conscientious outdoors people, we drew detailed plans for our descent in crayon on a sketchpad on the carpet. We then, very carefully and using an array of sophisticated knots, tied one end of a ball of string around my waist, wrapped it several times around the bedpost, and tied the other end to Ben, who held onto the rest of the ball to lower me safely and smoothly to the ground.

The plan was flawless, and we were eager to get underway. We opened the window as wide as we could, and I pushed my way backward through it, but just as I was beginning to put my weight onto our rope, Ben's father opened the bedroom door, saw us, and, in an uncharacteristic burst of anger, shouted: "What the fuck are you doing?!"

I jumped back through the window in a panic with my lower lip already starting to tremble, but Ben calmly explained the plan, pointing out the details of our blueprint.

"You've put some good thought into this," said Jon, cooling off. "But what you are doing is very dangerous. To do something like this safely, you would need a rope at least five times bigger. Why don't you build something with your Legos instead?"

Ben and I looked at the floor and nodded solemnly, but as soon as the door clicked shut, we locked eyes and beamed in uncontainable excitement.

Five Times Bigger!

Five Times Bigger!

All we had to do to complete our plan without getting in trouble was get a bigger rope!

We rushed down to the basement and began tearing through boxes, unearthing nails and tape and electrical cords. Eventually, Ben held up a thick red twist of rope. When we compared its girth to our ball of string, it was undeniably five times thicker.

We rigged up our system once again, albeit in hushed voices–we knew we'd found a loophole, but we weren't stupid–and I once again crawled out of the window. I began to lower. It was perfect. I was secure, weightless, a spy on a mission. I was two-thirds of the way down the wall when I was startled by a booming, low bark.

"Sage Minnig Garrettson!"

I whipped around and, in stomach-dropping terror, saw my substantial father leaning out of the window of our big blue van in the driveway, turning purple.

"Da-ad, it's safe! We asked Jon!" I pleaded, dangling in midair.

My dad took a slow breath. "Well, you've only got a few feet to go, so you might as well come down."

Ben lowered me to the ground, and I shuffled over to my fuming father.

I tried to explain the logic of five times bigger on the car ride home with no success. I resigned myself to sulky silence as I was sent to my room while my mother was filled in on the day's events.

Now, despite my father's poorly contained rage, it is important to note that this man was a poetry-loving, guitar-strumming, fairy-house-building gentle giant. I'd never seen him raise his voice indoors, let alone punish a small child.

But the wrath of a gentle man is no small thing, and as I sat weeping in my bedroom, I was certain I had made it to my final night on earth.

Eventually, I was allowed downstairs, where my parents sat at the kitchen table. My mother was inexplicably stifling a grin.

"Sage," my dad said. "I know you love to climb and explore, but what you did today with Ben was very risky. Jon told me he said no, and you did it anyway. I need you to make better choices, and there will be consequences. We have decided you will be grounded for the next two weeks."

I gasped. "Grounded?" To be grounded was legendary, the stuff of books and movies and Disney Channel shows about cool tweens.

"Yes. You are grounded. And by that I mean you must stay on the ground."

"What!?"

"This is serious, Sage. We need to be able to trust you. No monkey bars, no climbing trees, and definitely no rappelling."

Behind him, my mother was becoming red-faced from trying to hold in her laughter, and despite my father's calm demeanor, there was a gleam in his eye. My dad has a unique appreciation for clever wordplay and was undoubtedly feeling more than a little pleased with himself.

I, on the other hand, was gutted.

Part 2

Ants. Thousands of them, crawling through the cracks in the floor, up along the walls and the ceiling and the bed frame. I measured time in the white spaces that disappeared beneath swarms of their tiny bodies. It smelled like mold and dirty laundry and some plant that must bloom in autumn in southern California that infused the air with a sort of umami desert fruitiness. Also rice. I had a rice cooker, and when it got to be too much to face the dining hall, I would walk two miles to the 98-cent store in Montrose and buy rice to cook in my dorm room. I got a few sparks of joy from the thin film of paper left behind on the edges of the pot, crispy little wisps that melted in my mouth. I had flown three thousand miles from home to go to college, hoping the sunlight would fix me. Instead, I spent an entire semester glued to my bed, skipping my classes, avoiding my peers and their parties, leaving only to get rice and cigarettes.

I was grounded, like an airplane with a broken engine, or a ship washed too high onto the rocks to get back to sea.

I came home to Maryland and lived in a series of basements and closets. My world became gray. I tried taking community college classes, then state university classes, becoming lost in the throngs of people my age who seemed to be in some unstuck place a world away. There was an English professor who looked at me and saw me, and when I realized this, I never returned to his classroom again. Compassion was not a door I could open.

I measured my time in unpaid parking tickets and overdue assignments and missed calls. I spent most of my evenings crying in my car. Car crying is loud and immediate and suffocating. It crushes you like an airbag. There is no place for the sorrow to go. It clings to you, like a cloud of Pigpen dust everyone around you can see.

My father’s warnings to stay on the ground had not followed me into adolescence. I was smart, athletic, and hard-working, and the people surrounding me began to expect excellence. Puberty blasted through my life like a tornado, and I became piercingly aware that I was perceived in the eyes of others as a young woman. I traded out my mohawk and cargo shorts for bangs and skinny jeans and went about the work of becoming perfect. The private school environment stoked my ambition and my rising understanding that I would never be enough. So I climbed higher.

But something else was growing in me. Something that dragged me downward. I collapsed whenever I was alone. I felt worthless, helpless, hopeless. I hated myself with a sharp fury. You are nothing, a voice in my head repeated relentlessly. Nothing. The world would be better off without you.

I became a masterful performer. I infused my voice with a light energy, laughed often. When I couldn’t, I disappeared. Blonde and silly and ebullient, or gone altogether. “Where were you?” people would ask later. I would dodge, give vague answers. Certainly not shoving my fingers down my throat in the bathroom, shattering like glass in some hidden place.

My mother took me to see a performance of Legally Blonde: The Musical for my 14th birthday, and while Elle Woods danced around in her pink miniskirt on stage, I crumpled in my seat, despondent. My mother cried in the car ride home as she set up a psychiatry appointment.

A week later, I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder.

When I got my driver’s license at 16, I started taking long drives at night to feel close to the idea that I might jerk the wheel hard to the right and careen off the road, crash into a tree. There was a spot next to the farm stand that would have been perfect.

I took a medical leave during my senior year. I got a Planet Fitness membership and ran on the treadmill for two hours every night at 1 a.m. I spent the rest of my time playing my guitar until my fingers became calloused and nimble.

The years that followed are mostly lost to me. I have a theory that depression is like an open wound in your brain, and when it heals, it leaves behind a thick layer of scar tissue that interrupts the normal signaling, muffles your memories.

I know I spent hours upon hours staring blankly at a laptop in bed as Netflix shows flowed across the screen without leaving a trace of their substance behind.

I know friendships and relationships dropped away like leaves off a dead houseplant, unwatered and left in a dusty corner. But not without me feeling the anger, resentment, and disappointment they left in their wake.

I know that, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get off the ground.

Part 3

I sit on a rock at the edge of the creek, looking out at the gentle rapids surrounding me on three sides. I breathe deeply and wiggle my toes in the damp sand. Light dances on the water. Tears stream down my cheeks.

Crying at the water’s edge is nothing like crying in your car. It is expansive and soft and tender. Your sorrow has everywhere to go; it washes off of you like mist carried on the wind.

I am twenty-two, eight years older than the child who received a diagnosis after collapsing at a musical.

This year, I have begun to hear a voice.

When I listen to it, I am grounded, like a sapling firmly rooted, gathering nutrients from the earth, or a worn stone nestled into the land, solid and sure.

There is a formula I have discovered to hear it.

It goes like this.

I feel bad. I feel an angry snake trapped inside a wooden box in my chest, coiled and ready to strike. I want to crawl out of my skin.

Instead, I put in my earbuds. I open a playlist whose title is just an emoji. Winky Kissy Face. I set off into the woods.

The playlist is full of soft songs with steady beats. They all have the same descending bass line. G, F#, E. G, F#, E.

I walk, ideally barefoot, for at least a mile.

My path takes me down an improvised mountain biking trail, across a creek on a fallen log, and through a meadow of tall grasses where the deer freeze and stare at me or huff in irritation.

At some point during the walk, the snake begins to uncoil, loosened by the rhythm of feet and melody, and I realize it has been squeezed tight to hide its wounds. I let myself feel the hurt. I start to cry.

I let out all of the thoughts I have been holding back. The sad thoughts, the angry thoughts, the insecure thoughts, the scary thoughts. I blubber and fall apart. I am snotty and puffy and unkempt.

Eventually, I get to my destination. It is a triangular patch of earth at the confluence of two creeks, the water flowing away to the east. I call it The Peninsula.

I get out my journal. I write down all of the messy thoughts, record the fear, the sadness, the anger.

And then, beneath all of that, there is the voice. It is radiant. It talks in all capital letters. YOU ARE LOVED, it says. YOU ARE ENOUGH. And I can finally hear it. I believe it. It sounds like me.

The voice began to develop sometime during those gray years. It bubbled in the back of my head as I rode my bike to my new job at the Greenbelt pool, blasting Nicki Minaj as I blew through stoplights. I sat in the lifeguard chair and felt like a fish in a bowl, surrounded by glass on all sides, watching the same few people enact their private, daily rituals, swimming back and forth, back and forth. I taught myself to swim butterfly and read the same books until the covers fell off.

The voice grew stronger as I chose to stop pushing through undergraduate classes and start massage therapy school, where I was touched and taught with gentleness and intention. My classmates cradled my head and helped me memorize every muscle in the human body.

The voice got louder as I moved in with true friends, the kinds of people who would rappel out of a window on a ball of string with you. Instead, we chose to go rafting and play board games and eat breakfast together. I ate a can of beets every morning. They teased me about it each day. The kitchen crackled with laughter.

The voice got clearer as years of therapy started to stick to me a little. The words of the kind therapist who tried to guide me through high school came back to me in a new light as I saw a stern Buddhist nun at the nearby counseling center who told me I had Bipolar Disorder.

The voice got more powerful as I learned to reach out to the people who loved me without conditions, like a houseplant growing toward the window.

One day, as I sat in a drizzle at the Peninsula, the voice burst into my mind with a golden light. It was crystal clear.

I follow the formula whenever I need to be grounded. It carries me through my twenties.

After I have listened to the voice, I sit for a while looking out at the water flowing away, and stay in that soft, warm, glowing place for a while. I allow new layers of skin to begin to form. Eventually, I wipe the dirt off my clothes and make my way home.

Epilogue

I have a pillow now covered in tiny wires. They weave through the pillowcase and into a long cord that wraps around my legs at night as I thrash in the dark. It ends in a single prong, designed to be shoved into the big hole in the outlet. The pillow is meant to slough off the extra electrons clinging to my body, to channel them into the earth. To make me grounded, like a live wire tamed. The doctor said it might help with the pain.

In May of 2023, I got sick with COVID-19 and never recovered.

Some hard things have happened. I had to move out of my apartment to receive more intensive support. I had to leave my job as a massage therapist. I had to stop doing physical activity and start using a wheelchair.

Some good things have happened, too. I have learned to knit, to paint, to write. I have had the gift of time with my family and those friends with whom I have stayed connected. I have slowed down, settled, aged.

I am grounded now in a very tangible sense. My body is tethered to the earth, and it is not a long leash. I am not well. That is hard.

I am also grounded in a deeper sense. Not always, not every day. But I have come to understand I have always been disabled, and that has set me free.

If it weren’t for the versions of me who lived through all of it– the adventurous child, the lost young adult, the spiritually seeking twenty-something–I would not be here. I would not be able to keep finding new ways to be grounded.