Exile Medicine

Since the world cracked open in 2020, I’ve been drifting—slowly, steadily—into a deep kind of aloneness.

Not the kind that comes from six feet of distance or canceled plans, but an existential kind. One that forces you to rearrange yourself from the inside-out.

Yes, the pandemic fractured our rhythms and scattered us into private orbits. But even before the masks and the mandates, something quieter had already begun unraveling in me.

Something deeper. Something painful, but necessary.

I now understand it as a process of un-belonging.

Roots that Run Deep

In the summer of 2018, I returned to Maine with Adam, my soon-to-be husband. Maine is where I grew up, and is the place my bloodline has called home since the 1700s.

There's a grave tucked at the end of a winding gravel road in Hartford, Maine, where my great, great, great (etc.)… grandfather William Hayford lays to rest. My father presumes the town was named after some iteration of my family’s surname. Several other Hayfords lay to rest there, likely a spot where they once had a house.

The soil there holds centuries of my lineage.

And for most of my life, I thought that’s what defined Home—yes, capital-“H”-Home. It was simply the place where you come from. The place that was familiar. And Maine was deeply familiar—the thick dialect, the salt air, the landscapes that nourished and molded me.

It was in me. And with a wedding on the horizon and plans for kids in the future, it made sense to return, to plant roots and build a life.

But immediately upon arriving, everything started to fall apart.

The Unraveling Process

During the move east, Adam and I watched as the landscape caved in; wide-open skies gave way to dense forest, mountains flattened, roads filled with impatient drivers. Everything felt like it was closing in.

We stayed in the tiny apartment above my parents’ garage—a generous landing pad, but something in me couldn’t breathe. I kept waiting to feel the peace I thought would come from returning, from arriving.

It never came.

Time passed. I got a job. We bought a house. We had gardens and chickens and freedom and a wedding full of love. From the outside, everything on my list was checked off. Inside, I was crumbling.

I did what I always do when I’m lost—I turned to nature. I was devastated to see how even that was hostile.

Ticks, mosquitoes, black flies, horseflies... I couldn’t go for a simple hike without being swarmed, bitten, infected.

One particular hike stands out as the epitome of this loss.

I had found an old logging trail deep in the woods—abandoned and quiet, a space my dogs could explore off-leash as they were meant to. As I followed the old tire ruts through the forest, I felt the flicker of relief, the sense that maybe this was it—maybe I could finally find my footing again.

And then the horsefly came.

It buzzed around my head, perfectly dodged my swats, bounced off my head, and circled my ears in search of the perfect place to saw its grotesque mandibles into my skin and have its meal.

It didn’t let up. Not for a second. The entire hike became a siege.

I was already unraveling—lost in a fog of depression, exiled from a Home I thought would hold me. And now even the woods, my refuge, my place of self-remembering, was no longer an option for me.

Eventually, I stopped in the trail, tears streaking down my face, and screamed toward the sky:

“I’m fucking trying! What do you want from me? I’m trying!”

The buzzing didn’t stop. The grief didn’t stop. And the more I tried to force it—to root into a place I thought should feel like mine—the more it pushed me away.

Painfully this was happening not just with the land, but also with the people.

The Heartbreak of Friendship Loss

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes when a friendship ends—not from betrayal or explosion, but from slow, quiet misalignment. And it’s rarely spoken of, which makes it all the more disorienting—you just don’t expect it to happen, and therefore have no idea how to move through it.

My best friend lived about an hour-and-a-half away when I moved back to Maine. Our connection was the kind that felt immediately familiar, and we were inseparable in the early years of our friendship. She helped me move across the country to Seattle once—our first great pilgrimage. We sang the best 90’s pop songs down the highway with the windows wide open, chasing sunsets, taking a million pictures, exploring all the roadside attractions, and feeling alive and free.

Even during my years out west, we stayed close with frequent visits and nearly daily check-ins. Despite the miles, it never felt like distance.

She was one of the biggest reasons I moved back. While my ancestral roots defined home, on reflection I have come to realize it was she who really felt like Home.

She saw me in a way that not many others did. She was loyal. She held space for all parts of me. She understood me and encouraged me. I felt grounded because I had our friendship as a foundation, and so I returned to it, believing that feeling of home would be there waiting for me.

But it wasn’t. Not really.

She had changed. I had changed. And almost as soon as I arrived, I could feel the gap. She had a life, a rhythm, and a community I didn’t belong to. Every time we tried to reconnect, it only emphasized how much space had grown between us. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it was palpable and painful.

Eventually, it hurt too much to keep trying, so we decided to take a break. And then we didn’t speak for almost two years.

At the time, and for many years after, I felt gutted—abandoned, unchosen, confused… all themes that reflected many of the most painful aspects of my childhood.

In retrospect, I can see what I couldn’t see then: this loss was part of the medicine. It was a necessary unhooking and disentangling from a version of life I had outgrown.

That friendship had nourished me deeply in the season it was meant to. But I had become dependent on it—on her—to give me a sense of identity, safety, and belonging. I didn’t know how to be me without it. And now I know that’s what life was guiding me to see.

Every loss I experienced during that season—my friend, my sense of nature as refuge, the dissonance of my ancestral roots—was part of a larger force pulling me away from the external structures I’d relied on to define me. It was a dismemberment of my old idea of Home. And if I had been really honest with myself back then, I would’ve admitted that I didn’t even want to move back to Maine. I felt resistance in my body—but I overrode it. I thought that resistance meant I was wrong.

But now I know: it was my inner compass trying to speak. And this is the journey I’ve been on every since.

Belonging to Oneself

As I write this now, I am sitting on my porch in Montana.

It’s hot out, nearly 75 degrees, but the slight breeze and the shade of our big maple tree makes it just right.

There are no bugs, aside from the occasional fly. I’ve yet to find a tick on me in our more than two-and-a-half years of living here. Our gardens are blossoming and I can see a canyon in the distance that feeds up into miles and miles of hiking trails. I’m sipping tea and hearing my little boys squeal inside as their father plays with them.

I have found a place that, externally, reflects what I need in a Home.

The internal process of finding Home, however, has been a much longer, much more challenging, very grief-filled process that continues to this day—but, mercifully, seems to now be in the throes of wrapping up its six-year painful curriculum.

By the time the pandemic hit, the outer world had caught up with my inner collapse. Isolation became literal. And strangely, it matched how I already felt—adrift, emptied, disconnected from the life I had built.

But this was never punishment. It was initiation.

This is what exile does. It detaches you from everything you thought you were so that you can remember who you actually are. It strips away the mirrors, the accolades, the relationships you used as scaffolding. It takes the ground from under you—not to break you, but to reorient you toward something deeper.

Your own center. Your essence, your unique genius. The person you truly are, and always were, before life got in the way.

Illness, too, works like this.

It deconstructs. It interrupts. It forces stillness and solitude. It pulls you out of known reality so that you can tune in to a different frequency—the one where your truth lives.

As Toko-pa Turner writes,

“We must learn that in disorientation we are being given an opportunity to discover a different knowing, an inner compass.”

That compass doesn’t ask you to fit in. It asks you to belong—first to yourself, and only then to the whole.

Now, in my own journey of exile, I can feel the quiet of that return. There is more spaciousness and aliveness than there has been in years. I can breathe. My voice feels clearer. My grief is still here, yes—but now it feels purposeful, sacred, and even welcomed.

I’m on the journey back to myself. Back to listening for what I want. Back to choosing based on resonance, not preconceived obligation. I’m learning how to belong to me, fully and unapologetically.

By rooting deeply into my own knowing I am now finding the path to once again, slowly but surely, belong to the world. I see now so clearly how everything external is just a reflection of what lives inside, and only when we reclaim our essence can we find true Home, in whatever form it takes.

This is what any exile, in any form, ultimately teaches us:

We sometimes need to get desperately lost in order to reconnect to the one thing that can ever truly be Home—ourselves.

The Authentic Medicine Immersion

If you’re in the thick of your own exile—in the thick of chronic, confusing symptoms, lost in the space between who you were and who you’re becoming—know that you’re not lost. You’re being rerouted. The ache, the aloneness, the illness all has intelligence. It’s calling you back to yourself.

The Authentic Medicine Immersion is for those walking this path—those who are ready to explore how illness is an invitation to begin again. It’s a 6-month journey of remembrance, where we turn inward, not to fix what's broken, but to reclaim what was forgotten.

If you're ready to stop searching outward for your healing and start leaning inward, and if you're ready to walk through the dark and find yourself on the other side, I would be honored to guide you.

You can learn more about the Authentic Medicine Immersion here.

Come meet yourself again.

You are never truly lost. Just waiting to be remembered.

photo shot at Aro Ha