The Jeep Wasn't the Point

The true story behind the book — my husband, a Jeep, four words, and what it means to see someone before they can see themselves.

My husband Jim once offered to buy me a Jeep.

I declined. I had my "mom car," and it worked fine—why did I need anything else? But Jim was persistent. He told me he'd seen me driving a rental Jeep, and something about it had stopped him.

You were lit up.

Four words. Then he said, I want to see you live lit up.

I didn't ask him to explain what he meant. I didn't need to. Something in me recognized it immediately, the way you recognize a word in a language you didn't know you still spoke. He had seen something in me—something about freedom, about a version of myself that had gone quiet somewhere along the way—and he'd just handed it back to me.

I've thought about that moment a lot since then. Partly because of what it changed in me. And partly because, later, I realized I'd written the same moment into a novel that has almost nothing to do with Jeeps.

Ruth didn't get a Jeep

In Remembering What's Hidden, Ruth doesn't get a Jeep or some cinematic moment of reinvention. She gets a neighbor with imperfect cookies.

But the gift is the same. Lindi sees something in Ruth that Ruth can't yet see in herself and hands it back to her—not as advice, but as a name. A word. A door held open just wide enough for Ruth to recognize something she'd been living inside for thirty years without knowing it had a shape.

That's what Jim did for me. That's what I've watched happen, over and over, in coaching rooms, when one true sentence lands at exactly the right moment.

Why naming did the actual work

Here's the part that surprised me once I understood the science behind it: the Jeep was never really the point. Freedom hadn't disappeared from my life. It had just gotten buried under function—under the calendar, the roles, the version of myself that kept everything running.

Your brain doesn't simply record your life. It is constantly interpreting it, using what it already knows to make sense of what you're experiencing. Language matters because a name gives us something to recognize. Something that used to feel vague can suddenly become visible.

That's what happened for me. Freedom hadn't appeared because Jim said those words. It had been there all along. But once he named what he had seen in me—lit up—I could begin noticing where that version of me still existed.

The Jeep didn't create it.

It gave me somewhere to see it.

That's why everything felt different after that conversation. I wasn't chasing "lit up." I was finally oriented toward it, because for the first time, it had a name.

It's hard to move toward something you haven't learned to recognize. Naming it gives you somewhere to look.

What Jim actually gave me

Before he gave me the Jeep, Jim gave me the experience of being noticed.

He didn't hand me a to-do list. He didn't tell me to change anything. He just named something that was already true and let me carry it from there.

That idea became part of the architecture of Remembering What's Hidden. It's also, I've come to believe, one of the most loving things one person can do for another—not fixing, not managing, just seeing clearly enough to say the true thing out loud.

What's your Jeep?

I don't think this story only belongs to me. I think many of us have had a true sentence do that—name something we'd been carrying for years without language for it.

So here's what I'd ask you to sit with: has anyone ever said something to you—maybe small, maybe just in passing—that landed like it already knew you? What did it name? And have you let yourself actually go toward it since?

You don't need a Jeep. You just need the word.

Your Name Was There First

What Ruth, Lindi, and Sloane's names reveal—and an invitation to look at your own.

There's a moment in Remembering What's Hidden where Ruth—who has introduced herself as "Louise" to nearly everyone in her life since the seventh grade—finally looks up what her actual name means.

Ruth: friend. Companion. From the Hebrew. Carried in Scripture by a woman who walked through grief and loss and chose loyalty when she could have turned back.

She reads it standing in her kitchen. And something in her recognizes it before she's even finished the sentence—because she has been that, her entire life. Staying when she could have left. Showing up for people. Being the one who doesn't go. She just never knew it had a name worth keeping.

I didn't invent that idea. I've watched it happen, over and over, in real rooms with real women.

A name is a description, not a decoration

Most of us think of our names the way we think of the color of our front door—something chosen for us, more or less at random, before we had any say in it.

But names aren't empty either. Somebody gave you yours. Maybe they knew its meaning. Maybe they didn't. Maybe it came from a grandmother, a song, a family story, or simply because they loved the sound of it.

The meaning doesn't predict who you'll become. But every once in a while, you look it up years later and find a word that makes you stop.

Not because the name made you that person.

Because somehow, the word recognizes something you've already lived.

When I named Ruth's neighbor Lindi, I was drawn to the Germanic lind—associated with softness and tenderness, and with the linden tree, known for the shape and shelter of its branches. It fit her before I'd written enough of her to fully understand why.

She embodies it so completely that Ruth notices it before she understands why. "She seems like her name," Ruth thinks, without yet knowing what it means. She isn't imagining it.

Ruth's daughter is named Sloane. The name comes through an Irish surname with roots connected to an expedition or raid—a name with movement and boldness built into it. And it carries an uncanny echo of Louise, traditionally understood as "famous in battle," the very name Ruth has been hiding behind for thirty years. Ruth gave her daughter, without knowing it, a name carrying the strength she'd been unable to recognize in her own.

What happened to you is not your name

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a parlor trick, and it isn't a horoscope. A name doesn't determine you. But it can be a doorway—a small, specific place to start asking a much bigger question: who was I before I started performing who I thought I needed to be?

That's the real work, and it's not something I'll do for you in a blog post. Part of what makes this exercise land is doing it yourself—sitting with your own name, in your own time, and letting it surprise you the way it surprised Ruth. So I won't tell you what your name means here. I'd rather you go find out.

Look it up. Sit with the words. Notice which ones land, and which ones don't feel true yet. Then ask yourself Ruth's question: have I been living this, without knowing it had a name?

The line I keep coming back to

Whatever you find, I want you to hold it the way I ask every client to hold it, and the way I hope every reader holds it by the end of the book:

What happened to you is not your name. This is your name. And your name was there first.

Before the roles. Before the armor. Before whatever you started calling yourself at eleven, or twenty, or last year, to keep the world at a safer distance.

Your name was there first. It's still there now.

If this is a thread you want to keep pulling, I wrote about this same idea in a piece called Your Signature Statement—the work of putting words to who you actually are, starting with exactly this: your name.

The Curve You Can't See

Why "I should be fine by now" is the wrong question.

In Remembering What's Hidden, there's a chapter where my main character, Ruth, ends up wide awake at two in the morning, reading a hundred-year-old research study she has no business being awake for. By the time she closes the laptop, something in her has genuinely shifted—not because she's found a solution, but because she's finally found a name for what her body has been doing to her for years.

I wanted to pull that chapter out into daylight, because the science behind it is one of the most useful things I know, and almost nobody's ever explained it to them.

The curve

In 1908, researchers Robert Yerkes and John Dodson published an experiment that eventually gave us one of psychology's most familiar ideas: more pressure isn't always better. What began as a study of learning under different levels of stimulation became the basis for what we now often picture as an upside-down U.

Generally speaking: too little pressure, and performance suffers—nothing's urgent enough to sharpen you. Too much, and performance collapses—you're too overwhelmed to think clearly. Somewhere in the middle is the zone: your clearest thinking, your best work, the version of you that feels most alive and most capable.

Most of us know this instinctively. A deadline can focus you. A crisis can also break you. The question is where you actually live on that curve, most days.

The part nobody tells you

But there's another piece the curve can't show you.

That simple upside-down U is a snapshot. Real life isn't.

We don't experience one stressor, return neatly to zero, and then wait for the next one. Sometimes one season of pressure runs straight into another. The body keeps adapting because that's what it is remarkably good at doing.

But adaptation has a cost. Researchers use the term allostatic load to describe some of the cumulative wear that can come from repeated or prolonged stress. In ordinary language: yesterday's pressure can affect the body you're bringing into today.

Which means you may not be overreacting to today's stressor. Today's stressor may simply not be the whole story.

This is why "I should be fine by now" is so often the wrong question. You may be handling the stressor completely competently and still be carrying the stress—because those are two different things, and solving one doesn't automatically finish the other.

Stressor vs. stress

This distinction is the one that changed the most for me, and for Ruth in the book:

A stressor is the thing causing the pressure. The email. The deadline. The diagnosis. The conflict.

Stress is what your body does in response to it—the full biological event. Cortisol. Adrenaline. A heart that's already running before you've decided to be afraid.

You can solve the stressor entirely—send the email, survive the deadline, resolve the conflict—and your body can still be sitting there mid-response, not yet caught up to the fact that the threat has passed.

That's the nowhere-to-go feeling. You handled it. You're still not okay. Both of those can be true at once.

What actually tells the body it's safe

The body doesn't always respond immediately just because your mind knows the problem is over. Sometimes it helps to give it physical evidence that the demand has changed: movement, slower breathing, rest, connection, or something as simple as intentionally tensing and releasing muscle groups in sequence.

That's what Ruth does on her kitchen floor at three in the morning. It's called progressive muscle relaxation, and research supports it as a way of helping the body move toward a more relaxed state.

She isn't solving another problem. For once, she's helping her body notice that there isn't one to solve.

You are not weak for still feeling wound up after the crisis has passed. You may simply be living in a body that has carried sustained demand for a long time without enough recovery.

That's not a character flaw. That's a body that's been adapting.

Where are you on it?

I'd ask you the same question I'd ask a coaching client, and the one Ruth ends up asking herself: when you solve something—a real problem, something that's been pressing on you—do you actually feel better right away, in your body? Or does the pressure just move somewhere else, still looking for an exit?

If the answer is the second one, you're not imagining it. And there's a way back down.

The Value Got Buried Under Function

Why naming what you feel isn't just poetic—it's how your brain starts to recognize it.

There is a word I hear more than any other in my coaching practice, and it isn't a diagnosis. It isn't a symptom. It's not even really a feeling.

It's fine.

"How are you doing?" Fine.
"How's the marriage?" Fine.
"How are you, really?" I'm fine.

I know it because I have lived it. Because I have sat across from women who have lived it. Fine is a greeting and a deflection and a door held firmly shut—so often it stops meaning anything at all.

That line opens my novel, Remembering What's Hidden. It also opens most of my coaching sessions, whether the client says the word out loud or not.

The word isn't the problem

Here's what I've come to believe after years of this work: fine isn't a lie. That's what makes it so hard to catch. A woman who says fine isn't usually hiding something dramatic. She's often telling you the most honest thing she has language for in that moment—because the actual thing underneath it never got a name.

I call this the value got buried under function.

Somewhere along the way, a woman starts running her life instead of living it. She becomes excellent at the calendar, the carpool line, the casserole, the crisis management. All of it real. All of it good. None of it, eventually, connected to anything she can feel.

The value—what she actually cares about, wants, needs, grieves, hopes for—doesn't disappear. It just gets buried under everything she's doing to keep the function running.

What happened when one word finally showed up

A few months ago, a beta reader named Pam read an early chapter of Remembering What's Hidden and texted me something I haven't stopped thinking about.

She'd spent three years trying to describe something to her doctor. Bloodwork. Hormones. A friend's antidepressants, tried on her own body just to see. None of it was wrong, exactly. None of it was right either, because nobody—including Pam—had a word for what she was actually feeling.

Then she read one word in the book: flatness.

She told me it was so wild to finally have language for it—that she realized, reading it, she didn't feel that way anymore. The flatness had lifted at some point, and she hadn't even noticed, because she'd never had a name for it in the first place.

That's not a coincidence. That's how the brain works.

Your brain needed a concept before it could have an experience

This is the part I wish someone had taught me twenty years ago: naming isn't just poetic. It's neurological.

Your brain doesn't simply receive what's happening inside you—it predicts it, filters it, and files it, using whatever concepts it already has on hand. If you don't have a word for something, your brain has nowhere to put it. It becomes background noise. Static. The kind of thing you learn to call "fine" because fine is the closest available word, even when it isn't true.

The moment something gets a real name, your brain can finally recognize it when it shows up again. It stops being noise and starts being information. You can't move toward what you can't name—and you can't feel what your brain has no concept for.

That's what happened to Pam. The word didn't fix anything. It just let her see what had actually been happening to her, this whole time.

Where do you spend the word fine?

I don't think this is only Pam's story, or Ruth's, the woman at the center of my novel. I think most of us are fluent in fine long before we're fluent in what's actually true.

So here's the only question I'd ask you to sit with this week, the same one Ruth eventually has to ask herself:

What would it cost you to stop saying fine?

Not forever. Not to everyone. Just once, to someone safe, about something real.

You don't have to have the whole word yet. You just have to be willing to go looking for it.