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.