On Returning to My Body, and Choosing to Stay
How Claiming Our Futures is an Act of Resilience, Devotion and Defiance
This one has been a long time in the making. If you’ve been here a while, you might have been part of my first big wave of readers who arrived in August, when I started writing about the injury I sustained last summer—the alpine lake jump, sharp rock, nicked artery, and the 21-person rescue team that carried me down three steep and rocky miles. If you’re new here, you can start the series here, but the short version is this: I was extremely lucky that the injury was only as bad as it was, and that the rescue played out exactly as it did.
I planned to wrap up the series a while ago, but life had other plans. Politics escalated, Charlie Kirk died, the administration threw more chaos into the air, and my plans got thrown off course by things that needed more immediate attention. The past year has taught me that life moves on its own timeline, and despite my best attempts, some things can’t be rushed.
But this week, as Transgender Awareness Week and Transgender Day of Remembrance wrap up and we approach the holiday season, it finally feels like the right moment to close the loop. This story was never just about a freak accident. It became a story about the body I live in, the future I’d been afraid to imagine, and the home I’ve finally decided to claim.
A year after the accident, I decided to return.
July 31st was the one-year mark. While a few friends, including Arden from part 2 of my story, had offered to join me to redo the hike, it didn’t align. And so, I set out to do it alone. I planned for a day off of work, something that has been rare for me to do outside of planned travel. However, the forecast that day threatened afternoon hail, and I didn’t need to tempt fate twice, so I postponed until Sunday.
When I pulled into the parking lot, the intensity hit me quickly:
“And this is the mountain that nearly took your life” thundered in my head.
It startled me. That had never been my internal narrative or the way I’d relayed the story to others.
I’d moved through the last year focused mostly on function: rehab, pain, pacing, mobility, recovery. While I’d sat with the fragility of the body I inhabit, and the gratitude that I have a functional body, I hadn’t truly sat with the proximity to death I came so close to, or the simple fact that I am still here.
The first mile cracked me open and tears welled up. Despite how much I advocate for feeling feelings, I felt relieved to be alone. To just let it out without needing to explain myself. Landmarks from that last leg of the rescue triggered memories of relief at being closer to safety. I had an intense, full-body flashback, that jerked my whole body to the left while I hiked up the trail, as my brain recalled the moment of impact on my right foot. My gratitude for the strangers who carried me down that mountain still feels bottomless. It was a difficult hike on my own two feet. Imagining carrying another human down it is something else entirely.
The miles afterward were steadier. I continued steadily towards my destination until something seemed off. The first lake I’d reached didn’t look how I’d remembered. After talking to several hikers, I finally met someone who actually knew the trails, and it became clear I was nowhere near where I meant to be.
When all was said and done, I hiked eleven miles to the wrong lakes!
Initially I felt disappointed and upset, but a year prior, I couldn’t walk 20 feet to my bathroom without pain. Now my body carried me eleven miles by accident.
I laughed so hard on the drive home: alive, exuberant, humiliated, grateful. And assured that I could do the 6+ mile hike I was trying to do.
Determined to go back, I rearranged my Wednesday clients (truly a thing I never do) so I could finish my hike. This mountain and I still had business with each other.
At the real lake, I walked the shoreline quietly, revisiting the exact spots from that day. Taking photos. Feeling the depth of what happened and didn’t happen. And I said thank you. To the mountain. To my body. To the rescuers. To my friend Alex, and his mom. To whatever forces kept me alive.
Recovery changes the body, but it also changes the future.
After the accident, I spent months recovering, mostly alone or with the company of my then 8-year old. And you might recall, during my second week of recovery, isolated as I’d ever been, I somehow managed to contract covid for the first and only time (ok, not really a mystery—it must have been an Uber driver or someone at the doctor’s office, but talk about getting kicked while you’re already down!). Further isolated, I was also dealing with a lapsed insurance policy, a very painful foot, and cabin fever.
Turns out, when you’re alone long enough, you meet the feelings you’ve spent years avoiding. Or you stare at a screen. But after decades of avoiding my emotions, and a few short years of learning how to feel them, I knew I had no choice anymore.
Many trans people learn to disconnect from their bodies to survive. We think our feelings. We abandon our bodies and exist from the neck up, sometimes for decades.
Many of us also struggle to imagine futures for ourselves. I hear regularly from my trans clients “I never thought I’d make it this long and I don’t know how to picture what comes next.” I’ve never been actively suicidal, but I’ve felt that too. I couldn’t imagine growing old. I couldn’t imagine much of anything far into the future. My early thirties were the first time I had the “well, shit, here I am. Now what?” moment.
I hadn’t fully realized how much of that focus had been based on external pressures I’d put on myself to conform to societal ideals of success. If I couldn’t be cisgender or straight, at least I could build a successful career, find a stable relationship, and make sure I was generally well-liked and respected. I’d show the world just how worthy I was, even if I didn’t believe it myself yet.
Chronic pain cracked that open for me. It forced me to learn how to feel everything I’d kept repressed for decades. It was one of the most grueling and liberating experiences I’ve had. And I’m still learning, still healing.
When I ended an eight-year therapeutic relationship with the therapist who helped me feel safe for the first time, she asked, “What about that other set of issues we never got to?” I told her honestly: “I know they’re still there but I just can’t access them.”
Slowing down changed that. Stillness changed that. I started healing not just my foot and leg, but my relationship with my body. I started listening to it. Valuing it. The aloneness allowing me to feel things I’d never been able to touch before.
When my physical therapist told me it could take up to a full year for my foot and leg to recover, I said “hell no, I will do everything I can to speed that up,” and I returned to swimming, for the first time since childhood, to strengthen and care for my body while other exercise was still out of the question.
Swimming has brought me an unexpected calm, despite the whole locker room whilst-trans experience. The cool water feels soothing on my body. I still remember the first time I took my shirt off to swim in a lake after chest surgery. If I had been able to cry back then, I surely would have.
A few weeks ago, standing in my garden imagining next year’s bounty, I realized I still rarely picture myself in the future. This year especially, there were moments early on when I genuinely feared I might have to leave the country. Leave my daughter.
In that uncertainty, I didn’t know whether to keep investing in my home, my yard, my life. But then something shifted recently:
I decided to stay. To make a conscious choice to stay. In my house. In my town. In my life.
For the first time in my adult life, I’m putting down roots intentionally, based on what I want.
I’m making my home feel like my home, our home, my daughter and me. Rather than planning to someday buy a bigger house, or worrying that someday a partner may cause us to outgrow this one. There is something quite literally grounding in that: planning how I will continue to cultivate and care for this small patch of land that I call my yard. How this land, with the medicines, fruits, and vegetables we are growing, will care for our family and give us enough to share with others. I’m imagining years instead of months. I’m letting myself dream about shared land, community, belonging and a future that includes me.
It is new territory. And it feels like freedom. To stop waiting for the next disruption and to claim this life that I have.
Trans Awareness Week, and claiming my own life
Trans Awareness Week, leading into Transgender Day of Remembrance, hits differently this year. Maybe because the anti-trans rhetoric is constant. Maybe because so many of us can’t imagine a future here and some of us are leaving. Maybe because last year reminded me that my body isn’t disposable. Maybe because choosing to stay, choosing to root, feels like devotion and defiance.
Trans people are taught to see ourselves as temporary. That our lives are unstable. Disposable. That planning ahead is a luxury we might not get.
We’re taught that our desires and our realities are unattainable and false. It’s hard to imagine a future when you’re told you’re not allowed to exist.
After moving more than 30 times before finally settling into this home four years ago, I spent years in a posture of non-attachment. Always ready to leave, always bracing for the next disruption, never fully settling in. Moving around taught me not to plant myself anywhere. And I learned to travel light.
But this year, something shifted:
I want my future. Here. Not the one someone else might allow me, but the one I choose.
I want my life, and I’m choosing things every day that make me want to stay alive inside it.
I want to remain in this body—this trans body—that carried me eleven miles even on the “wrong” trail.
This imperfectly beautiful body that lets me put literal roots into the small patch of earth behind the small house I get to call my own.
And the audacity of wanting—that might be the most trans thing I’ve ever done.
Continuing the work
As I retrain my leg to move differently, I’m also retraining my nervous system, my patterns, my survival strategies. I’m learning to live guided not by urgency or fear, but by presence. That’s been one of the deepest lessons of healing from chronic pain, and one that keeps echoing.
And I’m making mistakes—maybe even a lot of them. But I’m finally figuring out what kind of life I want to create for myself and for my daughter. Not in the abstract “what if” space I’ve lived in for so long, but in the grounded question: What are we building, and how do we build it together?
I’m learning that coming home isn’t just walking through the front door. It’s a practice—physical, emotional, political, spiritual.
Coming down the mountain was part of it. Rooting into my house is part of it.
Deciding not to leave this country is part of it.
Letting myself imagine a future is part of it.
Choosing to stay ties it together.
I’m here.
In this body.
In this home.
In this moment.
Claiming my life.
As we honor and mourn the known transgender lives lost this year, let’s also commit, fiercely, to a world where every trans person not only survives, but gets the chance to stay, to root, and to grow old.
Thank you for being here. Your support means the world to me.
If you missed my last email, the Trans Love Notes project goes through the holiday season. Let’s push back against the noise and show our trans loved ones some care. You can fill out a very short form here. Thanks so much for spreading the love!
As a new reader of your work, I'm stunned at the clarity of your voice and overjoyed to have read this post. As a cis, gay brother (from another mother), I applaud your strength, courage, and wisdom to not only heal but share your journey. Thank you for helping me reframe a few of my own injuries and for shining a light on some of the darker areas I still need to work on.
Much love and light, Nyle, to you and your daughter!
Nyle, your writing opened something in me the moment I stepped into it. You tell this story with such clarity, such embodied truth, that I found myself breathing differently as I read, like I had entered the same atmosphere you were moving through. What you describe isn’t just the aftermath of an accident or the arc of recovery; it’s the revelation of a soul returning to its body with devotion and with defiance. That is no small thing. That is initiation.
What rises through your words is what I can only call a deeper field, the energetic reality beneath identity, beneath trauma, beneath politics, beneath even the body itself. So many trans people, myself included, had to live for years from the neck up, disassociated from the vessel we were given. You name, with such gentle precision, the miracle of coming home to that vessel. Not because society has grown kinder, but because your own soul asked you to stay. And you chose to say "yes".
What touched me most was not just that you returned to the mountain, but that you returned to yourself. Your story reveals something the world often fails to see: that transness is not an “otherness” to be debated, but a profound way of interfacing with reality. Our bodies are permeable, perceptive, tuned-in membranes that hold the imprints of every field we’ve lived through. You show how stepping back into your body, fully, gratefully, creates a resonance that is unmistakably love. And that love is its own form of activism.
In a culture that insists on turning otherness into enemy, your presence becomes its own kind of antidote. The Titan mind, the one that fears fluidity, fears permeability, fears the unknown, cannot fathom what you have done. You chose to stay, chose to root, chose to imagine a future that contains you, that welcomes you, that grows with you. That decision is not only courageous; it’s sacred.
You remind us that coming home is not merely emotional or political, it is metaphysical, it is somatic, it is relational. It is, as you say so beautifully, devotion and defiance intertwined. Thank you for letting us witness the field you’re walking in. The world is better for your voice, your body, your story, your will to remain.
With deep warmth,
Sheila Grace Newsom