The Wisdom of the Wrong Turn

It wasn’t the life I planned that taught me how to live. It was the one that fell apart.

We don’t often talk about it like this. We frame loss as a detour, conflict as disruption, and collapse as failure. But what if these moments aren’t roadblocks at all? What if they’re the very paths that lead us back to ourselves?

When my husband died suddenly, everything I thought I knew cracked open. I wasn’t just grieving the man I loved—I was grieving the future we were meant to have. The map I’d been following no longer made sense. For a while, I kept trying to get back to it. To the plan. To the life that had vanished.

But there was no going back. Only through.

And in the months that followed, something unexpected began to emerge. Not clarity, exactly. But a quiet, persistent invitation: What if this, too, holds wisdom? What if the breaking is the beginning of something deeper?

This question didn’t arrive with a loud voice. It came in stillness. In the ache of missing him. In the choices I was forced to make without him. In the silence of the clinic after everyone went home.

And slowly, I began to see what I’d told so many patients: that healing often hides in the places we’d never choose. That sometimes, the only way to find your path is to lose it first.

In The Door Behind My Belly Button, I share how loss, conflict, and even illness revealed a compass I didn’t know I had. Not the kind that points to safety or certainty, but the kind that keeps you honest. The kind that helps you remember who you are when everything else falls away.

We don’t have to glorify pain to acknowledge its power. We just have to stop pretending that struggle means we’ve done something wrong.

Sometimes the wrong turn is the way.