Fascination

The emotional territory:

This is a story about what happens when grief strips away everything you thought you were supposed to be, and you're left standing in the rubble trying to remember who you really are. Callie lost her parents and her best friend Kristina within three years. After their loss, she realized somewhere along the way she lost herself too. The person she became to survive corporate America, to play it safe, to do everything the “right” way. Now she has to figure out how to build a life that's truly hers, not the one she thought everyone expected from her.

The childhood foundation:

Before all the rules and performance, there was wonder. Callie was the kind of kid who sold dirt in RV parks on vacation because she needed “spending money” at the ripe age of six, who opened a music venue at sixteen because after a basketball injury left her outside the jock crowd, she found her people in the alt music scene and decided bands needed a place to play. So she made it happen. Her home was already a revolving door for friends, family, neighbor kids, cats, neighbor dogs, and when she started the venue, random band members joined the chaos too. It was loud, with the TV on and music playing and everyone talking all at once in full volume. It was utter chaos in the most welcoming way. She went from painfully shy to running summer camps for 4H, from the kid selling dirt to the teenager who opened her own doors because no one could tell her no. Her parents let her be weird and curious (and vegan) and fully herself. She knew what it felt like to be captivated by life, to want things simply because they delighted her, to take up space without apologizing for it.

The breaking point:

Corporate life slowly eroded all of that. She became someone she didn't recognize: efficient, composed, successful on paper, hollow underneath. Then grief cracked her open. Both parents gone, Kristina gone, and in the aftermath she couldn't find herself anymore. The version she'd built to survive no longer worked and the version she used to be felt impossibly far away.

The rebuild:

The trip back to Seaside, Oregon becomes the turning point. She spreads her parents' ashes on the coast. She stands alone in that same arcade she frequented growing up, rolling the same little ball across the same game board, and for the first time in years she feels something real. She's not performing or producing or proving anything. She's just there, fully there, feeling something she'd forgotten how to feel. Fascination. The feeling she'd been chasing without knowing it. Permission to want a different life, permission to build something that truly feels like hers.

What she believes now:

Leadership shows up in the consistency. Bold looks like the unglamorous daily decision to keep choosing yourself. Grief cracks you open in ways that make you brave enough to stop pretending. You don't need anyone's permission to want a slower, softer, more authentic life. The only person who can give you that permission is you.

The feeling we're all chasing:

Reclaiming our wonder. The courage it takes to want something different when you've spent your whole life doing what you're “supposed” to do. The quiet bravery of building from broken. That childhood sense of fascination with life when everything felt possible and worth paying attention to. The grief that cracks you open enough to let the light back in.

This book is about recognition and reclamation. The long, messy, beautiful work of becoming yourself again.