Sometimes the plot twist isn’t what happened, it’s who you became to survive it. Episode one is I Was a Cactus, about the brilliance of self-protection, the quiet loneliness that it can create, and the relief, the relief in realizing your story is editable. If you ever have made yourself smaller so no one had to adjust their life for you.

You’re going to feel this one. The twist. It’s you. No one’s life is going exactly according to the plan or how any of us imagined. And sometimes the real plot twist isn’t even what happened us. It’s who we become when it does. If you’ve been holding your breath for the next thing, this is a place to exhale. I have a confession.

I was a cactus. So the thing about cacti is they’re remarkable survivors. They learned how to hold what they need, make something out of very little, and in the right environment there. Absolutely beautiful. But sometimes the way we learn to survive becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it at all. I couldn’t see the distance, the self-reliance, the quiet ways I had learned to get through.

It wasn’t wrong or not broken. It’s just the way we adapted. And sometimes the moment comes along when you simply notice it. The story you’ve been living, the shape you’ve taken. Not to fix it, not to force anything, but just to see it. And sometimes that is noticeable. That’s the very beginning of a plot twist. I’m your host, Christine, and at 40, I blew up the life I thought I was building.

I got a divorce, I shut down my startup, and I moved to the big city. Not as a dramatic reinvention, just being honest. Because sometimes things don’t pull apart loudly. For me, it was really, really quiet. Over time, it was happening inside me. Here we talk about the turns that change us, the sudden ones, the chosen ones, and the slow ones that simply ask us to become somebody new.

There’s no fixes here. I don’t have a five-step plan. It’s just a practice of telling ourselves the truth with grace and a little more tenderness than we usually get to. Plot twist is a companion for the space between what you planned and what is true. It’s that gap, and that gap is actually where we live. Plot twist isn’t a shocking life event.

It’s the realization that kindness towards oneself is the most transformative turn that any story can take. If you’re in the middle of a plot twist or you’re standing right at the edge of one, you’re not behind; you’re the story. Sometimes again, they arrive as a whisper that you can hear. Sometimes they’re a loss, a pivot, a choice, a door closing, a version of you that can’t fit anymore.

There’s a rhythm to each episode of plot twist. So what will happen is I’ll introduce a concept. Today I was a cactus. Then I’ll share a personal story of how it showed up for me. After that, we’ll move into my favorite segment, narratives, where we keep, revise, or retire. When we look at the stories that shape us, we hold them gently.

The goal there is recognition. The goal is permission, and the goal is grace. And maybe, just maybe, we can make a little room inside our own skin. At the end, I’ll play a short, original piece of music. It’s the same motif, but different expressions each time. It’s a soft landing, and about a day later, there’s a digital postcard you can keep private or share.

It’s simply meant to meet you wherever you are. Nothing here is ever a demand. It’s just a light so you can see yourself with more kindness. Take what’s yours. Leave what’s heavy. You’re the twist. I started out as a cactus. What a cactus is. Do they survive harsh environments? They conserve water. They store what they can. We don’t need much.

They protect themselves with spines. Oh, yeah. We’re armored. We thrive. We absolutely thrive. We’re tenderness would absolutely die. We crush it on self-sufficiency. Nothing about it is wrong. Everything about it is adapted. Some of us didn’t grow in environments that could sustain tenderness. So we became resilient, self-contained, and low to no need. If you’re like me, we didn’t just learn to survive.

We drive under neglect. Our adaptations were really intelligent and were emotionally self-sufficient. We learned to survive without being nurtured, and we became resilient, but also armored. A cactus survives beautifully and for that I am so grateful. It survives in a landscape we’re very little is given. It was that cactus. And I don’t live in the desert anymore. It’s not my whole story anymore.

It was late July. It’s my favorite time of year. Full sun, feeling the warmth. There are more people smiling. The days are bright and long. My dad was terminally ill and it accidentally FaceTimed me of all places at work. He was telling me he’s dying. Time was imminent. I started making logistical plans and I told my partner at the time, don’t take off work.

Don’t waste your vacation. This is what a cactus looks like in me. I go low, need I go? No need. Frankly, limbo of needs. How low can you go? Spoiler alert I got you. I’m gonna win, I go alone, I make myself easier. So I got on a plane to Cleveland to be with my dad when he died. This wasn’t coldness.

This was pure protection. I’m trying to survive the unbearable. That’s a cactus making my grief so small. Nobody has to even rearrange their life for it. I chose aloneness before it could be chosen for me. So it’s a little after midnight. It’s a Friday night. I’m at my parents house in their master bedroom. Because where else would you keep the paperwork?

Like wills? So it’s the bedroom. I recognize it from my childhood. It screams late 80s. Early 90s. Oh, the sponge paint accent wall behind the headboard. That’s right. Fuchsia pink and electric blue. It would look better if it was on a white background, but unfortunately it is on a baby blue background and it’s still like this perpetually stuck in a time warp.But I’ll tell you, the year is 2015 and this is how it’s going to go down. My parents love TV, so it was so fitting it’s on and not is it on blaring? My dad needed hearing aids and when he went to bed he would take him out. So The Tonight Show being on absolutely at a decibel level, way above appropriate, it felt right.

It’s a surreal moment for me, like the world was still doing its normal thing again. We’re there for the paperwork, right? But my dad was terminally ill, so in theory we’re supposed to be prepared. And yet here I am trying to open up these three metals fire safe boxes. It’s some sort of sick game where there’s at least 30 random keys on their bed with the boxes.

Oh, yeah, I try them all. And this is how it’s going to go down, I got it. I’m gonna turn key after key and none of them fits. All of a sudden the phone ring, no one’s answering it. Not my mom, not my older brother, not my sister in law. So I answer, because, of course I do. And that’s how it happened in my parents bedroom with late night TV behind me, the keys in my hands, trying to find his will and those fires safe.

Boxes unopened on the bed. We never got the boxes open that night. We left them on the bed and we went to hospice because my dad, he was gone. Knowing that was enough, seeing him would have been too much. So you know what? I didn’t, and I was there alone on purpose, I guess, in a way, when I went to bed that night, all I could see when I shut my eyes were his jaundiced eyes.

They were so bright yellow. I’m telling you, they were the Scooby Doo eyes. I used to love that show, but now it haunted me. The person I had felt safe would die. My dad was gone and the only thing left as I tried to fall asleep was that I was alone. Alone in the world. Alone in that bed that night.

That was full cactus mode on me. When everything in me tried to solve what I couldn’t bear to feel. Classic moves by KDF I went for the keys. I answered the phone. Im with the boxes. That’s love and survival. Wearing the same outfit. Maybe you’re having a moment of yourself right now where you said I’m fine, even when you weren’t, or a moment where you adapted to live by becoming emotionally self-contained.

If you’re listening and thinking, you know what? I’ve done that too. Here’s what I mean when I say I was a cactus and I want to admit to you I had no idea what I was doing in the moment. It’s not as though I was walking around going, I’m executing cactus flawlessly. Boom. I was just surviving, so I went low.

I don’t take time off. Don’t waste your vacation, I want logistical. Oh, you gotta love it. Those keys, the paperwork, the boxes. I got something to solve and that I’m going to hold on to. I went to the responder, the phone rang and I answered it and I went contained. I kept the moment narrow enough to get through it. Cactus was protecting me from the parts that felt unlivable in real time.

I couldn’t be fully seen in my grief. I couldn’t ask for care. What if I got disappointed? I couldn’t let anyone see the freefall of feeling it all at once, let alone the vulnerability of letting someone close when I wasn’t sure I could hold myself together. There’s a dark side though, to cactus. It has costs, and the cost show up later, so as well, after my adrenaline wore off, it was loneliness of having no one beside me when the world changed the weight.

I had to carry that moment on my own. That after image of grief, those yellow Scooby-Doo John disguise, they were stuck in my head with nowhere to go. And this quiet sense that I couldn’t shake. That I was untethered, floating aimlessly because the person I felt safest with was gone and I just didn’t know where to put myself.

That’s the trade offs cactus offers. Cactus will keep you functioning, but the prices you’ll do it all by yourself. So when I say I was a cactus, I’m not judging myself. I’m honoring. I’m honoring the adaptation with respect. It kept me a light inside an unbearable night. And at some point I realized I wasn’t just surviving my environment.

I was living inside a narrative about who I had to be in order to survive it.

So this is the part of the show where we slow things down for a moment. When we pause long enough to notice the story we are living, and a few things become much more clear. There are parts of this story that still feel like home, parts that might be shifting shape, and parts that were never really ours to carry in the first place.

So here we take a belief, a narrative, or a way of being, and instead of judging it or trying to fix it, we simply ask, keep, revise, retire. I think they’re just three places that a story can land. Nothing here was a mistake. Every story you’ve lived once had a purpose. So let’s take a look. It’s not a verdict.

It’s a way of holding your story with more room keep. So some things in my story are worth keeping. And they will be for you to. Not because they’re perfect, but because they’re true. I’m going to keep that. I can handle hard things. And that’s even when it’s really tough. I have strength so that self-reliance and resilience that I’m keeping.

But I may need to remove the loneliness requirement. I can handle hard things, but I don’t have to do it alone. I want to keep that. I show up, I do show up and it is rare these days. My dark side to that is I don’t have to do it all to show up. And so I need to honor my capacity.
But let me tell you, I’m going to keep showing up. Now we’re coming to revise. So some things aren’t wrong. They’re just ready for a softer edit. So I’m going to move from if I need support, I’m a burden to needing support is a human event, not a failure. I’m going to revise and move from if I name what I need.

I’ll ruin it to needing. What I need is an act of honesty, not a disruption. And then I have to retire. So some parts of the story have simply finished their work. I’m going to retire three narratives today. I’m starting with retiring. Love should cost the other person nothing. I’m retiring. The safest way to be loved is to be easy and I’m retiring.

It’s better to be alone than to be disappointed. You don’t have to decide what to keep, revise or retired today. Just knowing that your story is editable is more than enough, and that that’s already a plot twist. So we can hold that this did happen. I lived, it shaped me and I’m still here. With a subtle nod to what we swallowed, what we silenced, what we endured.

And the subplot is who did I have to be or become? I did start out a cactus and I’m grateful to her. She knew how to survive. She knew how to store what was needed. She knew how to protect herself. But I don’t live in the desert anymore. And when the environment changes, the story can chew. As a cactus, she learned to thrive off neglect, to grow in places where almost nothing else can.

And if you’d get too close. Oh, we’ll remind you that we’re built to survive. So you know what? Maybe the work wasn’t becoming someone new. Maybe it was forgiving who I already was. Plot twist. And the plot twist, at least for me, is realizing I can keep the strength without keeping the loneliness. I could keep the capacity without making myself small.

So before I go, I want to say this with a lot of tenderness. Some of you listening are still in the desert for whatever reason. That’s where you choose to be, or that’s where you are. There’s still heat, there’s still drought. The conditions still require adaptation because softness isn’t safe, and life isn’t always gentle. And if that’s you, I’m not here to take you out of cactus.

I’m here to honor it, to name it as the intelligent thing that it is. And the beauty, even there, there’s a plot twist. It’s in noticing, not transformation. Because sometimes that twist is noticing who your cactus comes out around, who gets met by that version that says, I’m fine, I got it. I don’t need anything. Not because you don’t care, but because caring has been expensive.

And then notice who shouldn’t be receiving your cactus, and you hadn’t noticed that that’s who’s meeting them. The unintended cactus recipient. And sometimes the twist is even quieter than that. Sometimes you look around and realize you’re not in the desert anymore. The danger is past, but the strategy has stayed, but your nervous system, it didn’t get the memo.

And if that’s true, if there are places in your life or you’re still living like water is scarce, just knowing that is a plot twist because it means your story isn’t fixed. It means your tenderness isn’t gone. It’s just been protected. So today, if something softened even a little bit, that’s a homecoming. If you became a cactus somewhere along the way, that makes sense.

You adapted to survive the climate you were in. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if the environment is changed or if you’re ready for it to, you’re allowed to soften. Take what’s yours, leave what’s heavy. The rest can wait. The twist it’s you. I end every episode with a short piece of original music. Same motif, different expression, so your nervous system can digest what we just opened. You’re not going to do anything. Just listen.