Fallon Davis told their story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was going through a very spiraling time of life. I was living in my car at one point and then couch to couch.

I was like, I cannot believe I got myself in this position.

My pronouns are they/them. I am an Afro-vegan. I am a Black Native. I’m an African-American. I am a radical educator. I am a CEO and founder of a nonprofit called STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics) Urban.

I’m in Newark, New Jersey. I’m originally from Somerville, New Jersey, which is about 30 minutes south.

The outdoors has been a love for me my whole life. I was inspired through sleepover camp in the woods, swimming in the lake, and going whitewater rafting and fishing. I was outside a lot. One of my favorite things to do as a kid was to ride my bike and play outside. I can remember the wind on my face and taking my hands off the handlebars and just speeding down the hills. It really was my peace, you know?

I had a lot of pressure on me growing up, being a latchkey kid and really having a single parent. They’re working all the time, and I’m really having to take care of myself and make sure that I’m keeping on track and doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

I went to the college for the business of fashion, LIM college in New York. And, it was life changing. I pretty much gave up everything I knew in a small town and went to the city.

Somewhere along the way of me graduating high school, going to college, getting into my first serious relationship, I kind of lost the outdoors. It was more of just a means to an end. You gotta walk to get to somewhere, you gotta drive to get to somewhere. I had forgotten how important it was to me, just breathing the air outside and just taking it all in.

When I turned 25, I was at the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life. I felt really depressed I was in an emotionally-abusive relationship. So I decided to move to Atlanta, that’s when I got my master’s.

I was able to find some stability in that, but I was going through a very spiraling time of life. I got into another relationship that I shouldn’t have been in, and I ended up having to flee the house I was living in and I lost my car and everything.

So I kept having to start over from the beginning. That’s a lot to figure out—housing, how to keep a job while going to school. I was working Uber and I was barely able to make the rent and do Uber and do my master’s program.

I was living in my car at one point, and then couch to couch. I remember I was renting a room for $500 a week. I could not even afford that. I was doing Uber and. I remember I had to pay this room, or get something to eat. And I was sitting down there that weekend, and I just had water from the faucet, and I was crying. I was like, I cannot believe I got myself in this position.

So I had to like suck it up and ask my family for help and come back home. That’s not what I wanted to do. Because you’re embarrassed, you feel like you should have had your life together. People tell you you’re supposed to have your life together at a certain age.

It’s also like if you grow up without help, you don’t know what help to ask for. That’s also what I was realizing,I just didn’t know what to ask for help. I’m thinking I’m supposed to do all this and figure all this out, and I’m not really seeing any stability. I didn’t really feel at home, and especially I didn’t feel at home in my own body.

I came back to New Jersey about 2018. I had been away from home for about six years. I knew that my mom wasn’t gonna be happy about it, and she would want me to have a job. So I started looking and I found a great position. I was creating a curriculum, and I started to integrate nature and outdoors, the environmental center, uh, planting and visiting gardens. I really was enjoying how it made me feel, how it made others feel, and just started to really understand the impact of the environment.

My most profound awakening with nature happened when I went to the Grand Canyon. My mom took me on a trip for the first time.

It was during the process of me coming back, getting into this new role, and dealing with all the stuff that had happened. I didn’t have the money to go and she said, “Well, I’ll treat you.” We went to Las Vegas and she had set up a couple different outdoor excursions. We went kayaking in the Colorado River, which she made me paddle the majority of the time. It’s cold as heck out there, so you want a paddle.

It just showed me a strength that I didn’t realize I had, like, Wow, I could do this all these different miles. And it felt so good to be out there in this large body of water that was silent. You could hear the nature, the water, and the air.

And then we did a tour of the Grand Canyon. When on that native land, something happened to me. It was like a switch went off, and I just felt I was supposed to be there. I felt like I was supposed to be in this space. Then I’ve been finding out that I’m a Black Native, and my family’s Native American. So it made so much sense why I needed to get back to that space. And from there, I’ve just been exploring more.

So when I got back home, I got an invite from a friend to go on a hike. And I have always done small hikes or different things, but I didn’t actually think about it as something that could be a part of my lifestyle.

I met this great, phenomenal group of Black hikers. We had a circle and folks told their stories. And we were all kind of going through these different but similar journeys of connecting back to self, finding community. It changed my life because it allowed me to be outdoors. It really connected me back to who I was.

When I did my first hike, it gave me such a mind clarity. It gave me more oxygen to my brain, that I was able to think clearer, and I realized that I was just running, from age 25 to 30. It was a tough awakening. I had been running, running, running a long time, running from my family, and all the trauma and drama that was happening, running to try to find myself. I wasn’t listening to my inner intuition.

And I used the outdoors and healing through food to do a whole spiritual cleansing of all the traumas I’d been going through, and realized a lot of that had contributed to all that stress I was going through. It’s changed my life to this day.
I didn’t realize that home is within me, and that’s really what the outdoors gave me. A home.

Fallon Davis is an activist working to improve the lives of Black and brown individuals through science, technology, engineering, arts, and math, otherwise known as STEAM Education. They’re a pioneer in the queer fashion industry and are currently focusing on their work as co-founder, CEO, and President of STEAM Urban. You can follow them at steamurban.org.

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Hana Jung told her story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It truly was a wake up call when I ended up in the hospital twice throwing up blood, and feeling frustrated that the doctors ran a billion tests and the only thing they could give me was, “Oh, you have [gastrointestinal] issues.” That was not very helpful.

I’m from New York City. I’ve been living on and off in Nicaragua for about seven years now.

Professionally, I am a coach and a retreat leader. I’m a creator of personal evolution and an advocate for self-love. I am very passionate about learning the lessons from nature, and one of the ways that I do that is surfing. I surf almost daily here in Nicaragua, and it’s a way to feel connected, to feel joyful, and to be present.

Death has been such a transformative character in my life. Every weird turn I can trace back to a significant loss in my life.

One of the most significant deaths in my life was my uncle, who passed away when he was only 32 from stomach cancer. When I was 11 or 12 years old, I really looked up to him. I feel like he was like the cool uncle; he just had such a vibrancy to life. He had a curiosity for the world. He loved technology, he loved blending art and science and medicine, and he was very involved in his church. He played the drums and drove a cool car. All the things that, as a young child, you’re like, This is amazing.

I think intuitively I knew that it wasn’t picture perfect. There was a lot of stress. There were definitely parts of himself that he would suppress, that he never talked about. How things made him feel when things were not going well. And I thought that was the norm.

My uncle got sick right after he had just graduated from dental school. He built his practice. He put everything into it. He reached his pinnacle. And I think it was the first or second year into business when he got the diagnosis too late, because he ignored his body signals for so long. I remember as a child he would just take fists of antacids and pills and things to just basically treat the symptoms. I think It was less than six months from the time he found out to the time he passed. So it was really traumatic for the entire family.

When I entered the workforce after graduating, college, I took a job in advertising. I was working in New York City and in London for about 10 years. On paper it looked like a dream. I’m the cool New York City girl; I’m that girl, I have that job. I’ve got these amazing clients. I’m going to amazing parties. But inside I was dying, and it made me kind of question, Wow, was this something that my uncle was also thinking? I have it all yet, why do I feel so unfulfilled?

I think I knew, three years prior to me actually leaving corporate, I knew that I had to leave. But I did what was the holding pattern, which to me looked like, Maybe if I change like one thing, maybe if I work in the London office, or maybe when I move client side, or maybe if I work for a startup, this clawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that this is not what I’m supposed to do will go away.

The first time I started experiencing symptoms it kind of felt like a stomach ache, like I needed to throw up, and it started to feel like my whole body wanted to reject getting out of bed. A hum of feeling unwell, but not feeling obviously unwell. I didn’t have a cold, I didn’t have the flu, I didn’t have any other symptoms. And then it escalated more and more where my stomach would be really reactive to things that I was never reactive to before. I tried to numb out even harder with drinking, and obviously that didn’t help my stomach at all, and it was just kind of a snowball effect. It got to the point where I went into the office one day and the pain was so bad that I was in a fetal position on the ground, and I needed to take myself to the emergency room. And they ran a bunch of tests, and they couldn’t figure it out.

They’re like, “Oh, you just have GI issues,” and it was a catchall phrase to say, “We don’t know what’s going on.” That’s when I deeply knew in my gut, pardon the pun, but I knew that it was not just physical. It was psychosomatic. It was that something really significant needed to change in my life, and it was an opportunity for me to break a cycle.

I felt so ill, I literally couldn’t even keep down food or water. I was hospitalized twice in one month, and they’re like, “You just need to minimize stress.” And that was not enough.

It wasn’t until the second time I was hospitalized in that same month when I was reminded of Holy crap, like this is exactly the bridge that my uncle probably came to, and he chose to ignore it. I was taking Prevacid and I was doing all the things that my uncle was literally doing as well to mask and put a bandaid on a situation to drag myself through this life that I had built. I was so disassociated from my body that it took literally something this extreme to wake up to the fact that something was wrong.

When I first started to make the decision to basically 180 my life, there was for sure a lot of internal and external resistance that you would not believe. Internally, I was like, I spent 10 years dedicated to building this life, and now you want to blow it up? What are you doing? People are gonna think like you couldn’t hack it, or like you’re a fraud, or whatever. Externally, it looked like my parents being super confused, being like, “Why are you leaving this job again? I thought things were going great. Didn’t you just get a promotion?”

Then the final checkpoint was my aunt. My aunt was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She had married my uncle, she also went into a similar line of work in dentistry. She built a super successful business, way more successful than my uncle probably would’ve ever been, and I’m super proud of what she had achieved, but it was at the expense of her health. It wasn’t until later after I’ve been working on myself and exploring who I wanted to be for several years, at that point, that’s when we kind of started to discuss it more openly. She’s like, “You have no idea the amount of pressure and shame and guilt I was under. Your grandmother pretty much said it was my fault that he passed away. It was really hard to hear that.”

And I asked her, “What would you say to the younger version of you at that juncture?” She had just lost her husband. She had an infant child, and she had to put herself through dental school and try to make ends meet. And she’d be like, “You know, I spent so much of my life from that point onwards proving to others that I wasn’t some fraud, that I wasn’t just some can’t-do-anything, wife. I wanted to prove that I can be successful, that I could take care of my son, that I was capable.”

And that really resonated with me because I felt like so much of my identity and so much of our collective identity is so wrapped up in what we can do, and produce, and be in the world, that if we lose that, we’re almost afraid of, what does that mean? What does that mean for who we are? Are we enough if we’re not a doctor or a lawyer or a successful artist or someone to be admired? Are we only admired for the things that we can do?

So that to me, communicated very clearly that this idea of prioritizing other people’s expectations above your own knowing really has deathly consequences.

I think it wasn’t until I started experiencing those stomach issues where I kind of woke up and was like, Oh my gosh. I don’t wanna be like my uncle. I don’t wanna work and then die.

I finally decided to answer the call and did something completely crazy, which was leave a director of marketing job in New York City, a six figure salary, a townhouse in New York City, all the things that people would kill for. I felt like it was absolutely insane to leave, but the alternative was death to me. I’m for sure, convinced that I would’ve died if I never left New York, if I didn’t do a full 180 from my life and really alter the course to try to break the cycle of self-denial and self-betrayal.

Ever since I started to listen to my gut and really trust that, I haven’t been sick since. I can’t remember the last time I had any major gut issues or feeling that sort of stomach pain. And if I do feel a little hint of it, I know where it’s originating from, and I pause and I can get curious about it and kind of nip it in the bud before it kind of snowballs into what happened to me before. So I think I learned my lesson.

I think that’s why I naturally became an evolution coach, because I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes and really I’m grateful for death for being the impetus for me to change my course.

Hannah Jung is the founder of a retreat company, Reboot Experiences. She is also an artist, surfer, and coach for professionals navigating their next life chapter. Find her work at or follow her on Instagram .

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Ashley Bugge told her story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was at home with my one and three-year-old, six months pregnant.

I got a call from the shop manager, panicked. Saying, “Is this Ashley? Is this Brian’s wife? There’s been an accident on the boat. Where are you? We’re coming to get you.”

I just went white. I remember shouting, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” The kids are sitting next to me like, “What’s going on, Mama?”

I am in my closet in Vancouver, Washington. So the Pacific Northwest. I’m a full-time author, so I write and I do a couple freelance jobs here and there. For fun, I am a master SCUBA diver and I travel on different expedition teams. I just got back from one in Norway swimming with some killer whales and humpback whales.

I’m a military widow. I’m raising three kids, ages four, six, and eight, on my own. Life is very busy.

Brian and I met when I was 19 and he was 20. We were both living in Portland, Oregon. He lived with my older brother’s best friend, and they were all in this metal punk band. I used to go to his shows and I was like, Oh, he’s kind of cute.

I was home from college and we ended up dating for the summer. We bonded over our love of the ocean. Any chance we got, we would drive out to the coast.

His big plan after dating eight weeks of the summer was, “I’m gonna join the Coast Guard and then we can get married.” I’m 19 and I’m like, “Absolutely not. No way. I’m not ready to be married.” And so we ended up breaking up.

We went our separate ways. I moved to New York City. He joined the Navy. We both lived very separate lives for 10 years, and then I ended up moving back to Portland. We still had a lot of mutual friends, but we just happened to connect about this band that was coming to town that we both liked. So we ended up chatting, and then he called me one day when I was at work. I went in the break room of the bank that I worked at, and ended up talking to him for over an hour.

I got off that phone call and I was like, I’m gonna marry him. He is still the man that I loved ten years ago. I was not ready then. I’m ready now. I am not gonna let this time pass us by. And we were married 11 months later on the coast in Manzanita, Oregon.

In 2013, which is the year that we got back together, I went up to his house at Gig Harbor. He had this flyer on his refrigerator and it said, “Learn to SCUBA dive, $99.” And I was like, “We should do that.” And he was like, “I know I’ve always wanted to dive and I’ve never tried it.” And then, you know, life happens. He kept going on these crazy deployments. I was living in Portland and we had this long distance relationship, but his birthday was in June and my birthday was in August.

And because he was gone for basically those two months, when he came home, we exchanged both of our birthday presents. I gave him this envelope for SCUBA diving lessons, and he gave me an envelope, and he had gotten me SCUBA diving lessons
But, I ended up getting pregnant with our daughter, our firstborn, and so we had to push it off. But in 2014, when we were in Hawaii, we a discover SCUBA dive course. You go down 20 or 30 feet. We surfaced, and we hugged and we kissed and we said, “Oh my God, this is it.”

We were hooked after that. So from 2015, we just traveled the world with our kids when we could. We dove all around the world, and that was gonna be it.

He really wanted to learn to cave dive. That was his goal. He found, this class in Honolulu and signed up for it, and took a couple courses. As part of his training, he was learning to dive on a rebreather, which is a very technical piece of diving equipment far outside of recreational SCUBA diving.

There were all these just things that came up along the way that should have been red flags. At any point along the way, we should have said, “This is not a good shop. This is not how things should be done.” But when you’re excited about something, you don’t worry about it.

It was a beautiful, beautiful, sunny hot Hawaiian day in May. That day was his last class for this basic certification. He used to buy this tea tree oil shampoo. I woke up and I could smell that coming outta the shower. So I knew he was in the shower. He came out, we went downstairs, we tiptoed past the kids’ rooms, and made coffee. And just talked for a few minutes before he left, made a plan.

Our plan was always that he would text me before he got in the water, and then he would text me when he surfaced. That was our diving plan. Always. I always knew where he was, who he was with. He texted me that he was headed out. It was about eight o’clock in the morning.

My kids woke up, came downstairs. Our big plan was to go to Target for the day to get stuff for the baby. I was six months pregnant, and we were just sitting on the couch getting ready to go. Literally keys in my hand when my phone rang.

We raced through the streets of Honolulu to the hospital without knowing anything other than there had been an accident. I got to the hospital, and waddled my pregnant self across the parking lot, and ran inside and saw his whole dive team there that he had been in his class with.

They didn’t know anything, but one of them told me that they had performed CPR on him. That was the first time that I knew there was at least a portion of the morning where he hadn’t been breathing, and then it sunk in. I might be finding out that he’s dead, that he’s not here anymore.

Finally, my doctor and a security guard came out. As soon as I saw the security guard, I knew that that was it. There was no reason for a security guard to come out with a doctor unless they were telling me that my husband didn’t survive. And soon enough, that’s what they said.

He went out, and he had been trained to turn his oxygen off for the boat ride out, so he did that. He had his brand new camera on him, which he had never used before. The instructor had asked him to take pictures of the class.

So Brian was in the water with his camera, not paying attention to his gear, and basically hadn’t turned his air back on before getting in the water. He used up everything he had in his closed loop system, and drowned right in front of his class, and nobody noticed. Eventually his instructor brought him back up, but it was too late.

Later that night, I got a call from the organ donation place. He had been an organ donor, and I had to consent to what they called the harvesting of his organs. I had to go through each organ—his skin, his tissue, his bones, his eyes, everything—and say either yes or no. You can have this, you cannot have this. It was just the absolute worst. It just doesn’t get worse than that.

I knew he wanted to be an organ donor, so I knew that that was his wish. It was not up to me. However, he had these piercing blue eyes, and I couldn’t imagine him without them. So I said yes to everything below his neck.

At the end of that phone call, they ask, “In the event that anything is able to be used, would you want to be contacted by the donor or the donor family? And I said, “Yes.”

Almost a year later, I was preparing to fly back to Hawaii for the one year memorial. I had his remains turned into a living reef memorial, and organized his dive team to all fly to Hawaii, and we were going to lower his living reef memorial onto the ocean floor where he died. As I’m getting ready to fly back to Hawaii, I got a letter in the mail, and my heart just stopped. When I saw it, I opened it, and it said, “From your grateful recipient.”

So almost a year to the date of his dying, I received a letter from Alyssa, who was the recipient of his ACL.

I got to read all about Alyssa and her family, and how Brian’s donation has changed her life and let her continue to lead this really beautiful, adventurous life of running and hiking and climbing with her three boys. It just kind of went back and forth for a couple of years. I explained who Brian was and his love of diving and travel and adventure, and now she and I have this really beautiful friendship thanks to Brian and this donation, and this really, really, really awful phone call that I got to go through the night that he died.

When she flew to Hawaii to meet me and our kids for the first time, she got to dive to his living reef memorial, and put her hands on him and just complete this weird circle of him and her. We’re all at the bottom of the ocean together, and our kids are on the boat above us, and it’s just wild and crazy, but also really special.

I don’t just miss him as my husband and I don’t just miss him as the kids’ dad. I just miss him. He was just this really incredible human. That doesn’t go away. That’s still a minute-by-minute thing. I just miss him.

We can’t change the fact that he’s not here, but we can use his death as a tool to help us live our best lives. So as a way to honor him, we literally get out there and just live the shit out of life every single day.

In one of his journal entries, he wrote, “I just don’t have a bucket list. Tomorrow is not guaranteed and I don’t want to waste any time.” And that has just resonated so deeply with me. Don’t, don’t save this for some day. Don’t make a plan for your future of this one event that you really want to do before you die. Instead, make the plan of how you’re gonna make that happen now.
That’s how my kids and I live. We live with no bucket list. We figure out what we want to do and we go after it.

Ashley Bugge is an author who chronicles her life as a young military widow turned polar explorer in her books, Always Coming Back Home and The Ocean is Calling. She’s also a master SCUBA diver. You can learn more about her on Instagram .

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Mercy M’Fon told their story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

After I got out of the course, I didn’t want to be outdoors anymore. My whole dream of being outdoors, I was not feeling it. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, and I felt so much shame around it, because the community supported me.

My name is Mercy M’fon. My pronouns are they/them. I am the executive director and the founder at Wild Diversity. We do outdoor adventures and outdoor education for the BIPOC and the LGBTQ+ communities. I am in Ellwood, Oregon, southeast of Portland.

In the beginning when I was starting Wild Diversity, I really wanted to have the actual hands-on experience with people guiding me and telling me, This is the right way to approach this, this is how to take a group out. I’m such a “now” person, so I’m like, “Let’s just do this now. We should go do this course.”

It was a 90-day instructor education course with one of these big adventure hubs. It was a leadership course. So it was an opportunity for me to really grow. If I want to run this outdoor nonprofit, I need to know what the standards are, how people are approaching it.

The course is very, very expensive. I think at the time it was around $7,000. We did a Go Fund Me to start. I think for me, I just hoped it did well, but I didn’t know if it was really gonna do it. So when it did, I was just like, Oh my gosh, I think this is gonna happen. People really want to make this happen. The community pitched in so I could get this education to help launch, and it seemed really, really exciting.

I felt pretty excited just to learn and to try new things and to have new experiences, like mountaineering, paddling on the river for weeks, rock climbing, backpacking. I’m like, This is so dreamy. But it wasn’t.

My experience in the outdoors has never been in a professional setting. So I was really looking forward to that. But I think at the end of the day that it wasn’t that much of a professional setting, that there wasn’t understanding towards other identities and people.

One thing that they did was take our IDs from us for the whole course. So we went 90 days without our wallet, our IDs, nothing. But they’re also taking us through rural Oregon. You’re hiking in the forest and all the signs are shot up, there’s shotgun shells, there’s people shooting in the distance. And you know how your mind goes when you’re on a backpacking trip or a long hike, all you do is obsess about the same thing over and over again. So I think that feeling was compounded in my mind.

This was five years ago. A lot of people of color were getting pulled over at that time for being brown. That was a huge thing from Arizona all the way up to Oregon at that time. I never felt really safe because if I’m walking through the grocery store and a cop wanted to hassle me, I have nothing. I knew of people personally who had siblings in jail, like immigration prison, just because they didn’t have their ID, even though they’re citizens. I’m already feeling like this is not a safe group.

And I didn’t feel like I was amongst people who would support me through that. They don’t understand what it’s like to be targeted by somebody who could take your life, it creates an interesting dynamic to be surrounded by people who you feel unsafe around for such a long period of time. And I’m experiencing it in a place where there’s no safe place to retreat to.

Every day you’re gonna wake up, somebody’s gonna say something inappropriate and rude to you. The people who are in the instructors don’t know any better, so they’re not gonna stop and interrupt it. So you have to be your number one advocate while being exhausted.

You either endure or you quit. But the thing is that the community paid for me to be there. So, I felt like I would be letting them down if I left. It was just like I just needed to endure it, keep my head down, and just get through it.

After I got out of the course, I didn’t want to be outdoors anymore. My whole dream of being outdoors, I was not feeling it. It wasn’t something I wanted to do and I felt so much shame around it because the community supported me. And afterwards I was radio silent about my experience because I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never raised that amount of money for myself, and they believed in something, and now I’m feeling unsure.

I had already previously signed up to partner with another organization to run a BIPOC backpacking trip after my course. So even though I was feeling like, I don’t know if this is for me, I still had this trip to guide. And going into it, I think in my mind I was like, This is gonna be my last one.

This backpacking trip was a beginner’s backpacking trip that goes through Serene Lake. And Serene Lake is well-named because it’s in this little crater, and it’s just like high trees all around it.

There’s this steep hike to get to the top of the crater that we had to do, and I’m just taking the time with the group. We had such a fun day, we get to Serene Lake, and it was so cute and there’s this one little rock sticking out that looks like a little throne in parts.

So we would all swim out to the little rock, or wade out to the rock, and we ended up calling it Lover’s Rock because we were just so in love with the scene and our trip together. It was really beautiful.

For this trip my co-guide had planned, since it was a loop, we had hid a bunch of food in the forest, because we knew we’d be back down there the last night. So our last morning, the day we were heading out, our participants woke up to them making donuts on a cast iron pan. Deep frying and making donuts in the woods. It was so, so confusing for them, the level of confusion on their face of, “How do you have this big bottle of oil, this heavy pan, and where do these donuts come from?” And I think that was just like a special moment, a cool treat that we created for them. It was just magical from start to finish.

The experience was so beautiful, so different, so easy. It was just the ability to truly be myself. I didn’t have to code switch. I didn’t have to be more of this, less of that. I could just be myself and that was OK. It was so relaxing.

You don’t realize how you walked around life with your shoulders constantly tense, and you thought that was a natural way, until your muscles relax and you’re like, Oh, I must have been tense for a moment. And that’s the feeling I felt. It was a lifetime feeling.

Here I am, four or five years later, with Wild Diversity. We’re growing, and we’re running these programs, and I think it was because of that experience, I want our community to feel like that all the time. I want them to go outside and make connections and feel free and relax and have a level of safety out there.

So it was really coming from a place of feeling really stagnant and unsure, to just having the biggest fire under my butt, driving me forward and feeling so passionate about supporting the community.

I want people to feel good all the time. I want them to feel connected all the time. I want them to feel like they can do it and feel supported. So it really not only helped me drop back into the organization, but create the foundation in which we want all the work we do to center around.

Mercy M’Fon is the founder and executive director of Wild Diversity, where they connect BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people to the outdoors through adventures and education. Through their work, Mercy cultivates safe and welcoming spaces for underrepresented communities to thrive.

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Amánda Efthimiou told her story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It was really up and down. I was depressed, one moment, anxious another. I took all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs. Not only are the side effects ranging from nightmares to my libido being super low, but I was feeling really disconnected from my body and the wisdom of my body.

I’m in Tijuca National Park in the jungle of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. I grew up in New York, the United States, to Brazilian and Greek parents, and I have very strong ties to Brazil. I am a psychedelic wellness advocate and integration educator. I help people to integrate transformational experiences that they have in altered states into their daily lives.

Growing up, I was a walking pharmacy, so to speak. I took SSRIs, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, to help with and manage the symptoms of depression and anxiety that I had.

I was suffering for many years, and I was also quite young. I was finishing high school, going through my university years, and still navigating what I wanted to be in the world and who I wanted to be in the world. I was also taking a bunch of pills, and I wasn’t in my body in that process. That was very difficult.

For example, I remember in my freshman year of University I had a boyfriend. We were in this love bubble, but I was so out of it. I feel like I almost don’t even remember the details of my relationship. The medication numbed the highs and lows of a human experience of love.

And so there was this moment when I was finishing college, and I was about to go traveling, and I was like, I want to be fully present when I’m traveling. I want to be fully immersed. I’m already on the path of weaning myself off of antidepressants. I’ve been working with a psychiatrist to do so. It’s not that I just decided to go cold turkey.

So I went traveling, and I basically went overland, starting in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, in Argentina, all the way up to Quito, in Ecuador. And I did most of that overland, over a period of eight months. It was incredible. There’s so many different topographies—there’s desert, there’s mountains, there’s beach, there’s salt deserts, there’s jungle.

I see other cultures and how they take care of themselves. I’m seeing how these cultures are working with plant-based medicines, natural medicines to help themselves, even if they’re feeling pain or if they get stung by a mosquito. They’re working with plants to help them get well. And so I was really curious about that. How come we don’t do that where I grew up in New York?

In Peru I heard about psychedelic wellness for the first time, and I knew at that time I wasn’t ready, but that trip changed my life. It opened up my whole world.

I went back to the US, and I met this incredible community of people that were doing things differently. They have an alternative way of living. They were always talking about how they were feeling, and that’s what I wanted to be more in touch with. Not be in my head and not push aside the uncomfortable things that were coming up, and actually embrace them and make them part of me, so that I would grow and become wiser and better.

So when they expressed that they work with plant-based medicines, psychedelic, non-psychedelic, all forms of plant-based medicines, I wanted to try it. I was super scared. I was so nervous. But, even though I was nervous, I was ready. And I had no idea what was going to happen.

I had a profound ceremonial experience that essentially opened the door.

It wasn’t easy, not in the beginning. It was these cyclical moments where I was in my body and not in my body, but when I was not in my body, I was observing myself. I was observing all the things that were happening in my life. So there were a lot of conversations with myself, but in different ways so that I had all these different perspectives. And it’s also conversations with nature, with animals and plants that exist within you, because you are nature, nature is you. So there’s also this very deep, profound sense of unification of one with the world and the environment.

I was having a conversation with myself outside of my body, and then I would come right back into my body. And so when I came back, I came with all these tools and tricks and ideas to help arm me to become more myself. It gave me even more confidence in my body. It was this affirmation of the sacredness of my being in this world, like I am meant to be in this world. My body exists here now. Many people have this when they’re actually in near death experiences, but we don’t have to go there. It’s such a gentle, beautiful way to do that.

When I entered, I thought, It’s gonna be cause and effect. I’m gonna do this experience and I’m gonna get well. But what it really did was start me on that path, because this by no means a cure, but it showed me the rest of the paths that I didn’t even know were there.

Only months later did I realize that that moment is what increased my capacity to feel more. I was starting to feel everything, all the emotions, all the sensations. It was like a rocket ship to transformation. It showed me that I really had what it takes to uncover the root causes of my issues, and not just take a pill to treat symptoms.

Trust yourself. Take a moment to close your eyes and breathe, and just feel you for a bit in silence. What, who are you? What do you feel like? What does your body feel like? For many of us, we can’t even access that.

So if anyone wants to even try something like this, just start with a deep trusting of your own body and coming into it. And then when you go and you work with plants then it’s deeper. It’s much deeper.

Amánda Efthimiou is the founder of Integra, which designs programs for hospitality retreat centers and wellness facilitators focusing on altered states and transformational experiences. She also serves as a director at El Puente Foundation, which bridges Indigenous wisdom within modern psychedelic applications.

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Artemis Simon told her story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When you push your body to these limits with these kinds of endurance sports, you can die. And that’s what I was doing prior to that one race. I was putting myself into an unsafe zone.

I’m a professional dominatrix. But that’s only one avenue of it. I work with clients on the mind, body, and spirit. The actual title is a somatic practitioner. I also really am into running and traveling. And I like being a mom to my kids and my fur babies.

I didn’t speak, read, or write until I was nine years old. I could make sounds, but the only people who could understand me were my caregivers. Or people that were with me all the time. I probably didn’t know what was going on, until right around middle school. That’s when it really got shined on me that I didn’t talk. I wasn’t able to write, and I dealt with horrific dyslexia.

Every day after school I would ride the bus home with one of my friends. We would always see their mom out running. And I would just be inquisitive about it like, “What’s your mom doing? Why is she running?” I was so curious.

When I went over to the friend’s house to visit for a sleepover, I actually woke up in the morning when the mom went to go running. I asked if I could go with. So, we all went running together. Come to find out, the mom was training for a marathon. She could tell that I took a liking to it, and actually asked if I wanted to do the Jingle Bell Fun Run in Seattle. My friend of course was like, “You’re not gonna go to this race with my mom without me.”

I started with local 5K fun runs, and it was like a whole new world for me. About six months into the running, my speech impediment stopped. I wasn’t slurring my words either anymore. Then spelling gradually started coming in as well. I was able to start reading and writing. I read Green Eggs and Ham for the first time ever from cover to cover. And my parents were so excited, they actually made me green eggs and ham.

I don’t think it dawned on me until my thirties that I was doing a somatic practice and healed myself. Through the movement of my body, I forced my brain to rewire.

I did a lot of track and cross country, which moved into ultrarunning. The first two years of me ultrarunning, I was really hard on myself. Like, How dare I not finish. I need to finish. I would even beat myself up the whole way to get to the finish line, and there would actually not be a whole lot of even congratulating myself at the end. Really not a lot of pleasure or excitement with even like finishing it.

I hate marathons; the marathon distance is my least favorite distance. But for some reason, I would sign up for them and then feel this weird obligation that I had to finish. At the Missoula Marathon, at mile 21, I couldn’t stop vomiting. I don’t know how many people at how many different aid stations said, “You should stop.” I would literally vomit in front of them and be like, “I’m fine.”

My cousin and I both did that particular race, and she ended up lining up with me, I think around mile 23, where I was laying in the grass of somebody’s house vomiting. And she was like, “Hey, I know you. Maybe you should actually stop.”

I perked up and quit vomiting around mile 25. So that last mile I was able to get through, and I was standing at the end. But even when I crossed the line, I was like, That was so stupid. Why didn’t I just stop at mile 21? I’m so dehydrated now. I’m so depleted. I’ve caused more damage to my body than I would have if I just stopped and listened to it.

In my ultrarunning, I definitely needed way more recovery than I was allowing myself. I did cause myself plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendonitis so bad that I was crippled for six months.

During the peak of ultrarunning for me, I developed an eating disorder, where my food started becoming so regimented that it became dysfunctional. I wasn’t receiving the nutrition that I needed to actually do the big miles that I was doing.

I have been on courses where people have died, in the race that I have been in. So that’s really eye-opening, too. I can traumatize my body to a place that it won’t recover. I’m playing in that zone right there with this sport.

I was supposed to do this particular race, the Tillamook 100K. It’s all uphill. So, I trained a lot uphill.

My race got canceled due to the forest fires. So my coach said, “Let’s not let that training go to waste. Why don’t we do this other race?” It was a 50-miler, so it was gonna be shorter than the 100K. So I was like, “OK, I’ll do it.”

This course is extremely hilly. It’s up and down, up and down, up and down. I had only trained uphill, so my quads were just burning on the downhills. I think I probably made it to mile 30. And I went into the aid station, and I was just ripped up. I looked at the guy, and I had the biggest grin on my face, and I said, “I can’t believe how excited I am to DNF right now.” Which is, “Did Not Finish.” This is my first DNF ever in my whole entire running career since age nine. I have always finished my races up until this particular race. When I got into the back of the truck to go back to the starting line, I was thrilled. I felt like I won the lottery.

I was like, “I made the best choice for myself. I’m not running for anybody else but me. And that wasn’t my race. It wasn’t my day to cross that finish line on foot. It was my day to cross that finish line in the truck.”

Really my running started being for me and nobody else. I didn’t need to prove anything to anybody at all. I feel like that’s what a lot of it I was when I was crossing that finish line, dying; I was really doing it for a lot of other people, and not because I wanted to.

I started picking courses that I actually wanted to be on, and I started doing bigger challenges, and I didn’t care if I crossed the finish line. I think that is when I started really discovering my self-worth, because I was able to know where my edge was, and I loved myself enough to stop.

That lesson that I learned in that DNF really translated to so many different things. I was ending relationships before it went too far. I was ending things that were going on in my career. I just quit pushing myself past the limit of no return.

I would catch it before that and just say, No, this needs to end. I saw the red flag. It needs to end.

My last race was a hundred miles around New York City, but I made it to mile 41 and was like, “It’s too hot. I wanna go home and eat ice cream.” So I went home and ate ice cream, and I was happy with my decision.

Artemis Simon lives bi-coastally between Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York. She is a somatic practitioner, professional dominatrix, an ultramarathon runner. You can find her online .

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Tiffany Duong told her story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Everyone else is floating away, looking for sea life, pointing things out to each other, and I’m just stuck to this rock. I’m watching them get smaller and smaller. In my head, I’m just thinking, If you don’t let go of this rock, you will die here alone at the bottom of the ocean in the Galapagos.

I usually go by Tiff. I live in Islamorada in the Florida Keys. I’m an explorer and an ocean storyteller. I used to be a really unhappy lawyer.

It was downtown Los Angeles in a high rise. Concrete jungle, the whole bit. I was just like, Well, I made this decision to go to law school, which means I’m going to be a lawyer. I am a pretty type-A overachieving kind of person. I was doing really well, but, becoming sadder because success just begets more work.

I remember feeling like I had two personas, my work self and my outside-of-work self. I only felt like the real me for those two hours at the end of the day, or the two weekend days, or two weeks of vacation a year. I just felt really disconnected.

I remember sobbing under my desk at least once a week, and muffling my cries so that my coworkers wouldn’t hear it. Then getting back up and being like, Okay, well, got that out. Like a cigarette break. A sob break. And then getting back to work. I was just like a hamster on the wheel, because it wasn’t a real possibility to leave. I didn’t know there was a way to actually work and like it.

There was one day I was alone at the office working at 3:00 AM on some crazy 300-page contract. And I got an email saying, “Oh, come dive the Galapagos.” I was a pretty new scuba diver, and that’s an advanced destination. But I was like, You know what, this sucks. I’m just gonna go for it. So I signed up.

Then I kind of forget about it, and the trip comes up. And I’m like, Oh, OK, Well, I guess I’m going. I know nobody going on the trip. It’s the first time diving off a ship, off a liveaboard, and internationally. So it’s a lot of firsts for me. I am not even interfacing with that because I’m still probably wrapped up in whatever work I left behind.

I got to the Galapagos, and I remember the first night on the water. The ship is sailing out, and I find myself drawn to the bow of the boat. I’m standing there, Titanic-style. There’s wind rushing through my hair, the ship is cutting through the water. It’s bioluminescent, so the waves are glowing, and then there’s dolphins jumping into that, and they’re making it glow more. That glow is mirrored by the stars above. So, it just looks like you’re floating through glowy space. Then there was a volcano in the distance, glowing. It was out of this world, magnificent.

I just started crying. My soul was like, Wow, you can be happy. There’s beauty, and it’s so inspiring. And you can still feel it.

It was a lot of feelings, especially coming off of years of trying not to feel. It was cutting into my soul, and life was flowing again. I didn’t sleep a single night in my cabin. I actually took my comforter and slept on the deck because I didn’t wanna be away from that beauty for even a millisecond.

There was one dive, it’s a drift dive. That is, you have to drift with the current, so you don’t go to a set spot and sit, but the current takes you and you just let it, because it’s way too strong to fight.

I was terrified, because I’d never done a drift dive before; I’d never let the sea just take me. I remember sinking to the bottom of the sea and finding the biggest rock I could find and holding on for dear life. Everyone else is floating away, looking for sea life. And I’m just stuck to this rock, because I was thinking, I’m not gonna trust this. This is too scary.

I’m watching the rest of the group drift away, and in my head I’m thinking, If you don’t let go, you will die. You will die here alone. They’re getting smaller and smaller, and I’m like, OK, it’s now or never. If you don’t let go, you literally will be lost.

I was screaming internally. Finally I was like, Ahhhh. And I let go. I didn’t even push off or anything, I just opened my fingers slightly and the current took me. The moment it did, all of my fears vanished. It felt like I was flying. It was so light and freeing.

Then I remembered, Oh, we’re all actually here because we’re looking for whale sharks, we are looking for this magic animal. So we rode this invisible underwater highway, looking for whale sharks. It was the first time I really felt stoke in my life, and I was filled with excitement and joy.

My life has changed from that moment in every way possible. I was wound up and so in control of that life. I had to learn to let go.

I almost didn’t get back on the plane to Los Angeles. I was like, I need to have this happiness in my life. I can’t keep not feeling. I did ultimately get back on the plane, and as it was landing, I made this vow to myself. I said, Tiff, promise nothing will ever be the same.

Then I was like, OK, I’m gonna hold myself to that.

I went back to work, and within a month, I quit without a plan. I was thinking, We have to figure this out. I just cannot tolerate not feeling alive anymore.

I moved to do a four-month-long diving internship in Islamorada. It’s been five years, and I have not left.

One of the things that has helped me the most in this journey is realizing I’d rather disappoint everyone else than disappoint myself. Holding true to that has guided me into many different evolutions of myself since then, and with each one, I feel like I become more authentic and more confident and more real.

You can’t always control where life’s gonna take you, and if you stop trying to, you might actually end up somewhere better. Just try to figure out your next best step, because from that vantage point, you might see a different path forward, a better one, a truer one. What lies out in the blue might be more magical than what you’re leaving behind.

If it excites you and scares you at the same time, it probably means you should do it. Because that internal voice is trying to guide you back to yourself.

Tiffany Duong is an explorer and storyteller. She left corporate law to campaign for our planet. Now, she writes, speaks, and leads from wild places all around the world. Follow her on and @tiffmakeswaves.

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Lori King told her story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I swam over to the boat, and my coach was like, “You did an amazing job, but you gotta, you gotta get on the boat.” And I was like, “Well, what do you mean?” I’m trying to ask, “What’s going on?” And then, she’s like, “You gotta get on the boat.”

My name is Lori King. I do not have any nicknames, but I have a mermaid name, which is Lorelei. I’m in Long Island, New York, and originally from Pennsylvania. I moved to New York once I met my husband. And, you know, the rest is history.

I’m a mom first, a wife, and a public health researcher. And I swam Division I in college. I had performance anxiety in college. Some people, maybe if they have nerves and they overcome it, they really love the thrill of the competition. That’s not me. My times in practice were where they should be. Then I would get into race day and I would fall apart. I would focus on worrying about my goggles and whether my goggles were gonna fall off or leak. There was definitely pressure I put on myself and expectations that you feel. But I loved it. I just didn’t love the race part.

I had taken time off after college. I really didn’t want to look at the water again. I had gone as far as I could, and it took a lot out of me, physically and emotionally. And I was OK. I was content.

Then, after about seven years, I just felt like I needed to get back in. I wanted to get back in. I was missing something that was a huge part of my life.

So, I started swimming at this YMCA in New York City. This group of swimmers would jump in with me. One of them happened to say to me, “You should come swim open water with us.” Uh, OK, I don’t know what that means, but sure. That’s kind of how it started.

It took several years before I actually competed in my first open water event. Anywhere from 18 to 22 mile races or channel swims, that’s typically what I do. That is the ultra-marathon. I was doing a swim in Tampa Bay. It was my first really long swim. I was told that it was a really good training swim, because there’s not much to look at, and It could be not the best swim as far as the conditions.

The thing that I can’t stand is that whole beginning part, where there’s a ton of swimmers standing around and everybody looks like they could kick your ass. There’s a lot of training that goes into these events. There’s a lot of sacrifice that my family deals with, and I don’t want to let them down. But at some point you just stop being nervous about all of the hoopla of the beginning and you can really just focus on settling in and finding your rhythm. I like the longer stuff because it feels less of a competition and more about why I do it, which is, seeing if I can finish the swim.

When we started, it was kind of gloomy, but I mean, we were also starting at 7:30 in the morning. But that gloom never went away. It was choppy, raining, off and on, and the water was all churned up the entire time. I don’t know how many people total were in the swim, but more people dropped out than finished.

It was just a fight. The whole swim was a fight. But there was an Olympian, Brooke Bennett, who was doing it, and she finished. And it was me and another guy left in the water. I think at the time, if I had known that I was swimming for 12 hours and still not finished, I probably would’ve started breaking down. But in my mind, I don’t know, it could have been eight hours, right on schedule.

You feed every half hour. You’re not allowed to be touched and you can’t hold onto anything. So what they do is they throw a water bottle out to you. Mine’s usually on a rope. Or, if you’re going to eat something solid, they’ll throw it out to you in something.

I had just fed, and the whistle blew, and I thought, that’s weird. I just did a feed, and my kayaker started making his way to the boat, and I was like, “Where’s he going?” So I swam over to the boat and my coach was like, “You gotta get on the boat.” And I thought that because the weather was so crappy that it was an in-water finish. I thought, Oh, maybe we finished, or there’s lightning. And I was like, “Well, what do you mean?”

And then they just grabbed me and pulled me up, and I knew once you’re touched, you’re done. They had told me that there were two juvenile bull sharks that at first came up to the boat, and then they were swimming around me and my kayaker. The boat pilot said, “Now they’re showing fins. They’re exhibiting behavior that the next thing is they’re gonna start just going in.” Because they were literally circling. He just apparently turned white and was like, “She’s done.”

I don’t know why, I just got emotional there. It still bothers me. When I got pulled, and they told me it was sharks, my first reaction was, “So I can’t get back in?” I was three miles from the finish. So I was at mile 21 of 24.

The next day I went to breakfast by myself. I told my husband and my coach, “I just wanna be by myself”. I was a mess. It was utter disappointment.

I really questioned whether I should have gotten pulled. I’ve been stung by a Portuguese man o’ war and it’s a terrible, horrible feeling. But I could survive that. The sea life doesn’t scare me, but being derailed because of sea life scares me. Not being able to be in control of a situation scares me. If it were up to me—and this sounds so reckless, and as a mom, too—I probably would’ve tried to chance it.

My friend shared with me a part of a poem by Rilke. It says, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. No feeling is final, just keep going.”

I feel like that’s kind of how my open water swim experiences are. But I would reverse it. The terror always comes to me first. But to get to the beauty part, I have to experience that terror and overcome it.

The terror is completely worth it, and there’s always a lesson. The next swim I might do something slightly different that kind of changes things so there’s slightly less fear, but it’s still there.

Everything that you worry about, the feeling, the finish, the achievement. When you have it, you want that again. I would say that’s kind of what helps me through it.

I’m going to do what we set out to do and hope for the best.

Lori King is an open water swimmer, a mother, a wife, and a public health researcher from New York. You can learn more about her at lorikingswimming.com.

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Sheri Tingey told her story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Then I got really sick. I couldn’t crawl across the floor. And I just kept thinking, Is this my life? I will never design again. All of this life was over.

I am here in Mancos, Colorado. It’s one of those one stoplight towns when you drive through, like, Oh, did I pass this place? It’s a very eclectic mix of people.

I was sewing by five. By about the second grade, I got the hand me downs, and oh my God, I hated them. I would just take scissors and chop it all up, and I’d walk out the door. By about the fifth grade, I was making all of my clothing.

As a young child, I had terrible tourettes. I was dyslexic. I was all of these things. But that also gave me my window that I created through other ways. For me, it was fabrics and the outdoors. That became my lifelong love.

I fell in love with skiing and moved to Jackson Hole. I was a horrible waitress. I couldn’t do any of those things, and I started making ski clothing, just because I wanted something to wear, and I hated what was out there. That really started my first business. It just absolutely lit every candle that mattered to me.

During that time, I had also discovered kayaking. The minute I got it in a boat it was like, You’re home, girl. This, this is you, this is it. It’s everything that I had ever loved about the water. So I would spend the winter skiing and the summers kayaking. I would be on the first tram and would ski until three in the afternoon, and I would sew until midnight. In the summer, it was the same. I was kayaking all day. I ran 24-7. I never knew how to shut off those things.

Jackson Hole in those days was a real hotbed of outdoor design. I was probably the first one out there that was making really practical clothing. Doug Tompkins was there, John Simms from Simms Fishing. Yvon Chouinard lived there; he had the climbing business and then he started the clothing.

Teton Mountaineering was the main mountaineering shop there in Jackson. I remember so distinctly, they had a celebration when this Patagonia catalog came out. I remember, I looked at it and a couple other people that were small little guys like me looked at it, and we went, We’re dead. This is it.

And it did happen that way. All of a sudden Patagonia went, and here came the North Face, and here came the others. And they got bigger and bigger and bolder, and all the little guys disappeared.

Then I got really sick. I’d had this flu, maybe two and a half weeks. I thought, I’m okay. And [my partner] Ralph and I went out to climb a thing called Irene’s Arete in the Tetons.

It’s about a 4,000-foot ascent up to the base of the climb, and then a 13-pitch climb. And that’s when the viral pneumonia came in. The next day, I was down, and I was down for two and a half months. Then the chronic fatigue came in.

I mean, I was on my hands and knees. It also had this component of your brain kind of going out the window. It was just this terrifying, horrifying thing and nobody could help me. I go to doctors and they just say, “Well, go home and take an aspirin, because tests don’t show anything.” Within two months, I had to give up my business and skiing and boating and all these things. It all just left.

[My son] Thor was two at the time. I had nobody to watch him. I’d just lay on the floor, and he’d crawl over me. And I just kept thinking, Is this my life?

The chronic fatigue would ebb and flow and ebb and flow. You’d have years where you do work better and years where you just didn’t function. You wish you were dead, but you’re not gonna die from it.

Then we moved to Alaska. We had this good size dog team, which I could do because I could control the amount of energy I put out. Hop in the sled and the dogs take you.

Clothing was really junky for mushers. I could make something better. But I had to ask, Do I have the energy? When I was first sick, I couldn’t sew for 15 minutes. I would be so exhausted. Anybody that has ever dealt with chronic fatigue, knows if you either overdo yourself physically or mentally, you’ll crash, and you can crash for a day, or weeks, or months. Ten years in, that was probably the hardest thing I ever did, retraining myself how to recreate without exhausting myself, because it went so against everything in my personality. Whether it was skiing or kayaking or working on an art project, it was 24-7 until I crashed.

It was like, No, you’re gonna sew for 15 minutes and then you’re gonna walk away. Now you’re gonna sew for 30 minutes, you’re gonna walk away. You need to put it away at night and pick it up again.

Dr. Denton at Alaska Alternative Medicine Center saved my life. She said, “You were 17 years getting in here, plan on at least 12 getting out, because you can’t go out too fast. You’ll fall down.” She was right. And my energy came back.

Within a year of that, Thor walked through the door with this dead boat from these trips that he’d done. And he asked me, “Can you build me a boat?”
Pack rafts are boats designed to fit into a backpack. Building a pack raft is much closer to making clothing than it is to making boats. It really is a sewing technology.

You talk about times in your life when light bulbs go off. It was like, This is everything that I’ve ever cared about. All that I thought I had lost, and all that I thought was useless, just absolutely came and jumped in the basket. It was like the door just opened and said, “Walk.”

I could never have run or become Alpacka had I not done that. I needed those years to retool myself to do what eventually came out to be that this is what you’re gonna do, girl.

I used to run the whole business, and thankfully now I don’t have to. I just design boats. I’m back in that element that I really care about, that it all comes down to, How good of a boat can you make? Not how beautiful a boat, but what’s the best boat you can come up with? And that’s way more interesting to my soul and to how I work.

I am so blessed to have had that second chance. If that had come ten years earlier, I would have still been too sick to do anything about it. And this time around is so much more enjoyable than the first time.

Sheri Tingey is the founder and head designer of Alpacka Rafts. She started the company at age 50 with her son Thor. You can learn more about her work at .

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Ty Duckett told his story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was very insecure about my body and how it presents. So I just have one leg, and I stand up for a half a second, and everybody goes nuts. I’m like, What’s going on? What’s happening? The volunteer guy paddling me back out says, “Dude, nobody’s done that. Fifteen years and nobody’s done that before.”

I’m originally from Philadelphia. I am in Los Angeles, California right now. I moved out here about eight years ago. It’s funny, because I’ll tell folks back home in Philly, I’m rowing, I’m surfing, I’m rock climbing. They’re like, “What the heck happened to you?” But it’s amazing.

Prior to surfing and rock climbing, the only surfing I did was on the couch. I tried all this stuff after almost dying.

I had a major motor vehicle accident. I was on my motorcycle, I didn’t even have time to look and see what was about to hit me. My helmet just filled up with light, and then I woke up in an ambulance.

I’m looking around at the EMTs and I’m like, What just happened? What’s going on? And at first they didn’t answer me. They look at each other with this look you never want any healthcare professional to have. Then when they answer me, they say, “Your leg is mangled.”

I woke up in the ICU, and my bed was surrounded by surgeons, And, they said, “We’re going to have to amputate.”

As a motorcycle rider, my wife realized that I needed something to replace that. She found this organization called Life Rolls On. And we go, and I go surfing.

How I would be received was one of my biggest fears. I’m somebody that lives a lot in my mind, and I’m realizing that can be a scary place if you let it be. So I surfed without my prosthetic on, and I stood up for a half a second, and everybody went nuts. The volunteers were like, “Whoa, nobody’s done that in a while. That was pretty cool.” I didn’t think anything of it.

We came back and we sat down in our little area, just enjoying the beach, watching other people surf. But I noticed people kept coming up saying, “Good job.” And I’m thinking, This is like hours later, you guys just got here, this happened at 9:00 AM. What’s happening? Then one lady tells me that over at the booth, my pictures are all over the place. There was a photographer there that caught some shots of me surfing. I go over and then there’s these awesome shots. These professional surfers from Hurley are there and they’re saying, “Dude, this is amazing.”

It was the acceptance that I felt. It was the community that I felt like I just joined. It was the congratulations on something physical that I did. I have so many issues physically, and I have issues mentally because of my physical issues. So it was like, Whoa, I just did this physical thing and people are literally patting me on the back about it. I’m thinking, Whoa, if professional surfers are saying this is pretty dope, then maybe I’ve got something here.

Throughout my day when I’m walking with my prosthetic, or in a wheelchair, or on crutches, I always feel constricted and restricted. In the water, you just feel free, you feel weightless, you feel like you’re doing things that you just can’t do on land.

So I’ve been surfing, and picking it up well enough to win the national championship for the USA. That earned me a spot on Team USA for paralympic surfing.

Sometimes you need to be vulnerable. I have a buddy who has an organization called Pushing for Independence. He takes people who are disabled paddle boarding. I see him loading up his truck himself. He has some help, but he does a lot on his own, in his wheelchair. I know that he has a little daughter. So we had a moment where it was just me and him chatting, and that’s when I shared how I was nervous about becoming a dad. He said, “Dude, what are you nervous about?”

I said, “We’re both disabled, it’s tough to get around. I just feel like as soon as he’s able to walk, he’s going to be walking faster than me, and I won’t be able to catch him.” God forbid, he goes somewhere he’s not supposed to, and I can’t get him in time. It’s my biggest fear, my whole job is to protect this kid. Luckily, I had this friend to be vulnerable with, and he said, “Dude, I’m in a wheelchair. If my daughter goes behind the couch, I can’t get her, she’s just behind the couch.” In an instant I felt like, OK, I can do this.

And it did pan out well. I took my son surfing and we caught our first wave at this place called Inkwell in Santa Monica. He grabbed onto my back, and wrapped his arms around my neck. He was nervous too, but he trusted me and he went outside his comfort zone, and we caught a little baby wave. I absolutely cannot wait until we can paddle out together.

The vulnerability with my son and not thinking that I could do what I need to do for him, and also the body vulnerability and the image vulnerability, those two moments really propelled me in my life to have some strength to take care of two people, myself and my son. It’s funny, in that moment of being scared and vulnerable, I was able to not be afraid by saying that I was, acknowledging that and trying to figure out what that’s all about. Life is showing me that I am enough and I am strong enough.

We have to start accepting our entire selves. We have to accept everything that’s going on with us, because we can’t keep fighting ourselves. We can’t keep having this internal battle with ourselves, before we even step out of the house.

My most unlikely ally was other people. That’s why I implore people to get support, to go to therapy, to find community, to find like-minded individuals, to find some unlike-minded individuals to maybe give you a different perspective.

Rapper Nipsey Hustle said, “To kill fear, you’ve got to do something that you fear every day.” I would just encourage that, and then you’ll see how strong you really are and how fearless you can truly be.

Ty Duckett is a West Philadelphia native and Los Angeles transplant. He’s an adaptive rock climber, rower, and surfer. In 2021, he earned a spot on Team USA for para surfing. You can follow him on Instagram .

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