The Answer to Everything *really was* 42

Hello loves,

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First, a content warning: I'm gonna briefly describe my adolescent trauma, and my trauma healing. Check to make sure you're resourced before continuing. Love you.
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It's my last day of age 42, and I want to (finally) share how that punchline was my compass to sanity this year.

If you're a nerd from my generation, you know the reference from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The answer to life, the universe, and everything is.... 42.

When my people turn 42, it is customary in our culture to ask if they finally know The Answer.

I figured it out last summer, but it it was too painful to talk about at the time.

Right now, I'm preparing for my re-emergence back into the public professional world. I'm warming up my voice again, warming up my coaching, traveling, connecting, and calling in a chosen family of collaborators to create with. (I even have an extraordinary new event space to work with — more on that later.) It's all still happening behind the scenes, but it is very much alive.

It has been four years since I closed down my community coaching business and switched to full-time healing. Four raw and humbling, excruciating, extraordinary years. Four years of burnout recovery, neurodivergent identity integration, lifestyle design, and the absolute shitshow of a kicker: trauma healing work at a level I didn't know was needed or possible.

On my 42nd birthday last year, I was in a cabin in the woods, hiding in redwoods, trying to pull myself out of a multi-week CPTSD emotional flashback. I had tested out working again on a short-term tech project and the alarm bells that shot out from my nervous system were spectacular. The response was so extreme that it was obvious to me that it was not about the project.

It was how I felt when I was fourteen and sμicidle, trapped in the role of primary caretaker to an intensely controlling terminally ill father, who was refusing to let me move in with my mother, after she had left our household for her own sanity.

There was no memory in the flashback. No story. Just a full-body terrified belief that I was trapped again, without a path to survival. It felt real and present and immediate and justified.

It was the first time I could see clearly that I was re-experiencing my adolescent trauma.

And that I had spent an enormous amount of my life reckoning with this trauma response pattern, without realizing that's what it was. I was either suffering within it, or I was contorting myself and all of my decisions to do anything possible to avoid it.

I don't think I would have found it if i hadn't integrated burnout recovery and neurodivergent identity beforehand. 20 years of talk therapy hadn't budged it. The thing that helped me parse it out was clarity on what a healthy neurodivergent person actually looks like. So much of my uniqueness was covered by that lens – relieving me of trying to "fix" myself in those areas. But this pattern wasn't responding to that acceptance, and it kept taking me out.

So drawing from IFS (parts work), I started holding conversations with that emotional state... exploring it with psycədelics and EMDR, negotiating with it, and realizing exactly how much of my life, I've been trapped in a haunted house theater set in my mind.

The timing was perfect for my generation's joke to hand me The Answer.

The answer to my life, to my experience of the universe, to everything is obviously.... 42.

I'm 42.

I'm not 14.
I'm 42.
I'm not 14.
I'm 42.

I'm 42. I'm safe and loved. I'm resourced and capable. I have full agency over my life. I am free.

I'm 42. I'm 42. It was a mantra. I followed it everywhere it took me.

Today I get to release it, so I can move into 43, and get this magic back on stage. It got me to safety and gave me my freedom back.

Thank you for the joke, my friends. It gave me my life back.

Love you,
Sarah