A JOURNEY OF GRIT, GROWTH, and GRACE
THE BERBLY PROJECT
Following Life’s Branches Back to Their Roots
The tree was barely taller than my forearm the day I carried it home.
To call it a tree was probably a bit of an overreach. It was delicately shaped and clumsily supported by a trunk so thin it could moonlight as a twig. Its branches were somehow even more delicate, still. Arranged so sparsely it seemed as if they were embarrassed to even be calling themselves branches at all.
The needles were spaced so dramatically, it seemed the seedling hadn’t yet decided whether it intended to grow up and become a real tree one day.
It was what my small donation to my elementary school’s Earth Day event had earned me.
And I loved it the way some people fall for enormous red flags:
Immediately and completely.
When my dad asked where I wanted it planted in the yard, the answer escaped my mouth without so much as a stutter:
“Outside my bedroom window.”
I’d spent hours at that window as a kid. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t blindly believe in the seedling more than was probably rational or even healthy for a kid my age.
But even then, I knew one thing with complete certainty:
if this not-so-remarkable twig ever actually managed to impersonate a real tree one day…
I wanted to see it happen.
I wanted to watch it grow.
Every morning before school. Every evening before bed.
Every thunderstorm, every snowfall…
Every summer evening when the sun stayed out just a little bit longer than it was supposed to.So that’s exactly where we planted it.
At the time, it felt like the perfect spot. The tree was so perfectly visible from my bedroom window, which sat just on the other side of it. It was separated from me by only a handful of feet and one stubborn pane of glass.
I watched birds during warmer months choose the branches they trusted enough to build on.
I watched snow in the winter settle onto needles that looked far too fragile to carry its weight, somehow both unprotected and seemingly unbothered in the same heartbeat.
I couldn’t begin to count the number of times over the years I’d watched the wind tear through the yard before rain or snow could even make its entrance. Like sounding an alarm for whatever happened to be standing in the storm’s path.
Sometimes it’d arrive suspiciously quietly, as if to tiptoe across the tree’s branches like someone who’d wandered into a stranger’s kitchen through an unlocked door in the middle of the night, suddenly invested in remaining unnoticed… terrified that they might get caught.
I’d sometimes watch those storms bend several of that tree’s thin and deceptively fragile-looking branches so far backward, I was damn near certain they’d have no choice but to break clean off.
But they never did.
I’d been so distracted by a miscalculation I mistook for certainty—that the branches would break under the weight of the storm they were still inside of—that I never stepped back to admire the strength it must’ve taken for them to get that far in the first place.
They were resilient as hell.
I’d sit by that window frequently and just…watch.
I couldn’t always tell whether the tree had been pulled into the ring of a losing battle. Like a boxer wiping blood from their face with the backs of their wrists as they retreat into the corner of the ring reserved for them. As though the evidence of the next blow couldn’t exist until after the punch had already landed.
There was something almost unbearable about that space between knowing another hit was coming and having no evidence yet of what it would do.
But without fail, every time the storms decided to roll through,
the tree would put up a hell of a fight.
Sometimes, strength under pressure is exactly the point. A chance to witness it in motion. See where it works and where it breaks down. To understand its limits, its weaknesses, and where its boundaries begin and end, until you can use your fingers to trace the edges, even with your eyes closed.
If I pay close enough attention, I can observe the mechanics until I understand the framework. So that the next time I find myself standing inside of something I once believed would break me, I already know something I didn’t know before:
Once I began observing the architecture of choice,
I started to learn something tremendously valuable:How to create my own options.
I don’t remember anything changing.
I just woke up one day and suddenly realized that, somewhere along the way…
falling apart stopped being my only exit.You see, once I understood that failure is inescapable, I learned pretty quickly how to convert it into something more useful than self-condemnation.
I began to use it to teach myself how to adapt.
I began treating failure as a data point rather than as a dead end.My failure became something that required analysis.
Something that needed to be taken apart and then put back together again four different ways because I stubbornly believe there’s always more than only one way to understand what went wrong.I am my father’s daughter, after all.
Information creates understanding.
Understanding creates choice…
And choice is one of the most powerful things
a person can possess.
Because choice creates runway.
Optionality.
Agency that may otherwise be stripped away.
I don’t remember the exact day I began to call the seedling a tree.
And I think that’s what makes gradual change feel like a stranger at times. Like someone who quietly enters a room while your back is turned and somehow feels familiar in a peculiar way, one you can’t quite put your finger on before you even begin to ask yourself if you ever remember being introduced.
When you stand beside something long enough, transformation is difficult to spot. Like your vantage point changing after growing an inch taller, not even realizing the ground is a little farther away now. And then, before long, you keep calling something by its old name long after it’s begun becoming something else.
I think it’s because we sometimes remember the evidence in fragments.
But whether by choice or by circumstance, the distance required to recognize accumulation is rarely available while the change itself is still happening. As though becoming something different happens too close to us to be fully understood while we’re still inside of it.
As if to be denied the space necessary to adequately digest the inevitability of the change itself.
I remember the day I finally noticed.
The day I looked up and found an enormous pine tree, standing in the exact same spot the seedling had once been planted.
Its branches climbed far above the roofline, surpassing it and stretching outward until they seemed intent on taking possession of whatever space the sky was willing to surrender. Its shade spilled across the yard in a dense, cool blanket. So complete that if you closed your eyes while you were beneath it, you might have believed the sun had been blown out as abruptly as a birthday candle by someone who’d just desperately cast a wish so silent, not even God himself could hear the request.
The limbs that stuck out from all sides of its trunk bore needles with them loyal to the branches they still clung to and seemingly unthreatening when you’d stay far enough away.
They brushed parts of the sky I’d once been certain belonged only to birds.
It was unreal, how gargantuan the seedling had grown.
I scrambled to reach backwards in time, trying desperately to locate the version of myself who’d stopped calling it a seedling and begun calling it a tree. But memory failed me.
What had started as something as small and as vulnerable as the little girl who’d once found the seedling’s roots a home…
had become the botanical equivalent of something that spent years mainlining Miracle-Gro and doing steroids behind the garage when no one was looking.
Nobody really thought the seedling would amount to much. But nobody needed to.
Sure, it was underestimated. But that never stopped it from growing anyway. It just… kept becoming what it was always going to become, surrounded by trees that made its own smallness impossible to ignore.
The seedling didn’t give a damn about what anybody believed it could or couldn’t become.
And then, in what felt like no time at all,
it had somehow become the largest tree in the yard.It had done exactly what everyone doubted it could do…
it grew.
It grew while nobody was even looking in its direction.
Well, nobody except me.
And once it knew what it could do…
It didn’t want to stop.
Decades after burying those roots in the ground, I was standing in that very same yard the tree was first planted in, listening to my dad—judge, jury, and executioner—deliver a verdict with a kind of quiet certainty. A kind of confidence that shows up in a man who’s already decided…
“The tree needs to come down.”
…and in as little as six words,
the fate of that once-seedling-turned-tree had been sealed.It had been decided. And the decision could not have been more final.
I was in disbelief as I glanced over in the tree’s direction, my eyes instinctively finding the roofline of the house.
There it was, right in the same place it’d always been standing. Rooted firmly in the ground, sturdy as hell…
for nearly three decades.
The enormous pine was still looming over it, leaving all of us filled with the uncertainty of whether it was serving the house as protection or as a threat. And that kind of ambiguity, the kind the tree was quietly creating… was the exact reason it needed to go.
It was the exact risk my dad had decided he wasn’t willing to take.
The pine tree shielded nearly a third of my childhood home from the rest of the world, almost as though to protect memories from my childhood and the time I’d spent staring out my bedroom window, witnessing the tree over the course of several years as it grew.
My old bedroom had nearly disappeared behind the tree’s voluminous branches, as if swallowed up from view of the rest of the world. As if it were a secret the tree were keeping.
The tree’s branches had become uncomfortably sticky with sap. The scent of pine was almost overwhelming, like the tree were wearing fragrance that carried nostalgia and memories of Christmas, tricking you into getting closer to it.
But the pine needles had earned their name,
and I knew better than to get close enough for that tree to draw blood.
In time, the tree’s relentless growth made it seem as though the side of the house were slowly being consumed by its hungry branches, swallowed whole in one very large, uncomfortable gulp. Like trying to swallow pills without water.
As the tree continued its aggressive climb into the sky, the house seemed to shrink beneath it until it looked less like something the tree had been planted beside, and more like a nest clumsily perched among several of its branches.
And there he was: my dad.
Casually leaning against the back of his fire-engine-red truck.
I stood there watching the life of that once-defenseless seedling flash before my very eyes.
Years packed into seconds. Trying to understand how something I had spent so long watching grow had somehow reached the moment where the very thing that proved its survival had become grounds for its own execution.
It was a kind of crossroads, of sorts.
And the most bothersome part about it…
was that I’d never even seen it coming.
My dad couldn’t see the roots any better than I could from my bedroom window. He just knew they were there. He knew enough about trees to know that what threatened the house was never the part reaching for the sky.
It was the part moving underground. Growing slowly…quietly.
The part that was the least obvious because it was the part none of us could see.
If those roots were anything like what we could see above ground, even a tree amateur could take a stab at what was happening inside the earth without ever breaking the dirt with a shovel.
The roots hadn’t broken through the foundation of the house yet.
There was no dramatic crack splitting random walls in two.
And that was precisely the point.By the time the damage would’ve become visible, the roots would already have done the work.
The roots were quiet. But quiet did not mean harmless.
Every day they went unaddressed, they grew stronger beneath the house, like a threat that had lost its voice.
As a little girl, I’d asked for growth, but I never thought to ask whether the place I’d chosen for it could survive the kind of growth the seedling had in mind.
I quickly learned my first mistake was using the other trees in the yard as a baseline measurement.
Because this was no ordinary tree.
Lucky for my dad, by then I was an adult, which spared him from an apology to a teary-eyed little girl who’d once been excited to watch it grow.
Children mistake what’s visible for what matters.
Adults do it a lot of the time, too.The more life I’ve lived, the more I’ve found myself drawn to the parts nobody’s looking at:
The roots beneath the tree. The story beneath the story.
The fear beneath the anger. The grief beneath the silence.The belief beneath the decision.
Not because I’m hunting in search of darkness, or because I think something’s always wrong.
But because the roots are the architecture—they hold up everything we think we already understand.
Branches tell you what something became.
But the roots tell you why.
Eventually I stopped watching the world through my bedroom window and started seeing it the way my father had.
That’s not to say I stopped noticing the branches. They never became less important to me. Not even close.
I just got less willing to walk away from them without understanding them first.
That isn’t to say I’m returning to the same places hoping the answers have changed.
It’s about returning with better questions.
Writing slows life down long enough to examine it. To analyze the hell out of it. It began as a place to put thoughts that had become too heavy to carry, and then, somewhere along the journey, stopped feeling temporary.
It became the place I go to make sense of the things too important to forget and too unfinished to explain.
A place where loose threads get followed instead of ignored.
Where hard questions are allowed to remain unanswered for as long as they need to.
Where discomfort isn’t treated as a reason to stop digging, but as evidence that I may finally be getting close to the roots.
Every story here starts with something ordinary.
A conversation. A race. A financial decision. A diagnosis. A memory.Most end somewhere I didn’t expect—grief, family, resilience, or a moment that meant nothing at all until years later.
Every one of them begins with something visible, just like a seedling outside a little girl’s window.Almost none of them end there.
Roots are quiet. They grow patiently beneath the surface. Waiting for someone to come along who’s willing to start digging.
So that’s what I do here… I dig.
And in my experience,
…the roots are always where the real story begins.
welcome to
THE BERBLY PROJECT