Let me set the stage: it was January, and the world was a snowy mess—Bozeman winters pull no punches. My hair froze one morning hauling firewood, which now feels poetic in hindsight because, by March, my entire life followed suit. Frozen, hollow, snapped clean into unrecognizable pieces. This is the story of the year everything fell apart and, somehow, the uneven way I stitched it back together.

The Avalanche Moment: When It All Comes Tumbling Down

It started, as most chaotic chapters do, with a cocktail of bad decisions and untimely circumstances. My six-year relationship fizzled out with all the romantic fervor of damp matches. Our last argument? A debate over whether the kitchen hutch qualified as furniture or “an extension of the house” (his case for keeping it). Spoiler: the hutch stayed, and I left.

Losing him meant losing the version of a future I’d been clutching too tightly—weekends at farmer’s markets, hypothetical kids playing tag in the yard, arguments over how early was “too early” to put up Christmas lights. But what hit harder was how a breakup can suddenly leave you untethered, drifting somewhere between who you were in the relationship and who you’re supposed to become after it. And isn’t it just my luck that life doesn’t believe in one catastrophe at a time?

April brought the kind of phone call everyone dreads. My parents, aging like the sturdy yet weathered oak trees they are, decided they could no longer keep the ranch running. They needed to sell. We’d spent years riding across those pastures, corralling stubborn horses and laughing past exhaustion while the Montana sunset turned the fields golden. Selling that place felt like erasing part of myself, like I’d lose the last patch of solid ground beneath me during a year when I desperately needed stability.

Building From Ashes (and Eating a Lot of Pizza)

Here’s the thing about life: you can cry into your sweater for only so long before your friends barge in with emergency takeout and some choice words about “pulling your boots out of the mud.” My friend Carly said exactly that as she handed me a buffalo chicken pizza that I didn’t want but inhaled anyway. (Pro tip: never dismiss the healing power of melted cheese.)

Her unsolicited advice? “Start small. Figure out what makes you feel you. Everything else will follow.”

So, I did. I edited my life like you edit a sloppy first draft—strike through the unnecessary sentences, rework the parts that ramble, and keep only what feels true. I fled to the places that always steady me: the quiet trails just outside Missoula, where pine trees murmur against the wind and your only company is the occasional elk. I began writing poetry again, raw and unsorted, scribbled in notebooks while sitting cross-legged on boulders by icy rivers. And I bought myself a single stupidly expensive houseplant to feel like I could nurture something without overwhelming responsibility. (Its name is Harold, and yes, we’re still doing fine. Thanks for asking.)

Finding Joy in Really Unlikely Places

When you’re starting over, the milestones of growth often feel microscopic, like learning to walk again after falling on metaphorical ice too many times. Oddly enough, my first real “win” happened when I tried something totally out of character: learning to salsa.

You could not find a less likely candidate for dance classes than Montana girl Willow Fitzgerald. I could ride a horse, sure, but my moves at weddings usually involved swaying to Fleetwood Mac with precisely zero rhythm. Yet, salsa offered something I desperately craved—a reason to get out of my own way. To stumble, laugh at myself, and realize mistakes don’t matter nearly as much as showing up at all.

For the uncoordinated among us, dancing means giving up the need for control—even if you step on your partner’s foot twice in a row (guilty). But here’s the upside: when you stop trying to be perfect, you free yourself up to enjoy the ride. I found my footing, both on and off the dance floor, one spin at a time.

What I Learned About Picking Up the Pieces

Some lessons only reveal themselves when you’re knee-deep in the chaos. In hindsight, here are my hard-won truths about rebuilding a life from scratch:

  • Metaphorical Renovation Takes Work: You get no blueprint for what life should look like post-breakup, career shakeup, or existential ranch crisis. So, you pick your favorite hammer and start rebuilding. Maybe you discover that salsa dancing or adopting a rescue dog (I’m looking at you, Rufus) is the doorframe you didn’t know you needed.

  • The Wild Mends Us: In moments of solitude, I remembered why I’ve always loved Montana. The mountains don’t apologize for what they’ve endured; rockslides scar their faces, fires raze their forests, yet every spring, wildflowers claw through the ash. There’s something impossibly tender about being in that kind of quiet, where you remember the strength in your own roots.

  • Relationships Should Compliment, Not Complete You: This one was brutal to face, but it’s true. You can love someone and still lose yourself, build a life together and forget you’re allowed separate foundations. Recovering from the breakup meant rediscovering all the parts of me that didn’t depend on someone else’s approval—who knew I liked my hair short and didn’t actually care about skiing?

And Then, You Move On

Eventually, the cruel irony of heartbreak is that it doesn’t kill you, even when it feels like it might. You struggle through messy moments: eating peanut butter out of the jar because you’re too tired to cook, choosing to keep the houseplant alive because even small victories matter, realizing two weeks too late that the dance teacher was maybe flirting with you.

Then, little by little, your new “normal” sneaks its way in. Suddenly, your small apartment feels like home. You understand how to make coffee exactly the way you like it. You laugh at your own jokes again. And one day, without any grand realization, you notice you feel lighter, freer.

Here’s the secret: when everything in your life falls apart, you don’t have to put it back together the same way. Or at all. Sometimes, the pieces lay there for a while, and that’s okay, too.

What I know for sure is this: the valleys don’t last forever. Even in the hardest years, you get sparks of joy that keep you going one imperfect salsa step at a time.

So here’s to the dusted-off cowgirls, the reluctant dancers, and all of us learning to build something new after life gives us the chance. I hope you’re cheering yourself on. You deserve it.