I cleared out the garage to make room for new life.
Leo and Orion arrived in a large dog carrier—two baby goats gifted by a friend with an eighty-goat dairy in Cumberland, Wisconsin. I drove them thirty miles home on Highway 46, where they huddled in the far corner of the carrier, wide-eyed and wary.
Their new residence: a metal pole shed with a dirt floor and two south-facing windows. It shared a view with my kitchen door. I thought of it as homey. They did not. I’m pretty sure a garage and a wire enclosure weren’t on their bucket list. From the start, they saw the place as temporary. A prison, really. And they made mental notes of every security weakness they could exploit for a potential escape.
Their sense of captivity lasted about four days—until they realized I was the one delivering the milk.
Twice a day, I showed up. They were ready. The twin kids would climb over each other to reach the bottles. A three-minute duet of staccato sucking noises followed. Whoever finished first would shove the other aside and latch onto the second bottle to get the drizzle of remaining milk. And slowly, they began to trust me. Leo, who had wanted nothing to do with me on day one, started climbing into my lap and gazing into my eyes like he’d known me forever.
This was a few years after a traumatic brain injury—an injury I worked hard to overcome. At the time, I was insistent that it wouldn’t derail what was then a new career as a therapist. I was used to pushing through. Twelve-hour workdays gave me the illusion that I could outwork the damage. That it was just another obstacle to clear.
Then in 2012, I was diagnosed with melanoma.
A general surgeon told me I’d need a second surgery with an oncology specialist. More tissue would need to be removed—including surrounding lymph nodes—to make sure we got it all. A biopsy would follow to check if the cancer had spread.
I scheduled the surgery. But I wasn’t convinced.
For a while, I flipped between “good elements” and “bad elements.” After the one-two punch of brain injury and cancer, I gave “cancer” a dark persona: sinister, gravelly, shoving aside the sunlit breezes and baby-bird chirping I loved so much. I wanted to fight back.
And then I paused. A thought drifted in: what if this wasn’t something to fight?
Maybe going after every last cancer cell would be missing the point. Maybe the cancer was a message—something I needed to listen to. Maybe the healing would come not from action, but from stillness.
I cancelled the surgery and the lymph node biopsy. I sensed that what I really needed was rest. I decided to get out of my body’s way and let it do what it knew how to do. I hoped, deeply, that it knew what it was doing.
I also began to look inward. I read about the Type C personality—one shaped around coping by not coping. People who don’t share their feelings, who put others first, who repress their needs.
That description felt uncomfortably accurate.
I loved the work of attuning to others and helping them discover their own wisdom. I also loved the way that work let me avoid the things in me that didn’t feel good. Vulnerability, uncertainty, and emotional discomfort weren’t welcome guests. While I often prescribed emotional openness to my clients, I rarely gave myself the same medicine.
So I stepped back. I referred my clients to other therapists and turned inward. Sort of. Not wanting to hand control over to the elements, I did what you do when you’re not quite ready to get quiet: I got goats.
And in doing so, I began to rewrite my story without even realizing it.
During the consult with the oncology surgeon, a friend asked what would happen if I didn’t have the surgery.
“The cancer will come back,” the surgeon said.
Not could. Not even would. Will.
That word stuck with me. I felt the absence of context. No “if,” no “unless,” no consideration for the healing I was already trying to cultivate. I wanted to live in a different story. One where “will” softened into “could,” and maybe even into “won’t.”
The goats helped me live in that new story.
Each day I fed them, and each day they seemed to love me more. The garage shifted. It stopped being a prison and became a home. They stopped planning to leave. I stopped trying to escape myself.
Time passed. Trust returned. The story, like the garage, softened.
Eventually, it became the story of someone who chose to live just slightly more within their own range. Someone who fed goats twice a day and rewrote her fear into something gentler. Someone who didn’t have cancer—not in that moment, not in that morning, not in the soft look Orion gave me after finishing his bottle.
I imagined myself as someone who doesn’t have cancer.
And Orion, standing beside me in the dusty garage light, imagined it too.