The surgeon, who for some reason felt the need to tell me she was originally from Kentucky, leaned down as I lay on the operating table in a pretty comfortable stupor and asked: “Do you make a habit of holding things inside?”

“I do,” I said.

“Everything you think creates a physiological reaction in your body. Internal pain always comes out. Always,” she said.

Later, I understood that to be her cryptic way of telling me that there are many ways a person can die and still go on living. But one summer day, it might catch up to you and put your body at the centre of a rebellion so intense that you’ve only got 24 hours to live.

I have thought about that brief conversation so often over the years. About how what you don’t let out traps you. How you don’t bury feelings or secrets. They bury you.

I thought back to that summer afternoon in 2012 in the operating room — high on the drug that killed Michael Jackson — again on Monday morning. As we rolled through the sunny countryside bound for the gorgeous wilderness of the Bruce Trail, we were listening to podcasts, pausing them occasionally, to discuss the finer points.

Liz Gilbert was talking about the transformational power of rock bottom. And we paused to wonder aloud what our rock bottoms have been. 

“I almost died,” I said. “I don’t think you get more rock bottom than that.”

Even now it seems strange to say. Like it was all a dream. A scene I watched unfold from above.

Somehow, in the midst of what had looked like having everything — the career, the home, the family — I had arrived at my own longing for myself and fell, face-first, into the truth of my existence. It wasn’t a stumble. It was a collapse. I fell all the way to the bottom and landed on my own life.

Unknowingly, my body’s shutdown had started a few weeks before, as I worked up the courage to come out to my husband. That moment alone nearly killed us both. But I still had to tell family. And our kids.

The rest is a story I will never fully tell. out of love and respect for them. And because, even now, I can still barely touch those memories. No amount of therapy has yet extinguished the guilt I still feel for the pain of others brought on by telling a truth that tore through the fabric of our family tike a wildfire. It’s lessened over time, but I know it still lives in me like a splinter under the skin.

The difference is that now, I see that there is another side to it. A sacred side. Where I feel a kind of reverence for the moment everything I thought I knew about myself cracked open. And gratitude for everything that came after.

But on that July day, rock bottom centred around that blurry, nauseous afternoon strapped to the operating table at London Health Sciences Centre. My body was giving up. It had finally called my bluff.

I accepted then what I see now as something the core of me had always known and fought against. That I couldn’t go on doing what I had always done — thinking my way out of things instead of feeling them. Putting the hardest parts of my life, and how I felt about them, into imaginary drawers in my mind to be kept but rarely opened.

By the time of the collapse, the drawers were bursting with unacknowledged emotion and truth. More than anything, it was the effort to keep them shut that had nearly pushed me to the limits of my life.

Later that summer, as I slowly healed, I came out to the rest of my family. It was the summer of my — and our — complete undoing. The summer I disappeared into myself. The summer I came to intimately know the cold comfort of the bathroom floor. The summer I recognized that this decade long correspondence I’d been having with myself in my mind was killing me.

On Monday morning, as we rested in the midst of the overgrown ruins of The Corran, an estate built near Wiarton in the 18th century, I thought about how we all have moments in life that leave us writhing on the bathroom floor.

We all get lost lost trying to find our way sometimes.

It’s the price of admission to growth. To a meaningful life.

And, I’ve since learned, it’s entirely possible to get lost in the right direction.