I'm Chaela — writer, horse-healer, artist, recovering people-pleaser, and full-time student of the quiet patterns that run our lives until we finally turn around and look at them.
For a long time I thought being “good” meant being easy to love: agreeable, available, endlessly understanding. I got very good at reading a room and disappearing inside it. What I didn't know was that every time I abandoned myself to keep the peace, I was reinforcing a pattern — a hook — that kept me tethered to people and stories that were never really mine.
Getting unhooked isn't about becoming hard. It's about coming home to yourself — and staying.
These days I write about attachment, self-abandonment, and the slow, un-glamorous work of choosing yourself. Not the bumper-sticker version — the real one, with all its backsliding and 2 a.m. honesty. I'm writing a memoir about the transformation that's occured since my last trip to Africa, one chapter at a time, and sharing the journey here as I go.
What you'll find here
Bits of memoir. Field notes from Africa, from the unraveling that came after, and from all the growing and changing since. Thoughts on whatever fascinates me at the moment. And a few tools I’ve built along the way, like The Queen’s Sanctuary, to help you recognize your own patterns and come back to yourself.
If any of this sounds like you, you're in the right place. Come home to yourself with me.