The Rainbow That Started It All

There are moments in life that seem ordinary when they happen.

And then there are moments you somehow know, even while you are standing in them, that you will remember forever.

For me, one of those moments happened in Panama in March of 2023.

I had traveled there during a season of my life when a lot had changed. A chapter had closed, and although I was moving forward, I wasn't entirely sure what moving forward was supposed to look like yet.

There is a strange space between the life you thought you were going to have and whatever comes next. You're functioning. You're working. You're doing all the things you're supposed to do. From the outside, you may even look completely fine.

But internally, you're still trying to figure out who you are when the future you had pictured no longer exists.

That's where I was.

And then one morning in Panama, my friend was outside doing yoga when I heard her yell.

It was the kind of yell that made me immediately think something terrible had happened. I rushed to see what was wrong.

Nothing was wrong.

Quite the opposite.

Outside was one of the most beautiful, vibrant rainbows I had ever seen.

Not a faint little streak of color you have to squint to see. This was the kind of rainbow that made you stop whatever you were doing and stare. It stretched across the landscape, brilliant against the mountains and greenery of Panama, as though someone had turned the saturation all the way up.

She hadn't yelled because something was wrong.

She had yelled because something was so beautiful she needed me to see it too.

And standing there looking at it, something about that moment landed differently.

It felt like hope.

Not the loud, motivational-poster kind of hope that tells you everything happens for a reason or promises that everything is going to be okay.

I don't think life works quite that neatly.

It was quieter than that.

It was the realization that something beautiful could still appear after a storm.

Maybe even because there had been a storm.

I came home from Panama, but that rainbow came home with me.

I kept thinking about it.

About the timing of it. About how something so simple could stop me in my tracks. About why, during that particular season of my life, I seemed to need that reminder more than I even realized.

And somewhere along the way, I started thinking about a woman.

Her name became Paige Martin.

Paige isn't me. Rainbow Season isn't my autobiography, and the events of her life aren't simply mine disguised as fiction.

But I understood something about her.

I understood what it felt like to reach a point in life when the future looked nothing like the one you had planned.

I understood what it meant to have to ask yourself questions you hadn't expected to be asking at this stage of adulthood.

What do I want now?

Who am I when I'm not trying to be who everyone else needs me to be?

And perhaps the hardest one:

What if starting over isn't only about surviving what happened?

What if I actually get to build something new?

Those questions became the emotional heartbeat of Rainbow Season.

So I sent Paige to Panama.

She experiences the mountains. The adventure. The fear. The unexpected connections. The moments that force her outside the carefully constructed boundaries of the life she knows.

And eventually, she gets her rainbow.

But from the beginning, there was something I knew about Paige's story.

I didn't want a man to be the thing that saved her.

That mattered to me.

This isn't a story about a woman whose life falls apart and then becomes whole again because someone else chooses her.

It's about a woman learning to choose herself.

A lot has happened since that morning in Panama.

I've stood beneath the Northern Lights.

I've climbed Kilimanjaro.

I've watched sunsets in Greece. I've seen Alaska. I've traveled to places I once only imagined visiting and done things an earlier version of me might have been too afraid to try.

And every once in a while, I think about how different my life might look if I had allowed the ending of one chapter to convince me that the best parts of my story were already behind me.

That's probably why the idea of a 'rainbow season' has grown to mean so much more to me than the title of my first novel.

To me, a rainbow season is the season after.

After the heartbreak.

After the disappointment.

After the plan changes.

After whatever made you look at the future and wonder, even briefly, what on earth you were supposed to do now.

A rainbow season doesn't mean everything suddenly becomes perfect.

Mine certainly hasn't.

It means you start noticing possibility again.

You say yes to things that scare you.

You go places.

You try things.

You stop waiting for your life to look the way you thought it was supposed to look before allowing yourself to enjoy the life that's actually happening.

And somewhere in that process, you may discover that the detour wasn't the end of your story at all.

It may have simply taken you somewhere you never would have chosen for yourself.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, that somewhere turns out to be beautiful.

This fall, Rainbow Season will become something I can actually hold in my hands.

Even writing that feels a little surreal.

What began with a trip, a difficult season of life, and one spectacular rainbow in Panama somehow became an idea.

The idea became Paige.

Paige became a manuscript.

And now that manuscript is becoming my first published novel.

There is something beautifully full-circle about getting to share it.

Because while Paige's story is fiction, the hope behind it is very real.

I know what it feels like when the life you planned changes.

But I also know something now that I didn't fully understand when I stood looking at that rainbow in Panama:

An unexpected life doesn't have to be a lesser one.

Sometimes the life on the other side of the storm contains mountains you never imagined climbing, places you never expected to see, people you haven't met yet, dreams you haven't even thought to dream, and versions of yourself you haven't had the chance to become.

I couldn't have known any of that that morning in March of 2023.

I only knew that my friend had yelled, I had come running because I thought something was wrong, and instead I found something breathtaking waiting outside.

Maybe there's something fitting about that.

I went looking for what was wrong.

And instead, I found a rainbow.

Three years later, that rainbow is on the cover of a book with my name on it.

And in more ways than I ever could have imagined that morning, it was the beginning of a story.

Maybe even the beginning of a new chapter of mine.

Some storms don't end you. They clear the way for your rainbow season.