Am I okay?
Megan’s spent most of her life asking that question, while simultaneously trying to convince others that there was never a doubt. She spent years looking for herself in someone else’s reflection. In a sister’s rebellion, a boyfriend’s approval, a camera lens pointed at somebody else’s love story. She built entire seasons of television around the question of who belongs with whom, who is chosen, who gets the rose at the end of the night, and never once turned that same tender attention on herself. It took difficult decades, stacked surgeries, and a countless number of missteps to finally ask herself a question she had been avoiding her whole life: “Who am I, really?”
The Valley. Private School. An Idyllic childhood so lovely it almost doesn’t sound real—to the outside world. Every summer her family flew to Maui, the same stretch of sand year after year, until it stopped being a vacation and became a second home. Holidays were sacred. Dinners were sacred. Her parents never fought, or never where their daughters could see or hear. Naturally artistic, Megan painted and sculpted her way into a gifted visual arts program before she’d even finished elementary school. She was class president in the fifth grade. The toddler queen of her tiny kingdom, adored and untroubled. Her sister, six years behind her, would grow up to be the storm while Megan remained the sunlight. The good one. The one nobody thought to worry about. That is, until the storm clouds lifted and the sun made way for night.
By junior high, Megan found what most girls of that age find: an utter discomfort within their own skin. The aspect that escalated this all for Megan was her innate ability to blend into her surroundings. If she made sure she was there for you, she never really had to be there for herself—always playing the part of good friend, good student, good daughter. But under the surface, “good” never entered the equation. “I would never show my emotions. I didn’t really know how to.”
High school came, and something in her caught fire again. She found the New Megan. She became captain of the cheer squad—the top of the pyramid—raised into the sky by the other girls in her class. She dated the captain of the football team. A tale as old as time. From the bleachers, it was a fairy tale. But underneath the pom-poms, Megan was still just as tortured. Wondering what her lot in life really was.
The summer before her senior year, Megan walked into a house to see her father’s packed bags lined up by the door. He sat at the dining room table. Her mother stood off to the side, crying without sound. Megan doesn’t remember his exact words anymore, only their shape, the crater they left behind. “It’s not working, and I have to go.” Seventeen-year-old Megan did the only thing she knew how to do. She folded her own grief into something small and quiet and reached instead for her mother’s. Whatever true self might have been stirring underneath all that performance went quieter that day. It wasn’t her time, she thought.
That’s because when she was sixteen, she was slid a prescription for Adderall. It felt, for a moment, like being handed a key. Like she wasn’t acting normal anymore, she simply was. Ambien came next, for the sleep the Adderall stole from her. Then Xanax. She had been the good girl her entire life, the designated driver for all her drunk friends. For a long time nothing about any of it looked like ruin, because everyone around her was drowning just as quietly, in the same beautiful, sun-bleached bubble. It looked like immunity. It was never that.
She went to Boulder for college and told herself, almost like a vow, that this was round two, her real chance to finally meet the girl underneath all the costumes and pom-poms, far from anyone who thought they already knew her. Instead, she fell in love with drinking and fell deeper in love with pills. Her third love, however, was a boy. A boy she found amazing at first, but when his father was diagnosed with cancer, things became increasingly difficult between them. He took out his grief and rage on her and, after three years and multiple acts of domestic violence, she left him. That round two of self-discovery never came. Eventually, her friends staged an intervention her junior year. She weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, in all her clothes, with pockets full of 90 pounds of rocks. She wasn’t well. Whoever she’d traveled all that way to Colorado to find, she still hadn’t met her.
After Boulder, she came home to Los Angeles wanting to be an art therapist, and instead she found herself dressing strangers for a reality show, and fell hopelessly for the whole beautiful machinery of the entertainment industry. Wardrobe led to casting. Casting led to producing, and for the next twelve years she was a supervising producer on one of the most-watched dating shows in America. I won’t say the one, but suffice it to say she ROSE to the top of her industry. The schedule was brutal, seven months a year on the road, home just long enough to remember she had a home at all. It was, in its own strange way, a third attempt at the same old question, except this time she solved it by vanishing completely into other people’s stories instead of writing her own. She built their meet-cutes, sat beside them through their heartbreaks, and produced, frame by frame, the happy endings. Somewhere in the middle of those years, driving home from a wrap party, her tires lost their grip near a construction site, and her car sailed off an overpass, twenty-five feet through open air, then rolling another seventy, until it came crashing into a tree. Her seatbelt snapped and threw her clear of the driver’s seat—which was her saving grace because when she awoke from the crash she saw that there was no driver’s seat left. She lay pinned against that tree for six hours before a construction crew’s flashlight finally found her. Her jaw was broken in four places. Her ribs were cracked. Her cheekbone was shattered like glass. That was the first night pain medication became, in her own words, “her closest friend.”
Then came the back surgeries, the realization that she’d been born with one vertebra too many, undiscovered until her leg buckled beneath her on set one afternoon. OxyContin followed close behind. For the years that followed, she was in and out of the hospital for various surgeries. Fourteen surgeries in all, stitched across nearly two decades. Her spine. Her jaw. A rib. Five separate operations on her knees. Her ankle. “Hospitals began to feel more like home to me than my actual home. I felt the safest in a hospital.” Nobody there ever questioned her drug consumption. They were just there to help ease her pain…and she was in a lot of it. “I’ve never once had a drug dealer. My drug dealers were doctors.”
Five years ago, a routine knee replacement went wrong in a way no surgeon could ever fully explain. She woke up and simply could not urinate. When it never resolved, doctors placed a permanent catheter just beneath her belly button, tethering her forever to a small bag, and told her this might be the rest of her life. What followed was the darkest chapter in a story already full of dark chapters. Total isolation. Agoraphobia so severe she couldn’t make it to her own mailbox without her whole body rebelling. Blinds drawn, lights off, a television flickering through every hour of the night, a nightstand crowded with bottles. She overdosed once during that stretch, and it was her mother’s boyfriend, twelve years sober himself, who found her crumpled on the floor and breathed the life back into her lungs. Later, still recovering from a second knee surgery that had accidentally fractured her femur, she tripped over a towel in her living room and struck a shelf on the way down. She shattered her ankle into twenty pieces, broke her jaw, eye socket, and three teeth. Feeling nothing, because of the pain pills, she tried to stand up. This futile action resulted in her trying to step on a completely shattered ankle—causing her to fall again into the shelf…and then she did that same move again. When her legs finally refused her for good, she crawled, hands and knees, a long red ribbon of blood trailing behind her, toward her bedroom, then toward the bathroom, until she finally lost consciousness. Her father found her there hours later, because they’d had lunch plans that day, and he said it looked as though someone had broken in and beaten her within an inch of her life. The brain injury was severe enough that she had to relearn how to speak, and for days the only word she could summon, again and again, was “okay,” which is a strange and almost painfully holy thing to sit with now. The one word she was left with was the lie she had told her life. The lie that she was okay. After that, her father moved onto her couch that week and stayed there six and a half months, until the morning he drove her here himself. “I was shown real, true love from my parents who sat next to me in the hospital every day I was in there. Gave up their life to help mine….If I wasn’t in the hospital, I was recovering at my mom’s apartment or needing round-the-clock help at home,” she says with unfathomable gratitude.
Megan was no stranger to Beit T’Shuvah. She had visited here many times in 2019 when her sister, Alex, attended the program. Remember when I mentioned the rebellious child that turned it all around? Yeah, that was her, and it happened here. While Megan became the storm, her sister thrived professionally and personally as a single mom. When Megan would visit her sister, her nerves would be so high that she would stop at what she now knows is Vena and drink a shooter of liquor before walking in. For the record: that is ill-advised and fairly frowned upon. Through everything, her sister always knew there was more for Megan. “She’s been my biggest supporter. She’s the one who set up my initial call with Lysa here for me to take the first step in coming here.” By the time Megan was finally ready to submit to treatment, she was a different woman than she was back then. But still, when Megan first arrived at Beit T’Shuvah, she didn’t leave her room for three weeks. She couldn’t eat for the first five days. “This many people! I couldn’t even leave my room, and now I am around this many people?!” She describes herself from that time as a shell, trembling around others, unable to hold anyone’s gaze, nothing left of the girl who once flew weightless through the air off a cheerleading pyramid, and not yet anything of whoever she was becoming instead.
Then Megan watched Freedom Song. Something in her split open that hadn’t cracked in years, and she wept, ugly and unguarded, for the first time in longer than she could remember. It wasn’t only her own pain rising to the surface. “Watching the family side of it was like a knife to my heart, thinking how I put my family through so much shit and fear and watching me almost die. Not just thinking about it, but actually seeing the blood, the pain, the overdose.” She joined the cast of Freedom Song not long after. The irony of it all is that, once she joined the play, she stopped performing—stopping playing a role.
About a month and a half into her recovery, sitting in a meeting with her catheter bag almost painfully full, she went to the bathroom expecting nothing, and for the first time in five years, her body worked entirely on its own. She sat there and wept. She was almost too afraid to hope it wasn’t a fluke, so at first she told no one. But it held. “It felt like I was being reborn physically while I was already being reborn mentally.” The two kinds of rebirth finally arrived at the same address. Her body and her mind, torn apart for years by one surgery and one prescription after another, finally began speaking the same language again, which may be the truest definition there is of finding yourself: the moment your body and your spirit stop living as strangers under one roof. When she called her parents and her sister, they wept with joy—knowing how much it meant to her. She calls it her first real miracle, and she means the word exactly as it sounds.
These days Megan works as a Program Facilitator Intern at Beit T’Shuvah, entrusted with precisely the kind of responsibility she once assumed she’d never be steady enough to carry again. “PFs are like the producers and the residents are like the cast. So, for me, it kind of feels natural.” Except this time there is no one standing just off camera, least of all her. She isn’t directing somebody else’s arc from a careful, professional distance anymore. She is finally, fully inside her own. She works beside some of her closest friends and gets to watch them bloom the same way she is blooming. She wakes up curious about what the day might bring instead of dreading it. She laughs, real laughter, not the fake niceties we do for strangers—the gut-giggling laughs of recovery. “Before coming to BTS, I didn’t think I ever needed or wanted community. Thought my isolation was independence, but coming here showed me what I was missing. Community brings light to my dark places. Struggles feel lighter when other people understand them or simply sit beside you through them. Having a sense of belonging and acceptance, for the first time, I can honestly say I’m proud of the woman I’m becoming and can’t wait to see where her future leads.”
Megan even has her own slice of BTS. The residents call it “Megan’s Nook.” It’s where her spotlight photo was taken, for obvious reasons. The name has caught on so much that one time a brand new resident pulled her aside to ask, “Where Megan’s Nook was?” not knowing she was the namesake.
I could spin you the ole closing yarn of, “The person she was searching for her life was inside herself the whole time.” That is true, but doesn’t that feel cheesy? We know that. We know that Megan is the light of every room she walks into, bringing joy and laughter to everyone she meets. We know that Megan helps every lost soul that crosses her path with a warm smile that uplifts their recovery. We know she deeply cares and has found greater meaning at Beit T’Shuvah, being the poster-child of humility and sincere love, than she could have imagined. We know that. She knows that. There is no reason to go over that again. What is worth mentioning is that, through this whole spotlight, I am confident that one thing has been true: You don’t believe. You don’t believe that someone who is so charming, outgoing, and capable could have ever been so wilted, broken, and lost. I get it. It’s hard for me to believe either. So, my best advice is to talk to Megan yourself. Because not only will you get the full story, but you’ll get showered in the light she emanates when she tells it.
So, to answer your question, Megan. No, you’re not okay.
Because you are so, so much more.