The Dog Who Saved Me

The Dog Who Saved Me

(Intro image: a soft photo of Desi’s collar, paw print, or sunlight through a window — something quiet, not posed.)

I mentioned losing the love of my life, Desi Lou Arnez, a few posts back. I think this is finally the right time to find the words I’ve never been able to find — about the little bitty dog who saved my life.

It’s strange to sit here, tears in my eyes, trying to write about him while “puppy music” plays for Waylon, who’s learning to self-soothe in his kennel right behind me. I wish they could have met each other.

When Life Fell Apart

It’s always a long story, isn’t it? How we end up where we are. How the tragedies find us.

When I lost my home of seven years to toxic mold, I was already stretched thin. I agreed to help a friend in their kitchen for a while, trying to hold myself together. Another young woman who worked there kept insisting I come stay with her until I figured things out.

So I did. I hired junk removal companies, threw away nearly everything I owned, and took Desi across the river, praying that being away from the mold would give him more time. His congestive heart failure had worsened, but he loved that new place — the new friends, the cats, the fresh air.

And then, life did what it does. It broke again.

Two weeks before my thirty-seventh birthday, everything collapsed — except this time, I got to be with Desi every day, the way I always wished I could be. Within a month, one of the cats attacked him. A big tom — almost twenty pounds heavier — and my six-pound baby never stood a chance. He fought so hard. We spent a night at the emergency vet. They stabilized him, and he came home.

We spent Christmas in my hometown — his favorite place. Ham steak. Walks. Sunshine. His parks. His people. And then, we said our see-you-agains.

We built a little box from old barn wood and buried him on his favorite back road, where he could see the river and feel the sun all day long.

The world went black.

The Aftermath

In that kind of finality, everything else feels pointless. I was taking care of the young woman I lived with, applying for jobs, interviewing for positions I almost got but never did. I kept the apartment clean and made meals because if I stopped, I think I might have stopped breathing too.

I’ve always been someone who keeps going if someone else needs me. It’s a survival skill — and a curse.

When another disaster hit a few months later, I went into a full C-PTSD spiral. Rolling panic attacks. Sleepless nights. The same suffocating feeling I’d had when my life burned down the first time. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t stop crying.

I scoured the internet for what was wrong with me, desperate to know if I was “too far gone.” I did the stupid breathing exercises. I cut sugar. I ate soup and bone broth and supplements. I bought a vibration plate, a weighted vest, a weighted blanket. I prayed. I sobbed. I took Epsom salt baths until my skin hurt.

The detox was intense — it had to be. My body had survived for years on diet pills, cigarettes, Diet Coke, and espresso. When I read that anger was tied to liver stagnation, it hit me in the chest. My body, my hormones, my emotions — all clogged. And so, I started over again.

At the very bottom, the last thing I wanted to do was choose myself. But I didn’t even recognize who I was anymore.

The Spark

When I used to run my businesses, I talked about finding the joy — and when you couldn’t find it, being the joy.
But there was no joy left. None.

And yet, even at my worst, I’m stubborn.
I decided that couldn’t be the story.

I couldn’t just die.

So I started reading. Neuroscience. Nervous systems. How mineral deficiencies make healing harder. I cried until I couldn’t move. I listened to bird sounds for hours and tapped and prayed.

And then — the smallest spark.

The Puppy

My very wonderful man friend started gently saying, “Maybe it’s time for a puppy.”

I didn’t think I could. I didn’t think I deserved another chance to love something that much. But he showed me a photo of a little dog from a small town with a sad story, and my heart skipped for the first time in months.

Waylon came in like an actual wrecking ball — mostly in the best ways. Of course, puppies are chaos. But he was joy incarnate.

Like me, he was afraid of everything. And so, I had to be brave — for him.

Every day, he made me a little braver. Sometimes he made me laugh so hard it startled me — then I’d realize that was my laugh. Mine.

The first few weeks, I grieved Desi harder than ever before. But I realized that all the love I thought I hadn’t gotten to give him was now being poured into Waylon. And that brought peace.

Waylon gets me outside in the morning sun, even when I don’t want to. He makes me walk laps instead of scrolling. He reminds me how much I want to live somewhere quiet again — in the country, where we can nap in the sunshine.

Out of everything I’ve lost, losing Desi was the hardest.
He was the greatest joy I’ve ever known.
The most unconditional love.
The reason I stayed on this planet.

And without him, I would never have been ready for Waylon — never been the soft place this new little soul needed to land.

Letting It Out

Now, as I’m writing this, sobbing again, I can feel something loosening. Maybe this is what it means to release it — to finally let it move out of my body instead of keeping it locked behind the ribcage.

Because when you’ve spent your whole life compartmentalizing, you forget how important it is to get it out.

And maybe that’s what nervous system healing really is —
feeling safe enough to tell the truth about what hurts,
and not staying so locked down
that you never let love in again.

Finding My Way Back to the Kitchen

For a long time I thought I hated being in the kitchen at home. After leaving the kitchen professionally, I’ve learned I actually love it. My favorite thing? Don’t laugh—freshly folded and tucked-away tea towels. That is my jam.

If you showed up unannounced, you’d probably find me with a towel over my shoulder, three different beverages on the counter, and music playing just loud enough.

Is my kitchen Instagram-worthy? No.
Do I love it? More than just about anything.

Every visceral memory of both of my grandmothers centers in their kitchens—me at the table, or standing on a stool to shred cheese or roll pickle wraps. The smell of coffee and the sound of humming women are the foundation that built this love inside me.

Why a Clean Kitchen Feels Like Safety

My favorite feeling is walking into a clean kitchen in the morning with everything I need for the day.
In the evenings, especially when I feel anxious or overwhelmed, I turn on Gilmore Girls, light a candle, flip on the three lamps in my cozy kitchen, and start my reset—put away dishes, make tea, wipe counters, polish the sink.

Yes, I’m the oddball who can’t relax until the water spots are gone. We all have our joys in life.

I rotate décor with the seasons, throw together simmer pots of citrus and herbs, and make myself focus on whatever task is right in front of me instead of letting my brain spiral.

The more intentional I am with the spaces I spend the most time in, the more joy I find being there.

My Little Systems

I don’t have babies at home, but I’ve cleaned up after teenage boys, partners, and less-than-ideal roommates. This isn’t about perfection—it’s about making spaces functional and joyful enough to draw you back in.

I live for reset moments. As a kid, I stayed up late reorganizing my bedroom. That energy never left me, so now I do little kitchen resets weekly to keep things fresh.

Once a week I:

• swap out my seasonal “pretty” towels—the ones no one’s allowed to touch,

• change flowers (about $15 worth into tiny jars or thrifted vases),

• and rearrange them through the house so it feels like new ones were just delivered.

(Possible pull quote)

“When you’ve never really stayed home, you need little things that make it feel lively.”

RO water, a pinch of sugar, and a drop of trace minerals keep those flowers alive for almost two weeks.

Meal Prep That Feels Like Care

Usually I start my reset after a little mise en place—everything in its place. I chop veggies for the week, make a protein for Monday morning when I break my fast, and cook a batch of potatoes or rice.

Cooked and cooled potatoes (and rice) are easier on blood sugar—PCOS ladies, that’s how you still get to have carbs—and they’re good for the gut.

(Affiliate note placeholder: link future magnesium trace minerals, RO filter, or kitchen tools.)

Creating Comfort, Not Clutter

I know the girlies love their chemically perfumed “holiday” sprays, but give me a simmer pot or a candle and I’m happy. I prep my RO water filter, set up my drink station with options that aren’t “just water,” and get the kitchen ready for service Monday morning.

Everything I once did for guests, I started doing for myself.

On days when I struggle to know how to take care of me, I think back to the little touches that made service special—and do them for her, the woman who forgot she was worth the same effort.

(Pull quote)

“I started treating myself as someone I’m joyful to bake bread for and host.”

Consideration as a Form of Love

How often do you forget to do the little things for you?
I honestly didn’t even know it was an option.

There are still moments every day when I say out loud,

“Chloe, you can…”
and insert whatever thing I’ve been denying myself because I forget I’m allowed to consider me.

And isn’t that the highest form of love—consideration?

So this week, I hope you find a way to love on yourself.
Even if just for a moment, consider how impactful it could be if you did.

(End image: folded tea towels, candle light, and maybe a little cup of tea steaming in the background.)

The Supplement That ACTUALLY Helped Me Breathe Again

If we’re going to be friends here, I think we have to start with honesty.

Honesty is always the best policy.

So, for a little reference, let’s start with how I got to the place I started from: the underbelly of rock bottom.

The simplest way to frame this is to say my nervous system is broken. And if we’re being frank, it’s probably been broken for a very long time. I just didn’t understand what a nervous system was or how it shaped the days and weeks that felt like I was being dragged straight through hell.

““I just didn’t understand what a nervous system was or how it shaped the days and weeks that felt like I was being dragged straight through hell.””

— me

I’m sure many of you can imagine it — months, years even, working 80 to 100 hours a week in a physical job. Hot kitchens, snow blowing through the hood, constant deliveries, 50-pound cases, stooping, never sitting except for a quick bathroom break, rarely eating.

Am I superwoman? Are any of us who push that hard? Of course not.

I lived on six shots of espresso at a time, used to swallow my prescription diet pills (yes, plural), and chased it with at least one 5-Hour Energy later. Usually another while I did my makeup in the work bathroom or my car before service — because, obviously, a show pony has to put on her face.

By nine p.m., I was starving to the point of nausea. I didn’t cook for myself; I didn’t even keep food at home. I ate whatever was open, grabbed premade meals from the grocery store, or begged my sous chef to fire something off. Then I’d fall into bed around midnight, only to get up by five, shower, unload deliveries, plan menus, organize events, and prep the whole show again.

I had no idea I could actually break. People had warned me for years, “you can’t work that hard.” I could hear Grandma Ninny’s voice saying I was doing too much, that if I didn’t slow down I’d have a “backset.”

She was right.

Eventually I hit a point where no cold shower, no face in a bowl of ice water, no hands in hot Epsom salt, no diet pills or 5-Hour Energies could revive me. My body gave out.

It took over a year and a half after falling apart to even begin to understand how much work it would take to find my way back to myself.

Finding the Starting Line

Who knew that meals, a few supplements, actual sleep, and a Do-Not-Disturb setting could start to make me feel human again?

Did I start with more than 30 supplements? Pretty much.
Did I gut my pantry and my life all at once? Absolutely.
Do I recommend that? Not even a little.

But I’ve always been all-or-nothing.

Instead of setting up kitchens that made life easier for everyone but me, I started building up the woman I’d let down for so long. Vitamin lists. Timing charts for what to take with or without fat and how long to wait between doses. Nutrition trackers, because eating — shockingly — felt foreign.

People laughed when I said I didn’t eat my own food, but I found joy in other people eating what I made. I never learned to feed myself.

Nutrition has been my biggest struggle. I still fight to eat three meals a day. My brain, a little obsessive at times, gets overwhelmed by all the information and all the contradictory rules. I felt like I was failing every meal I didn’t get “right.”

With PCOS, endometriosis, no gallbladder, and years of extreme cortisol from both my career and personal life, I had to start at the very beginning. So I chose to do a full liver detox.

Some days it felt like nothing was working. I’d quit phentermine. I’d quit smoking after almost twenty years. Desi Lou Arnez — the love of my life — had died. I was drowning.

There were other reckonings, but for now we’ll just say I needed a way out. I didn’t know what my nervous system was, but I knew it was broken.

Learning to Heal

• [Magnesium glycinate supplement link here]

• [GABA product link here]

When you realize the first part of healing is figuring out what the heck your nervous system even is, you go down every rabbit hole.

That’s where I found GABA and magnesium glycinate. That was the beginning of feeling like the world might not swallow me whole.

I’ve always been tough — called “too sensitive” since childhood, which means you learn to armor up fast. But by this point I didn’t feel tough anymore. I felt empty.

There was one person who believed otherwise, and if he hadn’t been in my corner, this story might never have been written. He said, “Let’s go get some of that GABA you keep reading about.” So off we went, wandering the aisles of supplement stores and natural groceries.

It started with those two things — GABA and magnesium glycinate — and little by little, I could breathe again. And sleep.

Eight hours. At a time.

For a woman who had lived on four or five hours a night for most of a decade, it felt like absolute luxury. And it was.

Once I started breathing and sleeping, mornings were different. I drank hot lemon water when I woke up, learned which supplements needed an empty stomach, started to feel hungry again in the morning — something I hadn’t even thought was possible. I added clean protein wherever I could. My heart stopped racing out of my chest.

I still jump at too many sounds, and everything still feels too loud some days, but I have systems now. Ice packs in my bedroom freezer and the kitchen. A little bottle in the fridge with aloe, trace minerals, and rose water for when my skin flushes for no reason.

Each routine was a quiet way of telling my body it was safe.

What Healing Looks Like

I still catch myself whispering, “You’re safe, Chloe, you’re fine,” like I’m half-annoyed with the younger version of me who couldn’t even keep her phone on ring. But the more I practiced real care — not productivity disguised as care — the safer I actually felt.

I started jotting down how I felt at the end of the day. Not paragraphs, just enough to have evidence that something was shifting.

As I added supplements, changed routines, and edited my food, I had proof that things were working.

I stopped laughing at the wellness people and bone-broth Pinterest boards. I finally understood why they cared about all these things. My gut was a mess, and until I healed that, everything else would stay a mess.

Some days it’s still overwhelming. It’s a lot to learn when no one ever taught you how to take care of yourself. But after 37 years of taking care of everyone and everything else, surely I could do it for me.

And that’s what this is about — learning to take care of ourselves. Because as cliché as it sounds, you cannot pour from an empty, shattered cup.

Why I’m Sharing This

It’s my mission now to make sure others never get as far down as I did. This is how I got there, and this is how I began climbing back.

I had to change my methods. For me. For saving what’s left of the world I love. For holding space for the broken and the desperate who are trying to heal.

So here it is — my love letter to those who feel so lost and so broken they can’t even say it out loud.

I wish it weren’t true that the smallest changes make the biggest difference. But it is. There is always a way.

And for the rest of my life, I’ll keep teaching this to the overachievers, the workaholics, the stay-at-home moms who do it all, the parentified oldest children, and the “I’ll just work harder” crowd.

Because what I’ve learned, more than anything, is that I didn’t need to be tougher.
I just needed a little love.

If you’re new here and want the full backstory, you can start with Why I Started The Rooted Sparrow. Or, if you’d rather see how those nervous-system habits started to spill over into my home life, you can read Learning to Stay Home (and Actually Enjoy It).

Why I started The Rooted Sparrow

If you are anything like me, you built a life that never really felt like your own. And by built, I mean you taped together scraps from the junk drawer of life and called it “good enough.”

I had a marriage that was over before it really began. I was not having the babies my parents dreamed I would. I was told “Boss Babe” energy would fill the holes of not having kids, or Sunday suppers, or a family that gathered. And in some ways, it worked. That drive got me on Food Network. It won me awards. It made me a chef people in St. Louis knew by name.

And it completely collapsed me as a human.

This is the story of a woman raised to be a people-pleasing, co-dependent, overachieving workaholic. And how at 37, I let it all fall away, in hopes of finally discovering who I really am.

When the Glue Finally Cracks

I was the glue. In my marriage. In my family. In my work. The “piece” everyone counted on to keep everything else pieced together.

When you stop fixing everyone else’s mess, you find out pretty quickly you don’t actually have much of a community at all. That truth isn’t pity. It’s reality. And it broke me in ways I didn’t see coming.

Because here’s the thing. My life hadn’t actually started. Not my life. I had been a metronome keeping time for everyone else. The beat I needed? It didn’t matter.

And when the beat finally stopped, I realized I didn’t know what my nervous system was, why it was fried, or how to even begin fixing it.

Breaking What Was Passed Down

I used to think the phrase “generational curse breaker” was dramatic. Same. But here I am, realizing that is exactly what I am trying to do.

Survival skills learned in unhealthy family systems only take you so far. They make you reliable, productive, useful. But they do not make you whole.

After months of breaking my own heart open, I realized this rebuilding wasn’t optional anymore. If I wanted to feel like I belonged in this world, I had to learn the basics of living — safety, structure, joy — things I should have had all along.

So I began writing it all down. Every lesson. Every practice. Every small hinge that moved a big door. Not because I had answers, but because surely someone else needed to hear what I so desperately needed myself.

What You Will Find Here

Wellness and Beauty
Clean swaps I actually use. Nervous system care. Supplements that help. Simple seasonal body practices.

Seasonal Living
Rental-friendly homemaking. Sunday resets. Pantry basics. Balcony planters. Autumn anchors.

Life Rebuild
Essays on finances, faith, nervous system healing, and how to start again after ashes.

Waylon’s Corner
The puppy who reminds me daily to laugh, go outside, and begin again.

What I Hope This Becomes

I hope this feels like stepping into a warm kitchen. Something simple on the stove. A dog underfoot. Someone handing you a glass of water and asking how you really are.

I hope you find ideas that make your next week lighter, and a community that makes you feel less alone. I hope you see that starting again is not punishment. It is permission.

If you’ve ever wondered what rebuilding actually looks like day to day, I wrote about how I started healing my nervous system from the ground up — from supplements to sleep — in The Supplements That Helped Me Breathe Again.

If You Are Starting Again

Here are five small things that helped me:

• Eat protein with your first meal
• Swap one personal-care product for a cleaner version when it runs out
• Pick a 15 minute home rhythm and repeat it daily
• Step into sunlight for ten minutes
• Tell one trusted person you are starting again, and what you want to be true a year from now

Thank you for being here. Truly. If you need a sign to begin, consider this it.

— Chloe