It Ain't Over (12 page)

But part of the old Lynn was still in there. She took a job at the Squaw Valley Ski School, first to teach beginner kids and later adults. But then that old competitive drive started thrumming: She wanted to instruct the
experts
. To do so, she’d need to take a certification exam that had a passage rate of only 15 percent.

Lynn trained for five years, learning to ski anywhere, in any conditions,
at any time of day. She studied the physics, physiology, and biomechanics of skiing. And in 2011, at age 50, she aced the test.

Lynn and Dave married; today he works part-time as a consultant and she teaches most winter days when the weather allows. For so long focused on her own success, she now finds joy in watching her students light up when they learn a new trick.

The healthiest she’s ever been—on the slopes for six-plus hours at a time, running, and doing CrossFit—she can’t imagine still sitting behind a desk. She can barely last an hour in her home office these days before the sparkling white view through her window beckons her back outside. She plans on skiing, she says, until she can no longer walk.

“I have changed so much, and I would never have thought that something as simple as skiing could do that for me,” Lynn says. “Letting go of everything I had worked so hard to attain was a huge risk, but the alternative of staying was an even bigger one. I learned to trust myself.”

Karen Schaler, 49

New York, New York

F
or as far back as Karen Schaler can remember, she was glued to the news. Watching TV with her mother in their apartment in Everett, Washington, she was fascinated by the stories of people in distant places who were caught up in dramatic circumstances and had to overcome hardship, prejudice, and danger. And there was something about the journalists she saw covering the stories. They were at the center of things. By the age of ten, when people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, Karen would tell them she wanted to be a news reporter.

That answer might have seemed a bit precocious, the kind of thing kids soon outgrow. But by the time she was 14, an age when some kids are still trying to remember the combinations to their lockers, Karen was poring over college catalogs, and one—California State University at Fullerton, with its state-of-the-art broadcasting program—really captured her heart.

There was only one problem: how to afford the tuition on her mother’s
income as a public school teacher. Working with her high school counselor, Karen developed an audacious plan. Instead of finishing high school in Washington, she would eventually move to California, enroll in school there, and take a job as a live-in babysitter for a family in Calabasas.

“It was such a huge adjustment,” Karen recalls. “Not only were these people total strangers, but I had never even lived with other children, let alone cared for them, and I had never been outside of Washington.”

But the plan worked perfectly, and after a year, Karen was eligible for the much lower tuition rate offered to state residents. Four years later, she graduated with honors.

At one point during her undergraduate career, Karen saw Peter Jennings, the anchor of
World News Tonight
on ABC, speak at a conference. “I remember it vividly,” she recalls. “He said, ‘You are the watchdogs of society. Whenever something happens, whether it’s at the local school or at the White House, people depend on journalists to keep them informed about what’s important in their lives.’ Some people thought that was kind of clichéd, but I found it inspirational. Empowering.”

After graduation, Karen landed an on-air job at a tiny station in Billings, Montana. “I wanted to cover any and all stories,” she recalls, “but because I was ambitious and worked hard, I kept getting the top story to report every night, which was often hard news. By the time I realized I was constantly covering death and destruction, I was already hooked on the adrenaline rush.”

Karen thrived on the intensity, sharpening her skills and developing an impressive reel full of hard-hitting pieces that kept carrying her to better jobs in larger markets.

But there was a cost. “I was living for my work,” Karen recalls. “That wasn’t hard, because I really did love it. I always filled in when somebody was out, always worked holidays. I worked 18 Christmases in a row! As a result, I
seldom saw my family, didn’t get married, never wanted to get that close to a man who could tie me down. And I wasn’t doing it for the money. The jobs in these small markets pay under $25,000 a year. I just loved the work.”

But there were also rewards: three regional Emmys, respect, wider exposure, more challenging opportunities. In the nineties, while working for a station in Salt Lake City, she became the first reporter in the world to be embedded with troops in Bosnia. “With the career I had built,” she says, “I hoped it would help get me closer to my dream of landing a job at one of the networks and being a full-time foreign correspondent.”

Then things began to turn. Karen joined another big-market station in Dallas. As she had done elsewhere, she volunteered to work on Christmas and was scheduled to anchor the broadcast. That’s when she got a call from her father: Karen’s beloved grandmother, long ill, had taken a turn for the worse and was near death.

“I told my supervisor that my grandmother was dying and that I needed to go,” Karen recalls. “He said that I couldn’t, that everyone else was gone. So I stayed and anchored the broadcast, and my grandmother died without my being able to say good-bye. It was then that I began to have doubts about my career. I’d already given so much to this profession, but look what I’d lost.”

But she continued working and soon moved to a station in Phoenix, where she was assigned to be embedded with an Apache helicopter unit in Afghanistan. “One day I was doing a live-shot report,” she recalls, “and a bomb exploded a couple hundred feet away. There was noise and chaos and ambulances. I was hustled into a bunker with a bunch of soldiers, and for two hours we hunkered down there while a loudspeaker kept blaring ‘This is not a drill! The base is under direct attack. Mass casualties have been reported. This is not a drill!’ ”

Karen later learned that 26 people had been killed in the explosion.
“People always ask me if I had been afraid of dying. I can honestly say I wasn’t. All I could think about was ‘Have I told everyone I love that I love them? Have I done all I can to make a difference? Am I happy?’ ”

Back in Phoenix, Karen finished a documentary she’d been working on and began preparing to return to Afghanistan, a promise she had made to the troops with whom she’d been embedded. Then she received some shocking news. The station had decided not to send her back. For several days, Karen vehemently appealed the decision, but the news director was adamant. “The decision is final,” he said, “and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Something inside Karen had reached its breaking point.

“Yes, there is,” she answered calmly. “I quit.”

Moments later, she called her mother, who didn’t believe what she was hearing. “You quit your job?” she asked.

All at once, Karen began thinking of all the hours she had put in, the holidays she had missed, everything she had sacrificed—the husband, the kids, the life outside work.

“Not just my job, Mom,” she said. “I quit my career.”

But now she had to find something else to do. Karen remembered that when she was in the bunker, some of the soldiers got to talking about what they wanted to do when their tour was over. Visit family was a frequent answer. Take the wife to Hawaii. Take the kids to Disneyland. Karen was struck by how many of them wanted to travel, intuitively recognizing that in going somewhere new, they would be revived, restored, reinvigorated.

“For almost two decades as a reporter, I had been doing what Peter Jennings told us to do, which was to give people information that was important to their lives. I had focused on crime, scandal, war. But suppose a person needed to know how to restore her spirit, or recover her energy, or develop a more positive outlook on life? And that’s when my idea of Travel Therapy was born.”

Karen had given herself a new assignment. She would build a Travel Therapy Trips website and write a book that would help people inspire and empower themselves through travel.

It wasn’t easy to make the transition. Karen’s finances had taken a hit when she quit, but she felt she needed to take the plunge. “After I built the website, I sold my car and cashed in my 401k,” she says. “Then I bought a one-way plane ticket and took a one-year lease on an apartment in New York City, where I knew almost no one. That’s where I wrote my book,
Travel Therapy: Where Do You Need to Go?
, featuring trips to take based on whatever you’re going through in life.”

Using her skills as a reporter and a communicator, Karen tells her website audience about spas, resorts, beaches, and other destinations and activities.

“I’m not literally a therapist,” she says, “and the closest I get to writing a prescription is when I say ‘Take two vacations and call me in the morning.’ ”

What separates Karen from other travel reporters is that, while she’s writing about adventure trips, family vacations, or romantic excursions, she maintains her focus on the things that help restore and maintain peace of mind.

And just as her audience is on a journey—both inward and outward—so, too, is Karen. “I’m different now,” she says. “I make sure that I have more balance in my life. The truth is, to be good at my job, I had to become numb to the horrors I was covering. But the problem with going numb is that you can’t decide when to turn it on and off. I found that I had become numb in my personal life, too.

“I want to feel joy, to experience beauty, to be in touch with my spirit. You know you’re doing the right thing in the right place if it gives you the courage to go forward. I can’t wait to see what’s around the next corner.”

“There wasn’t anything even remotely appropriate to try on. . . . It made me feel so bad about myself.”

Robina Oliver, 53

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

“M
y butt looks huge!”

“My thighs are so jiggly!”

“My boobs need a lift!”

Every day, Robina Oliver listens to women put down their bodies as they stare into the mirrors of her swimsuit shop. “It’s really difficult to hear,” she says, “because that used to be me.”

Rewind to 2003. A size 16 Robina was vacationing with her husband in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, browsing for a new swimsuit. Each one she pulled off the rack was skimpier than the last. A string bikini? Get serious. A one-piece with cutouts on the sides? Like
that’s
gonna hide love handles. A crocheted thong bottom? Not on your life.

“There wasn’t anything even remotely appropriate to try on,” she says. “It started to get really depressing. It made me feel so bad about myself—even worse than I normally did.”

Robina had struggled with weight her whole life. “I’ve always been big,” she says. Growing up in Connecticut, she had a tumultuous home life. Her parents divorced when she was two, her dad moved to the Cayman Islands when she was nine, and her mom remarried, had two sons, then divorced again when Robina was 15. Robina sought comfort in eating. She’d binge on bologna, mayo, and white bread sandwiches, eating one, then another, then another. “It was a way to fill the void,” she says. “Then, after food, I turned to other things.”

Namely, men. “I was always looking for male approval and attention,” she says. “If they liked me, that was enough, even if they were jerks. I was using them to escape.”

At age 19, Robina wound up in Austin, Texas, following a guy she’d met while waiting tables back home. Soon after, she found out she was pregnant. “He didn’t want children,” she says, “and I just let myself go along with it. So there I was all by myself.” Too far along for an abortion, she decided she’d put the baby up for adoption and, after giving birth six months later, held her little girl for only a few minutes before doctors took her away. “I never saw her again,” Robina says. Refusing to let herself get emotional, she blocked out most of what happened that day. “It was the only way I could deal with it. I stuffed it all away. It was something I just needed to get through; I never really faced it.”

Austin, with its lively nightlife, was an easy place not to face problems. Working as a waitress and hostess, Robina earned a reputation as a sassy, loudmouthed party girl. “It was fun, but I was just drifting. I drank away my pain.”

In 1989, Robina decided it was time for a change. She moved crosscountry from Austin to San Francisco, where a year later she found work as a waitress at the city’s hip Zuni Café. Six years after she landed the job, a new dishwasher arrived from Acapulco. His name was Carlos, and it wasn’t long before he was smitten with Robina.

“He would follow me around like a puppy,” she says, “begging in broken English, ‘Give me a chance.’ ” Though she had sworn off men after moving to California, Robina says, “He wore me down.” One date turned into moving in together after three months—and eventually into real love.