My friend Margo Talbot https://margotalbot.com/ is a world-renowned ice climber, author and mental health advocate.

Margo has led expeditions in such far-flung locales as Antarctica and the Arctic. She is a motivational speaker and writes a powerful blog about her insights along the road of life. She promotes women’s personal empowerment through workshops and coaching.

Her book All That Glitters: A Climber’s Journey Through Addiction and Depression, is a story of healing and redemption; a story about losing oneself, and then finding one’s way back home. https://margotalbot.com/book/

Margo writes about family dysfunction and healing from it and regaining/preserving mental health. She once gave a powerful TED talk on this very subject. https://youtu.be/kayj6oew9_M

In her youth, Margo got into trouble with drugs. She was eventually arrested for drug dealing. She has spent most of her adult life figuring out how she got there. She helps others to get out or stay out of similar places.

I met Margo Talbot as the group leader of an Outward Bound survival course I took in Ontario, Canada over a decade ago.

Margo taught us how to live survive in the woods. We chopped a lot of wood that week. We made a lot of fires out of forest detritus. We took a lot of swims in a cold and uninviting (but admittedly invigorating) lake.

Margo organized a solo camping trip for each participant on the final night. That was the “big finish” to the course.

Mid-afternoon on the next to last day, each of us were taken by canoe to separate remote campsites. We were left alone to spend the night with a tarp, some rope, a box of matches, snacks and a barebones breakfast. My nerves were pretty steady until nightfall neared.

I went wandering once I landed onshore. I came upon a derelict and uninhabitable shack in the woods with a two-hole outhouse beside it.

On the side of the shack hung a sign. In huge letters, it proclaimed: “Bear Country.”

I can’t even pretend I slept well that night. But I did survive. Bonus.

Margo once shared this wisdom below in a post and it has stayed with me.

I share her perspective.

Make lemonade.

“Things you don’t see coming in life: your sister trying to legally prevent you from seeing your dying father.

Your brother taking your father’s hearing aids from the nursing home to prevent you from having conversations with him.

Your mother defending both of your siblings and their actions.

Your extended family standing by doing nothing to prevent these emotional crimes.

The upside is, I don’t know ANYBODY who gets handed such PRICELESS stories to fill their books with!“

– Margo Talbot