Kintsugi Heroes
Only When You're Broken: From a Norwegian Forest to the World
Helen M. Ryan
Helen fled Norway at 18 with $1,000 and built a life of agency by choosing to act despite fear.
Kintsugi Studio
Kintsugi Heroes
Helen M. Ryan
Helen fled Norway at 18 with $1,000 and built a life of agency by choosing to act despite fear.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Helen fled Norway at eighteen with a thousand dollars and no plan. Behind her was a childhood fractured across continents: sexual abuse in her uncle's house, a year in her grandmother's remote forest home where fear was forbidden, then her teenage years caring for a mother spiraling through alcoholism and multiple suicide attempts. By fourteen, Helen was cleaning up blood, calling ambulances alone in the night, working while still at school, buying flowers with her paycheques. She learned early that she could not fix what was broken in her mother. What she could do was leave.
In California, she worked temp jobs to learn new skills, started a graphic design business, raised two kids, and married her roommate. For years she moved through life on autopilot, gaining weight, losing herself. When her father died in 2003, she decided she was not going to wait to die. She started walking, then spin classes, then teaching. She found a version of herself that felt strong. In 2007, after her divorce left her without child support, Helen packed a suitcase with her adult children and they became digital nomads, travelling through Poland, Bosnia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Montenegro. In Auschwitz she stood where genocide happened. In Kotor she found beauty that felt like a fairy tale. Everywhere, she met people who had suffered more than her, who remained kind and grateful anyway.
Now Helen runs her business, teaches, hosts a walking podcast, and measures success not by money but by trying something new. She looks at failures as finding out what does not work. Her message is simple: fear does not have to stop you from doing what needs to be done. She still counts in her head before something scary. One, two, three, go.
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