Meet Rachel Rickman

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rachel Rickman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Rachel, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Finding resilience within ourselves and healing our pasts could be an essential part of human cognitive and emotional evolution.
All I’ve been through, and especially the recent loss of my father and a sister-friend in the last year has honed my belief that, as Cheryl Strayed says, “Love is our essential nutrient.” Love and understanding for ourselves, others, and the glorious planet that we live on. We have so little time here. Let our legacy be love.
Achieving that kind of love and healing means being willing to put in the work: therapy; admitting we’re wrong and apologizing, even to our children; giving ourselves love and grace for the burdens and struggles, as well as joys and pleasures of being human; admitting our privilege; and many, many days finding the strength to simply put one foot in front of the other.

There are countless phrases for “choosing the road less traveled.” Movies, books, stories, songs, myths, and legends laud those who choose a different path in life. They are unconventional heroes, and we root for them.
However, the reality of stepping out of the grooves worn by the feet ahead of you—ruts in the road carved by family, society, and culture, can be incredibly difficult. And, at times, heartbreaking.
While we may cheer for the Moana character in the movie as she pushes against tradition or endlessly quote Frost’s poem, society, community, and especially family, do not always look kindly on those who swim free of the current.

My resilience is multi-faceted. A cool lake within me fed from many streams.
I’m a white woman born and raised in the rural woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I grew up in a loving, educated home where I learned to grow my own food, fillet a fish, and track a deer. I have a BA in English/History, an MA in Nonfiction/Pedagogy, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan. I taught at the college level at NMU for nine years.
I thought I would live out my life in Michigan.
Today, I live in Rosarito, Mexico, just south of Tijuana, San Diego, and the San Ysidro border.
My current life is about as far as I could get from 15 years ago, when I was 25, married to my ex-husband, teaching, and fulfilling my family and community’s expectations of what my life would look like: teacher in a long line of teachers, gardener like my father, food writer, and wife.
Despite having a life filled with things and people I loved and valued, I carried an ache in my heart that sounded like the distant rumble of horse hooves reverberating up through the ground on a mist-filled morning.
In March 2013 I made a choice. I stepped away from everything known. Despite the throbbing pull to return to a familiar version of my old life, I kept putting one foot in front of the other, determined to find my own way.
Vulnerable and disoriented, I stumbled from my path to freedom, straight into a two-and-a-half-year abusive relationship.
For almost three years I lived with a man who used words like weapons and whittled away at my sense of self.
By the time I found the strength to end that relationship I was isolated from friends and family. I lived alone in the 100-year-old cabin on 40 acres we had purchased, but that I owned and was responsible for.
I wasn’t sure if he was stalking me. When I went to the police, they said I didn’t have enough evidence to warrant any sort of protection.
I learned to barricade the door and sleep with a knife by my pillow and a loaded .22 at the foot of my bed.
When I first walked through the door of the cabin, I was a shadow of myself.
Through necessity and resilience, I learned to take up space again.
I grew strong. Listening to the river at night and a lone coyote call, I pushed fear aside and slept.
Facing a long, cold Michigan winter alone in the cabin, and wanting a change in perspective, I decided to spend two months in Mexico on a little island called Isla Mujeres. Within a month, I fell in love with Ryan, a handsome musician from Southern California making a life on the island and the man who’s now my husband and father of our two beautiful children.
I sold the cabin, which took a piece of my heart, and moved to Isla Mujeres to begin another chapter in my life.
Ryan and I decided to have a baby. I found out I was pregnant with our son the same week we started our restaurant.
Nine months later I had a traumatic c-section in a Cancun hospital, where I gave birth to a beautiful child we named Callan.
Callan grew up swimming in warm Caribbean waters and playing in turtle nests on white sand beaches. Our restaurant grew in scope and popularity. But those days ended in March 2020.
Our island-life changed irrevocably with the pandemic.
Almost immediately, the island went into full military lockdown. There were strict rules, curfews, and military checkpoints to enforce the new edicts. Our business shut down, as did the entire island, and our savings quickly disappeared. Friend after friend left for the hospital in Cancun, never to return.
In September 2020 we received word that Ryan’s father had been in an accident. He was hospitalized and died three weeks later.
When Ryan was offered his father’s place in the Longshoreman’s Union in San Diego, California, we made the huge decision to leave our home, sell our business, and take a giant leap into the unknown. For my husband, it also meant leaving his dream-job as a house musician to become a Longshoreman working hard jobs in west coast ports.
A year and a half postpartum, I was struggling to find my identity after becoming a mother and no longer teaching at the university.
Now, my husband was going through similar identity struggles.
They were hard days for us.
We left our island home with thirteen suitcases, our son, and our two dogs. I flew with Callan, one dog, and the suitcases. Ryan drove across all of Mexico with our 150 lb., 13-year-old labrador and the rest of our belongings.
We lived with my mother-in-law for three months and then moved to San Diego. The night we moved into our new home I listened to the sirens and helicopters and felt like an undertow was carrying me into an unknown sea.
The next morning, I awoke to a call from my sister that my father had had a stroke.
I left my husband and two-year-old son in California and flew to Michigan.
After a week in the hospital, my father recovered, but the event was frightening for us all.
Six months after settling into our home in San Diego we realized we couldn’t afford our life in the most expensive city in the nation, and we made the decision to move across the border to the north-Baja beach town of Rosarito. Both Ryan and I are Mexican residents and Callan is a citizen, so the move made sense for us on many levels.
Tijuana and its’ surrounding region were an unknown world to me that only existed in scary stories, but through determination and necessity it quickly became home.
Ryan and I learned to navigate the crazy roads, learned the nuances of crossing the border, got Callan into a wonderful local Waldorf School, and settled into our community that has since become like family.
I slowly started to feel like the years of constant movement and struggle were smoothing, even a little, when my father was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer.
Our world became flights back and forth across the country, chemo appointments, and managing his symptoms.
In June 2024 we decided to have another baby, and I was pregnant by July.
My father’s cancer worsened in August—the same month we became embroiled in an emotionally and financially draining legal battle for visitation time with my stepson.
I spent the beginning of my pregnancy helping caretake my dying father.
My mom, sister, and I were with him when he passed away in the living room of my childhood home during a mid-January snowstorm. I was eight and a half months pregnant.
After we handled all the necessary arrangements, my mother returned to Mexico with me, and I prepared for a natural birth after my traumatic c-section five years previous.
Our baby girl was almost two weeks overdue when I entered the hospital for inducing. When two days of painful, invasive “natural inducing” techniques with the midwives failed, they told me Pitocin was the only option. Shortly after it was administered, I began experiencing unbearable contraction pain and went from “No pain meds” to begging for help.
I was still in agony after the epidural and when the baby’s heart rate began to spike, they told me I would have to have another c-section. Tortured in heart and body, I cried and then readied myself to be cut in half again.
In the midst of the procedure, I heard a flurry of activity behind the blue curtain. The doctor came around to tell us that my uterus had ruptured, and they were doing all they could—to save the baby; to save my uterus; to save my reproductive organs; to save my life.
Thanks to the good doctors at UCSD, our beautiful Eloise was healthy, I survived, and didn’t have to have a hysterectomy.
My body was broken, sliced, and traumatized, but I was alive.
Since Eloise’s birth I’ve been working to heal from all these traumas and their legacies within my parenting, marriage, and relationships. I’m thankful to be alive and have the opportunity to do so.

At age 28, when I walked out of my first life and marriage and into the unknown, I couldn’t fathom I would be writing these events just over a decade later.
My resilience comes from many places, helped along by the love and support of my husband, family, and community.
The needs of my children and my fierce love for them have helped me focus on healing—healing for my family, and for myself.
Being resilient is an everyday exercise and practice.
One of my favorite words is “pivot.”
Being a work from home mom with a 10-month-old and six-year-old; a husband who’s sometimes gone working for days; the necessity of crossing a border for doctor and dentist appointments, etc. means “pivoting” and being resilient go hand in hand.
Over the last several years I’ve decided to do my utmost not to waste my life being stressed, angry, frustrated and anxious much of the time. Nothing in life is guaranteed. This. Now. Is the time we have. There is no choice but to be resilient.
Resilience has come in the form of learning that I can always redefine myself. I can pull myself out of the ashes of whatever struggle I’m coming through and find the way forward to a new, more aware, perhaps even better iteration of me.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m a former English professor/freelance writer/editor. I’ve worked on dozens of different projects from editing the children’s books of astronaut Sunita Williams’ mom, to writing marketing blogs, to building my own curriculum as a tutor, to creating a small following around my creative nonfiction writing (especially my food writing).
Finding my way as a writer and work-from-home mom has been a challenge that I think many women and parents face. Finding the time and energy to put into the subjects that I’m passionate about has made me redefine myself and my work numerous time. I’m learning to combine my life as a mom with my writing–it’s a constant work in progress.
I have two writing projects that I’m focusing on right now.
The first is a series of essays on the website jezebelstable.com. I hope to combine these essays into a book one day.
Finding ways to monetize the writing I put hard work, love, energy, and intention into has been a struggle. Especially in the days of ChatGPT and AI.
Rather than continuing to publish only on social media and jezebelstable for free, I started a new project and series of writing on Patreon. It’s easy and inexpensive for people to subscribe to my page and allows me a tiny compensation for my efforts. My Patreon site is titled, “Around the Table.” My hope is to create conversation, community, and inspiration through talking about food. A subscription to “Around the Table” gives patrons access to videos, photos, essays, meal ideas, information on food, culture, and food history. In addition, I’ve been publishing essays from my book with the same name on the site.
In an age where it’s difficult to know what’s real, I hope my writing is something solid and tangible people can carry with them in their daily lives.
I want to bring people together “around the table.” We can learn so much about ourselves, our histories, and the larger world by talking about food.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

When I lived alone in my cabin on 40 acres in the middle of the Upper Peninsula wilderness, I tested myself and was tested by my circumstances.
I was alone and afraid my abusive ex was stalking me.
I had to chop and haul my own firewood, figure out snow removal, mow the lawn, deal with issues like a broken well pump, and so much more.
I was alone in ways people are seldom alone.
There were so many things to be afraid of that at some point I came to the determination that I must either embrace my fear or sell the cabin, which I loved.
Determination was hand in hand with resilience.
I determined that in order to master my fear, I must become fear.
I walked the dark woods at night, listening. My skin raised with goosebumps, but I forced myself not to run to the beckoning warm light from the cabin windows.
The old cabin creaked in the night. I determined that whatever spirits lingered in the cabin’s old, hand-hewn log walls were my spirits and if my ex came to do me harm, they would protect me.
I learned to find comfort in coyote howl and owl hoot, rather than fear.
I walked against the river’s current, naked, a queen, a steward of all I surveyed.
I watched otter play, sensual and sinuous on the riverbank, and felt more a part of their world some days than the human world I visited for work each day.
I’ve carried that resilience and strength with me through the many struggles and hardships that followed.
Rather than letting the fear take me, I embrace it until it’s wrung of its’ power and is no longer an obstacle. I move forward, stronger.

The longer I live, travel, and meet people, the more I realize how beautiful and unconventional my upbringing was.
My sister and I were raised by parents who believed in living a “good” life. That entailed growing their own food, reading, being up to date on current events, participating in community, traveling, recycling, and giving love to their daughters and a wide community of friends and family. Their way of life wasn’t based in any religious incentive, political agenda, etc. Their belief in love and kindness was their driving force.
Because of my parents I know how to be self-sufficient, and I think that sense of self-sufficiency is a major strength in today’s uncertain times. Their way of life taught me to be adaptable.
Growing up in an unconventional household taught me to value my place in nature and the wider world.
They taught me the importance of food, love, and community—especially bringing all those things together. Today, our family has a community in Rosarito that have become like family. I’m incredibly thankful for this “familia”, especially for my children.
My grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. He was an activist who marched and fought for equal rights, especially during the equal rights movement and the gay rights movement.
My grandfather and parents taught me to advocate for others. To read. To think.
While my life has changed considerably since I was a Contingent Professor, it’s my hope to continue teaching via tutoring and online teaching portals such as OutSchool.
I believe we’re never done learning. My 100 year old grandmother believes the same. She visits her local library regularly.
In my life at this moment, I’ve struggled finding my identity as a work from home mom who has little time or energy to work on the writing and teaching projects that fulfill me.
I’ve had to find acceptance in the fact that this season of my life is necessarily more devoted to childcare. I’m working to shift my focus and see this time as a gift as well as a struggle. I have the chance to be a positive influence for my children. To share with them the same values and magic moments that I had as a child.
I didn’t always feel this way. With my first child I struggled to find my footing and felt like I had lost my identity. Who was I if I wasn’t writing? Wasn’t teaching?
It’s taken me many years to untangle my feelings about the move from professional life to full-time parent. Ultimately, I’m deeply thankful for the challenges. With the help of my therapists and support of my husband I’ve worked to find happiness and joy in the now. I understand better how fleeting time is. How fast it all goes.
We only get this one precious life. I feel we need to spend more time asking ourselves: How will we spend our time? What do we want our legacy to be?
If we’re so privileged to have the time and access to resources I think we need to put in the work: go to therapy. Work to build a community, especially if you have a family. Work to find what brings you joy and find ways to share it with others.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

Throughout my life I’ve been incredibly blessed with a wide community network who’ve mentored me, supported me, and given me love.
My parents raised us amongst a loving group of “aunts” and “uncles” who love my sister and I, and by extension my children, unconditionally.
When I was in college I struggled with numerous hardships and was heading down a negative path. My friend, instructor, and mentor Jaspal Singh helped pull me back into the light and taught me so much. She guided my post-colonial studies and influenced my teaching. She continues to inspire me today. I traveled to India with her in 2013—a trip that changed my life forever.
The support of my mentors, community, and family help keep me going.
They’ve taught me the importance of reaching out in troubled times. The importance of community support. The ways love can reach through all the hard things and lift us up.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.patreon.com/AroundtheTableRR
• Instagram: aroundthetablerr
• Facebook: Rachel Rickman