Meet Mel Yackley

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mel Yackley. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Mel, 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?

One of the things I am most proud of is my resilience. In fact, because I have felt it and seen it in action, throughout seemingly the darkest of times in my life, it is one of the reasons I trust myself so deeply. I gained resilience from a multitude of life experiences, one of them stemming from a lifelong commitment to recovery from addiction. I have been in recovery from drugs and alcohol since 2011, and I have maintained this lifestyle throughout some fairly traumatic and stressful life events. A string of single days put together to comprise nearly 13 years at this point in recovery, takes a lot of work, commitment, and brutal honesty – not only with others but with oneself.

In 2017, my best friend and mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer; by the time it was diagnosed it had already metastasized (spread) to her brain. I watched my parent go from full independence one day to being unable to work or even complete a task such as making a pot of coffee independently. We lost her 7 months after she fell ill, right in the middle of the holidays – December 3, 2017. During those 7 months, I became a fierce advocate for her and my dad in navigating her healthcare. I also continued to work full time, three hours away from my parents, while managing her care and also somehow trying to come to grips with what I knew to be true – that she would be gone within the year at age 64. I had just turned 33.

My dad and I became very close following our family’s loss; I felt he was my witness and my confidant, the only one left who had known everything about me. I could look in his eyes and see he was proud of me. He tried at times to remember special dates in my life that my mom would have remembered. We attempted to adapt to our lives without the main glue, which was Mom. 18 months after Mom passed, my dad began to experience health issues. As the Covid pandemic hit and unrest ensued in Minneapolis, I was called home again to care for my dad. What we thought to be herniated discs and sciatic nerve issues turned out to be very progressive ALS/Lou Gehrig’s disease.

I’d watch my dad – my strong, active, dad – lose his ability to walk, to swallow, and inevitably his ability to breathe. He was officially diagnosed with the cruel disease on September 4, 2021 and after declining any medical intervention with the few words and breaths he’d had left, we were shocked to find he’d slipped away sometime between that night and the following morning – September 5, 2021. He was 72, and I was 36. The last day that I spent with my dad was also my 10th sobriety date. The two will always be intertwined and some would find that sad. To me it is a stark reminder of what I was able to do only because I have been in resilient in my recovery life. Recovery gave me the ability to look my dad in his eyes, in tears, and listen to him apologize for having to leave and tell him I had just wanted to find him a moment of comfort for the last year but could not. He’d shown me the outdoors at a young age, and I told him I’d take him along with me hiking everywhere. I think that’s the last thing I said to him that he reacted to.

Within the first eight months of losing my dad, I was tasked with clearing out and selling my childhood home, my dad’s home, my dad’s business/shop, my own apartment, and buying a house of my own. My friends kept me afloat, as I also continued to work full time. I spent many mornings frozen, not knowing how on earth I was supposed to tackle the day ahead managing 3-4 properties all on my own, while reeling from the losses of both my parents. This is resilience.

I find it hard to relate to majority of people my age, as I am not yet 40 but have made decisions and carried through on wishes of my parents that inevitably ended their lives; I had to do this while it shattered my heart. I did it. This again – is resilience. I don’t know how far my resilience is going to take me, but I know I can trust it and count on it.

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 became heavily involved in outdoor adventuring following the loss of my mom in 2017. It was where I again found myself and could turn to it at any time to center myself with the Universe. Somewhere in 2020, I became involved with Boundary Waters Advisory Committee, which as a nonprofit doing work to maintain and advocate for backpacking and hiking trails in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I became a crew leader after volunteering, and I’ve since taken on more and more responsibility with the organization. I currently head up Outreach/Recruiting, am a member of the Board of Directors, and am the Vice President for the organization as well. It is truly a privilege to take volunteers of all shapes, sizes, ages, and backgrounds into the wilderness for a few days and watch them grow as human beings and volunteers, all in the name of increasing accessibility to wilderness trails for future generations. If any readers take interest, please reach out! Our crews go each spring and fall, and we are happy to mentor people of most any experience level; we can usually find a trip that will fit anyone’s interest.

While I do a lot of outdoor adventuring throughout the year personally, professionally I have worked in the legal field for over 15 years now. This affords me the stability to be a homeowner, a dog and cat guardian, a responsible citizen, and the ability to buy more adventure gear and cover travel expenses.

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?

Authenticity – I learned this throughout losing my parents. Had I not had friends in my corner that I could be raw and authentic around, I’m not sure how I would have coped. At this time in my life, if I am in a place or around factors where I feel I cannot be authentic, I will find my way out of the situation. To develop this quality, it may be helpful to spend time with people that have different lifestyles and backgrounds.

Resilience – a former supervisor of mine called me resilient, prior to me being hired. She picked up on this based on the way I spoke about losing my mom. I find it hard to articulate the depths of my resilience other than to say it has been sheer grit at times to pull through spending years in acute grief and what I’ve learned to be trauma at witnessing the losses of both my parents in a short time. I am unsure how to build resilience such as this other than to stay centered – anchored – with people you admire and that can sit with you no matter the emotion.

Connection – I love connecting with people. In another life, prior to recovery, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with other people, and in fact I wanted only to isolate by myself. My world is much different now, and that is the result of recovery too. I learned early on to pick up the phone and reach out as long as it took to find someone available when I was hurting. I used this frequently in hardship, and I continue to do so. This practice has led to my ability to connect with people in other communities, including in outdoor communities. My advice? Take the risk! Put your hand out, say what is on your mind, because we don’t know how long we have.

What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?

Over the past 12 months, my life has slowed down in some ways as I have been on adventure hiatus in order to train my new adventure partner, a 1 year old Australian Shepherd. I thought I had patience and resilience before but have grown leaps because of her over the last year. We spend a ton of time training, doing species-specific activities, and just building our relationship. She will get to come on any outdoor pursuit that I do, including my winter activities.

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