I live on a small farm in Vestfold, Norway. Six horses. An apple orchard, alpacas, a golden retriever named Fanta and a black cat with opinions. The kind of quiet that forces you to listen. This is where the work happens.

 

For two decades I ran equine-guided therapy for kids in crisis here — teenagers who'd been through more than most adults can name. Around the same time I started fostering, and for sixteen years there were kids in the house who didn't share my DNA but shared the work of figuring out what was actually theirs underneath everything they'd been handed.

 

Horses notice everything and explain nothing. Kids in crisis are the same — once they decide you're safe. Twenty years of those two teachers, and I learned to spot the scripts running people who didn't know they were being run. Then I hit my own fifties.

 

The kids grew up. The caregiving years ended. The house got quieter. And I had to face the fact that I'd spent decades building a life on scripts I'd never consciously chosen. Good woman. Devoted mother. Capable professional. Don't make a fuss. The same lines I'd been helping other people unlearn — running on autopilot inside me.

So I did the work. The same work I'd been doing with horses and teenagers, but turned on myself. The slow excavation of what was actually mine.

Then I wrote about it. Twice.

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The inheritance

 

There's a layer underneath all of this that I didn't fully understand until later. My great-great-great grandmother was Anne Brannfjell.

She was born poor in Vardal in 1815 and went to Christiania (Now Oslo) to work as a servant in the household of a wealthy goldsmith — a married man named Hermann Øiseth. She had two sons by him, my great-great grandfather was her firstborn . He refused to acknowledge either of them and put her out of the house to raise them alone.

So she did.

 

She became a signekone — a folk healer. By the late 1800s she was the most famous one in Oslo. She collected herbs, made medicines, blessed her patients with her hands. People came to her in lines for everything from rickets to gout. She couldn't read or write. She refused payment for her work — patients left gifts as they could afford.

Quackery was illegal in Norway at the time. She was never once convicted.

 

The goldsmith who threw her out is mostly remembered now in court records and parish books. Anne has a statue at Ekeberg. A road named after her. A novel about her life — Gaven — written by another of her descendants, Ellen Vahr.

And here I am, five generations later, writing about scripts and pattern recognition and women who refuse to disappear quietly.

The work is older than I am. I'm just remembering it.

​

 

What I do now

I help Gen X women see the scripts they didn't write — and stop running them. Sometimes that looks like a book. Sometimes a diagnostic. Sometimes a small cohort of three to five women in a twelve-week container. Sometimes a horse in a field with someone who hasn't cried in a decade.

 

I'm not here to fix you. I'm here to hand you the match.

​

— Line

 

Author of Screw the Script and Torch the Script

​

​