The Boat That Carried Me Back to Myself
Written by Kelly Gunn, Lifestyle Guide
Kelly Gunn is a cancer survivor, certified personal trainer, and founder of Feinix Haus. A year after her double mastectomy, she competed in two bodybuilding competitions and then built the lifestyle brand she couldn't find anywhere else.
Some of my earliest memories begin with the sound of wind moving through the mast of my dad's sailboat. If you've ever slept in the cockpit of a boat, you know the sound I'm talking about. The halyards are tapping against the mast. The gentle rocking that eventually becomes so familiar you stop noticing it. Cool air on sunburned skin. A sky full of stars where a ceiling should have been.
My dad passed away 25 years ago. The boat is long gone. But every time I hear a mast sing in the wind, I'm a little girl again. Funny how memory works. It doesn't always return through photographs. Sometimes, it arrives through sound.
When I think about my dad, I don't picture a living room or a camping trip. I picture water. If I pull out old photo albums, chances are he's wearing sunglasses, squinting into the sun, standing at the helm, or has one of us girls on his lap. Most of my memories of him happened there. Most of our photographs did too.
Maybe that's why boats have never felt like objects to me. They've always felt like where life happened. Maybe that's why I've always found my way back to the sea.
California. Hawaii. Belize. Virginia. Croatia. Greece. Now Montenegro. For a girl who grew up sleeping in the cockpit of a sailboat, that's either one hell of a coincidence, or life has been trying to get my attention for decades, and I'm just slower than I thought.
As kids, my sister and I built a little fort along the Chesapeake Bay. One of our favorite things to do was write notes, tuck them inside empty bottles, and throw them into the water. We were convinced someone would find them. Or a pirate. Honestly, either outcome felt equally exciting.
Looking back, I don't think I ever outgrew that game. I just changed what I put inside the bottle. That realization didn't arrive after cancer. Or during therapy. Or because I'd finally figured life out. It finally became impossible to ignore over a cappuccino in Montenegro. I wasn't trying to write an essay. I was trying to figure out what came next.
For months, I'd convinced myself I needed to become a better coach. A better marketer. A better entrepreneur. Instead, somewhere between a notebook, another sailboat drifting across the Adriatic, and a conversation that somehow kept getting deeper, I laughed out loud. “Motherf***er, this is it.”
Years before that morning in Montenegro, I'd started a swimwear company called NAU. Most people saw swimsuits. I saw stories. Every collection began with an artist. Not because I wanted beautiful prints. Because I wanted to know where they felt most alive.
That place became the collection. The artwork. The photography. The soundtrack. The handwritten thank-you postcards. The colors. Women waited for each new collection the way I waited to create it.
At the time, I thought I was building a swimwear company. Looking back, I realize I was building little worlds. I just didn't know how much I thrived in creating. Not until I stepped away. I thought I was selling beautiful swimsuits, and they were beautiful.
But what I was really creating was anticipation. A story. An atmosphere. A small invitation to imagine yourself somewhere beautiful before you ever packed a suitcase. Looking back, I wasn't trying to build a swimwear company. I was trying to bottle what it feels like to come alive somewhere. Not the actual destination. But the version of ourselves that somehow always seems to show up when we're there.
For almost a year after I retired from NAU, I barely thought about it. Honestly? I was relieved. I'd spent years trying to carve out space in an industry overflowing with beautiful swimwear. I was tired of hustling. Tired of chasing sales. Tired of believing the next collection had to outperform the last.
Then life gave me an exit. A relationship ended in a way I never could have imagined. I packed up my life, left the islands behind, quietly retired the company, and then, not long after, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That chapter deserved to end.
What surprised me wasn't that I missed NAU, the swimwear company, but what I missed about it. I missed sitting at a table covered in fabric swatches, playlists, sketches, photographs, postcards, and handwritten notes. I missed chatting with an artist and asking them to tell me about the place they loved most. I missed obsessing over details that almost nobody else would notice. The soundtrack. The hang tags. The anticipation. The thank-you postcard tucked into every order.
Closing the company wasn't the loss. Realizing I'd confused the business with the place my creativity lived, that was. For a long time, I thought I was grieving a company. I wasn't. I was grieving a boat.
Maybe grief isn't something we finish. Maybe it's just another way love keeps changing shape. That would explain a lot. It would explain how I could feel relieved to close one chapter and still mourn what it had quietly given me.
Maybe that's what we all do. We mistake the vessel for what it was carrying. We grieve the marriage, believing it took our capacity to love. We grieve the career, believing it took our ambition. We grieve the business, believing it took our creativity. We grieve the life we thought we'd have, believing it took our future. We grieve our bodies, believing they took our confidence.
Maybe loss feels so absolute because we've accidentally packed parts of ourselves into things that were only ever meant to carry us for a while. Standing in Montenegro, watching another sailboat disappear into the Adriatic, I started looking backward instead of forward.
Not because I wanted my old life back. I didn't. I was curious. Why had these same ideas kept finding me? The boats. My dad. Messages in bottles drifting across the Chesapeake Bay. A paper boat tattoo I'd chosen because I loved boats. NAU. The playlists. The postcards. The sea.
Life had been trying to get my attention. I just kept overlooking it. Maybe because I couldn't believe the answer could be that simple. I'd spent years assuming clarity would arrive like lightning. Instead, it wandered in quietly, sat down across from me with a cappuccino, and was, quite honestly, irritatingly simple. Which somehow made it even harder to believe.
The paper boat tattoo still makes me laugh. When I got it, I wasn't trying to say anything profound. I just loved boats. My dad loved boats. Boats were where life happened. Paper made it feel different, less expected. Years later, I looked down at it and smiled.
Paper has absolutely no business surviving in water. Somehow, there it was. Still with me. Maybe that's why clichés become clichés. Not because they're shallow. Because every now and then, you finally live one. Life had been trying to get my attention all along. I just hadn't been still enough to listen.
Maybe the better question isn't what you've lost. Maybe it's this: what part of yourself have you accidentally packed into something that was only ever meant to carry you for a while?
Read more from Kelly Gunn
Kelly Gunn, Lifestyle Guide
Kelly Gunn is a cancer survivor, certified personal trainer, published writer, and founder of Feinix Haus. A year after her double mastectomy, she competed in two bodybuilding competitions. She has been published in Wildfire Magazine, C-Heads Magazine, and on National Cancer Survivors Day. She is building a lifestyle brand and retreat experience for the post-cancer woman the world forgot about. She is not a coach. She is not a therapist. She is the woman who lived in the After and built the room she couldn't find.
