The Email That Rewrote Everything for Rebecca Faye Smith Galli

Rebecca Faye Smith Galli knows what it means to have your life rewritten against your will.

Loss arrived early. Her teenage brother was killed in a waterskiing accident when she was just 20. Then came the beautiful chaos of motherhood, shadowed by medical crises that would have broken most people: a son with a degenerative disease who wouldn’t see his sixteenth birthday, a daughter with autism, another son fighting a rare blood disorder. Her marriage crumbled under the weight of it all, though she and her ex-husband managed to create something rare: a divorce built on mutual respect and shared love for their children.

But the universe wasn’t finished with her yet.

Nine days after signing her divorce papers, Becky woke up paralyzed. Transverse Myelitis, the doctors said, is a one-in-a-million inflammation of the spinal cord. She spent 19 months in a state of suspended hope, waiting to see if she’d be among the lucky ones who recover. She wasn’t.

At some point during those endless months of therapy and uncertainty, Becky had to answer an impossible question: Who was she now?

A Message from the Past

The answer arrived in 1997, in the early days of email, from someone she hadn’t thought about in 15 years. Scott, a high school buddy, had read about her paralysis in her father’s newspaper column. The subject line was simple, almost comically understated: “Is that you?”

Becky laughed when she saw it. She’d been asking herself the same thing.

Scott was curious, full of questions, and apparently a very fast typist. So Becky started writing. She told him everything: the marriage, the kids, the medical nightmares, the divorce, the paralysis. She wrote about the dailiness of her new reality: playing goalkeeper soccer in her wheelchair with her three-year-old son, wheeling back and forth across the garage door opening as he tried to score, coming away with tire tracks on her thumbs.

The words poured out, and as they did, something shifted. These weren’t just updates to an old friend. They were stories. Real stories that might matter to other people.

She started forwarding them to friends and family. They forwarded them too. Eventually, someone suggested she send one to the Baltimore Sun. That garage-door soccer story became her first published piece—an op-ed that opened a door she didn’t even know existed.

Building a Life from Words

One story led to another. The Sun kept publishing. A local weekly paper offered her a column. After her father died, she took over his column too, then created a third focused on navigating autism with her daughter, Madison. Readers kept asking: When are you writing a book?

So she did. She enrolled in Stanford’s two-year creative nonfiction program, studying while raising her kids, living in her wheelchair, building a life she’d never imagined. In 2017, she published Rethinking Possible: A Memoir of Resilience. Last year came her second book, Morning Fuel, a collection of daily inspirations.

Today, her website holds more than 400 published columns. She still writes her Thoughtful Thursdays newsletter, sharing what keeps her grounded and connected. “I’ve learned that once I can accept reality, possibilities open up if we stay open to receive,” she says.

It’s a hard-won philosophy. Nothing about Becky’s life has been easy. She’s a single woman, paralyzed, living far from family, navigating the world alone in ways she never expected. When people read her finished work, they don’t see the labor behind it, the emotional excavation, the endless editing, the sheer persistence required to keep showing up at the keyboard.

But she’s found her way through by staying connected. “I told our therapist I wanted either an amazing marriage or an amazing divorce, and we have an amazing divorce,” she reflects on her relationship with her ex-husband. It’s a testament to her belief that even broken things can be rebuilt into something good, just differently shaped than expected.

The Pivot Point

For women standing at their own pivot points, feeling stuck or lost, Becky’s advice is practical and born from experience: Be brutally honest about where you are. Don’t disappear into isolation. Keep moving, even when you don’t know where you’re going. Find people who can walk alongside you.

And maybe stay open to the unexpected emails. The random reconnections. The moments when someone from your past asks, “Is that you?”

Because sometimes the answer is: Not anymore. And sometimes that’s exactly when you become who you were always meant to be.

“Scott’s email changed the trajectory of my life,” Becky says. It helped her live fully “in a life that I surely didn’t plan.”

None of us gets the life we planned. But some of us, the ones who keep writing, keep moving, keep showing up, get something even better: a life that’s authentically, courageously our own.

To learn more about Rebecca Faye Smith Galli, visit her at BeckyGalli.com or find her on LinkedIn.

Click here to read more stories from women like Rebecca Faye Smith Galli rewriting their lives. And if you have your own story to tell, apply here to be featured.