Sometimes, the best way to find yourself is to just get lost.

When you don't know where you're going, the world can be a scary place. That's what drives our to-do lists, our calendars, our goals, and our life plans. I know this all too well, as someone who had a minute-to-minute agenda, planning and plotting every major milestone in my life from birth to bachelor's degree to a big theatrical debut.

But occasionally, life takes a detour. Something that a yearly planner can't always account for. What's a detour? Merriam-Webster has an answer for that:

noun
1. a deviation from the direct course or the usual procedure

A detour, according to its French origins, literally means a change of direction. I, however, have my own defi nition of a detour: A detour is a curve in the road of life, a bump in a path, a big sign in the middle of your trip that says, "Sorry, you have to go that way." Nobody expects a detour to happen in life. But it's when we think we have things planned and all fi gured out that we're thrown a curveball.

A detour is many things--unexpected, a nuisance, diffi cult, hard to grapple with, and frustrating--but it can be beautiful. Sometimes, we can't appreciate how beautiful our detour was until we've made multiple twists, turns, and deviations in our set-out path. Sometimes, we can't realize the beauty of our detour until we spend a bit of time traveling it. We need to give our detour enough time to form a story of its own.

After all, every good story comes from a detour. What would be so funny about the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum if nothing happened on the way to the forum? By sharing our stories, we make sense of our detours. We reframe our derailments as the intricate pathways that make up who we are today. When we tell others about our detours, we become travel partners on these journeys with no straight path. When we know we're not traveling alone, that road becomes an adventure.

Detours force us to explore new opportunities. When we can't go in the direction we anticipated, we've got to switch gears and adapt. We have to resource inner strengths that we never knew we were capable of accessing. When we achieve the unthinkable, we discover who we really are. That's what makes a Detourist. A Detourist embraces those unexpected routes as opportunities for growth, change, and self-fulfillment. I'm living proof that a detour can lead to unexpected blessings.

Hi. I'm Amy--and I'm a Detourist, too. I didn't always call myself that. I was the "musical theater ham," "audacious Amy," or "the girl obsessed with the animatronics at Disneyworld." Then, my life took a turn.

The April of my high school senior year, a blood clot caused my stomach to rupture. I woke up from a coma months later to be told I may not be able to eat or drink ever again. It turned into nearly seven years and twenty-eight surgeries. Then, the unexpected jolt of the first bite of food awakened memories of being sexually abused by a trusted mentor. For a while, this didn't seem like a journey, detour, or any kind of road to follow at all. I felt stuck--facing obstacle after pitfall, after challenge, with only a barren wasteland ahead. But I kept going--or rather, stayed on a path--any path I could find--until things got better. That wasn't easy. It took time to find the beauty in the twists, turns, and detours that I continue to travel. But whose life goes exactly how they plan, anyway? Straight paths are boring.

Because of my fifteen-year trauma marathon of ups and downs, I've written a one-woman musical about my life, discovered the world of mixed-media art, published plays, recorded albums, and given three TEDx Talks--all about transforming adversity into creative growth--and through my writing, speaking, and workshops, I've inspired others to navigate their own detours by turning obstacles into opportunities. What I've experienced is, the more stories we hear about turning an obstacle into an opportunity, the more empowered we are to transform our own lives and have confidence that when life does surprise us, we're capable of getting through anything.

Even as I continue to deal with wounds, scars, and some medical issues that haven't been resolved, I look for the upside of obstacles. I welcome the unexpected change in my "thought-out" life and see what opportunities may arise. If I took away all of the setbacks, hurdles, frustrations, and detours, I wouldn't be who I am today. I wrote this book to share the actionable steps that helped me through all of my experiences--so that you too can love your own detours.

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Excerpted from Creativity and Gratitude: Doodle Edition: 52 Exercises for a Year of Art, Hope, and Healing, Now with More Space to Draw, Write, and Manifest by Amy Oestreicher
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