🚂 How a train wreck becomes a muse 🎨

Crafting beauty from chaos

Last weekend my friends and I wrapped up a beautiful Whistler weekend with a hike to the Train Wreck—a hidden pocket of forest where seven boxcars crashed in the ‘50s and never left. It was a gorgeous crunchy-leaf autumn day, vibrant colours and long shadows, so the wreck was particularly spectacular.

The cars are still there, half-eaten by moss and memories, resting under layers of graffiti and and in silence near the roaring Cheakamus River. Steel skeletons in the green emerald moss. You’d think it would be an eyesore. But over the years, something beautiful happened: the wreck became art.

Climbers, artists, seekers and bikers all stumbled across these hulking ruins and started painting them. Over time, the wreck turned into a collision of color and chaos—murals tangled with poetry, cartoon monsters and love notes. What could’ve stayed an accident site turned into something liminal. Urban legend. Vandalism-turned-art-installation. Grief-trap turned gallery.

And standing there, it hit me:
This is what living with ADHD can feel like.

Not ruined—just unfinished.
Messy, creative, hard to explain. Still worthy of awe.

It’s imperfect magic.
It’s proof that not every mess needs to be erased.
It’s wild beauty—a kind that only exists because something went wrong, not in spite of it.

And if I spend my whole life trying to clean up the metaphorical boxcars—or make every part of my brain run “on track”—I miss the opportunity for alchemy. I miss the gallery.

Every splash of paint on those boxcars is someone showing up.
Forgiving. Laughing. Letting go.
A friend listening. Hugging a grandchild. Holding the hand of a lover. A stranger letting you cut in line at the grocery store. Acceptance is a kind of art. Grace is a kind of color.

So here’s what I’m learning:
You can’t un-crash the wreck.
But you can allow it to be transformed.
You can’t fix everything that fractured, but you do get to choose what grows in the ruins. That’s the whole point.

Growth isn’t about cleaning up the mess.
It’s about planting beauty in the middle of it—
and letting that become the thing that’s worth seeing.

---

And maybe the real question isn’t “how do I fix the wreck?”
Maybe it’s—
Who’s showing up with color in your life right now?
And who are you allowing to paint your story with understanding, laughter, and some sacred permission to be unfinished?

Because even boxcars can make a masterpiece.