Welcome to the High Perch, where we look for the hidden patterns that help creativity, and life, flourish.
Most weeks, we circle the stories of remarkable humans and listen for the wisdom tucked inside their lived experience.

Today is something different.
Instead of circling someone else’s story, we glide down into my own. Some recoveries happen in real time; some take fifty years and a stroke of luck on the internet. What follows is a story about loss, reunion, and the strange ways our early selves call us back to them.

It is also the story of a gorilla named Goranchas.

Goranchas Comes Home

Some mysteries wait half a century to reveal themselves.

When I was little, I had a black-furred toy gorilla named Goranchas. She was my favorite. Her felt face was replaced again and again by my mother’s careful hands because I loved her to pieces, literally. We had matching outfits. She went everywhere with me until the day my dog found her first. My mother promised to fix her, but time does what time does. Years later, when I went looking, she was gone, probably one of my dad’s pragmatic clean-outs.

I remember that hollow feeling. It wasn’t just about a toy. Something in me knew I had lost a small, brave part of myself.

In September, while reading The Two Towers at the ocean, I stumbled on the name Gerontius Took, Bilbo’s grandfather. There it was. The sound of my gorilla’s name, hidden in Tolkien all along. My mum must have read it to me as a kid, the syllables lodging somewhere deep, emerging later when I needed to name a companion who could hold my fiercest love, keep me company, go adventuring with me.

That night I went looking. I still had her friend Veronica, the little brown gorilla, tag barely legible but enough to trace the toymaker. And there she was on eBay. Goranchas, fresh-faced, waiting. Reincarnated just for me. Seeing her, memories sparked. I recognized the original felt face and the perky yellow bow. I ordered her without hesitation.

She arrived close to my birthday and close to my last dose of tamoxifen, the end of my breast cancer treatment. The timing feels significant. I found a long lost part of myself at the same moment new doors were opening in my relationship with this body.

Maybe this isn’t just nostalgia.
Maybe it is a reclamation.

The child who loved without caution.
The girl who believed in magic, softness, and strength at once.
The one who still believed she could do or be anything.

Finding Goranchas again feels like finding her, the version of me who existed before I learned that I had to perform to fit in or be loved. It is the joy of reunion, of finding something we thought was lost forever, even when the thing we misplaced was ourselves.

We were all little badasses once.
And maybe the real adventure is remembering how to love ourselves like that again, fiercely and tenderly and without apology.

We spend so much of adulthood trying to outgrow ourselves. Today felt like a reminder that sometimes the path forward is a loop back: to the softness, the courage, the unedited truth of who we were before the world taught us its rules.

Goranchas returned so I could remember.
Maybe your missing pieces are circling back too.

Take good care of your magic.
Stay strange in the best possible way.
Stay open to the small miracles.

See you soon, scavenger.