Maria von Trapp

“What will this day be like…..I wonder.”

Some characters don’t just live in stories — they live in your bones.

Maria von Trapp is one of mine.

She arrived in my childhood like a warm gust of mountain air, all sunlight and sincerity, carrying a truth no one else had ever handed me:

that being too alive for the world you’re born into doesn’t mean you need to shrink.

It might just mean you’re meant to climb.

Maria had a spirit that refused to sit still.

She loved out loud.

She disrupted every rigid place she tried to belong to, not out of rebellion, but because joy leaked out of her in ways institutions couldn’t contain.

The nuns called her a problem.

The world called her improper.

But she was never undisciplined — she was unconfined.

“I Have Confidence” was the anthem that raised me.

The song that taught me what bravery feels like inside the body: not stoic, not cold, not performative — but warm, breathless, a little shaky, and absolutely unstoppable.

Maria didn’t fake fearlessness.

She let fear walk beside her.

And then she walked anyway.

She taught me that confidence isn’t an armor.

It’s motion.

The kind that comes from knowing that however unprepared you feel, your spirit is still on your side.

Her gift to me was this:

that a woman’s softness is not a liability.

That tenderness can be a compass.

That honesty can be a form of leadership.

That a life can be remade by choosing to show up with your whole heart, even when the world tells you to trim it down.

Maria sang her way into her real life.

And because of her, I learned that I could, too.