Not because anything terrible happened. Or maybe because it did. Not because you were proven wrong. Maybe you were four years old, hiding behind your mother’s leg while someone reached for you. Your whole body said no. And then an adult smiled and said, “Go give them a hug. Don’t be rude.”

So you did.

It seems like such a small thing. It is such a small thing. But I keep wondering how many of us learned some version of the same lesson long before we had words like intuition, boundaries, fawning, or self-trust: sometimes what you feel matters less than making another person comfortable.

Nothing terrible has to happen in that moment for something important to have happened. She has simply been given a tiny lesson in whose discomfort matters most. His feelings might be hurt if she refuses. Her discomfort, apparently, can be overcome. Somehow the possibility that an adult might feel weird about a child’s no becomes more important than the no itself.

We repeat versions of this lesson everywhere. Say hello. Be nice. Give them a chance. Don’t make it awkward. Don’t be dramatic. Hear them out. You should at least explain why. Maybe you misunderstood. Maybe they didn’t mean it. Maybe you’re being too sensitive.

By the time we are adults, some of us have become extraordinarily skilled at talking ourselves out of ourselves.

I know I have.

I have spent a crazy amount of my life, especially in the last five years, trying to outsmart my own knowing. Not because I couldn’t hear it. I could. The feeling was often there long before the explanation. Something in me would tighten or hesitate or quietly pull away, and instead of treating that as information, I would begin an investigation.

Was I being fair? Was I projecting? Was I scared? Had I communicated properly? Did I have enough evidence? What if I was wrong?

This is the strange thing we do with intuition. We ask it to prove itself before we allow it to protect us.

And I think we have made this much more complicated than it needs to be.

You don’t need a better reason than no.

That might be the whole essay here today.

You are allowed to say no without proof and move on.

No, I don’t want to.

No, I don’t like this.

No, something feels off.

No, I changed my mind.

No, thank you.

We have somehow made these sentences feel insufficient. We think a no needs supporting documentation. We think declining access to ourselves requires a persuasive argument, particularly when the other person hasn’t done anything we can neatly point to. We seem much more comfortable with boundaries once there is a villain.

But someone does not have to be bad for you to say no to them.

A situation does not have to become dangerous before you are allowed to leave it. A relationship does not have to become unbearable before you can decide it isn’t yours. You don’t have to hate someone to stop seeing them. You don’t need a catastrophic ending to justify an ending. You don’t have to let someone touch you because you let them yesterday. You don’t have to finish the date. You don’t have to accept the job. You don’t have to answer the phone.

You can simply not want to.

There is a difference between saying, “You are dangerous,” and saying, “I don’t feel safe here.” One is a claim about another person. The other is information about your own experience. We get into trouble when we think we must prove the first before we are allowed to honour the second.

Maybe you are wrong about them. Maybe their intentions are wonderful. Maybe someone else would adore the exact thing that makes your stomach turn. None of that means you have to stay. A person can be disappointed by your no and still respect it. Their disappointment does not turn your boundary into a negotiation.

This is where intuition gets interesting to me, especially women’s intuition, because I think we have spent a lot of time making something powerful sound silly. Too emotional. Too sensitive. Paranoid. Dramatic. Meanwhile, our minds and bodies are quietly taking notes. Tone. Timing. Inconsistency. The way we feel after spending time with someone. The relief when they cancel. The way a room changes when a particular person enters it. The conversation we rehearse six times before having it. The way our shoulders live somewhere near our ears around one person and drop around another. Call it intuition. Call it pattern recognition. Call it your gut. I don’t really care what makes it respectable enough to believe. We are magical and we are smart, logical creatures and I am tired of acting like those things cannot coexist.

Sometimes we know before we know the “why.”

That doesn’t make the knowing infallible. Fear exists. Anxiety exists. History comes with us. Human beings misread one another every day. I don’t believe every uneasy feeling is a prophecy, and I don’t think intuition makes any of us a perfect judge of character.

But this is the part I keep coming back to: it doesn’t have to.

Intuition doesn’t need to convict anyone in order to deserve our attention.

If something feels off, perhaps the first response doesn’t have to be to explain the feeling away. Perhaps it can simply be noticed. Not obeyed blindly. Not turned into an accusation. Just noticed. Allowed. ALLOWED.

Something in me doesn’t like this. I don’t know why yet. I don’t actually need to know why.

That sentence can sit there for a minute without being argued with.

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For anyone who learned to fawn, appease, accommodate, or keep the emotional temperature of a room comfortable, this can feel almost unnatural. Sometimes the instinct to override ourselves has been rewarded for years. We learned how to read everyone else before we learned how to remain loyal to what we were reading inside ourselves.

We became good at making things okay.

Good at giving another chance.

Good at finding the generous interpretation.

Good at explaining why someone behaves the way they do.

And understanding people is beautiful. Compassion is beautiful. Grace is beautiful. Some people deserve all of it. Your gut will recognize those people too.

But understanding why someone hurts you does not make the hurt disappear. Understanding someone’s intentions does not require you to accept their impact. Compassion does not require access. Grace does not require another chance. Being a good human doesn’t mean offering yourself as a sacrifice just because you cannot produce evidence that someone has done something wrong. You can simply say no and never find out whether your instinct would eventually have been proven right.

You can understand completely and still leave. You can also not understand at all and leave anyway.

I think this is where I have lost myself before. Not in some obvious cataclysmic moment where I suddenly stopped knowing who I was, but in a hundred small negotiations against my own discomfort. I knew what I felt, then immediately began making room for everybody else’s version of it.

Maybe they didn’t mean it.

Maybe I should wait.

Maybe if I am kinder, this will somehow produce a different outcome.

Maybe they didn’t know better.

Maybe I need to explain it better or dig into this more before saying no.

There is always another maybe available if you are determined enough not to trust yourself.

And eventually you can get so far from the original feeling that you start believing the confusion is the problem. But sometimes the confusion came after the knowing. Sometimes the first answer was incredibly clear and everything after it was negotiation.

I can trace this backwards in my own life with an uncomfortable amount of precision. There were moments when my intuition was not whispering. It was screaming. I felt the no in my body and shut my own voice down because I wanted proof. Something concrete. Something I could point to and say, See? Now I am allowed to trust what I have been feeling.

And inevitably, the proof came.

That is the part that gets me now. I got the answer I had been waiting for, but at what cost? Sometimes the cost was my sanity. Sometimes my sense of safety. Sometimes my voice. Sometimes months or years spent inside something my body had already tried to tell me about. The proof did not make me feel triumphant. It made me wonder why I had required so much pain before I was willing to believe myself.

There is nothing noble about being proven right after abandoning yourself long enough to collect the evidence.

I think part of what keeps us stuck there is our obsession with the narrative. We want to know exactly what happened, what they meant, whether we interpreted it correctly, who was right, who was wrong, whether there is some version of the story that makes everything make sense. We can spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to solve the narrative while barely looking at the outcome.

But the outcome is information too.

How does this actually feel in your life? What has this relationship, job, friendship, room, dynamic, whatever it is, actually produce? Will this new thing actually help you? Does it feel good? Are you peaceful or constantly explaining? Do you feel like yourself or are you disappearing? Are you spending more time trying to understand why something hurts than noticing that it keeps hurting?

Maybe the story is complicated. Most stories are. Maybe everyone involved has a different version and each version contains something true. Maybe you will never know exactly why someone did what they did. But sometimes we get so committed to understanding the story that we forget to look at where the story has brought us and what it cost us to ignore our voice.

And if the outcome is that you are repeatedly uneasy, depleted, diminished, afraid, confused, or simply do not want to be there anymore, you are allowed to take that seriously without first solving the plot.

You do not need the perfect narrative to honour the outcome.

I wonder how many of us would recognize that sequence if we started paying attention to it.

The immediate feeling.

Then the explanation.

Then the guilt.

Then the self-doubt.

Then asking three friends.

Then returning to the exact thing we knew at the beginning, only now exhausted and with less courage left to make the choice required.

I don’t want to keep requiring exhaustion before I believe myself.

And I don’t think the answer is to become suspicious of everyone or to turn every discomfort into a crisis. It is much simpler than that. I think the answer might be to stop treating our own no as the least credible voice in the room.

To let children refuse the hug.

To let ourselves leave the party.

To leave the relationship.

To stop answering the message.

To change our minds.

To decline without inventing an excuse that makes the other person feel better about being declined.

Because that is another strange habit, isn’t it? How often we soften a no into something circumstantial because we are afraid the truth is impolite.

I’m busy that night.

I’m just really tired.

Work is crazy right now.

Maybe another time.

Sometimes those things are true. Sometimes what we mean is simply: I don’t want to. I don’t know why. And, honey, I don’t always care to find out why my beautiful, intelligent brain and body are saying no before I honour the no.

There is a version of feminine self-trust I am trying to find my way back to that is much less apologetic than the one I have been practising. Less interested in whether the no is palatable. Less willing to turn an instinct into a thesis before acting on it. Sometimes something in you says fuck no. Not because we need to become hard. Not because every person who disappoints us deserves contempt. But because there are moments when all the soft language in the world becomes another way of negotiating against ourselves.

I don’t want to negotiate against myself anymore.

And I don’t want that for you either. Not as an instruction. I don’t know your life, and I don’t know what your intuition is saying. I just hope, somewhere underneath all the voices you have learned to consider before your own, you can still hear yours. I hope when it speaks, you don’t immediately make it audition for the right to be believed.

And I am increasingly interested in a world where that is considered enough.

Not because kindness doesn’t matter. But because kindness that requires us to betray ourselves is a strange kind of kindness.

Politeness should not cost us ownership of our own bodies, time, energy, homes, relationships, attention, or lives.

We are allowed to decide where we go and who comes with us.

And there will be consequences to that sometimes. Someone might think you are rude. Someone might be disappointed. Someone might believe you misunderstood them. Someone might tell a completely different story about why you left. They might vilify you. Someone might genuinely think you made the wrong choice.

They are allowed to think that. Let them, darling. Their interpretation of your no does not get to become the price of your yes.

This might be the piece of self-trust I have been missing. I thought trusting myself meant becoming certain. Certain that my interpretation was correct. Certain that the other person was wrong. Certain that I could defend my decision if somebody challenged it. And I have learned that from a few very unsafe intimate relationships over the years. If I felt a “no”, I had to explain it to justify how I was feeling.

But self-trust has much less to do with certainty than that.

Maybe it is simply knowing that even if I cannot explain exactly what I am feeling, I will not immediately abandon myself for feeling it. I will listen. I will get curious. I will give my own experience at least as much credibility as I give everybody else’s explanation of it.

And if the answer is no, I am allowed to let it be no.

Not a debate.

Not an opening offer.

Not an invitation to convince me.

No. No. No.

There is something deeply powerful about getting comfortable with that word again. I cannot wait to get fluent in “No” again.

Maybe because many of us were taught so early to make it prettier. To wrap it in an excuse. To smile while saying it. To make sure nobody could possibly mistake our boundary for rejection, even when rejection was exactly what it was.

But rejection is part of being alive. We will reject things and be rejected by things. Invitations, relationships, ideas, jobs, touches, futures. We cannot build a life without choosing, and choosing necessarily means that some things do not come with us.

No is part of choosing.

It is not inherently cruel.

It is not a moral failure.

It is not something we earn only after another person has behaved badly enough.

Sometimes no is simply the sound of a person belonging to herself.

I wish we learned that as children, in the tiny, embodied ways we need it as adults. Your body is saying no, and that is enough.

I wish the little girl hiding behind her mother’s leg could be allowed to stay there. Not because Uncle Whoever or the neighbor is necessarily dangerous. Not because anyone needs to panic. Simply because her body belongs to her, and “I don’t want to” is useful information for a child to learn how to hear.

Imagine what might happen if we didn’t spend the next twenty years teaching her to override it and the twenty after that trying to teach her to trust it again.

I am still learning.

I still explain too much. I still sometimes catch myself constructing a beautiful, airtight argument for a decision that could have been one sentence. I still feel the pull to make sure everyone understands me before I let myself move.

But I am less interested now in being perfectly understood.

I am more interested in being able to hear myself. More interested in the outcome than in endlessly litigating the narrative.

There is a voice underneath all the noise that has been there the whole time. Sometimes it says yes. Sometimes it says absolutely not. Sometimes it only says, I don’t know, but something here needs my attention.

I want to stop rushing past it.

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Maybe that is enough for now.

Not perfect intuition or perfect certainty. Not a life where we never misjudge anything or anyone. I am basically a baby calf wobbling around with this one.

Personally, I just want a life where my own voice is no longer the easiest one to override. I can look back at too many moments when my body knew before my mind was willing to accept what it knew. Eventually I got the proof. I just don’t want to keep paying for it with myself.

I want to build a relationship with myself where a strange feeling gets my attention before it needs to become a disaster. Where discomfort does not have to graduate into suffering before we take it seriously. Where we can change our minds without putting ourselves on trial.

Where no gets to mean no before we have a better reason.

I keep thinking about how simple that is.

After all the language we have invented for why we don’t trust ourselves. Conditioning. Fawning. People pleasing. Attachment. Fear. Socialization. There are useful conversations inside all of those words. They can help us understand how we got here.

But understanding how we learned to leave ourselves is only half the story.

At some point, we get to come back. And perhaps coming back is not dramatic at all.

Perhaps it happens in a restaurant when you don’t want the second drink.

In the bedroom when you change your mind.

On a date or trip where something is off.

At work when an opportunity looks impressive but feels wrong.

In a relationship when you realize you have spent months trying to convince yourself to want what you do not want. Or when the voice inside keeps saying, I don’t trust this, and you keep silencing it while you wait for evidence that will finally make your no feel legitimate.

In a room where everybody else seems comfortable and you are not.

In the smallest possible sentence.

No.

No explanation required. No villain required. No catastrophe required.

Just you, with ownership of your own life, hearing yourself. Listening to yourself. Allowing your voice to be enough.

And believing that you are worth listening to.

And my dear, you are worth listening to.

I am learning to believe that about myself with my whole chest after years. I hope you believe it about yourself too. Step by step, right?

Let the story about your no be wrong if need be. Choose yourself, say no, and go to bed knowing you listened right on time. And, if you’re like me and have ignored your no too many times only to be shown what you already knew? Forgive yourself. Dust yourself off and try again.

Outcome for your life over narrative and “no” over everyone else’s comfort.

Love ya! Have the best day x

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Darling, no matter what? It still went that way.

There is a line in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that I have always loved written by Eric Roth.

“You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went. You can swear and curse the Fates. But when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”

It is such an unsentimental little piece of wisdom. It does not ask you to make peace with what happened. It does not ask you to call it a blessing, find the lesson, forgive everyone involved or become the bigger person. You are allowed to be mad as a mad dog about it. The only problem is that it still went that way.

I have been thinking about how much time I have spent arguing with things that have already happened. Not literally arguing, although I have certainly done enough of that too. I mean the private argument with reality that happens afterward. The conversation you replay because this time you have the perfect response. The decision you revisit because now you can see the exact place where you should have chosen differently. The person you keep trying to understand because some part of you believes that if you can finally make sense of why they did what they did, the thing itself might become easier to live with.

I recently made some choices that I had a lot of hope for, and when things inevitably fell apart, I found myself shaming myself for making certain choices despite knowing better and began to bargain with myself, picking everything apart and just trying to make sense of it all.

I am very good at this. I can investigate the past like there is still a case to solve. I can turn something over from every angle, find the childhood wound underneath it, understand the fear behind it, identify my own part in it, figure out exactly where everything went sideways and come away with a very intelligent explanation for something that, unfortunately, has still already happened.

There is a point where understanding becomes another way of refusing to accept the answer. It’s broken and that’s that.

So, this is what I have mistaken a lot about acceptance for a long time: I thought acceptance was an emotional process I must do before I can begin again. Or that I would know I had accepted something when I no longer felt angry about it, or sad about it, or when I could tell the story without some little part of my body tightening. I thought acceptance would show up when I could look back and say that everything happened for a reason, and perhaps even be grateful for the whole ugly thing because of who it made me or will make me.

I don’t believe that anymore.

There are things I would undo if I could. There are people I wish had behaved differently. There are years I would like back, decisions I would change, conversations I would handle better and versions of myself I wish I could pull aside and give a swift ass-kicking too before they walked into something. There are things that happened to me that I do not intend to dress up as gifts. There are also things I did, tolerated or returned to that I cannot blame entirely on anyone else. I can have compassion for who I was when I made those choices and still wish like hell she had made different ones.

Acceptance does not seem to ask me for any of that.

It’s way simpler and requires deep presence in this exact moment.

This happened.

It happened, whether you like it or not, , it just happened.

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The relationship ended. That person made “x” choice. I made mine. I lost that thing. I missed that opportunity. I stayed. I left. I trusted someone I shouldn’t have. I didn’t trust someone I should have. Whatever the sentence is, there is a funny and insane amount of relief in eventually allowing it to end with a period instead of a question mark.

Because the question mark keeps us there, mad as a mad dog.

Why did this happen? Why did they do that? Why didn’t I see it? What if I had said this instead? What if I had left sooner? What if they finally understood? What if I could have one more conversation and explain it properly? There is nothing inherently wrong with asking any of these things. Sometimes the answers are useful. Sometimes looking backward is exactly how we learn not to repeat ourselves. But I have also learned that there is a point where I am no longer learning from the past. I am trying to negotiate with it.

And the past is an absolutely terrible negotiator. It never changes its offer.

It happened.

It still went that way.

I find that almost funny now. Brutal, but funny. You can build the most compelling argument in the world about why something should not have happened and reality will just sit there like, okay. It did.

Which leaves a much less interesting question, but probably a more useful one.

What now?

I have spent enough time wanting enormous answers to that question. I want to know what the whole experience means, what I am supposed to do next, whether I am making the right decision, whether I have learned enough, whether I am healed enough, whether I am about to repeat myself. I want a map when what life usually gives me is about six feet of road. I also want to get something out of all the yucky things that have happened. It’s gotta mean something, right? The pain, the loss, betrayal, change, growing pains, it all means something, right?

Maybe six feet of vision on the road is enough.

I don’t actually need to know where the next year goes. I need to know which direction I am facing today. That distinction has become important to me because I think I have occasionally mistaken processing for progress. I can think about something for six months and still be standing in exactly the same place. I CAN know why I am there. I can explain how I got there. I can have excellent language for the pattern. None of that means I have moved.

Movement is annoyingly physical. You eventually have to do something.

Sometimes that means leaving. Sometimes it means staying and doing something differently. It can mean sending in the application, making the appointment, going to a class or apologizing, starting over, deleting something, making something, going outside, telling the truth, letting the unanswered message remain unanswered. It does not always feel profound while you are doing it. Sometimes it is tiny and insignificant. Most changes in direction probably don’t seem like much. You turn the wheel a few degrees and for a while the scenery looks almost exactly the same.

Then one day you realize you are somewhere else. A few degrees of change in direction on a ship will bring you to an entirely different place than the original course you had planned over the course of weeks at sea.

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This is the part of letting go that I think I understand better now and look forward to embodying. I used to imagine letting go as a feeling. Some clean internal release where I would finally stop caring and know I was done. I have waited for that feeling before. It can take forever. Sometimes I think the action has to come before the feeling. You start walking while you are still angry. You make the decision while some part of you still wishes you didn’t have to. You accept the ending while still hating the way it ended. Your emotions are allowed to take the long way around. Your feet do not have to wait for them.

That feels more doable to me than all the pressure we put on ourselves to be over things. I don’t need to be over every part of my life in order to keep living it. I don’t need to forgive on command. I don’t need to find a silver lining. I don’t even need to stop wishing certain things had gone differently. I only need to be careful that my wish for a different past does not become my reason for refusing the present or rob my future.

There will probably always be things that catch my eye when I look backward. I think that is part of having actually lived. We accumulate people we miss, choices we question, embarrassments that still make us physically cringe, grief that changes shape without disappearing entirely, and whole chapters we would write differently if somebody gave us the pen back. The feeling of wishing you could turn back time can sometimes feel extremely loud.

But, nobody gives us the pen back. We can’t edit life that has been lived. We get the next page, though. How lucky are we?

Imagine: being given this one, big, beautiful life, and when bad things happen and steal your time, your energy, your LIFE… you give that bad thing that made you mad… even more of your time, and all of your future movement? For what?

Maybe that is why Eric Roth’s line gave me comfort. It gives permission to be mad and not be over “it” and STILL move on ahead. There is no demand for grace in it. No insistence that we approve of what happened before we are allowed to leave it behind. Swear. Curse the fates, and holy hell, you need to know- I have. We can be mad as a mad dog about the whole damn thing. And in some cases? I’ll be the first to admit… I am mad as a mad dog. But that doesn’t change it and sitting in it mad will not help me find closure or acceptance.

It still went that way.

So, if you are mad as a mad dog about how things went, which direction will you turn next?

What will you do about it?

Can you move toward something better, still mad and find acceptance and forgiveness on the road ahead when you are ready rather than sitting still until you feel ready to live again?

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I know, darling.

the world has given you
plenty of reasons to.

but don't.

don't become so accustomed
to being alive
that you forget
what an unbelievable thing
it is to be here.

you are a miracle.

and you get to be here.

look at this place.

there are strawberries
that taste like june.

the moon has been following you home
your entire life.

trees make sugar
out of light.

somewhere, someone is learning
the opening chords
to their favorite song

badly,

again
and again

until suddenly,

music.

how did we become
so difficult to impress?

I think there is something
we have to protect in ourselves.

the part that can still
be astonished.

because life will make you tired.

you will lose people.

you will lose places.

you will lose entire versions
of the future
you were certain you'd have.

but please,

don't let grief
take your wonder with it.

there is still bread
with too much butter.

dogs sleeping
in impossible positions.

friends who answer the phone
and say,

tell me everything.

there are songs
you haven't heard yet

that will become part of you.

cities where nobody
knows your name yet.

versions of you
you haven't met.

another summer.

another peach.

another morning
with the window open.

you have to want these things.

you have to leave
some small part of yourself
available for delight and awe.

because the magic
doesn't disappear
when you stop believing in it.

you just stop noticing.

and what a shame
that would be.

to spend your one strange life
waiting for something extraordinary

while the moon guides you home.

while a new lover
reaches for your hand

while peaches drip
down your wrist.

while we put candles into cake
to measure another year of being here

and then close our eyes
and wish for more.

more life.

please.

even after everything,

more.

weary soul... notice.

practicing noticing again.

look.

look at the light on the water.

look at the ridiculous privilege
of having a favorite song.

of knowing someone's laugh
before you see their face.

of biting into something sweet
and thinking,

my god.

i love this.

you don't need to love
the whole world today.

you don’t have to like it

but please,

keep something in you
that wants to.

keep looking.

keep letting small things
be miraculous.

the world is terrible
and beautiful

and heartbreaking
and magnificent

and somehow,

still full of magic.

don't forget.

don't forget.

don't forget.

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I thought I could clock awkwardness instantly. I thought I could tell when somebody’s… anything, felt too curated. When somebody was trying too hard to be deep or they were just shallow. When someone’s confidence looked rehearsed instead of embodied. When a rollout felt forced or awkward. When someone was clearly in their “watch me reinvent myself” era and not fully pulling it off yet. I could see the seams ripping. Or at least, I thought I could.

And there was a part of me that took some pride in that. Like that weird self-decided sense of discernment was a form of superiority. That me, seeing through things meant I was somehow above them. I could judge. Decide. Watch. From high up in my ivory tower where I could not fail because I was doing nothing outside of the ordinary.

Eventually life humiliates you a little and you realize something very sobering: it is unbelievably easy to critique people who are actively risking embarrassment while you remain completely safe & shielded from it. It is easy to criticize the doers as a watcher.

It is much harder to keep doing while people watch you try.

I didn’t understand that until I became the person trying. The first time you post your writing and wonder, maybe even know, that somebody is rolling their eyes at it. The first time you release art attached to your actual heart. The first time you put your face online beside something vulnerable. The first time you say what you really think instead of what keeps you socially protected. The first time you publicly become a beginner at something or anything at all. Suddenly the whole thing looks different from down here. Messy and definitely not so easy.

I genuinely don’t think most people are afraid of failure itself. Or maybe I shouldn’t speak for most people. I know that for me, being witnessed during the process has often been scarier than the possibility of failing. If I could fail privately? Fine. I can lick my wounds and move on. Dust myself off, try again.

But being seen trying is different. There is no hiding the wanting or trying. And wanting something enough to publicly try for it gives everybody else a front row seat to the possibility that you might not get it. That’s vulnerable as hell. It also makes you understand people differently.

The Audacity of People Who Just Go For It

I have such a different and hopefully ever-evolving relationship now to people who simply decide to do things. Start the business. Move to the city. Post the videos. Sing the song with less experience than they would prefer. Launch a new product before they feel ready. Try before they are exceptional. Fail publicly. Keep going publicly. Try, fail. Try, fail, succeed. Try again, fail.

There is something deeply alive about those people. And no, not all of them are geniuses. Some of them are awkward. Some of them are still figuring it out. Some of them genuinely are a little cringe at times, and they know it. Fine. Cringe. So what? If cringe gets you where you need to go… so be it.

I think I used to believe the opposite of cringe was cool. Now I’m not even sure those are opposites worth caring about. Because the person doing something awkwardly is still doing it. The person making imperfect art is still making art. The person whose first attempt isn’t very good has something the person waiting for the perfect attempt does not have yet: a first attempt.

Once I started doing scary things myself, I realized how many negotiations happen before a person ever presses “post” or submits the application or signs the lease in a new country or leaves the relationship or says the thing out loud. Courage almost never feels cinematic in the moment. Sometimes it just feels nauseating or like you might physically just keel over and die from the weight of change.

I think I used to confuse audacity for delusion. Now I think audacity can simply be somebody deciding that embarrassment is a price they are willing to pay for finding out. I respect that more than I used to know how to.

I Was Limited and Scared

This part is uncomfortable to admit. I don’t think all judgment is jealousy. I don’t think every person who dislikes something secretly wishes they could have it. Sometimes we just don’t like things. Sometimes our discernment is right. Sometimes somebody really is being annoying.

But when I started looking at my own internal reactions to people trying way back when, I had to admit that some of them weren’t nearly as objective as I had believed. There was a very real irritation I felt when somebody else gave themselves permission to do something I was still waiting to feel worthy of doing. It is freaking annoying watching somebody take up space when you haven’t figured out how to let yourself take up any. Nothing will trigger you more than people living well when you are dying inside at your own hand.

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Sometimes I translated that feeling into criticism. It was easier to call someone embarrassing than to admit, “I wish I had the courage to do that too.” Not every time. But enough times that I started paying attention to my own bs.

I became curious about envy instead of immediately trying to get rid of it. Sometimes it was petty. Sometimes it was insecurity. And whether it makes me a bad person or not, I will admit, that there were times where I just didn’t like the person personally and couldn’t admit that despite that feeling, what they were trying to do was awesome. Sometimes I genuinely didn’t want what the other person had. And sometimes, underneath all the noise, there was a small and irritating piece of information about me. I wanted something and they were a mirror for me to look at and rather than turn it on them… I was supposed to feel it and turn inwards.

I wanted something they had. Maybe not their life. Perhaps not their business or their relationship or their audience or their clothes. I wanted their willingness. Their nerve. Their ability to say, “I want this,” and then move toward it without first receiving permission from everyone who might have an opinion.

That self-audit has changed the way I understand my own judgment. It also made me wonder how many things I had dismissed because dismissing them was easier than admitting they interested me or triggered me somewhere inside that i needed to look at.

Good Enough to Be Bad at Something

Starting my writing made all of this painfully obvious and felt like a really necessary part of my own evolution. I wanted to write publicly for a long time. I wanted to build something around my thoughts, experiences and creativity. I also had approximately one million reasons why I wasn’t ready.

I didn’t know enough about writing beyond my regular education. I didn’t know enough about audience building. I didn’t know enough about philosophy despite being obsessed with it for most of my adult life. I didn’t know enough about Substack and growth. I didn’t know enough about any of it. I didn’t get a degree relative to what I want to write about.

And underneath all of that was the question I was actually avoiding: What if people think I’m ridiculous for trying? What if they roll their eyes? What if they think I’m self-important? What if the writing isn’t good enough yet? What if I change my mind about something I’ve written, and it now exists forever? What if I fail publicly?

At some point another question showed up that was much more useful and vulnerable: Do I think I am good enough to be bad at something?

Unfortunately, for the last year or two, the answer was, no. I didn’t want to find out and I was scared.

And yeah, nobody starts as the fully formed version of themselves. Noone gets to skip the part where their taste is better than their ability. Nobody gets to show up at the finish line without producing all the unfinished draft versions first.

You learn relationships by being in relationships. You make better art by making art. You thrive in business by attempting business. You cannot study or judge your way into becoming somebody you have never practiced being.

Eventually I had to accept that if I wanted to become a writer of any kind, I was going to have to tolerate being a writer who was still shit at being one and I would have to tolerate writing to a small audience that likely included people who I knew… who won’t like it. It would require being seen becoming this new shape. I would have to let people see me wanting to be one and trying to be one. I think that’s true of far more than writing and applies to anything. You must allow yourself the space to be good enough to be bad at something.

René Girard and the Strange Thing About Wanting

There is a theory on why desire gets tangled up with other people. I really like this one from Rene Girard. René Girard wrote extensively about mimetic desire, the idea that our wanting is often mediated through other people. We don’t form every desire alone in some sealed internal room. Other people show us possibilities. We see lives being lived and sometimes recognize something in them.

That doesn’t mean every jealous feeling is secretly a calling. Gosh, no. But it gave me a different way to look at some of my feelings.

Instead of immediately judging, moving to more of a curious ask, “Why am I being such an a$$ about this?” Kidding, kinda. I would start there by nipping my own bad behavior in the bud and I would get to asking something simpler: Why did them doing something affect me at all?

Sometimes the answer is nothing profound. Or the answer is that I don’t like it. But every once in a while, (more often than not) the answer is uncomfortable and useful. Because another person can show you a possibility you had not given yourself permission to consider.

And I think that’s part of what makes watching other people so complicated. We aren’t only watching them. Sometimes we are watching evidence of what a person is allowed to do. If we don’t give ourselves permission to do things, it’s easy to struggle watching others do what our soul is craving.

Watchers and Doers

I still think there are watchers and doers. I just don’t think they are two permanent categories of people anymore. Doers watch. Watchers do. I have been both, sometimes within the same day.

There are parts of my life where I have thrown myself in with absolutely no idea what I’m doing, and other parts where I am still standing at the edge researching the water temperature and dipping a toe in or watching to see how other people are doing in the water.

Watching isn’t inherently bad. Watching teaches us things. Observation is where we develop taste. It’s where we learn. It’s where we notice what works, what doesn’t, what we love, what we absolutely never want for ourselves.

The problem, at least for me, is when watching becomes such a comfortable position that I forget I am allowed to get up. And modern life makes the seat very comfortable. We can sit on our butts and watch the world pass by on our little screens that convince us that we are in fact, living when we are not.

We can watch people build businesses without building one. Watch people make art without making any. Watch relationships, reinventions, experiences, opinions, careers, bodies, homes, mistakes. We can become incredibly educated about everybody else’s attempts. And with the internet and social media, we have an anonymous way to observe anyone from our ivory tower.

There is a real safety in being the evaluator. The evaluator doesn’t have to miss the note. The evaluator doesn’t have to publish the bad paragraph. The evaluator doesn’t have to want something badly enough to risk not getting it. If you are watching, and evaluating, you have no skin in the game and that is very safe.

Eventually, though, safety has to make room for participation.

Love That For You

One of the nicest by-products that has happened to me since I started doing more things badly, publicly, is that I like other people trying more too.

I don’t mean I suddenly think everything everybody does is brilliant. I still have thoughts and opinions. There are songs I don’t love and writing I don’t connect with and decisions I would never make myself.

But I don’t need somebody else’s thing to be for me anymore in order to think: Love that for you.

You posted the video even though you reconsidered it ten times? Love that for you. You started the weird business that might have low profit margins to begin with? Love that for you. You moved somewhere and it didn’t work and came home six months later? Honestly, love that for you too.

And above and beyond the things that don’t look like they’re gonna work but you gambled and they did? I LOVE that for you.

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You wanted something. You tried. You found out.

There is something freeing about no longer requiring another person’s expansion to make sense to me. And the more I started cheering for other people, the less threatening their courage becomes. Actually, the opposite happened.

It started making the world feel bigger. I feel inspired by people doing their thing. If you can do your strange thing, perhaps I can do mine. If I can do my strange thing, guess what? You can do yours. If you can survive being seen trying, maybe I can too. Maybe courage is a little contagious that way. Trying gives each and every one of us a fictional permission slip from someone else to go ahead and give it a shot.

Participating

I think there are a lot of people hovering at the edge of something in their own life. I know I am. There’s a line in a Noah Kahan song “Your needs, My needs” that I have never forgotten “trace the outlines of your dreams.” OOOOF. I heard that and was so personally victimized by how much I related to living on the edge of my potential. Busy watching everyone else and tracing the outlines of what I want.

Watching. Researching. Refining. Overthinking. Waiting to know enough. Waiting to be good enough. Waiting for some version of ourselves to show up who will finally be completely immune to embarrassment. I have so many dreams I am still afraid of putting into public view. I am just getting started on this little courageous journey of starting things that aren’t quite on the regular path.

And maybe that is why I care about this so much. I don’t want to become someone who only knows what everybody else should be doing. I want to participate.

There is something deeply vulnerable about wanting something badly enough that failure would actually hurt. It is easier to stay observational. Easier to stay ironic and flippant. Easier to maintain enough distance from your own dreams that if they never happen, you can still tell yourself you never really tried, so you didn’t fail either.

But some of the most alive moments of my life have also been the ones where I felt exposed. Getting on stage terrified. Posting the thing before I knew how it would land. Saying what I actually meant when my initial instinct was to hold my tongue or hold back. Letting people see me changing in real time instead of disappearing until I had perfected the transformation. Being earnest about wanting something. Being seen… trying.

I used to think the people I admired had figured out how not to care what anyone thought. Now I wonder if they care just as much as everybody else and decided to participate anyway. Maybe that’s all a doer is. They aren’t fearless. They don’t think they’re better. And it isn’t someone who never watches from the sidelines.

Just somebody who, every once in a while, gets up from their seat because they are sick of watching. Then, they enter the ring of their own life before they feel completely ready.

I hope this inspires you to do something you’ve been putting off. You’ve got this. It’s beautiful to want, to be seen trying and whether you succeed or fail, that isn’t the point. The point… is that you did something and didn’t settle for just watching and judging.

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If you want to read more about Rene’s Mimetic Theory for yourself: Mimetic Theory

Why do I do that, you ask?

Waiting to be more certain. More approved of. Or maybe hoping to be understood. Waiting for some invisible panel of judges to stop watching long enough for me to become whoever I actually am and who I am supposed to be. I wanted to have the approval of everything I feel is watching before I started anything.

So over time, I have begun to realize something both humiliating and liberating:

Most people are not thinking about us nearly as much as we think they are. It’s actually a little bit narcissistic and self-focused to believe that they are. Hear me out.

People are just as busy thinking about themselves as we are involved in worrying about what they think of us. They are busy being human too. Busy wondering if *they* sounded stupid in that conversation. Busy thinking about the text they should not have sent. Busy worrying about money, love, aging, purpose, how their body looks, their future, their loneliness, their grocery list, their ex, their parents, their career, their own reflection in the mirror.

We are all standing in front of our own lives trying to survive the weight of being perceived.

I have never had a thought about someone that persisted into my day longer than a moment aside from people in my close circle that I have love and care for. Beyond that, I have never looked at someone’s choices or clothes or body or life and lost sleep over it.

And yet somehow… we walk around acting as though everyone else has a full-time position dedicated to monitoring our every move. We are monitoring our OWN too closely and worried about what people think.

You post the photo. Wear the outfit. Start the business. Share the opinion. Apply for the thing. Say you love someone. Admit what you want. Change careers. Become more visible. Become less agreeable. Become different.

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And underneath all of it is this less than reasonable terror:

What will people think?

The answer is probably:

something brief. You are literally a fleeting, passing thought for most people. A slight hit to the ol’ ego, I know. Maybe they will judge you for a moment or admire you briefly. Perhaps they will misunderstand you entirely.

It is very likely they will project their own fears onto your choices because your freedom reminds them of all the ways they abandoned themselves. But then dinner needs to be made. Their dog throws up on the carpet. Their situationship texts them back. Their bills are due. Their own life starts screaming louder than yours again.

And you fade back into the background of their mind. I do not say this cynically or like our lives don’t matter to others. I actually think it is one of the kindest, most freeing truths there is.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote a great deal about anxiety and the burden of becoming oneself. One of his core ideas was that many people avoid fully living because they become trapped in “the crowd,” meaning the imagined expectations and opinions of everyone around them. He believed a person could spend their whole life performing instead of actually existing. He’s probably right and how sad is that?!

I think about that often and laugh about how much I let this happen to me. How many versions of ourselves die because we were too aware of being seen? How many dreams do we have that we cut short because… God forbid, someone watches us try and fail?

How many people never write the thing, wear the thing, say the thing, try the thing, because they mistake visibility for danger?

And the strange part is, the fear feels so real. Your body reacts as though social judgment is life or death. Sometimes it makes sense that it does. Humans survived through belonging for thousands of years.

But modern life has distorted that instinct into something exhausting. Now we could potentially be perceived by hundreds or thousands of people at once, and somewhere along the way many of us started believing perception itself was catastrophic.

Meanwhile, everyone else is sitting at home worried about themselves too. Just like we are. I think that is why confidence is often misunderstood. Confidence is not believing everybody will like you. It is realizing they were never going to anyways, and even if they do… they do not know the full spectrum of you. You gotta keep living your life with your full chest regardless. Not in that fake “I don’t care what anyone thinks” way people love to preach online. Of course you care. I think most of us do care. But- what “they” think is fleeting and what YOU feel about your own life is not fleeting. We are human. We want belonging. We want tenderness. We want to be understood.

But there is a difference between considering people and abandoning yourself in front of them. Noone is thinking about you this much, so maybe, apply the same to how you move through life.

At some point you have to decide whether you want to spend your life managing perception or actually living. One day you wake up and realize years have passed.

The haircut grew back. Noone remembers it that clearly. The embarrassing post became irrelevant. One person might vaguely recall it.

The risk either worked out or it didn’t, but you survived and they forgot.

The people who judged you moved on to judge someone else or themselves.

Most barely remember.

It would be a tragedy to discover you built your whole life around an audience that was never paying attention in the first place. The audience is self-made in our owns heads.

People aren’t thinking about us that much. We assume, because we are self-involved in our narratives, that other people are just as busy with us even though they are actually just that busy with themselves. How freeing is that?

Go do your thing. Nobody cares that much. And if they do…. catch next week’s article “Watchers & Doers.”

Happy Sunday ✌️

For years, I thought Sylvia Plath’s fig tree was solely about choosing.

If you’ve never read The fig tree passage from The Bell Jar, the image is simple. The character imagines herself sitting beneath a fig tree. Each fig represents a different future. A husband. A career. A family. Adventure. Art. Different lives hanging above her, ripe and waiting. She wants all of them, and because she cannot choose, she sits there watching them wrinkle and fall.

I’ll read it for reference for those who haven’t read it.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

-Sylvia Plath, the Bell Jar

Even if you’ve read it before, it’s worth revisiting because few literary metaphors have managed to haunt people quite the way this one has. It’s beautiful, and thought provoking.

I’ve carried this literary image around for most of my twenties like a warning label on my path. I don’t think Sylvia Plath was wrong, but I wore it that way because I thought she was exactly right. I must choose or every option will disappear and I will be left with nothing. I was twenty-three years old with a notebook and a heart full of plans and a nervous system that believed every decision was permanent.

I don’t mean permanent in the practical sense. I understood, intellectually, that people changed jobs and moved cities and got divorced and reinvented themselves all the time. But emotionally, I treated decisions like stepping on wet concrete. Once I stepped into them, I imagined they would harden around me forever and I would never be able to step into a new plan.

So I became and have become obsessed with getting things right. The right relationship. The right choice. The right place. The right career. The right timing. The right version of myself. Everything must be right and if I choose wrong, let something go or grasp tightly, somehow, I am doing something wrong. I must be wrong. I would sit in paralysis to try and make the perfect decision.

Basically, beneath all of the fear was the assumption that choosing one thing always meant losing another.

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I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to solve my life before I had lived enough of it to understand the question. Sometimes I think that is what people mean when they talk about anxiety. Not fear of the future exactly. More like a belief that if you think hard enough, carefully enough, thoroughly enough, you might somehow outsmart uncertainty. As if anxiety is some type of technique to outsmart the unknown parts of the path.

As though life is a multiple-choice test and somewhere there is an answer key- and the answer key lies in ruminating.

I remember sitting in coffee shops or driving down the highway making plans for futures that no longer exist. Not because they failed but they were eventually replaced.

There was the version of me who thought she knew where she would live, who she would marry, what success looked like, and what she wanted. Looking back now, it is almost endearing how certain she was. How certain I still can allow myself to be.

I miss some of those women. Others I am relieved to have outgrown. Most disappeared via Irish goodbye and I didn’t even realize that version had left. They didn’t leave through catastrophe. Not through revelation or one big moment. Just through the simplest passage of being alive. A season ended and another began. The person who entered it wasn’t quite the same as the one who had arrived the first day she walked into a new season.

A friend of mine who is nearly triple my age once told me that the craziest thing about getting older is realizing how many former selves you contain. I think about that often and think there is a lot of wisdom in that.

The woman who got her heart broken would not recognize the woman writing this with a heart that is more open again to life and not for lack of hurt or pain. The woman writing this would not recognize the girl who thought every important decision could be made perfect with no casualties with enough reflection. Somewhere between them are a dozen other women who existed just long enough to carry me into the next chapter before handing over the pen to the next version.

When I first encountered Plath’s fig tree, what frightened me was the possibility of choosing incorrectly.

Now, if I’m honest, something else unsettles me. The certainty that we always have a choice and that all choices are fixed.

The Problem with Trees

So, perhaps this is where I begin to part ways with Sylvia.

Not because I think she misunderstood suffering. Few writers have articulated the ache of being human and looking towards multiple futures more honestly than she did. The fig tree remains one of the most accurate descriptions of possibility I have ever encountered. Every choice does contain a loss. Every path closes the door on another. To love one person is to not love countless others. To live one life is to abandon infinite alternatives.

That part feels right for me. And, we must choose. What feels less true to me now is the tree itself.

Because a fig tree is fixed.

It is rooted in one place. The fruit hanging from its branches is the fruit available to it. It cannot wake up one morning and decide to grow in another climate. It cannot pull itself from the earth and wander toward a different horizon. The possibilities available to the tree are determined by where it stands.

Human lives operate differently.

When I was younger, I treated life as though all the important options were already visible. As though navigating life was one long exercise in selecting correctly from a completed list. This career or that one. This city or that one. This relationship or another. I thought wisdom meant identifying the best future and committing to it.

But looking back, I am struck by how incomplete the list always was and is.

At twenty-three, I could only imagine futures that made sense to a twenty-three-year-old version of me. I could not imagine what I would want after heartbreak because I had not yet experienced that particular heartbreak. I could not imagine the desires that would emerge after certain dreams failed. I could not imagine the ambitions that would appear after achieving goals I once thought would satisfy me. I could not imagine becoming someone I had never been. And that seems obvious when written down, yet I spent years behaving as though I should have been able to.

There is something almost arrogant, maybe ignorant about the way we think about the future. Not arrogant in a malicious sense. Innocently arrogant, again, perhaps just ignorant. We assume the limits of our imagination are the limits of reality. We assume that because we cannot currently envision another possibility, one does not exist.

But life has repeatedly proven itself far more creative than I am.

When I was engaged, I thought I could see the shape of my future. Not every detail, of course, but the broad strokes. I knew the direction. Or at least I thought I did. There was a plan. Then life did what life has done every single time I became too certain.

It changed. Painfully & unexpectedly.

And for a period of time, all I could see was what had been lost. The future that had disappeared. The branch that had broken. The fig that had fallen from the tree. I felt stuck, rooted with the damages done.

What I could not see from where I stood was that the future was already busy creating itself again. Not repairing itself. Not replacing itself. Creating itself.

What came after a cataclysmic change of direction was not a consolation prize. It was not a lesser version of what I had wanted. It was something entirely different. New experiences. New friendships. New work. New questions. New parts of myself that had never been required before. New…. everything.

An entire chapter that was invisible to me while I was mourning the previous one. The pattern of recreation has repeated itself often enough that I can no longer ignore it. Every future I was afraid of losing was eventually replaced by one I never saw coming.

That change doesn’t always come immediately or painlessly. And the replacement has rarely been what I expected. This time, it was replaced with a sense of agency and a deep sense of feeling okay on my own for the first time ever. I woke up one morning, staring at the mountains after months of deep pain and sorrow… and realized, whoa, I finally am starting to feel at home in my new uprooted reality. And it shook me because months before that I could not have pictured feeling that contentment.

So, I am starting to get suspicious of certainty. That isn’t because I think planning is pointless or that direction does not matter. But because life keeps demonstrating that it is under no obligation to limit itself to my imagination. The older I get, the more I may believe that many of us suffer less from choosing and more from believing we can see all the choices available.

We stare at the branches above our heads convinced they represent the whole orchard. Meanwhile, beyond the edge of our vision, new seeds are being planted. New trees are growing. Entire forests are appearing. The future I feared losing was never the future I got anyways, it was always subject to change.

The Lives That Never Appeared on the Branches

When I look back on the periods of my life that felt most uncertain, what strikes me now is how convinced I was that I could see the full scope of what was available to me.

I couldn’t. None of us can.

At various points in my life, I have been absolutely certain I knew where things were headed. I have looked at a relationship and thought, this is it. I have looked at a town and thought, this is home. I have looked at a version of myself and thought, this is who I am now.

Sometimes I was right for a while. Then life kept moving. I think about the version of me who got engaged. If you had asked her what the next five years looked like, she would have answered with confidence. She would have been wrong.

Not because she was naïve or foolish. Because she was trying to predict a story she had not finished living instead of allowing it to take develop on its own. That version of me could not see the change that was coming. She also could not see the woman who would emerge from the grief and feel alive again after it all.

She could not see the apartment in a city she wasn’t planning to live in. She could not see the new dog sleeping beside her as I write this after my other beloved dog went missing and died, shattering my heart. She could not see the peace found in writing essays. The music. The people who would walk into her life and also leave. And even come back. The conversations I would have. The things I would discover I was capable of surviving.

None of those futures were hanging from the branch I was studying. And yet they exist now. Or perhaps they didn’t exist yet.

Maybe that’s the point.

When I picture my younger self sitting beneath Plath’s tree, a fig tree of my own, I realize she spent so much time worrying about choosing the correct future that she never considered the possibility that the most meaningful parts of her life had not been created yet or looked different than she perceived. Seeds planted are not always growing beyond the soil yet.

That thought changes something for me- there is a subtle difference between believing you are choosing among futures and believing you are helping create them. One feels like selection. The other feels like participation.

The first assumes life is already written and your job is to choose the right chapter. The second assumes the story is still being drafted. Perhaps that is why some of my favorite memories feel so impossible in retrospect. Not because they were extraordinary. Because I never would have thought to want them.

I could not have sat in a coffee shop at twenty-three and written what was going to happen in the future into a notebook if I tried. I didn’t possess the imagination required. I didn’t know enough yet. I wasn’t enough versions of myself yet. And even now, I will never know enough to see what is coming. What an adventure.

And maybe that is what I find most comforting now when I think about the future. Not that everything will work out. Life has never promised that. Not that every ending or beginning leads somewhere better. Sometimes things are simply lost. What comforts me is something much smaller. The recognition that my imagination and vision has been wrong before.

Spectacularly and repeatedly wrong.

The future I feared losing was never the future I got. But neither was the future I dreamed of.

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Life kept handing me things I never thought to ask for and sometimes surprised me in the best way. Which makes me wonder what is currently waiting beyond the edge of my imagination now.

What conversations.

What people.

What versions of myself.

What joys.

What griefs.

What a seemingly normal day may have in store this time beyond my mind’s eye.

Looking Up

These days, when I picture the woman in the fig tree passage sitting beneath her tree, I no longer feel afraid for her. I feel tenderness. I know that woman. I have been that woman. I am that woman.

Not literally beneath a tree, of course, but beneath the weight of possibility. Beneath the pressure of believing that one decision could determine the rest of my life. Beneath the assumption that somewhere there existed a correct future and that my job was to identify it before time ran out.

I understand why she keeps looking up and studies every branch. I understand why she hesitates.

What if she chooses the wrong one?

What if she reaches for the life of adventure and later discovers she wanted stability? What if she chooses love and wonders about art? What if she chooses art and longs for family? What if she commits to one future and spends the rest of her life haunted by the others?

Those fears are rational. I think every thoughtful person has met them at some point. But the more time passes, the less surr I become that the tragedy of the fig tree is the inability to choose.

I think the deeper tragedy might be believing the branches we can see represent the entire story. The deeper tragedy is thinking we are trees deeply rooted and unable to move and change. The metaphor asks us to imagine that every meaningful future is already visible. Life has convinced me otherwise.

Some of the most important and grand things that have happened to me were never on the tree. They weren’t hidden among the leaves. They weren’t hanging from a branch I forgot to inspect. They simply did not exist yet in my frame of reference. They arrived later… all created by choices, circumstances, accidents, timing, heartbreak, courage, luck, and the absolutely mad alchemy we experience being alive. Things change and so do we.

A younger version of me could not have imagined this exact life in all its beauty and mess. Not because this life is extraordinary necessarily but because it is specifically mine. It belongs to a woman she had not become yet. Just as the life I imagine now will likely seem incomplete to the woman I am ten years from today. That realization has changed the way I think about the future.

I still catch myself trying to predict outcomes. I still catch myself wanting reassurance before I move. I still catch myself staring into the distance looking for evidence that everything will make sense eventually. Old habits die hard and sometimes having some sense of control feels good.

But now there is another voice in the conversation. A quieter one. The voice that remembers how many times I have been wrong. How many times I have mistaken the limits of my imagination for the limits of reality.

How many times life has arrived carrying something I never thought to ask for.

A conversation.

A city.

A friendship.

A heartbreak.

A dog.

A dream.

A friend.

A version of myself I needed to meet.

A life I have not lived yet.

There are entire chapters I could not have predicted because I had not yet lived the experiences that would make them possible. And so, when I picture the fig tree woman now, I don’t want to tell her which fig to choose. I don’t want to reassure her that everything will work out. I don’t even want to tell her she’s wrong. I only want to tap her on the shoulder and point toward the horizon.

Toward the forests beyond the orchard. Toward all the futures she cannot yet imagine. The ones that aren’t hanging from branches. The ones that haven’t been created yet. The ones that will seem like an ordinary day but will become extraordinary butterfly effect stories one day.

And then, maybe, I’d leave her there. Eventually she will have to discover for herself what all of us discover if we have the pleasure of living long enough… that the future is far less interested in being predicted than it is in being lived and explored.

Life keeps producing fruit long after you thought you’d seen the whole harvest and the orchard is full of trees.

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It was one of those impossibly smoky summers when the sun never really looked like itself. The sky stayed muted all day, and everything smelled faintly of campfire before anyone had even lit one. It was still blistering hot.

I wasn’t there alone, with friends. It wasn’t a solo retreat where I disappeared into the woods to find myself. It just happened to be my birthday that week we went, something that, up until that point, I had always felt really uncomfortable celebrating. Being seen made me really uncomfortable. Taking a day to celebrate me? No, awkward. No, thank you. I love the water though, and that was enough. The coffee was hot in the morning, and the day was shaping up to be gorgeous. The cabin sat deep in the trees so a hot coffee could still be enjoyed before the morning left and the heat arrived. While it would take me another year to really want to celebrate another lap around the sun, this would become the first year of a ritual I didn’t know I was starting. Life at 25, was beginning to feel like it was opening up in front of me in ways I couldn’t quite explain. I think subconsciously, I knew that I was going to grow out of my own bullshit soon.

That morning, armed with coffee in my ugliest sweatpants, I wanted to write. Deeply. I felt drawn to it. I don’t remember exactly why. Maybe I wanted to remember the year, or the perfect morning air on the lake. Maybe I wanted to mark the beginning of the next year. Maybe I had simply reached an age where life no longer felt like something that was happening to me, but something I wanted to participate in. I had done a lot of soul searching the year before my 25th birthday, and I think my attention to life was shifting.

I didn’t have any paper. There was literally no paper to be found, and this cabin wasn’t near any stores. I knew I didn’t want to write in my notes app.

So, I found a brown paper bag that housed mushrooms for omelets. I dug out a pen from the bottom of my bag.

And for the first time, stream-of-consciousness style writing, I began.

On it, I wrote down everything I hoped for. Things, places, and people I was grateful for. Things I wanted to become. Things that didn’t even make sense yet. I remember being shy about my desires even though writing on this bag was a private experience, how insane is that? I wrote one-word wishes for every person I could think of that I loved in the folds of the bag. I wrote as if the life I was hoping for was already happening. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I ran out of room. The writing was messy and raw. I cried.

I told myself I would open it in one year. Then I folded it up, tied it shut with a piece of twine I found, and forgot about it.

The gratitude.

The wishes.

The hopes & dreams.

The ritual began.

The next birthday, I opened it before writing another one. Without meaning to, I’d started a tradition. It was so sweet to read what I was a year prior.

Every year since, I’ve read the woman I was before deciding who I wanted to become next. I have continued writing on bags to try and maintain the magic.

The funny thing is that the wishes almost never happen the way I imagine they will.

But oddly, they kind of do.

Sometimes they don’t happen at all. In a way, they happen so gently I don’t notice until twelve months later, when a sentence reaches through time and taps me on the shoulder. The bags are full of ordinary things. They’re also full of dreams I’m too afraid to say out loud, so I tuck them into the brown paper instead.

Some years they’re ambitious.

Some years they’re scared.

Some years they’re surprisingly wise.

Some of the line items are complete nonsense.

One line from that very first bag still makes me laugh.

I wrote that I wanted to sing loudly.

The funny part is that I wasn’t singing nor has it ever crossed my mind that I should sing. Not publicly or even privately. Not even badly in front of people, outside of the odd karaoke night or open mic. It wasn’t something I identified with at all. Fun, sure. Church choir? Sure.

Less than a year later, I would join a band. How specific, weird and magical.

People seem to love stories like that because they want them to be about manifestation or prayer or something. I don’t think that’s what happened. I think writing that day simply gave me away. Not because I secretly wanted to become a singer. I don’t think I did. I think singing was simply the first language my longing found. Looking back, I don’t think I wanted a microphone. I think I wanted to be seen. As I am. Not famous or important. Just less hidden than I had been. I was deeply craving myself.

I didn’t know how to write that yet. I didn’t know how to say “I am tired of hiding myself.”

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So, I wrote, I want to sing loudly. I think it was meant in the lame, cheesy “Dance like no one is watching” way. The wish specifically didn’t change my life. Maybe the words simply revealed the life I already wanted and couldn’t admit too yet.

I’ve come to think that’s what good writing does. Words don’t predict the future. Writing, it introduces you to yourself. Whether on purpose… or on accident.

Now, every year since… I fill another paper bag with gratitude, observations, hopes, and things I don’t yet know how to ask for properly. I let myself write without any restrictions, true to stream-of-consciousness writing, just like the first time.

Sometimes I write about work. Purpose. Sometimes love. Or family. Or hobbies. Money. Dreams. Friendships. Whatever. Almost always? The kind of woman I hope I become. Reading them back is strange because they don’t feel like predictions. They feel like introductions to what I was willing to allow in at the time.

Each version of me seems to be waving from somewhere in the distance, saying, You’re almost here. Just keep going.

Last year was the first year I didn’t write one. Life had become difficult enough that I stopped listening to myself for a while. For a moment, the dreamer in me died a bit. I don’t think I realized how much that little ritual had come to anchor me until it wasn’t there. I was too tired and uninspired to push the limits of myself at twenty nine.

There won’t be one to open this birthday. For a moment, when I realized that this week, it felt like I’d stolen something from myself. I’d been so consumed by surviving that I hadn’t considered there would be another version of me, a happy version- looking for that bag. For a minute this week, I thought that made me sad.

Now I think it makes this birthday more important. Maybe the tradition was never about preserving the past or beckoning myself forward. It was never about pushing the limits of me. Maybe it was about interrupting myself and intending on something, anything.

About stopping, just once a year, to ask myself what felt true before another year swept me along. We only have a few of them, you know. Some less, some more. They are all special. Every year I have written one of those bags, my life has surprised me. Not because I got everything I asked for. Far from it.

Some of the things I wrote down arrived in ways I never could have imagined. Others never arrived at all.

But absolutely none of the things that changed me were ever written on the paper. They were lived. Deeply. Learned, and experienced. Bag, or no bag as proof.

Reading those bags has shown me something else… that underneath every job, relationship, move, heartbreak, impossible dream, and every birthday was someone slowly becoming more herself. And while this year I don’t have a brown bag archive of those exact changes, from July 17th to July 17th… my life has still been extremely lived this past year.

Words and writing are important, but I don’t actually think the paper bags were ever about writing. They were about learning to tell myself the truth. They taught me to admit what I wanted before I was brave enough to say it out loud. To practice intention. To pay attention. To point myself toward the life I hoped to live, even when I had no idea how to get there.

That first paper bag wasn’t really about singing.

It was about visibility.

I just didn’t know that yet.

Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, I stopped translating my desires into something more acceptable. I learned to say them plainly. I learned to trust them.

As each bag was written, I got less and less shy about what I wanted to achieve. Like any discipline we acquire, I needed a few years of writing those bags to be intentional. And this year? Without the bag? The discipline paid off and I was still intentional. For the last year, I moved ahead without the map I have usually written for myself.

No folded paper waiting for me. No written wishes. Nothing. But the lack of paper bag might be more powerful. Somehow, I still kept walking in the right direction. Not perfectly or gracefully. But really honestly and intentionally. I still, without my woo-woo ritual, knew exactly who I wanted to be, despite the magic of the bags I had come to lean on.

I trust myself more now than I ever had before. Not because I knew exactly where I was going but I’d spent four birthdays practicing how to point myself toward what mattered.

Maybe that’s why this birthday feels different.

Not because I finally have it all figured out. But because for the first time, I know that even if I lose the “map”- I won’t lose myself.

This year, to honor the magic, I’ll probably make another coffee, and again, I will be at a lake with some of my favorite people. I’ll probably find another brown paper bag. I’ll write too much. I’ll run out of room. I’ll tuck impossible dreams into the folds and wishes for the people I love in the creases. I’ll probably cry. I will set new intentions.

But I won’t write this one because I need the bag ritual to tell me where to go, or to prove next year that I was on the right path. I will write it because I love the woman who will unfold it next year and get to delight in all the little synchronicities and impossible happenings. It will not be because I feel lost and need direction, it will be because I deeply understand the power of intention and the beauty of self-love in discipline and ritual.

Either way, bag or no bag- life will be deeply lived yet again. And this year? The bag will serve a purer purpose, as a tool rather than a lifeline.

Grateful for 30 years on this earth with a life that feels more and more… like mine.

As always- thank you for your non-refundable time spent here.

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“Almost every woman I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’—of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.”

- Elana Dykewomon

I have been thinking about this quote quite a bit in the last week of my twenties. Chapter 29, closing. It explains something I have felt but had never been able to name. I have written this piece with a lot of repetition, and the intention of writing that way is to send the point home- if you miss it, the first time, as I did and have, surely the second and third time it will not be missed.

It wasn’t the word “madness” that made me think when I read this. It was the guarding of said madness. I am definitely a bit “mad” in the hatter sense. And for a very long time, I have felt inclined to tuck that away. The guarding… a constant assumption that there is some version of yourself that requires supervision and stifling. Some woman living inside you who, if left unattended, would ruin everything. Oh no!! You have some madness. It would be best suppressed, right?

That mad woman? She would say too much. Probably feel too much. She would definitely want too much. Dream far too much and too big. Need too much, likely expect too much. Take up too much space. So, you become her keeper. To save her from becoming… well, too much!

You watch her. You interrupt her before she speaks. You lower the volume before she gets excited. You smooth the sharp edges of her madness before anyone else notices them. You become very, very good at anticipating what version of yourself will be easiest for the room to receive.

I don’t remember anyone teaching me to do this.

I remember doing it anyway.

I remember wanting to write and worrying that people would think I was self-important. Realizing I wanted to sing and wondering if I was talented enough to deserve being heard and if I was good enough… would I be too full of myself?

Falling in love with impossible ideas, then immediately searching for reasons they probably wouldn’t work. Feeling angry and translating it into understanding before anyone else had to feel uncomfortable. Feeling joy and trying not to look like I was enjoying myself too much. Even happiness, somehow, felt like something that needed good manners.

It is strange to think about that all. It’s actually fairly devastating how much of my twenties I spent trying to become a woman who could not be accused of excess.

Not too emotional.

Not too ambitious.

Not too confident.

Not too hopeful.

Not too much.

It sounds almost absurd when you say it out loud. At this point I have realized… too much is probably more like “too alive.” Who decided that was something to be ashamed of? To be deliciously alive and unapologetic? I wonder how many women have mistaken self-surveillance for self-awareness. Those aren’t the same thing. I know I have.

One asks, What am I feeling?

The other asks, How will this feeling be perceived?

One brings you closer to yourself.

The other slowly escorts you away to being less and less.

I have always thought of myself as self-aware or at least learning how to be more self-aware. Now I wonder if I was simply well observed. By myself. Every reaction inspected. Every desire negotiated down to be more palatable. Every instinct I had was cross-examined before it was allowed into daylight.

I became both the woman and the prison guard of her excess and madness. The strange thing about living this way is that eventually nobody has to ask you to become smaller. They weren’t asking you to begin with.

You begin volunteering for small.

You edit the email and add lighter language so the people will receive it well.

You soften the opinion.

You laugh a little quieter or louder depending on what would fit best.

You said “Oh, I don’t know” when you do in fact, know.

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You don’t wear the thing that will turn heads, God forbid you do what you want and wear what makes you feel good.

You don’t ask the question.

You don’t share your art.

You don’t start the business.

You don’t leave.

You also don’t stay.

You don’t follow the huge dream you have.

You don’t.

You don’t.

You don’t.

Until one day you realize the life you have built is not necessarily the life you wanted. It is simply the life that offended the fewest people. I don’t think this happens all at once. I think it happens by paper cuts. By a thousand tiny negotiations with yourself. None of them big enough to notice. All of them significant enough to shape a life and steal that delicious madness you should be preserving and setting alight. Then one day you wake up and cannot understand why you feel restless.

You call it burnout.

You call it anxiety.

You call it being lost.

Maybe sometimes it is.

I know I called it all of those things. But I also wonder how often it is grief. Grief for the woman who kept raising her hand inside you while you kept asking her to wait until everyone else was made more comfortable.

I turn thirty this week. People have asked me how it feels, as you do when people reach a milestone age. The truth is, I don’t feel older. I feel impatient. Not with life.

With myself and my own stupid restrictions. With negotiation. I am tired of bargaining with myself. Tired of asking whether I am too much before I ask whether I am being honest or doing what I want. Tired of treating my own instincts like unreliable witnesses. I want my madness to live deeply and unapologetically.

Somewhere in the last few years I started paying closer attention to women older than me. Not the ones selling certainty. The ones who seemed deliciously themselves. The women who laugh from their stomachs. Who wear red lipstick at ten in the morning to go to the post office because they felt like it. Who swear. Who dance boldly and sometimes baldly but do not care. Who leave marriages that stopped fitting. Who start new careers at fifty-three. Who understand their sexuality and aren’t ashamed anymore. Who cry in public and continue the conversation. Who become increasingly difficult to categorize.

There is something about them that feels almost... feral. I have been watching women who piss everyone off and I LOVE IT. These women are feral and wild in the way we’ve been taught to fear.

Wild in the way forests are.

Entire ecosystems refusing to become lawns.

Wild like we are meant to be.

I have never once looked at one of those women and thought, she should make herself smaller. I have only ever thought, I hope I become like her.

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Maybe that is the great surprise of getting a tiny bit older. Not that women disappear. That the best ones become increasingly impossible to contain. Like a lioness in the savanna hunting… which makes me wonder if we were handed the wrong assignment from the beginning.

Maybe the goal was never to become more manageable. Maybe it was to become more ourselves. And feral as hell.

I keep coming back to that word in Dykewomon’s quote.

Control. Losing control. What if we’ve misunderstood it?

What if control has become the project instead of the tool?

Control your appetite.

Control your emotions.

Control your ambition.

Control your body.

Control your age.

Control your face.

Control your voice.

Control your grief.

Control your desire and sexuality.

Control yourself.

Control your madness.

Until eventually there is so much controlling that there is hardly any living left.

Good women, I’ve noticed, are often rewarded for self-containment.

But artists aren’t.

Forests aren’t.

Rivers aren’t.

Music isn’t.

Men aren’t.

I don’t want to be a “good” woman, I want to live madly and be feral, I want to be wild like a river or ocean or music. The things that have made me feel most alive have never asked permission before showing up fully as themselves. Why should I?

I think the answer to doing it differently is self-trust.

Trusting that the life force moving through you arrived with its own intelligence. Trusting that your excitement is not a character flaw. That your ambition does not make you arrogant. That every “too much” thing you contain is meant to be whatever it is to the fullest extent.

Maybe your tears are not evidence against you. That your joy doesn’t require an apology it deserves MORE joy. That your hunger, in every sense of the word, is allowed to exist.

Maybe what we’ve been calling madness and fearing is simply a woman whose life has become too big to fit inside everyone else’s expectations. If that’s true, then good!

Lose control. I plan on it.

Lose control of the version of yourself who is constantly calculating how you’ll be received.

Lose control of the woman who rehearses every sentence before she speaks.

Lose control of the instinct to apologize for taking up exactly the amount of space your soul naturally occupies.

Lose control of the belief that your life is safest when it is least disruptive.

Lose control of the story that says being loved is more important than being fully alive.

I don’t want my thirties to be a decade of refinement. I don’t want to become a shinier, more polished version of myself. I want to become less edited. I want to be feral and lean into madness. I want to write the essay before I know how it will land. I want to sing even when my hands shake. I want to love people extravagantly if I feel it. I want to laugh until strangers look over. I want to cry because the sky is beautiful. I want to build things that feel bigger than me. I want to embarrass myself in pursuit of a life that is unmistakably my own.

I want to become the woman twenty-year-old me would have quietly leaned over and whispered about. ”She’s a bit… too much.” Good. She is right, I am. I hope she would whisper that. I have spent enough years confusing my vitality with something that needed to be managed. I don’t want to spend the next ten doing the same. If there is a woman inside me who has been waiting all this time for permission to become impossible to contain, this is it. Come out. Let’s dance, baby. Let’s get as mad as a hatter.

This is my wish for you, for me- for anyone:

Take up the room.

Laugh too hard, snort. Cliche, I know.

Love very deeply.

Write or say the dangerous and opinionated thing.

Wear the sequins. The bold outfit that will leave people asking you who the hell you do think you are.

Book the ticket. Go where you soul craves a visit.

Start again, and again, and again.

Say no, often.

Say yes, as often as no.

Be loud.

Become embarrassingly, and insanely alive. Feral. Mad.

There is only one life here, right now, for you.

It would be a terrible shame to spend it standing guard at the gates of your heart and mind to try and suppress your brilliance.

I wish you a life of delicious madness as I pursue mine.

Too much? Good.

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Not because I don’t believe the things I’ve written. I do. I’ve just been reminded rather rudely by life lately that understanding something and living it that way are two completely different things. Embodying authenticity is hard. It requires you to hear your own inner voice and turn down the volume of everyone around you. It requires balls of steel.

For the last few weeks, I’ve had no idea what to publish. I have essays sitting in my drafts that are finished. They’ve been edited. They’re ready. Under any normal circumstance, one of them would have gone out this week. I could blame having a cold and say I didn’t feel good or didn’t have anything ready, but that wouldn’t be true. Instead, I kept opening the drafts, reading a few paragraphs, and closing them again. Not because they aren’t true for me in some capacity or another. They are.

They just belong to someone who was standing somewhere else and at this moment, this week, I have the desire to just be exactly where I am. In flux. Honest. A little wrecked. Ironically, finally deliciously directional after making some scary ass moves. My thoughts have kept me trapped and if I had listened to my intuition and my body sooner- I would have been unstuck much sooner, too. Lesson learnt.

Before said choices, I felt stuck in a way I could barely admit to myself. I was living in a state of inertia in certain parts of my life, trying to call it patience, trying to call it grace, trying to call it timing. Blaming everything and anyone aside from just realizing the truth…

Sometimes you know what you need to do but haven’t acted on it yet.

You just don’t want to know. I found ways to talk myself out of what I want and into what doesn’t fit me just because it looked right. But it didn’t feel right.

That has been the center of everything for me lately.

Sometimes the right thing to do and the right thing to do for yourself are different things.

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I don’t know if that is always true. Sometimes we luck out and what we want to do is also the best thing for everyone around us too. I only know it has been true enough at this stage of my life... to rearrange my life in ways that are scary for me, but entirely right and I know that because I feel calmer now than before the choice was made.

For a long time, I believed every important decision should be explainable and pleasing to those around me. If I could build a convincing argument for it, then it must be the right one. If I couldn’t, maybe I hadn’t thought hard enough. Maybe I was being impulsive. Maybe I was making a mistake. Maybe I needed to keep talking myself into a life that wasn’t fitting because at least that version of my life made sense to everyone else. Choose the logical, safe, easy thing.

I don’t know where I learned that. I definitely haven’t seen that modelled by my role models.

It’s been constant second-guessing. The need to make everything sound reasonable before allowing myself to move. I’ve started wondering who decided that every meaningful choice should survive cross-examination. (The answer is me.)

Some of the decisions I’ve made recently don’t make much sense on paper. If I tried hard enough, I could probably build a timeline. I could connect the dots and give everyone a version that sounds logical enough to nod along to.

The problem is that it wouldn’t actually be true. Some decisions don’t arrive as logic. They arrive as recognition and clarity. A point where the body knows before the explanation exists. A point where you realize you cannot unknow what you know anymore. After that, some choices stop feeling optional. The longer I denied the incredibly necessary conclusion I had come to, afraid it wouldn’t be acceptable, the more I lost the plot. The more I lost myself. When your soul is calling for one thing, and you make moves in the opposing direction... your life gets messy. You get messy. Hell, you can even get sick.

The choices I needed to make became necessary at any cost. Necessary doesn’t always look reasonable. Sometimes it looks selfish. Sometimes it looks reckless. Sometimes it disappoints people you genuinely love. Sometimes it asks you to override the version of yourself that wanted everyone to understand so you can finally give yourself what you need instead of what everyone else wants. Of course it would be nice for people to understand. I don’t think that ever goes away, does it?

But I’m realizing that being understood and being honest sometimes have to stop occupying the same space.

Maybe there are moments when you have to make choices that don’t make sense to f*cking anyone but you and, hopefully, a select few who know your heart. Not because you’ve stopped caring what people think. Not because you’re convinced, you’re right.But because you do, in fact, know what is wrong. Even if what feels wrong for you is right for anyone else. And even if it hurts, you know what you need to do. You need to live your life honestly, for you.

Matthew McConaughey writes in his book, “Greenlights”

“An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind, and when we lie down on ours at night, no matter who’s in our bed, we all sleep alone.”

Nobody can own that but you.

Nobody else has to lay down inside the private consequence of your choices. Nobody else has to live inside the life you keep choosing because it is easier to explain. Nobody else has to feel the way your body starts rejecting the lie before your mouth can admit it. You stop sleeping. You stop eating. You can’t settle. You rehearse conversations that haven’t happened yet. You negotiate with truths you already know because they would be inconvenient if they were real. So, you twist, contort, bend, and break yourself to fit into the lie you are selling instead of stepping into your own truth and life.

So, one day, if you are lucky or brave or simply tired enough, you stop asking whether the choice makes sense to everyone else and start asking whether you can keep surviving the life that requires you to abandon yourself.

That is where I have been lately.

Not at the end of anything neatly resolved. Not standing on the other side of whatever the heck this is with a lesson. Just finally awake enough to my own bullshit inside my own life and truth to know I cannot keep choosing what looks right if it keeps costing me what feels true, real and mine.

After fighting between the right thing for everyone else and the right thing for me, I finally chose myself. And now? I can sleep. I want to eat. I can breathe better. Greenlight.

And that isn’t because everything is okay or figured out. But it is because I stopped stifling my own intuition and picked what I needed. Maybe I’ll look back on this a year from now and think… oof, I got some of that wrong. I probably will. It can’t all land perfectly. But I would rather make mistakes inside a life that feels like mine than perform one that makes perfect sense to everyone else. Living in inertia, being stuck is much worse than learning, moving, growing and changing.

Maybe that’s why my essays have stayed in my drafts. They were written by someone trying to understand life, and that person… well, I will always be her. I want to understand. But, this week, this one was written by someone trying to live “it”, go for my deepest desires, and the call at this moment is to move forward. Moving, in any direction, doesn’t have a clear outcome at times. And that is much more okay than not making a choice that serves my soul.

I don’t know where all of this ends or where this road I have chosen leads... One day, maybe I will explain it. Maybe one day, I will understand it. Maybe, one day, I will share it. I just know that, for the first time in a very long time, the life I’m living or at least moving towards… feels unmistakably like my own. And the only person who has to lay her head on that pillow every night is me.

Make the choice your soul is dying for you to make. Listen to your body, tune out the noise from others and more importantly? The lies and limitations you tell yourself.

We’re only here once. Life is short.

Greenlight.

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Being witnessed is.

The internet creates a funny mirror. You take a thought that once would have lived silently in a journal and you toss it into the void. Then you wait. Maybe nobody sees it. Maybe three people will see it. Maybe thirty thousand people see it. Somehow all of those possibilities feel terrifying for completely different reasons.

When nobody reads your work, it feels personal. You start wondering whether you’re wasting your time. Whether anyone cares. Whether you’re good enough. Whether the silence is trying to tell you something. The human brain is remarkably creative when left alone with uncertainty. A post gets two likes and suddenly you’ve constructed an entire narrative about your talent, your future, your worth, and whether you should quit altogether.

The internet has given us a scoreboard for our humanity. Views. Followers. Comments. Shares. Tiny little numbers attached to pieces of ourselves. If we’re not careful, we start treating those numbers like evidence. Evidence that people care. Evidence that they don’t. Evidence that we’re talented. Evidence that we’re not. Evidence that what we’re doing matters. Evidence that it doesn’t.

The funny thing is that the opposite outcome isn’t any easier.

Because what if people do read it?

What if they have opinions?

What if they misunderstand you?

What if they decide who you are based on eight hundred words they read while standing in line for coffee?

What if they hate it? Or God forbid, what if they love it and you have to reproduce more things they like?

What if they start paying attention?

A few years ago, I thought visibility was what I wanted. I thought being seen would feel freeing. Now that I have started putting pieces of myself online, I realize visibility comes with a price. Being seen sounds beautiful until it actually happens on any scale. Then you realize people can see things. They can see your mistakes. Your contradictions. Your evolution. The version of you from six months ago that you’ve already outgrown. They can disagree. Project. Judge. Misinterpret. Applaud.

All of which can become a trap if you’re not careful. Because eventually you begin performing for the mirror. You stop asking what is true. You start asking what will be received. And that is where things get dangerous.

I recently came across a letter from Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille. In it, Graham wrote about the unique expression that exists within every person. She believed there is a vitality, a life force, an energy that can only be expressed through you because there has never been, and will never be, another person who can create exactly what you create. What struck me wasn’t the poetry of it. It was what came next. She wrote that it is not our job to determine how good our work is. It is not our job to decide its value or compare it to the work of others. Our job is simply to keep the channel open.

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I haven’t stopped thinking about that. It drives me to continue doing my thing.

The internet tricks us into believing our responsibility extends all the way to the outcome. We become responsible for the views, the subscribers, the engagement, the growth. We become responsible for whether people understand us, agree with us, support us, or share our work. Somewhere along the way we stop being artists and become analysts of our own existence.

But Graham’s point was much simpler.

Your job is the work.

Not the reception.

Not the applause.

Not the criticism.

Not the numbers.

The work.

I think there is another layer to this for me, too.

For a long time, I believed I needed to have everything figured out before I was allowed to speak. Before I was allowed to write about something. Before I was allowed to share a lesson, an observation, or an experience. As if wisdom only belonged to people standing at the finish line. As if I needed to be fully healed before I could talk about healing. Fully confident before I could talk about confidence. Fully certain before I could write about uncertainty. But the older I get, the more I realize that being human is mostly just figuring things out as you go.

Very few of us are writing from the mountaintop.

Most of us are writing from the trail.

We’re sharing what we’re learning. What we’re questioning. What we’re wrestling with. What we’re discovering about ourselves in real time.

I don’t write because I have the answers.

God knows I don’t.

I write because I am curious enough to sit with the questions. Because putting language to an experience often helps me understand it better. Sometimes the act of expressing something is how we discover what we actually think about it. There is a humility in admitting that publicly. This is not a guidebook. This is not enlightenment. This is not me standing above anyone handing down answers.

This is one person trying to make sense of her life and occasionally leaving breadcrumbs behind in case they are useful to someone else.

Maybe that’s all art really is.

A collection of people saying, “This is what I noticed while I was here.”

Maybe we would all express ourselves a little more freely if we stopped treating every thought as a final conclusion and started treating it as part of an ongoing conversation.

Not every piece of writing needs to be perfect.

Not every opinion needs to be permanent.

Not every expression needs to arrive fully formed.

Sometimes it is enough to simply be honest about where you are and hopefully meet others who are on the same path or who have wisdom to share with you about the path they have already travelled.

Maybe that is why putting yourself out there feels so terrifying. The moment you create something that matters to you, it develops a life outside of your control. I feel it with my Substack.

I feel it with writing music at home I hope to share with the world one day.

I feel it every time I consider sharing something that matters from inside of me.

Part of me wants everyone to hear it.

Part of me wants absolutely nobody to hear it.

It’s a ridiculous contradiction, wanting to be seen and wanting to disappear at the exact same time. Yet I suspect most artists understand it perfectly.

The creator wants an audience, but the human wants protection.

The artist wants impact, but the nervous system wants certainty.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we get both. At least not at the beginning. So eventually the question changes.

It stops being, “What if nobody reads it?”

And it stops being, “What if everybody reads it?”

The real question becomes, “Will I do it anyway?”

Will I write if nobody is clapping?

Will I write if people criticize it?

Will I make music if ten people listen?

Will I make music if ten thousand people listen?

Will I continue creating regardless of the outcome?

Because both paths contain fear. Being ignored hurts. Being seen can hurt too.

One threatens our significance. The other threatens our sense of human safety.

If both outcomes are uncomfortable, then fear stops being a very useful compass. If both roads are scary, fear can no longer make the decision. Something else has to.

Purpose, maybe.

Curiosity.

Conviction.

Love.

Whatever word you want to use.

The thing underneath all of it. The thing that existed before there was an audience. Before there were followers, algorithms and applause. I don’t know that the goal is to become fearless. I think the goal is understanding that fear is present regardless of what we do. The fear of obscurity. The fear of visibility. The fear of failure. The fear of success. They all come along for the ride. The only question is whether you’re willing to keep going anyway.

Lately, when I find myself wondering whether anyone will read my work, I try to ask a different question.

If nobody was watching, would I still write this?

And if everybody was watching, would I still write it?

The answer, thankfully, is yes.

So I suppose I have my answer.

Publish.

Write the song.

Write the thing.

Make the art.

Send it into the world.

Let the void do whatever the void is going to do.

You were never responsible for the audience.

You were only responsible for keeping the channel open long enough for the work to come through and finish what you started.

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“Every single one of us can only be made of what came before us. We are all built from the pieces of the people who raised us, taught us, or loved us.”

- Unknown

Every time I cut into a mango, I find myself thinking about a stranger I met in Kenya.

I was young when I travelled there. One afternoon, after being thoroughly ripped off at a market because I had no idea what mangoes were actually worth and already felt guilty for haggling, I walked away feeling quite pleased with myself. I bought a small paring knife, found a spot on the side of the road, under a tree and sat down to enjoy a fresh, ripe mango.

As I hacked away at the poor mango, somebody stopped and watched me for a moment before laughing. I didn’t grow up eating mango in Northern Alberta, and when I did, it was cut for me. So, they had every right to laugh at how poorly I was managing myself. Then, they took the mango from my hands and showed me a better way.

I don’t remember their name.

I don’t remember much aside from that they laughed.

I don’t remember anything else about the conversation.

But I still cut mangoes that way.

Eleven years later, a person whose name I never learned still appears in my kitchen.

The realization of that stopped me and was the beginning of me writing this piece.

Not because of the mango, but because once I noticed the stranger in the kitchen with me, in spirit while I cut my mango with more skill, I started seeing duplicates of the same everywhere in my life.

I load my cutlery into the dishwasher with the handles up because someone once told me it was more sanitary and I had to agree with them. I peel potatoes carefully because my grandmother dislikes waste. I don’t dog-ear books anymore, or at least I don’t do it without feeling guilty. Every time I feel negative energy flowing in a group and feel the need to complain to someone, I remember someone telling me, “Don’t poison the pond.” I ask more questions than I used too. Every single time I open my mouth to sing, I think about someone telling me that if I am nervous, I probably care about the performance, and that’s important. Even my handwriting has traits belonging partly to somebody else.

When I was a kid, I used to help my Dad with livestock records on the farm. Everything was entered by hand. The numbers had to be clear and concise. A seven couldn’t look like a one. A three couldn’t look like an eight. Otherwise, the animal may have an inaccurate record. Accuracy mattered a lot because every number represented an asset. At the time, it felt like one more chore and it felt like my Dad was nitpicking. But now, every time I write numbers by hand, or I scribble a messy note, I think of my Dad.

I buy good shoes because a woman I met in palliative care who struggled with her feet once reminded me that your feet take you everywhere and it isn’t worth having sore feet or wrecking them. At potlucks, I still hold the bun underneath my plate because a stranger at a funeral informed me that “the plate is prime real estate.” I smile driving through construction because somebody once told me smiles are contagious and it makes everyone working in the heat happier. I give real hugs now. And firm handshakes that mean something with unbridled eye contact.

None of these moments felt insanely important when they happened. They aren’t huge, life altering things.

Nobody sat me down and announced they were about to teach me something I would carry for the rest of my life. They were just moments. A conversation. An observation. A passing comment. The sort of interactions that disappear into the natural rhythm of a day. And yet they didn’t disappear. They stayed.

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For a long time, I thought influence belonged to people who intended it. Teachers influence people. Authors influence people. Leaders influence people. The people who stand at the front of rooms and shape the way others think. But the older I get, the more I suspect most influence happens accidentally. It happens in grocery stores and hospital rooms.

At funerals and kitchen tables. On roadsides in foreign countries. It happens when somebody shares a small piece of themselves without realizing they’re doing it. The things that stay with us rarely arrive as lessons. Most of the time they show up looking completely and utterly mundane. Maybe that’s why they feel so profound when we finally notice them.

I think we spend a lot of our lives wondering whether we’re making a difference. Whether our lives matter. Whether we’re leaving anything meaningful behind. Meanwhile, pieces of us are quietly being carried around by other people. A sentence we don’t remember saying. A habit somebody picked up from watching us. A story we told once and forgot about by the next morning.

We imagine legacy as something grand. Something reserved for remarkable people. Buildings named after them. Books written about them. Accomplishments large enough to survive history. But maybe legacy is much smaller and more profound than that.

Maybe legacy is teaching a young traveler how to cut a mango.

Perhaps it’s insisting on neat handwriting while entering livestock records on a farm.

Maybe it’s reminding someone to buy good shoes and saving their feet from the same folly.

I think it may be all the little pieces of ourselves that continue travelling through the world long after the moment itself has passed.

The person from Kenya has no idea they still live in my kitchen from time to time.

My Dad probably doesn’t know that every compliment I’ve ever received on my handwriting belongs a little bit to him.

My grandmother doesn’t know how carefully I peel potatoes because I hear her voice in my head.

And I find myself wondering where I’ve ended up. Not in the big ways. In the small ones.

I wonder if somebody asks one more question because of a conversation we had years ago. I wonder if somebody does something every day and no longer remembers where they learned it. I wonder how many pieces of ourselves are walking around out there attached to other people.

The truth is that we’ll probably never know. We’ll never know which stories stayed. Which habits survived. Which parts of us settled into someone else’s life. But I think that’s what I find so beautiful about being human. We are constantly shaping one another without realizing it. A life touches another life, and something remains. That tells me that what we do matters a lot, on every level.

Years pass.

Whole chapters close.

We change, a lot.

Yet somehow the smallest exchanges continue travelling forward. When I look at my life, I don’t see a collection of habits. I see fingerprints from everyone who has ever touched my life. My grandmother is in my potatoes. My dad is in my handwriting.

A woman from palliative care is in my shoe preferences. A stranger from a funeral is somehow at every potluck. A person whose name I don’t know is in every mango I cut.

I think about these people more than they know. Sometimes, when one of them passes through my hands, or a moment in my life… I send up a little prayer.

Mostly just to say thank you.

Thank you for all the small meaningful pieces of yourselves you’ve left behind in my day to day. Thank you for being a part of… me. I hope you are well. I hope you know you are thought of.

The funny thing is that most of us will never know we left with someone and stayed in their lives. And we’ll never know which part of us stayed. But I like to think that’s happening all the time. I like to think we’re all carrying hundreds of people with us. People we know, people we may no longer know- not as memories or ghosts but as habits, betterment and perspectives.

People remain as little pieces of borrowed wisdom and actions woven into the fabric of an ordinary life. Maybe that’s what we are.

Museums of every person we’ve ever met.

And what a beautiful thing that is.

Who lives within your daily life?

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If you are from a small town, you already understand the contradiction of the experience. You know how living in one can feel both comforting and claustrophobic at the exact same time. You understand how a place can hold you and suffocate you simultaneously. You know what it is like to walk into the grocery store looking like sh*t and somehow hear about it three days later.

People romanticize small towns all the time. And to be fair, some of it deserves to be romanticized. There is something beautiful about familiarity. About the same cashiers. The same roads. The same gas station. The same people asking how your parents are doing. The same houses with the same Christmas lights every year. There is something deeply comforting about being known in that way and knowing in that way.

But there is another side to it too.

While a small town can offer comfort and support… it can also offer the opposite. This isn’t a slam piece about small towns, so bear with me as we get through the idea.

I grew up in a place where grown women talked shit about fifteen-year-old girls. A place where people knew your business before you had even processed it yourself. A place where everyone was both watching and pretending they were not. Small towns can be incredibly loving. They can also become ecosystems of projection, gossip, comparison, and emotional surveillance, especially for women.

And yet, I built my nervous system around it.

Not consciously, but it happened anyways.

So over time, I began associating regulation with familiarity. I thought being okay meant being home. I thought safety meant recognition. I thought peace meant predictability.

Which sounds reasonable until your entire emotional stability collapses because you no longer know where to buy groceries.

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The Myth of “I’ll Feel Better When…”

I moved to the city from my small town, and I was terrified to do it. Not because I didn’t want more for my life. I did. I had reasons to go. Real reasons to go somewhere new. But wanting something and feeling ready for it and being able to cope with the dysregulation are not always the same thing. I am super close with my family, and it felt like a really big trade. I was content in my small town because home is about people, and I have always understood that.

I love my family deeply. My parents were there. My routines were there. My little life was there. I could finish work and go sit at my parent’s house in the afternoon for coffee. I knew where everything was. I knew where I liked to buy gas. Which sounds deeply unglamorous until you suddenly do not know where to buy gas and realize stability was apparently hiding inside very boring errands.

There was one grocery store. I knew what roads to avoid in winter. I had my favorite unwind spot near the river. I knew where my body relaxed.

And then suddenly I didn’t.

Not only did I move, but I moved again after I got there. So right when I started adjusting, the environment changed again. Even my own kitchen stopped feeling familiar. I would open drawers and still hesitate because my body had not caught up yet. Nothing was familiar or regulated.

And then, on top of all of the change I had signed up for, life happened.

A relationship ended.

My dog went missing.

Everything familiar disappeared at once.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized something that genuinely altered me. I had outsourced my regulation to geography and other people. Which, in hindsight, is a completely insane thing to realize about yourself at twenty-nine.

I had built an internal sense of safety almost entirely around external consistency. The town. The routines. The people. The familiarity. The predictability. My nervous system was not actually grounded within me. It was attached to places, people, and things.

So when the place changed, the people changed, and my dog died, I disappeared with it.

Dysregulation & the Beige Wellness Girlies

I think social media has, in some cases, absolutely butchered the conversation around “nervous system regulation.”

Half the internet talks about regulation like it means becoming emotionally untouchable. Like if you are truly healed, you never spiral, never panic, never overreact, never cry too hard, never lose your footing. As if the goal is to become some perfectly optimized woman drinking magnesium in a beige apartment while whispering about boundaries beside a Himalayan salt lamp. Barf.

That is not what I have experienced at all.

What I am beginning to learn, and experience is that regulation is not the absence of feeling, but the ability to remain connected to choice while feeling. That is completely different. Let me explain. Mind you, this is just my opinion and how I view it all but indulge me.

Grief is still grief. Rage still burns through the body. Loneliness still feels physical sometimes. Desire can still make you impulsive. Anxiety can still make your chest tighten. Your body does not stop being human just because you read a few psychology books, practice somatics, and started going to therapy.

I think real regulation looks more like this:

Feeling something fully without handing it the steering wheel. Not suppressing anger but not letting anger make your decisions for you after the first wave. Not bypassing grief but not building a home inside it either. Not pretending you are unaffected, but also not allowing every emotion to become an instruction. The wave crashes, and rather than letting it drag you out to sea, you stand up and make a choice after the initial feeling passes.

There were moments this past year where I absolutely did not do this perfectly. There were moments where I was so overwhelmed that my sense of agency got blurry. I reacted emotionally. I panicked. I clung to things. I catastrophized. I made choices from pain instead of from clarity.

I don’t know that that makes me uniquely broken. That makes me human.

And honestly, I think part of regulation is also removing the shame around the fact that humans sometimes become dysregulated. Especially after loss or major change. Especially when your entire life no longer resembles the one your body memorized and regulated with.

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Your Body Memorizes Entire Lives

There is a psychologist named Peter Levine who talks about how trauma is not always the event itself, but what happens inside the nervous system afterward. The body keeps score of patterns and finds safety in those patterns. It memorizes environments. It learns what to expect from the world and then reacts accordingly. I think sometimes we underestimate how attached the body becomes to familiarity, even when that familiarity is not entirely good for us.

Because familiar does not always mean aligned.

Sometimes it just means repeated.

I think about this a lot now.

Because if I am honest, I do not even know if I truly loved living in that town anymore by the end of it. I think I had simply become adapted to it. There is a difference. A cage can become familiar enough that leaving it feels irresponsible.

I think that is why so many people stay inside lives that no longer fit them. Relationships. Cities. Versions of themselves. Entire identities. Not because they are deeply fulfilled there, but because the nervous system confuses what we know with what is safe.

The body says:

“At least we know what happens here.”

Even if what happens there hurts you. Even if it is not actual pain, but low-grade disappointment that became so normal you stopped questioning it.

The False Promise of External Anchors

One of the strangest parts of this entire experience has been realizing how many tiny external things I used to rely on emotionally.

The cashier who recognized me.

The route home.

The parking lot I always parked in.

The coffee shop where they knew my order.

My Mom being five minutes away.

Even seeing familiar trucks on the road.

These things sound small until they are gone.

Then suddenly you understand how much of your emotional stability was being unconsciously co-regulated by your environment.

And before anyone turns this into some hyper-individualistic “you should never need people” thing, that is not what I mean at all. Humans are communal creatures. We absolutely regulate through connection. Through familiarity. Through touch. Through love. Through routine.

But there is a HUGE difference between being supported by your environment and being entirely dependent on it for your ability to function.

I think what I am learning now, tentatively, is how to become emotionally portable.

How to remain connected to myself even when nothing around me feels recognizable. How to create safety internally instead of desperately hunting for it externally.

And honestly, that process is not aesthetic. It is awkward. It is crying in parking lots because I got lost on the way to the store trying to navigate without Google Maps and then still buying groceries. It is learning a new city while grieving an old life and missing coffee with your parents. It is sitting in apartments that do not feel like home yet and realizing maybe home is not a location you arrive at, but a relationship you build with yourself over time.

Healing Culture, But Make It Avoidant

I also feel healing culture sometimes unintentionally teaches people to fear emotion itself. Everyone wants to “protect their peace” now. And sure, sometimes that is healthy. But sometimes I think people are just becoming emotionally avoidant with more palatable language.

Life is going to dysregulate you.

Love will dysregulate you.

Loss will dysregulate you.

Change will dysregulate you.

Being deeply alive will dysregulate you.

God, even tasting happiness can dysregulate you.

The goal is not to become someone who never gets emotionally activated. The goal is to become someone who can return to themselves after they do.

Not emotional flatlining. Not pretending nothing touches you. Not becoming so detached that nothing matters enough to hurt anymore.

I actually think people who feel deeply are often incredibly alive.

The issue is not the depth of feeling. The issue is whether we abandon ourselves inside those feelings. The issue is burning everything down every time we feel something.

Because emotions are weather. They move.

But if you start building permanent identities around temporary emotional states, you will lose yourself every single season.

Becoming Someone I Can Carry Anywhere

There is something strangely beautiful and cathartic about realizing you can survive environments you once thought would destroy you.

It may not look graceful.

But genuinely having the realization: this too shall pass and I am okay. I am home in my body.

I still miss home sometimes.

I still miss the familiarity of my old life sometimes.

I still have moments where I want to drive roads my body already understands.

But I also know now that if my sense of safety only exists under perfect conditions, then it is not actually safety. It is dependency on external things. And that is literally outsourcing your power.

And I do not want to sound harsh. I say it compassionately. Because I think a lot of us were never taught how to emotionally hold ourselves through transition. We were taught how to attach ourselves to structures. Places. People. Outcomes. Identities. Then life changes, as it always does, and suddenly we realize we do not know who we are without the scaffolding. I think this past year has forced me to meet myself without it.

No familiar map.

No familiar relationship.

No familiar routines.

No familiar version of my life.

Just me.

And honestly? I have been so bad at the “life” thing lately. Because for the first time in my life, I am starting to understand that regulation is not about controlling the external world enough to finally feel okay. It is about remaining connected to yourself while the world changes around you. Realizing there will never be one perfect relationship, city, routine, apartment, income bracket, healing practice, or version of yourself that permanently saves you from being human.

Life keeps moving.

People leave.

Cities change.

Dogs go missing.

Hearts break.

Kitchens stop feeling familiar.

And somehow, despite all of it, your life keeps asking:

Can you still stay with yourself through this?

As per usual, thank you for making it this far. Your time is valuable and I appreciate your time spent here, reading.

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There is a woman in my mind who lives in a sea weathered blue house near the water.

When she was younger, she used to dream about living by the ocean the way some people dream about love. A small dream that stayed with her stubbornly. She would tear photographs from magazines and tuck them into drawers she forgot to clean out. Little coastal homes with linen curtains breathing in open windows. Salt air. Wild grass bending in the wind. A kitchen filled with late afternoon light.

At twenty-three, it felt impossibly far away from the life she was actually living and she forgot about the dream. It wasn’t practical and it would never happen.

And yet somehow, decades later, here she is.

The paint on the house has begun peeling softly near the stairs from years of storms rolling in off the water. Wind moves through the trees around the property like it knows them personally. Inside, the house smells faintly of coffee grounds, rosemary, old books, and dinners that stretch late into the night with people she loves.

Her life feels full.

Friends arriving without needing to knock first. Adult children calling to ask how long chicken lasts in the fridge. Music playing from another room. Flowers dying slowly in ceramic vases because someone brought them over just because they were thinking of her and she just can’t bear to throw them out yet.

She is somewhere in her late sixties now. Maybe mid-seventies. Silver hair, still worn long. The kind of face that tells the truth about time instead of fighting it.

There is something deeply beautiful about her, though it has very little to do with appearance.

She no longer seems to be searching for permission to exist.

She moves slowly enough to notice things. Pours coffee without rushing. Keeps herbs growing above the kitchen sink. Laughs with her whole body. Listens carefully when people speak. Walks through her life like someone who no longer believes every emotion requires immediate fixing.

And maybe the most striking thing about her is this:

She no longer seems afraid she is missing her life.

There are entire decades people spend thinking they are late to lives that have not even begun unfolding yet.

I imagine her at twenty-seven sitting in her car after a wedding, heels kicked off onto the passenger seat after dancing all night and smiling in photographs all evening while privately wondering when it would finally be her turn to be chosen that fully.

Two years later, she met the love of her life at a dinner party she almost did not attend because she was tired and feeling sorry for herself. They built a family slowly. Imperfectly. Not the dramatic kind of love she imagined in her twenties. Better. Durable.

Thirty-two and deeply successful on paper but secretly exhausted by a life she built mostly because it looked respectable from the outside. Entire mornings staring at spreadsheets while some softer part of her kept whispering:

This cannot be all I will do.

At thirty-five, she left the career everyone congratulated her for and started over completely. It terrified her financially for a while. People questioned her. She questioned herself.

Years later, she would look back on that decision as one of the first truly honest things she ever did.

Thirty-six and heartbroken in a grocery store parking lot after learning her father’s health had started changing, suddenly understanding adulthood is partly the experience of watching the people who built your world become fragile inside it.

The time afterward brought her closer to him than she had been since childhood. Long conversations at kitchen tables. Quiet drives together. The kind of intimacy people sometimes only reach once they finally stop assuming there will always be more time.

Sometimes there isn’t more time.

Forty-one and waking beside someone kind but wrong, understanding finally that loneliness inside love can feel heavier than loneliness alone.

At forty-three, she learned solitude was not the same thing as abandonment. Her life widened afterward. Friendships deepened. She became more herself in the silence than she ever managed to become inside relationships where she kept shrinking to remain loved.

Forty-eight and grieving all the years she spent trying to become understandable instead of honest.

Some relationships never recovered from the version of her that emerged afterward.

Sometimes she still misses them anyway.

Fifty-two and taking the trip she postponed for decades waiting for the “right” time, only to realize life had been happening in full the entire time she was busy preparing to eventually begin living it.

And somewhere along the coastline of that trip, standing beside the ocean she had dreamed about since she was young, she found the little blue house years later almost accidentally.

Or maybe not accidentally at all.

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Life Lived Forward

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

I think what he understood is that human beings are asked to keep moving without being able to see the shape of their lives yet. When you are young, you look ahead and mostly see uncertainty. You cannot see which heartbreaks will deepen you. You cannot see which wrong relationships will sharpen your understanding of love. You cannot see which failures are rerouting you away from lives that would have quietly hollowed you out over time.

You cannot see that the years which feel slow, lonely, confusing, or unimpressive are still building something underneath you.

Living forward feels a lot like standing in fog at night.

You make decisions with partial information. You trust people you should not trust. You stay too long. You leave too early. You grieve things that later make sense. You chase dreams that stop fitting once you finally reach them.

And while you are inside all of it, life rarely feels meaningful in real time.

It just feels messy.

Ordinary.

Painful.

Human.

But the woman in the blue house can look backwards now.

That is the difference. From where she stands now, she can finally see the shape of things. She can see how one heartbreak led her to another city. How that city introduced her to people who altered the direction of her life. How the years she thought she was wasting were actually refining her understanding of what mattered to her. How certain endings protected her from futures she would have eventually felt trapped inside. How even the delays themselves carried their own strange intelligence. At twenty-nine, she could not have seen any of that looking forward.

She only saw uncertainty. But now, decades later, the shape exists.

In the thick of it? Easy to lose hope and think nothing is ever going to be okay again and what is for me could never happen in these conditions.

The Porch Light Theory

Awhile back, I heard somebody describe something called the porch light theory.

The idea is simple:

Somewhere out there, the porch light is still on for you.

Maybe what moves me about it is the implication that life has not stopped expecting you simply because it took longer than anticipated to arrive somewhere meaningful.

I think there are seasons where people genuinely believe life has moved on without them.

Too late.

Too messy.

Too heartbroken.

Too far behind.

As though life itself eventually locks the door and turns out the lights if you fail to arrive according to schedule. But when I think about the woman in the blue house, the fictional woman in my mind, I cannot believe that anymore. Because hers was not a life that unfolded neatly. Nobody has a life that unfolds neatly.

She loved wrong people.

Stayed too long.

Compared herself mercilessly.

Spent years trying to become digestible.

Changed jobs.

Worried.

Changed again.

Doubted herself constantly.

Thought she was behind.

And still, somehow, she ended up exactly where some hidden part of her always longed to be.

Though by then, she was no longer the same woman who first dreamed of it. Near the ocean. Inside a life that feels inhabited instead of performed. Surrounded by people who know her properly. Comfortable in her own skin. No longer bargaining away pieces of herself just to remain loved. Maybe some people arrive quickly. Others wander for years.

The Shape of a Life

I think that is why the woman in the blue house no longer moves with urgency in her more mature age. Not because she solved life and she got the blue house by the sea. Instead, because she finally understands something her younger self could not.

There was never one perfect timeline she failed to keep up with.

There was only life.

Unfolding.

Rerouting.

Deepening her slowly into herself.

And sometimes late at night, after friends have gone home and the dishes are drying beside the sink and music hums softly through the house, she catches her reflection in the dark kitchen window. For a moment she sees every woman she has ever been standing behind her. And out beyond the glass, past the dark water and the wind, the porch light burns softly against the blue of the house.

For a moment, she tries to reach backward through time and touch every younger version of herself gently on the shoulder.

The grieving one.

The lonely one.

The worried one.

The woman convinced she had ruined her life somehow.

She wants to tell them:

“You don’t know it yet, but one day this all becomes a life you would not trade.”

She turns away from the window, switches off the kitchen light, and leaves the porch light on.

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Not in the cute way people use the word “oopsie” when they slightly burn their banana bread or accidentally send a text to the wrong person. I mean real ones. The kind that cracks your confidence a little… or a lot. The kind of oopsie that makes you stare at the ceiling at 2 a.m. replaying conversations, choices, timing, reactions, losses. The type of oops that forces you to meet versions of yourself you did not particularly enjoy meeting. Some things were well within my control, and some weren’t. C’est la vie. This year has held heartbreak, uncertainty, disappointment, embarrassment and fear.

But somehow, at the exact same time, it has also held beauty so staggering. I almost missed some of it trying to survive, but still didn’t, thank God. After a few years of doing many gratitude exercises and practices, the fruits of that labor finally arrived when it felt doable and almost habitual to see the good during the bad.

Isn’t that the wild thing about being alive? Nothing arrives alone, and it generally arrives with a ton of contrast.

The Human Nervous System Is Insane

I have had mornings and long nights this last year where I cried so hard my chest hurt, followed by laughing until I couldn’t breathe. I have experienced deep loneliness while simultaneously being deeply loved. I have felt completely lost while accidentally stumbling into parts of myself I had been trying to find for years. There were moments I genuinely thought, surely the human nervous system was not designed for this much emotional whiplash.

And yet, apparently, it was. It is.

I think we often imagine feeling “okay” as arriving at some emotionally stable plateau where everything finally makes sense. Like one day we become fully healed, fully evolved, fully certain versions of ourselves who never spiral in the shower or romanticize moving to the woods after one or two difficult weeks or months.

Life doesn’t work like that and does not seem particularly interested in making us one thing at a time. It is constantly asking us to hold contradiction.

Grief and gratitude.

Joy and uncertainty.

Love and resentment.

Relief and sadness.

Hope and realism.

I do believe we are meant to hold it all. And, when holding one oopsie, we get the gift of a daisy if we make a point of not numbing out. The full spectrum being able to feel… all the oopsies and daisies- are found by increasing your capacity to hold contrast without collapsing under it.

And maybe that is why I keep thinking about two strangers I met on the same morning recently. The weather was disgusting.

One man was walking through sleet and freezing rain sticking his tongue out at the sky like a child. Dancing. Laughing. Seriously! Clearly with someone he loved. The weather was objectively awful, but somehow, he was still inside the day, even possibly above the nature of the day instead of underneath it.

Later that morning, I met a woman running a flower stand who told me immediately the weather was depressing, her apartment was leaking, the city was miserable, nobody was accountable for anything anymore, and she wanted to leave the city entirely. She said she hated it here. Wanted sunshine. Wanted out.

And the strange thing was… both of them were standing in the same weather. I’m sure the first guy had life stuff happening too. And maybe I just caught the flower stand lady at the wrong time.

I left thinking about how we all contain both people. The person dancing in the sh*t and the person hating their life.

Because sometimes life genuinely is difficult. Apartments leak. Relationships end. Bodies fail us. Grief arrives uninvited. The nervous system gets overwhelmed. Some days really are heavy enough to make everything feel gray around the edges and make us want to leave everything behind and begin again.

But I am beginning to suspect that suffering and orientation are not always the same thing. Some people become so identified with the storm that they forget they are separate from it. Others somehow continue creating warmth inside of it, despite it usually.

It isn’t because life has been kinder to them. Definitely not because they are delusional or pretending pain is not real. But because somewhere along the line, they learned that joy is not something handed to you once conditions improve.

It is a posture- and posture requires energy and the commitment to correction.

I don’t mean toxic positivity. I also don’t mean denying grief or pretending difficult things are beautiful while they are actively destroying you. I just mean there seems to be a difference between feeling pain and building a home inside of it.

I think that is part of capacity too.

The ability to say: this hurts, this is disappointing, this season is difficult…

but you still remain available for awe.

Because the rain comes either way. And maybe one of the realest privileges of being alive is realizing we can stand in identical circumstances while inhabiting entirely different emotional realities.

I kept thinking after I left the flower stand:

I do not think the Sunshine Coast would make her happy either. And I do not say that cruelly or with judgement.

I say it because I think all of us have had moments where we believed the next city, next relationship, next season, next version of ourselves would finally remove the ache from being human. But life does not seem particularly interested in removing contrast.

Only deepening our ability to hold it.

Let Everything Happen to You

There is a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke that says:

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”

I think about this quote a lot. Rent free in my head at times. I like to resist the idea that I need to let terror happen to me sometimes.

But she IS right… the human experience is not clean or linear or emotionally organized into neat little chapters where one lesson ends before the next begins. Sometimes your dream life arrives looking the same as your breakdown. Sometimes the thing that breaks your heart also expands it. For example, a betrayal can build your sense of self and ruin you before the next inevitable daisy emerges. The rain ends and the flowers bloom. Sometimes the exact season you want to escape is the one introducing you to yourself.

I used to think being emotionally healthy meant becoming less sensitive. Now I think it might mean becoming more capable of staying present. Not hardening, not shutting down. Not becoming so terrified of pain that you accidentally numb yourself to beauty too.

The cost of avoiding heartbreak and pain is often avoiding awe. And I want to be in awe. If it is going to hurt this bad, I still want daisies in life, too.

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The Daisies

Awe is everywhere when you stop treating your life like a problem to solve long enough to notice it. It is in coffee with your mother on a gloomy day. It can be noticed in dogs resting their heads on your lap, even when you are too tired to continue. In songs that arrive out of nowhere while driving home at night after a heartbreak. It can be found in strangers being unexpectedly kind after someone close to you was unexpectedly hurtful. Maybe your body relaxes after weeks of tension. One night, you’ll find yourself laughing so hard you forget what you were anxious about for a moment.

Especially though: in realizing you survived something you once thought would destroy you completely, and on top of that, you grew from it. Like a daisy.

This year humbled me deeply.

There were plans that failed. Versions of myself that failed. Relationships that changed containers. Dreams that evolved- some for the better and some for the worse. Realizations I did not ask for. Consequences I had to sit with. Moments where I handled things beautifully and moments where I absolutely did not handle things with grace.

Alot of oopsies but many daisies. Looking for the light in things really helped me move through all of the ever-changing weather of my life.

Temporary Weather, Permanent Conclusions

I think sometimes we mistake temporary emotional weather for permanent identity.

A hard year becomes I am failing.

Heartbreak becomes I am unlovable.

Confusion becomes I am behind.

But feelings are not always facts. Sometimes they are just storms moving through a nervous system trying very hard to make sense of a complicated world. And if I have learned anything lately, it is that capacity is built and usually earned.

It doesn’t come during certainty. Or during the highlight reel moments, instead, in the ordinary act of continuing through adversity.

Continuing to love people.

Continuing to create.

Continuing to soften after disappointment instead of calcifying around it.

Continuing to risk joy and love despite knowing everything is probably temporary.

There is something profoundly brave about looking for daisies when you have every reason not to.

Anyways. Here Are the Flowers.

Maybe resilience and expansion are not about becoming untouchable. Maybe it is not becoming unaffected, either. Maybe resilience and embracing the human experience is about becoming someone who can carry the full spectrum of being human- warts and all- without needing every difficult season to mean something catastrophic about who they are.

Becoming someone who can survive embarrassment without becoming ashamed of themselves.

Someone who can lose things without losing themselves.

Someone who can feel grief without becoming incapable of seeing beauty.

Someone who can practice gratitude when there is often very, very little to be thankful for.

Maybe the whole point is becoming someone who can experience a lot of oopsies…

and still notice the daisies.

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The Wellness Years

For the last five to seven years or so, I have lived very much in the wellness world. And honestly, a lot of it helped me.

I learned how to take care of myself in ways I never had before. I started sleeping more. Drinking water. Meditating. Lifting heavy to move stress. Moving my body consistently most of the time. Learning about nervous system regulation instead of just calling myself “an anxious person” and accepting emotional chaos as my baseline. I started eating foods that made me feel energized instead of inflamed. I got into yoga. Walking. Healing. Self-awareness. Emotional literacy became a focus. All of it.

I even did the sober-ish thing for a couple years.

There were seasons where I genuinely needed that level of discipline. There are versions of me that were emotionally exhausted, disconnected from themselves, and using chaos as a personality trait. Wellness gave me structure. It gave me clarity. It gave me a relationship to my body that felt respectful instead of punishing.

I understand now why people say the body is a temple, because it is. Your physical state changes your entire experience of being alive. Sleep changes your thoughts. Food changes your emotions. Stress lives in the body before it ever becomes philosophy. There is something deeply spiritual about realizing your body is not separate from you. It is the place your life happens.

I love that part of wellness culture.

But at some point, I crossed a line from caring for myself into trying to manage myself so perfectly that I started losing touch with being human. The bar was so high I began to hate myself for not being “more healthy.”

Recently, after years of protein goals and magnesium powder and cortisol conversations and enough wellness podcasts to qualify for a minor in biohacking, I found myself sitting in a café staring at a matcha I did not even want thinking:

I do not want another cup of dirty swamp water.

I want a coffee with too much cream in it, and I want to drink it guilt-free without thinking about my cortisol levels or how it will affect my body.

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Spiritually Starved

I think some people are physically healthy but spiritually starving.

Not because they are doing wellness “wrong,” but because modern wellness culture has become obsessed with control. Everything now has to be optimized. Your sleep. Your hormones. Your digestion. Your emotional responses. Your routines. Your healing. Your habits. Even rest has somehow become another thing people perform.

Drink the wine, but remember alcohol is technically poison.

Eat the dessert, but only if it fits your macros.

Go out with your friends, but do not ruin your sleep score.

Relax, but make it productive relaxation.

At a certain point, I had to ask myself whether I was actually becoming healthier or whether I was becoming more afraid of life. I would say it was both! For every new good habit I picked up, I picked up a new fear along the way. But life is not meant to feel that way. Life is about balance. Taking care of yourself most of the time and still indulging in the good stuff.

Life is dinners that go too long. It is laughing until your stomach hurts and missing your ideal bedtime. It is staying out later than planned because the conversation got too honest to leave. Having the cigarette over a delicious conversation. It is wine with your girlfriends after a terrible week. It is dancing badly in smoke filled rooms. It is greasy fries at midnight. It is indulgent. It is pleasure and chaos and spontaneity and memory.

Human beings have always gathered around tables and stories and music and indulgence. We are social creatures. Emotional creatures. Ritualistic creatures. And I think part of what is making people feel so empty right now is that we are treating every imperfect human impulse like something to correct instead of something to experience. Not only are we connecting less but we are setting unrealistic goals for what health looks like without remembering that there is social health too.

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The Human Experience

If we really are energetic beings, souls if you will, then yes, we should probably take care of ourselves in our bodies. We should sleep enough. Drink water. Nourish our bodies. Care for our minds. Move through the world with intention instead of self-abandonment.

But if we are souls having a human experience, then the human part matters too. We are not here only to optimize. We are here to experience.

And experience is not always efficient. Or perfect. Or healthy. It is figuring out what works for you by trying things. It is, in essence, losing control. Maybe even voluntarily giving up some control.

The indulgent, ridiculous, beautiful parts of life are not distractions from the human experience. They aren’t always “unhealthy.”

They are the experience.

I think there are seasons where discipline saves your life.

And I also think there are seasons where over-disciplining yourself disconnects you from it.

That has been one of the hardest things for me to admit because discipline is praised constantly in our culture. Control is praised. Optimization is praised. The person with the perfect routine always seems morally superior somehow. But letting go can be healthy too.

I do not mean spiraling. I don’t mean participating in a serious season of discipline and then bingeing for weeks and hating yourself. I mean allowing yourself to participate again. To stop monitoring yourself so intensely. To stop treating every decision like it determines your worth. To stop acting like your humanity is getting in the way of your spiritual growth. Your human joy.

I think a lot of people are becoming spiritually starved trying so hard to become “better” that they are no longer allowing themselves to be fully alive while they are here.

Not just the meditation and the green juice and the healing journey.

But the less optimized, messy, beautiful, human parts need to exist and be experienced too.

Balance, Baby.

At what point do we get to arrive to our own lives? And find some sense of balance between taking care of our bodies to live a long time while also taking care of our soul and remaining human?

I want to take care of myself. I want to live a long time. I want my body to feel good. I want peace. I want to feel emotionally stable and spiritually aligned and physically strong. But I also want nights that become stories.

I want dinners that stretch way too long. I want music loud enough to rearrange my mood that slightly damages my hearing for my older self. I want wine with my friends. I want somebody ordering another round because the conversation got too good to leave. I want to pull a pack of cigarettes out of my freezer to enjoy a menthol.

Because I think somewhere along the way, a lot of us confuse wellness with having control. Or at least I definitely did. Control will always promise safety if you just keep perfecting yourself a little more.

But life is happening now.

Not once you finally heal enough. Not once you optimize enough. Not once you become perfectly regulated and spiritually evolved. Ironically, sometimes the most healing, and regulating thing you can do is just go out and enjoy being a human.

Now… I do not want to spend my whole life acting like the human part of me is a design flaw.

Head in the clouds, living in the realm where I understand I am a beautiful, spiritual being made from energy and I must take care of myself, yes.

But I also want my feet on the ground. Grounded in the human experience. Key words: human experience. Which in some ways, is also taking care of ourselves.

I want to remember that I am not a perfect ethereal being sent here to optimize my morning routine into enlightenment. I am a person. A soul, too, yes. But also a human woman on earth sent here to live well and learn through the human experience.

Earth has always been a little wild.

So no, I don’t want another cup of matcha… Maybe next week.

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The second a woman posts a photo of herself, especially one where she looks or feels beautiful, sensual, confident, expressive, or fully alive in her body, people immediately begin psychoanalyzing her. The voices, real or internalized begin to chime in.

She wants attention.

She needs validation.

She must be insecure.

There is this underlying assumption that visibility itself is some kind of confession of emptiness.

As though being seen automatically means you are begging to be approved of.

Maybe sometimes a person does need validation. We are human. Most of us want to be loved, recognized and seen. Most of us want to belong. But I think people who have never truly put themselves out there misunderstand something important about visibility:

You do not get validation without judgment attached to it.

Visibility Is Never Neutral

Years ago, I did a collaborative boudoir shoot with a photographer who is now a dear friend. It was a trade-for-portfolio shoot, meaning I was trading my time and image for photos and exposure, co-owning the images. I had done boudoir before, for myself, but this felt different. These images would not belong entirely to me. I could not put them in a box, neatly tucked away for my future self to celebrate my own youth. They would live on someone else's website. Someone else's Instagram page. Someone else's advertising on socials. They would be seen by strangers I did not choose.

I knew that before I ever stepped in front of the camera, but it didn't change how intense it was to feel so naked in a small town. Subjected to admiration, compliments and validation, sure and also severe judgment. Silent or otherwise.

This scenario is why it always amuses me when people assume women put photos online because they are desperate for praise. Not just boudoir photos, but maybe they are promoting a business, or taking up space in any capacity in their lives. Anyone who has actually done it- knows you are not just fishing for compliments. You are volunteering for projection. For criticism. For scrutiny. For strangers to decide what kind of person you are based on a single photo or video of you.

You are agreeing to become perceivable.

And being perceived is dangerous, especially if being judged is difficult for you.

The Experience of Being Observed

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote extensively about the experience of women existing both as subjects and objects in the world. Not just living life, but simultaneously watching themselves be perceived while living it. A strange split consciousness. Existing inside your body while also hovering slightly outside of it, aware of how you are being seen.

I think many women especially understand this instinctively.

It is the reason so many of us suck in our stomachs without thinking. The reason we adjust our posture before entering a room, making ourselves smaller or larger depending on the situation. The reason we can suddenly become hyperaware of ourselves the moment someone attractive walks by or a camera appears. We are not just experiencing ourselves. We are monitoring ourselves being experienced by others.

Social media amplifies this until it becomes almost impossible to separate who we are from how we are received. These days, currency is in likes and comments, which is absolutely not reality, but our minds register it that way if we are not careful.

Validation and Judgment Are Terrible Architects

But the longer I exist online, a necessary evil these days for anyone entrepreneurial, creative or just social in general, the more I realize something important:

Validation and judgment are both unstable places to build an identity.

If compliments can define you, criticism will absolutely destroy you.

If being desired makes you worthy, rejection will make you unworthy.

If applause becomes your compass, silence will feel like death.

One person tells you that you are beautiful, magnetic and brilliant. Another tells you that you are embarrassing, narcissistic or too much. You hear about chatter behind your back. One moment you are adored. The next you are dissected. And in all cases, observed.

If your identity is built entirely through the eyes of other people, you will spend your entire life shape-shifting between versions of yourself trying to be enough.

That is not identity.

That is survival.

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Visibility Changes You

Maybe this is where the essay stops being about boudoir photos entirely.

Silly maybe, I don’t actually think putting your a$s on the internet is all that different from starting a business, making art, falling in love publicly, writing honestly, singing into a microphone, launching a project, or admitting what you really want out loud.

All of it requires the same thing:

The willingness to be seen before you know how you will be received.

I think that is why visibility feels so terrifying for so many people. Not because they are shallow or attention-seeking, but because to show yourself honestly is to lose control of perception. Your metaphorical or literal butt out in the sunlight for everyone to see. The second you make something visible, it no longer belongs entirely to you. Other people get involved. Their opinions get involved. Their projections get involved.

And for a while, that can feel unbearable.

But something strange happens the more you do it.

You begin to build a tolerance for being misunderstood.

You realize criticism does not actually kill you. The way your nervous system is reacting may feel the same as the primal feeling of a sabre tooth tiger about to eat you… but being seen will not kill you. Neither will silence. Neither will someone disapproving of your choices or misunderstanding your intentions or deciding you are “too much.”

Eventually, both praise and judgment become secondary to the experience itself. With enough awareness you stop asking, “How am I being perceived?”

And start asking, “Did that feel true and right for me? How do I feel about me?”

That shift in inner dialogue changes everything.

When your life becomes centered around your own experience instead of constantly managing the experience others are having of you, you become much harder to shame. Much harder to silence. Much harder to shake.

I think that is the real gift visibility gave me. Yes, it started by putting my butt on the internet, but it didn't end there.

I realized, after being “seen” in the most literal sense, voluntarily subjecting myself to other people, that I would never be fully filled by validation, and I also wouldn't die from judgment.

The result?

Agency. Confidence. Less fear of visibility.

A deeper willingness to exist as myself, even when it is unconventional, misunderstood, disliked, or unsupported.

Performance or Self-Trust?

I think this is what I am slowly learning as an entrepreneur, a creative, and just a person becoming more comfortable with being visible online and in real life.

You cannot let visibility mean too much.

You cannot let praise become proof of your worth, and you cannot let judgment become proof of your failure.

Both are incomplete stories told by people who only know fragments of you.

And truthfully, some of the most meaningful things I have ever done in my life have existed completely outside of approval. Sometimes creating something beautiful feels good before anyone sees it. Sometimes simply wearing something bold, posting something vulnerable, starting a business or making art is less about being validated and more about refusing to abandon yourself in public. It has never been about anyone else. When you do things, allow yourself to be perceived- choosing to use your experience as a baseline for your enjoyment rather than how you are experienced by others.

There is a difference.

One is performance: the desire to be validated or seen.

The other is self-trust: the desire to express regardless of judgement.

Doing Whatever It Is, For You

I think people assume confidence means being unaffected by perception, but I actually think confidence is the willingness to be perceived at all without it changing what you think of yourself. To understand that some people will misunderstand you no matter how carefully you explain yourself. To understand that visibility creates friction. To understand that there is no version of being fully expressed that comes without consequence.

The goal is not to become immune to judgment. I don’t think that is possible. We are social creatures. Words affect us. Rejection affects us. Shame affects us.

But maybe the goal is to stop treating validation and judgment as final verdicts on who we are.

Maybe criticism can reveal where we are fragile. Maybe praise can reveal what parts of ourselves feel starved. Maybe both can act less like instructions and more like mirrors.

Because eventually, if you stay visible long enough, you realize something freeing:

People were never responding to your full humanity anyway.

They were responding to a version of you filtered through their own experiences, insecurities, desires, biases, and projections.

I put my as$ on the internet, and strangely, this is what it taught me:

Not how to be validated more.

Not how to avoid judgment.

But how dangerous it is to build an identity out of either one and the importance of knowing who you are, either way.

We speak about authenticity as though it is something a person eventually reaches, as though after enough honesty, enough loss, enough thought and experience, there comes a version of the self that finally holds still. Now we are “authentic,” and we get a little badge to pin to our chest that says “Authentic.”

You hear it all the time. Just be authentic.

I think part of me keeps hoping for that. The little gold star that says I've made it to some authentic place. Some place inside yourself where you finally stop shifting under your own feet. A point where what you want, what you value, what you can tolerate, what you are building, and who you understand yourself to be all sit together long enough that you stop revising yourself against your own life.

I have wanted that more than once. I still do, if I am honest. A girl just wants to make it to the pinnacle of authentic existence, you know?

There is something deeply, delusionally reassuring about imagining that if you think hard enough, survive enough, pay enough attention, make tough choices and “follow your heart” that eventually you arrive at a version of yourself that no longer needs such regular revision. You are just authentically you, suddenly.

Life has never really been that way for me.

What feels more true is that clarity keeps moving... and that living in authenticity demands re-meeting yourself, your values and desires- over and over again. Not in an obvious way everytime, not in a way that makes identity meaningless, but with enough weight that something once sincerely right can begin to feel incomplete. A desire can carry you faithfully for years and then, almost imperceptibly, stop holding the same weight. A life can still look reasonable while no longer feeling entirely inhabited from the inside. And when it has shifted, you know. You freaking KNOW. But then what? I'll get to that soon.

I am trying to stop assuming that revision means fraud. That change suddenly steals from being authentic.

Carl Rogers was interested in what happens when a person’s inner life and outward life drift too far apart. He called the healthier state congruence: not perfection, just enough alignment that what you privately know and publicly live are not constantly fighting each other. The longer that split remains, the more strain a person tends to carry, often without naming it clearly.

What stays with me is how often a life can continue functioning while something underneath has already begun asking for revision. The problem usually begins when we ignore that call for change and chalk it up to feeling like sh*t for no reason. So, back to the question: you know something needs to change, now what?

The “Bridge”

The hardest part has rarely been the moment of knowing for me. I think, often, we know more than we admit. What costs more is everything that comes after knowing and before movement.

That stretch of time where something in you has already changed, but your life is still arranged around the version of you that existed before. You are suspended between what was, what you know now, and what your life has not yet caught up too. The life you are not allowing yourself to live yet but know that you want.

I have lived there longer than I should have more than once. Long enough to know a person can lose an enormous amount of energy there while still appearing completely functional, until eventually even that function starts thinning out.

Awareness does not automatically create courage. It definitely does not automatically create clarity. Just because you know something does not mean you suddenly have the tools to move toward what that knowing requires.

Sometimes all awareness gives you is the uncomfortable realization that what used to fit no longer fits, while everything around you still looks intact enough that leaving feels unreasonable. You still know how to perform the old life. You know the rhythm of it, the practical language of it, the obligations attached to it. Nothing has visibly collapsed, so remaining where you are begins to sound intelligent.

That is exactly what happened to me with work years ago. I stayed in a job too long because leaving would have forced a question I could not answer yet: if not this, then what? The job was good in many ways. Stable. Legible. It gave me something clear to point to, which almost made leaving harder, because when something is obviously terrible, the mind has less room to negotiate. But when something is decent while slowly becoming misaligned, staying starts sounding like discipline even when it is avoidance.

What I knew privately was harder to admit: the work no longer felt right for me the way it once had. The alignment was gone. The integrity I needed from it creatively, internally, even ethically, no longer felt fully intact. I was growing out of the experience.

But because I could not yet see what came next, I stayed. I didn't want to experience growing pains or betting on myself. And staying cost more than I understood while I was in it.

It did not break me down all at once. It showed up in fragments. I stopped taking care of my body the way I usually do when I feel like myself. My mind became busy and noisy. My relationships took on the tone of someone internally tired long before I admitted how tired I was.

I was still functioning, which almost made it harder to respect how unwell I was becoming. Nothing really dramatic had happened. I was still answering emails, still meeting obligations, still technically participating. Not with excellence, but enough to keep calling it fine. But, I was chronically exposed to being done with my life and chronic exposure can be sneaky.

I became so consumed by being over the life I was living that I slowly disappeared inside my own frustration. I was there, technically, but I was no longer fully present. So much of my attention was being spent negotiating internally with a life I already knew I did not want in the same way.

That leaks your energy. It leaks into tone, into patience, into how much room you have for other people. It steals from how much capacity you have to move forward.

Without fully realizing it, I was taking that exhaustion out on people around me. Less softness. Less delight. Less capacity to enjoy what was still good because so much of me was preoccupied with what I could not stop circling.

And it became the thing I talked about constantly. The same frustration. The same loop. The same circling. At some point I was no longer especially enjoyable to be around because I was no longer fully in life. I was standing beside it, narrating why I could not move.

When Thought Becomes Rumination

Psychology calls one version of this rumination: thought that circles without landing. Not reflection, not insight, just the same internal path worn deeper each time you walk it, like animals wearing down a fence line, pacing the same route until the ground itself gives way beneath them.

Researchers, especially Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, linked rumination strongly to depressive symptoms because the mind remains active while nothing actually resolves.

That is exactly what it felt like in hindsight. I got low-grade depressed. I was living out of alignment. I was not being authentic. I was narrating a problem my body had already begun asking me to solve… and I was not solving it.

The image that still feels most accurate is a pebble inside a glass bottle. At first it seems harmless enough. A small thing moving in circles. You spin the bottle. The pebble moves in circles perpetually. Ruminating, if you will.

But keep spinning it long enough and the structure weakens. Tap the glass and suddenly it shatters somewhere that seems disproportionate to the force.

The same thing happens in an unresolved life. Eventually you become so worn down by your own lack of movement in the right direction, running in circles in the old one, that something seemingly small breaks everything open. Then ironically, change arrives anyway. Not because you chose it, but because life eventually refuses to let you remain suspended forever.

Why We Cling So Hard To Who We Have Been?

Sometimes I think I do not resist truth because I can't see it. I resist it because truth threatens the life I built to survive an earlier chapter or maybe I actually feel comfortable enough in the life I have. It's “good enough.”

I think one of the least acknowledged obstacles to authenticity is how deeply attached we become to our own continuity, not just socially, but inwardly.

We cling to versions of ourselves because those versions explain us back to ourselves: the person who chose this path, the person who built this career, the person who wanted this kind of life, the person who tolerated that much, the person who believed those things.

Once a version of self has carried you through years of decisions, routines, sacrifices, explanations, and relationships, letting it loosen can feel far more threatening than people admit.

Because if that identity is no longer fully true, then old decisions suddenly need to be reread. Old sacrifices take on new light. Old certainty becomes harder to defend.

Sometimes it is not that a person cannot hear what is changing. It is that hearing it means admitting the person who wanted yesterday’s life may not be the same person standing here now.

And there is grief in that.

William James argued that the self is larger than personality. We attach identity to work, relationships, reputation, habits, even the stories we tell about why our lives look the way they do. Which means changing one part of life rarely feels like changing one part. It can feel like disturbing the entire explanation.

That explains why people cling even when they know something no longer fits.

A job is never only a job once it has become part of how you explain your worth. A relationship is never only a relationship once it has become part of how you imagined your future. A long-held dream is never only a dream once years of effort have been organized around it.

We cling because identity offers coherence, and coherence often feels safer than freedom.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that possibility carries its own dizziness. Not because freedom is automatically beautiful, but because once you realize you could become something else, staying where you are stops feeling accidental and more like a choice. Then beyond that, the freedom of choosing your next “life” becomes incredibly daunting.

That is where authenticity often stalls. Not because truth is absent, but because old identity still offers something the next version cannot yet offer: familiarity.

What If Authenticity Is Not Arrival At All?

There is also a real pressure of remaining understandable, palatable, familiar.

Once people know you in one shape, there is often an unspoken expectation that you will continue making sense in that shape. We do this to ourselves too. We begin relating to previous versions of ourselves almost like signed agreements: I chose this. I built this. I worked hard for this.

So when something shifts, it can feel suspicious internally, as though changing your mind means you were false before.

But a previous self can be sincere and still incomplete.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote constantly about becoming rather than being, about how a human life is not one fixed identity but an ongoing process of outgrowing previous certainties. What I take from that is simple: remaining loyal to old certainty can become its own kind of avoidance when life is already asking something else of you.

And sometimes that shift costs people.

Some people love the version of you they first learned how to rely on and feel unsettled when that version loosens. But there is information in that too, because the people who remain close while you become more truthful usually reveal something important: who is capable of loving a living person instead of a fixed role.

Cognitive dissonance gives language to why staying too long in contradiction becomes exhausting. It refers to the mental strain that appears when actions, values, and internal knowing stop agreeing.

The mind prefers coherence, so when a person continues living one thing while privately knowing another, that tension often appears as fatigue, irritability, dullness, rationalizing, over-explaining, and the strange feeling that ordinary days require too much energy.

That does not mean every discomfort is a signal to overturn your life. It only means I no longer underestimate what prolonged contradiction can cost.

Eventually I had to admit that fear of not knowing what came next in my career had kept me suspended in a place already taking more from me than uncertainty might have.

The jump looked frightening because it meant losing what I understood. Ironically though, staying in the old life had already started costing me… myself.

Maybe authenticity is less concrete than people make it sound. Maybe it is simply the point where pretending not to hear yourself becomes harder than changing things.

Often it sounds ordinary: this no longer fits. This drains more than it gives back.

I am missing myself in this.

I know this, even if I do not yet know what to do with it.

And perhaps most importantly, the possible key to being authentic: I can trust myself to do what needs to be done.

Maybe authenticity is not flawless execution of every truth you uncover. Maybe it is the willingness to stop negotiating against what you already know and move forward without full answers.

I still want certainty more than I admit. I still want a version of life that explains itself and stays explained.

But what feels the most true to me now is that the self does not arrive once and remain there. It asks again. It asks differently. It asks for revision.

Maybe all we can really do is keep building the skill set required to meet that moment well. Keep gathering tools. Keep strengthening whatever in us knows how to tolerate uncertainty, make decisions, survive discomfort, begin again, and trust that we can live inside what comes next.

Because when change finally knocks, and it always does… confidence rarely comes from certainty. It comes from knowing you have lived enough to carry yourself forward, even before you fully understand who you are becoming.

Whatever peace exists in us seems to belong less to suddenly becoming authentic and more to answering the call of change when it comes.

And then doing it.

Authenticity, to me? Hearing your own inner voice, stepping onto the bridge between what is and what will be, allowing your life to be editted- then having the courage to cross the bridge into the unknown.

There is a phase where we become very fluent in what went wrong as kids

We are living in a time where people are exceptionally articulate from therapy and self-work about childhood and it can become pretty overwhelming.

People know all the right language now. We didn't always have this kind of access to understanding.

Attachment styles. Nervous system regulation. Emotional neglect. Parentification. Generational trauma. Enmeshment. Inner child work. Boundaries. The names have arrived, and in many ways that is good, because unnamed pain tends to govern people more than named pain ever does.

But, sometimes you hear someone describe their childhood and it sounds almost architectural and can sound like this:

I do this because my father was absent.

I fear this because my mother was anxious.

I shut down because no one taught me how it was safe to speak.

I over-explain because I learned early that being understood required evidence so I always make my case.

And often, those explanations are true.

There is relief in finding language precise enough to explain why certain parts of you formed the way they did. There is relief in tracing a habit backward and realizing it did not appear out of nowhere. Something shaped it. Someone shaped it. A tone of voice, a silence, a repeated atmosphere, a look across a dinner table, the emotional weather of a house before you were old enough to name what you were adapting to.

John Bowlby argued that early attachment becomes an internal map, that the ways safety, reassurance, unpredictability, closeness, and distance are experienced early often become assumptions the body carries into adulthood. This is important to understand but not without this from Donald Winnicott. He offered a gentle psychological theory as well: not the perfect parent, but the “good enough” parent, the ordinary parent who inevitably misses things, gets tired, fails in places, repairs imperfectly, and still, through enough steadiness, helps a child become whole despite some imperfections.

That phrase is more important than people admit: good enough.

Somewhere along the way, many adult children become highly skilled at identifying where their parents were not enough, while forgetting that no one was ever promised parents who would move through twenty years (+) of raising another human being without leaving dirty, oily fingerprints somewhere. Of course.

Naming what marked you is still important for development, of course.

It is important to notice where fear formed.

It helps to notice where vigilance became normal.

It matters to understand why certain parts of you still brace before anything has even happened.

But naming what shaped you negatively is not always the same thing as fully understanding what made you and being able to hold both “bad” and “good” at the same time.

I think that is where the deeper work begins, or at least, for me, it is. When I began the journey of understanding myself better, which as we all know- is a life long road, for awhile I stalled out on the “bad” part. I stayed far too long on what went wrong and took way too long to move into what went right and moving from that into gratitude. Later, duality would move me into a place of self authorship- yes, things went wrong, but yes, things went right… so now, I hold the pen and I decide who I want to be.

One day you hear your own voice and recognize theirs

There is a strange kind of shock that comes with realizing you are not above the patterns.

You say something a certain way.

You react too quickly.

You laugh exactly like your mother.

You answer a question and hear your father in your own sentence so clearly it almost startles you.

And for a second, something inside you thinks, Oh my God. I am so much like them.

People joke about it all the time.

“I never want to become my mother.”

“I hope I am not like my father.”

I am trying so hard not to repeat what I came from.

From a wounded, victim perspective, resemblance often feels alarming because what appears first is usually whatever you once resisted, or whatever felt sharp to you as a child.

The impatience.

The defensiveness.

The shutting down.

The exact tone you promised yourself you would never use. And then you do.

Carl Jung wrote that what remains unconscious continues shaping life until it becomes visible enough to name. That is often what adulthood feels like, hearing inherited patterns emerge from your own mouth before you have fully decided what to do with them.

And then, at some point, your parents become startlingly human.

I think this looks differently for everyone, but there is often a moment when you look at your own life and realize your parents were younger than you are now when they were already carrying far more than you imagined.

You look at yourself trying to manage ordinary adulthood, work, moods, bills, uncertainty, relationships, your own unfinished sh*t, and suddenly realize someone younger than you once had children depending on them while they were still learning how to regulate themselves.

Parents do not begin after becoming complete.

They begin as unfinished as anyone else.

They are learning how to be adults while already being needed as anchors, supporters, and guides.

And perhaps that is part of what changes as you age. The people who once looked enormous, giants even, begin looking startlingly human.

Not small or deserving of less credence or respect. Just human enough that you can finally see how much they were carrying while trying to love you.

My parents were younger than I am right now, and I do not even have children.

Of course things were not perfect.

Of course there were moments language was missing. Of course there were days patience ran thin. Of course there were reactions that landed harder than intended.

But there were also beautiful things in that same childhood.

That is what memory begins returning when you stop looking only through one lens.

The sweetness.

The ordinary effort.

The protection.

The being fed, clothed, held, considered.

Loved.

Growing up on a farm in rural Alberta meant watching love often arrive in disguised as practicality. It was busy, we had things to get done.

Cold mornings, but always warm clothes.

Work before daylight, and learning a work ethic before you were old enough to call it that.

Meals that appeared because someone kept making them. That same meal being eaten on the field or late at night but still getting read a story by your Dad who had been working hard all day long.

A household held together because somebody kept choosing responsibility whether they felt like they had the energy or not.

Birthday parties hosted in busy work seasons made perfect by a Mom who tried her best to make everything magical.

Bills always getting paid with calloused hands and grit.

Children often receive enormous effort before they understand what maintaining that effort costs.

You only understand later what it means that someone kept showing up tired. That someone kept trying while unfinished themselves. Parents, while deeply human and flawed, are still super humans after all. I look back at my childhood and see two people who worked their asses off to give us absolutely everything they could. Physically, emotionally, mentally and even spiritually.

One day you hear your own voice and are proud to recognize theirs in it

The longer you know your parents not only as the people who raised you, but as humans learning as well, the more resemblance stops feeling like evidence of failure and begins, unexpectedly, to feel like a lasting inheritance in the best sense.

You begin noticing there are parts of them you are deeply grateful to carry.

The steadiness.

The humor.

The ability to endure difficult seasons without making everything louder than it needs to be.

The instinct to protect.

A generous way of loving.

The practical care that often arrived so quietly you did not even realize it was molding you.

And then one day someone says you are like one of them, and instead of resisting it, something inside you feels proud.

Oh. I am like them.

And for the first time after seeing them clearly, as dynamic, complex people, it does not land like an insult or threat.

It lands like recognition of something good after a dark, sometimes clinical period of blame.

Once we can accept the darker parts of something, we are able to move through things and gratitude has space to enter memory, and our perspective becomes more honest too.

You are no longer only measuring yourself against what was difficult. You begin noticing what was beautiful enough to survive in you, too. Some seeds planted by your parents are among the most beautiful parts of you too. What you feed, will grow.

While learning from the pain of what was, in many ways, trial and error, parenting while becoming people at the same time, you also begin seeing the beauty that came from it.

Now you are finally seeing the ordinary strengths alongside ordinary weakness that felt so normal in childhood you did not realize they were shaping you until adulthood gave you enough distance to see them clearly.

Sometimes insight stops halfway and calls itself completion

I think this is where a subtle logical lapse happens for many people. I know it did for me. I was pretty p*ssed off for a moment there. Big victim energy. In the midst of learning about the effects of childhood on myself as an adult, I got increasingly more upset. But I lived inside a logical lapse without realizing it.

A logical lapse is what happens when one true observation is allowed to become the whole conclusion. Yes, some things were real, but without the whole picture and resolution, I have chosen to stop thinking about it and only consider things at the worst part. Basically: deciding the story ends up at the climax, not the resolution.

Something painful happened, therefore the whole story becomes painful.

A parent failed in one area, therefore the parent becomes defined by failure.

The first sentence may be true.

The second often becomes too narrow.

Verbs and nouns matter alot here.

There is a difference between saying they did some things wrong and unconsciously arriving at they were everything wrong.

One names an event or action.

The other hardens a whole person into a verdict.

Human beings rarely survive accurate examination if reduced to a verb completely.

Hannah Arendt wrote often about the danger of reducing human beings into singular moral categories because ordinary life resists that kind of neatness. Loving people fail. Sacrificial people leave deficits. Deeply decent people still wound under pressure, fatigue, fear, or limitation.

That does not mean harm should be softened.

Harm is still harm.

Certain things are unforgivable. Certain betrayals sever trust permanently. Certain forms of cruelty do not become acceptable simply because someone had their own history. I am not going to generalize completely and give everything a pass: sometimes, things ARE just wrong. I am not asking anyone to find a sliver of light in a black bleak room. I was very lucky to experience a normal childhood with normal “issues” and if yours was not, this is too generalized for you more than likely.

Gratitude, even in normal situations still is not a moral shortcut around reality.

It is not pretending damage did not happen.

It is not calling what was harmful beautiful because you are trying to be evolved about it.

It is simply refusing to let one true thing erase another true thing where both exist.

Because not everything is black and white.

Sometimes a person gave you something difficult and something beautiful in the same season, in the same life, or in the same childhood.

Sometimes you were protected in many ways and unmet in another.

Sometimes love and limitation sat in the same room every day, and you only understand that later because adulthood finally gives you enough emotional range to hold contradiction without panicking.

That is not excusing and we are talking about normal emotional deficits here, not extreme abuse.

One can explain but not excuse.

And explanation, when it is truthful, real and allows for more abstract concept- often has room for more than one thing at once.

At some point, explanation must become agency

I once heard someone say that the first twenty years of your life are shaped largely by other people, and the rest asks what you will do with what was handed to you.

That feels both daunting and liberating at the same time. There is a necessary period where you must unravel the story.

You look at the plot.

You look at the characters.

You look at the atmosphere you came from.

You understand who helped shape certain instincts, certain fears, certain reflexes.

And that work is arguably necessary.

But eventually explanation cannot remain the same thing as self-authorship. There is a version of self-understanding that subconsciously becomes a loop, where every present difficulty remains permanently attached to what happened before, and agency starts thinning. You lose your agency when you live as a victim to the past.

At some point, staying only in what wounded you begins removing your ability to become anything larger than the wound.

Not because the wound was fake or small necessarily. We all deal with different things in different ways, some are dealt easier hands than others, too. Regardless, life keeps asking more of you than explanation alone can answer.

And perhaps self authorship after childhood into adulthood is partly learning this:

Yes, some things hurt me.

Yes, some things were difficult.

Yes, some parts of my childhood were not what I would have chosen.

And still, I am here now. And so much of it was so, so good.

I am responsible for what I nurture forward.

I am able to decide which parts of what I inherited deserve repetition and which parts deserve revision.

Not from a place of “I know better” either. I believe each generation has the capacity to slowly improve from the wounds before it and it is our responsibility to try to do so.

From awareness and looking at ourselves from an editors perspective rather than a place without agency.

Maybe this is where reverence begins

Perhaps the deepest understanding family offers is that nothing exists singularly.

A person can hurt you and heal you in different years.

A relationship can hold disappointment and devotion at once.

A parent can love you well in certain places, miss the mark in others, and still remain one of the most meaningful relationships in your life because human love almost never arrives without limitation attached to it.

And maybe growing up is simply the long discovery that this is true everywhere.

With parents. With friends. With partners. With siblings.

With yourself.

You will also miss things.

You will also fail people despite care.

You will also love imperfectly.

You will also leave dirty fingerprints somewhere in another person’s story.

Maybe that realization is not depressing at all. Maybe it is what makes people human.

Because once your parents stop being giants, and are removed from a pedestal you created in your head… they do not become lesser.

They become human, and real.

And strangely, if you are lucky, that makes certain parts of them easier to love than ever before.

Now you can see the effort.

Now you can see the great deal of sacrifice.

Now you can see how much they got right while still learning life for the first and only time themselves.

I think that deserves real respect and reverence.

Perhaps living in a space of duality when looking at our childhoods, and when looking at how we are affected in general by people… healing looks like looking for gratitude. And I think it starts being more fully formed when it starts sounding like this:

I can see what went wrong- AND I can also see what went right.

Neither cancels the other, and both were likely necessary.

Both belong to the truth, and “growing up” may simply be learning not to lose the beauty to the human nature of humans. Grace, always.

Parents are deliciously human, I am deeply grateful for mine, have gratitude for our road, and learning to find grace for myself in the journey of understanding, as a result.

It's their first time on this earth and one day, I hope my kids will remember the same for me.

Thank you for spending your time reading. 🖤

*Little side note: my parents are my best friends, mentors and biggest inspirations. I feel so lucky. In every lifetime.

Everything Has a Hidden Price

Everything comes back to time. Money does too, if you follow it back far enough.

An hourly wage is your life divided into units and assigned a number in dollars. Which means most things are not really just things if you think about them honestly enough. Purchasing something, in a way, is an exchange of your time. The jeans in your drawer. The groceries in your fridge. The coffee you bought because the morning moved too fast. The lamp beside your bed. The dinner you barely tasted because your mind was already elsewhere.

Most things carry a second price underneath them: hours worked, hours traded, pieces of your actual life.

And unlike money, which does not always have to be earned hour by hour and can be regenerated, the hour itself does not return.

Money can come back. A person can earn again, rebuild, recover, eventually replacing what was lost. Time leaves once, and for something so absolute, we move around it and spend it with surprising ease.

People panic over wasted money because it feels measurable. We see the number, feel the regret, calculate what should have happened instead. Time is harder because it rarely feels expensive while it is being spent. Somehow, because we do not know when our time runs out, and because we all get the same amount of hours in a day, it gets treated as if it is not precious.

A day goes to errands. A week goes to catching up. A month goes to work, groceries, laundry, driving, emails, bills, trying not to forget something important, trying not to fall behind.

Then the season changes. Summer, suddenly fall.

Then another month is gone. How many times have we heard “How is it Christmas already?!”

Then a year begins to look suspiciously similar to the one before it, and you are left wondering where exactly your life was while you were busy keeping it running.

That, to me, is one of the harder truths of being alive: life is not only lost through tragedy. A great deal of it is absorbed by maintenance and the mundane.

Occupied Lives

Martin Heidegger wrote that most people move through life absorbed in whatever is directly in front of them: tasks, obligations, routines, expectations, what needs doing next.

In his view, people often live according to what he called das Man, or in English, the they: the anonymous pressure of ordinary social life, where you do what everyone does, value what everyone values, and move as though life stretches ahead in dependable amounts, without really confronting that your own time is finite.

What he meant was not that people are shallow or boring. It was that life will always be full enough to keep you occupied.

Occupied people do not always notice what is being missed beneath all the occupation and utility.

You answer emails. You buy groceries. You return calls. You think about next week while standing inside today. You keep functioning. And because functioning looks responsible, it can take a long time to notice that being busy and being present are not the same thing.

If we are too busy surviving, too absorbed in everything we feel obligated doing and are barely awake in the process… we lose our f*cking time.

It is disturbingly real that there are stretches of adulthood that are not fully lived so much as managed. You get through them. You do what needs doing. You keep things moving. And from the outside, it can even look like you are doing well.

Meanwhile, your life is passing you by.

When Time Stops Registering

The COVID-19 pandemic is a great example of this. It made time impossible to ignore for many people. I will speak for myself, anyways.

Time became strange. Days repeated so similarly that memory blurred. Plans stalled. Milestones happened without any real shape or memories applied to them to keep them intact. Entire years became difficult to place because there were so few borders around them to keep them contained.

Many people still talk about that period as though it happened both yesterday and very long ago, which says something about what happens when life continues on but does not fully register.

Stress does something similar, just on a more internal level.

Stress steals your life without removing you from it.

You can still be there making dinner, driving somewhere, sitting with someone you love, answering emails, folding clothes, and still not really be there. Auto-pilot.

Your mind is already on tomorrow, replaying earlier, solving something that has not happened yet.

Trying to be present sounds simple until you notice how difficult presence actually is.

Presence asks something deeply disciplined of us. It asks that you stop rehearsing what is next. It asks that you stop circling what already happened. It asks that you arrive inside an ordinary hour and accept that ordinary life is still your life. Here, now.

That is harder than people admit.

I have struggled to remain present often. I have caught myself in perfectly decent moments and realized I barely lived them. A conversation, a meal, a drive, an evening that was objectively fine, and I was there physically but mentally halfway into something else or looking backwards pondering. And it happens.

Thinking ahead. Carrying something old. Organizing life while life was happening.

That is not a massive failure, necessarily. It is just super normal and human.

Still, there is something sobering about realizing how often ordinary life passes through your hands while your attention is elsewhere, because ordinary life is where almost all of life actually happens.

The Ordinary Is Still Your Life

Not every meaningful moment arrives looking meaningful.

Most of them do not.

A quick coffee with someone you see often. A slow conversation in a kitchen. A drive with no destination that matters. A phone call you almost ignored, but took. A boring, mediocre Tuesday. A parent still healthy enough to call who is often available for advice. A friend still alive enough to answer that we take for granted.

Everyone gets to be young for a while.

Not everyone gets to grow old.

That sentence sounds simple until life starts proving it around you.

Someone passes too early. Someone you love changes in visible ways. A parent suddenly looks older and the face you knew well begins carrying time differently. Maybe you face illness yourself and have to stare your own mortality in the face.

Suddenly, ordinary moments stop looking ordinary.

Not because everything becomes sentimental, but because you realize nothing time-wise was guaranteed in the quantities you casually assumed.

This is where Heidegger’s thought becomes uncomfortable in the best way: he believed people often only wake up to their own lives when something reminds them that they are not endless.

Loss. Illness. Death in close proximity. A rupture. Anxiety. Something that interrupts the illusion that there will always be more time later.

Not to encourage looking at everything as though it will be lost, but to understand that almost everything is, in fact, rather precious. Including our time.

Because once you start understanding that your life is finite, really embodying it rather than just knowing it, a random afternoon wasting time stops being random and harmless in the same way it used to be.

A delayed decision feels different. A wasted year feels heavier. Even boredom changes texture a bit and feels rough to the touch when you realize it could be spent with more intention.

Attention Is Also Time

That is why attention is beginning to feel so serious to me now. Where it is not only placed by us and when it is given to us, as well. If time is non-refundable, then attention is life being handed over in visible form.

When someone listens properly, that is part of their life, their precious time, freely given.

When someone stays on the phone, drives to see you, lingers at the table, asks another question instead of ending the conversation, that is part of their life, freely given.

It should be treated that way. Freely given, sure, but taken with reverence. Because none of us are giving each other spare time. We don't have spare time. We have precious time. We are giving each other our lives in pieces. Every second we give and receive with others is a gift with no receipt for return or take-backs.

And where we place ours says more than we admit. Every hour goes somewhere. Whether we choose it carefully or not. Every hour says: this got part of me. This got my attention. This got a day I will never get back.

That thought does not make me want to become rigid or efficient to the point of absurdity. That misses the point too.

Rest is important. Wandering matters. Laughing too long is good for your soul. Losing an afternoon to a useless but lovely hobby or passion is healthy. A slow morning can reset you. Sitting in the sun without a care in the world will give you back your clarity.

The least measurable parts of life are often the ones that make it feel worth having. It isn't about being more efficient. It's about being there in whatever is happening.

The Real Part

I think what feels harder for me to make peace with is how much gets fed to things that leave nothing behind except depletion.

How many days disappear into stress?

How many years disappear into proving, coping, rushing, postponing?

How often do we all wait to live properly until things calm down, as though life is going to send formal notice that the difficult stretch is over and now the real part may begin. A notice taped to your door reading: Now you can enjoy your time.

It doesn't work like that.

This is the real part. This unfinished, expensive, ordinary stretch of it in between the odd obvious one. Everything. Every second.

And by the time you fully realize that in your body, mind and heart, some of it is already gone.

That may be what makes time the most expensive thing we waste: not only that it is valuable, but that it is being spent whether we are paying attention or not.

One day, people unaware of time as their greatest asset will look back and realize that what felt like regular life was, in fact, their life. That laying in the sun with someone you love counted. That washing dishes counted. That answering the phone counted. That even the ordinary hours were never outside of life or less valuable, they were precious parts of time and ultimatelt, your life.

I don't know the answers, by any means. But realizing how expensive time is makes me want to be clearer about where I place mine, and more grateful when other people place theirs with me. More aware, even in small things, that this hour is leaving too- whether I want it too or not.

I think we are all waiting for life to start while it is already happening. Missing the beauty in the mundane, waiting for another big milestone to fill the void. And, spending our time without considering the non-renewable resource we are spending. Can we avoid the mundane? No. But we can appreciate the time no matter what we are doing.

Time is, in my opinion, the most expensive thing we waste. It costs us parts of our lives and sometimes the entire thing if we aren't mindful.

If you made it this far, thank you for spending ten minutes of your non-refundable time.

Not just the polished parts people are comfortable admitting to that make it to your instagram grid. Not just the beginning, when everyone is beautiful, attentive, still slightly edited. I mean all of it. The inconvenient, irrational, embarrassing, overcommitted, body-altering force of it. The kind that changes the chemistry of a day because one person texted back, or did not. The kind that can make a city feel warmer, a song unbearable, a Tuesday briefly mythic. Love, romantically or otherwise is absolutely delicious.

Love has always fascinated me because even the most composed people become a little undone inside it. The most articulate suddenly lose language. The most rational start assigning meaning to timing, punctuation, tone, pauses. A single sentence can become an entire internal event.

And somehow, that does not make love feel ridiculous to me. It makes it feel deeply human.

We talk about love so often as though its worth depends on whether it lasts, whether it behaves, whether it arrives in a form neat enough to justify itself. But some of the most meaningful parts of love have nothing to do with permanence. Even unfinished love leaves fingerprints. Even complicated love tells the truth about you, if you are willing to look at what it stirred up inside of you.

That is why I have never been able to fully join the cynical crowd, the people who speak as though detachment is sophistication, as though caring less means you understand life better. I do not think guarding yourself is wisdom. I think remaining open after life has given you reason to close is one of the more impressive things a person can do.

Love Makes Students of Us

Roland Barthes understood this better than most. In A Lover’s Discourse, he writes about the lover as someone caught inside meaning itself, replaying words, noticing pauses, assigning weight to tiny gestures, waiting, interpreting, rereading. He took longing seriously. He understood that love creates a kind of private classroom, where ordinary interactions become texts we annotate internally.

That feels true because love sharpens perception, though not always in comfortable ways. It heightens what is already there. If you are secure, it deepens tenderness. If you are afraid, it often introduces you to exactly how fear behaves when attachment is involved. You are forced to learn. Or ignore what you are meant too.

Which is why I think love is never just about the other person. It is also a confrontation with self.

You meet yourself in love. Not the edited self. Not the self you explain well in daylight. You meet the version of you that wants reassurance. The version that suddenly notices old wounds still have a pulse. Your generosity, yes, but also your ego. Your softness, but also the places where you brace.

bell hooks wrote about this with unusual clarity in All About Love, where she argues that love is not just a feeling but a practice made up of care, trust, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and commitment. I have always loved that because it rescues love from sentiment without making it cold. It asks a harder question: not simply whether something feels intense, but what that love actually produces.

Intensity is really easy to mistake for depth. Plenty of people have felt chemistry that never became safety. Plenty of people have experienced desire that did not know how to hold responsibility. Love, in real life, often looks less dramatic than longing. It looks like steadiness. It looks like honesty before being cornered. It looks like repair.

And even when it does not become that, I still think there is meaning in what it teaches.

Love Is Not Mind Reading

Erich Fromm argued that love is less something we fall into than something we learn to practice. A discipline. A skill. Something requiring humility, patience, attention, and self-knowledge. His point was simple but unfashionable: loving well is not only emotional, it is a learned skill.

And he was right, because one of the strangest things about love is how often people want its rewards without its disciplines. They want closeness without self-examination. They want devotion without responsibility. They want to be understood while remaining partly hidden.

But love usually exposes how expensive hiding becomes.

Alain de Botton writes often about how romantic disappointment is sometimes less about lack of feeling and more about the fantasy that someone should simply know us without translation. His work returns again and again to the idea that compatibility is not discovered whole. It is negotiated. Built. Explained.

We imagine being loved should feel effortless because so many stories teach us that if someone really cares, they will just know.

But that has never fully made sense to me.

If someone is heading to the store and asks whether you need anything, and you say no while privately hoping they will somehow return holding the exact sweet thing you wanted, why are we so quick to feel disappointed when they do not? Why do we assign hurt to a person who responded exactly to the information they were given?

We do this in love constantly. We want people to notice what we did not clearly name. We want them to infer tenderness from hints, decode silence correctly, arrive at needs we ourselves barely admitted out loud.

But to be known is not effortless. It requires work.

To be loved well often means becoming honest enough to say what would actually make you feel cared for. Not because asking makes love less romantic, but because language is often what allows love to land where it was intended.

To be known, in many ways, is collaborative.

The Strange Mercy of Endings

Joan Didion understood something profound about attachment: once someone matters, absence does not arrive cleanly. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she writes grief in a way that shows how love alters perception long before loss appears. A person can leave, and still remain in it all mentally for months because attachment changes the texture of thought itself.

That happens in romantic endings too.

A person leaves, but the internal conversation continues. Not always because you are unwilling to move on, but because meaning takes longer to settle than circumstance.

And while endings hurt, I have never believed that pain automatically means the love itself was a mistake. Sometimes endings are where clarity finally arrives.

You begin to see what you excused. Where your hope outran reality. Where you confused potential for evidence. You see where you fell short and need to grow, too. But you also see what was beautiful. What was sincere. What was deeply alive, even if incomplete.

Not every unfinished thing is false or a waste of time.

Anaïs Nin wrote desire with a kind of fearless honesty I really admire because she never flattened love into moral simplicity. She understood contradiction. That longing and discernment can coexist. That tenderness and dissatisfaction can occupy the same room.

Maybe that is one of the most real truths about love: multiple things can be true at once.

Someone can matter deeply and still be wrong for you.

Something can be beautiful and still unsustainable.

You can be grateful for effort and still know you cannot build your life with them.

Clarity Over Fantasy

Jane Austen knew long before modern psychology that affection alone is not enough. What makes her work endure is not romance itself, but how sharply she understood character. Again and again, her women are not rewarded for feeling. They are rewarded for seeing clearly.

And clarity, more than fireworks, is what changes everything.

Who tells the truth before being cornered. Who repairs without performance. Who remains steady when nothing fun, easy or giving is happening. Who makes love feel less like guessing and more like relief.

That is more valuable to me now than any dramatic declaration ever could be. The fireworks are still beautiful, too. Distracting, even.

Why I Still Love It Anyway

Still, despite some hard lessons in love, I remain embarrassingly loyal to the lover girls, and to being a lover girl.

Emily Dickinson barely needed plot to explain love because she understood that feeling often exceeds event. A single line from her can hold more emotional voltage than entire chapters elsewhere because she knew how close love sits to awe, fear, imagination, and mortality all at once.

And perhaps that is why love never becomes ordinary, even when it becomes familiar.

Because every time someone lets themselves care, something ancient and precious is happening again: Trust is being offered without guarantee.

A heart saying: here, take this carefully.

That trust fall is absolutely extraordinary to me.

It is extraordinary that people continue to offer themselves in that way knowing it could be the demise of themselves as they know now.

But all of it is extraordinary, even the dirty parts. Even the humiliating parts. Even the parts where you learn too late. Even the endings, where all that remains is knowledge, which sometimes is the only gain in the battle field that can be love.

Knowledge of what you need.

Knowledge of what you ignored.

Knowledge of how you love and who you are when no one is watching or only one person is there to witness your mess.

Knowledge of whether you became smaller or more honest inside the thing itself.

Knowledge, finally, of what you need to do next to grow.

Maybe that is why I still cannot become cynical.

Because love, even when imperfect, still makes life deeper. It deepens absolutely everything about you, if you let it.

It sheds light on places in us that might otherwise remain hidden by shadow, tucked away neatly where nothing else can trigger us. But love, can. It teaches tenderness. It teaches discernment. It teaches where fantasy ends and character begins. About them, and about you, more importantly.

And even when love leaves, it rarely leaves you unchanged.

What a privilege to experience the highs and lows of love.

So, lover's, this is a case to remain open- if not to find love with someone else, to find yourself along the way.