The title does say it all really. You may again have all noticed that I disappeared not long after I posted my last substack, I spent a small portion of June and half of July in hospital. I've hinted and spoken about having a teeny tiny chronic illness on substack before. I have at least written poetry about it, if you follow me on instagram and Facebook (not a shameless plug by the way) you’ve probably seen it.

I’ve had for the last eight years a rare neurological condition called IIH (Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension). My brain produces too much Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) which is the fluid that protects your brain and as my brain produces too much. It essentially creates excess pressure which causes a lot of other issues for my brain/body etc. It’s something that has no cure and is controlled for most by medication and for some through surgery (not an option for me). Largely I just get on with my life taking enough medication that if you were to shake me I would rattle. Now whilst IIH isn’t curable it does have periods of remission for some years, for others days, weeks, months. The longest period I have managed is 2 years, I’ve actually had more issues with side effects from the medication I have to take to manage IIH than I have the actual IIH itself.

In June, I went to the emergency department with what I thought was a symptom of my IIH (going just a tiny bit blind in my left eye…okay a lot blind in my left eye). Oh yeah nah was not my IIH. So had a three week stay in hospital had numerous tests, do not recommend more than one lumbar puncture (I had three over 4 days no bueno). Also really fancy MRI scans aren’t it either, they sound like Pac-Man and the weird robot things in Doctor Who.

Now you may be asking so what exactly does this have to be with you saying goodbye (for now)? Due to my fun new diagnosis of yet another not very fun and kinda scary neurological condition. You might as well call me a Pokemon trainer, i’m tryna catch all the neurological conditions. Between the recovery, new symptoms and all the new medication I'm on. I honestly don’t have the brain power to write long form right now, I struggle having a conversation, it’s taken me nearly 8 days to write this single post. To be clear, this isn’t a pity post in the slightest, I'll be back when my brain decides it likes me again. I’ll still be sharing poetry via Instagram and Facebook but I'll no longer be sharing long form essays etc.

Thank you all for being here,
I’ll be back in the future,
Artisticpursuitsofher

TW: brief mention of anxiety, cult upbringing, religion

Hey, hi, hello.

I am still alive. If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you will already know this because I have been giving small, inconsistent signs of life like a panic attack with WiFi. I have, however, neglected Substack beautifully. Not casually. Not accidentally. Beautifully. With intention. With avoidance. With that very particular kind of anxiety where you know the thing is waiting for you, and the longer you leave it, the more it starts to feel like a locked room with something breathing inside it.

I think Substack became part of my anxiety issue because this is where I am the most open. Instagram gets the pretty fragments. Facebook gets the proof of life. My journal gets the unhinged evidence. But here, I tend to tell the truth in full sentences, and sometimes that is the most frightening thing a person can do.

So. Where have I been?

Well, I moved from Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Sydney, Australia. Which I love. I love it in a way that feels slightly embarrassing because I didn’t realise how badly I needed to disappear until I got somewhere big enough to let me. Not disappear in a concerning way. Not vanish into a spiral or become a mysterious woman in a black coat who only drinks espresso and says things like “I don’t do attachment.” I mean hide in the soft way. In the breathing way.

New Zealand is beautiful, and I miss it, and there are parts of me that will always feel stitched to it. The air. The water. The green. The way the sky looks too close to your face. But community wise, New Zealand is oddly tiny. I could drive three hours north and somehow run into my next door neighbour, my daughter’s friend’s auntie, and a man I once made eye contact with in Countdown in 2024.

In Sydney, I have seen my neighbours maybe three times since I moved here. Do you know how romantic that is to a woman who has spent years feeling like she was always being perceived? No one knows me here unless I let them. No one is quietly tracking the shape of my life through mutual friends and school gates and someone’s cousin’s cousin who swears they saw me at the petrol station looking “tired.”

I feel more at ease here. I feel like I can be strange and soft and tired and happy and overdressed and under-slept and no one is making it into a case study. Auckland always made me feel like I had to be on. Not even in a dramatic way. Just constantly aware. Constantly socially braced. New Zealanders are friendly, yes, but they are also quietly judgmental in that very polite way that makes you feel like you have committed a crime by being visible.

Also, making friends there is hard enough to be classified as an endurance sport. Especially if you do not work in hospo, and I do not, so there went half my chances at accidentally becoming part of someone’s chosen family after crying in a beer garden at 1am. I loved New Zealand. I still love New Zealand. But I needed somewhere I could breathe. Sydney gives me that. A place big enough to lose myself in, but not so big that I cannot find coffee.

What have I been doing? Existing, mostly. Which is both nothing and everything.

I have been writing heaps more poems. Some of them good. Some of them probably evidence of a nervous system trying to claw its way out of my skin with a glitter pen. I have been spinning around a lot of poles, moonlighting as a midnight ballerina alongside my big girl job. Which sounds ridiculous until you are upside down at night, bruised in places you did not know could bruise, realising your body still belongs to you after all.

There is something very healing about it. Not in an Instagram therapy way. Not “movement is medicine” in a beige font over a woman looking at the ocean. I mean it in the literal way. My hands gripping metal. My thighs burning. My skin catching. My body learning how to hold itself again.

I also ended whatever that thing was. We do not need to give every almost-love a name. Some things are not relationships. Some things are bad weather systems with good timing and nice hands. Some things arrive, make you feel insane for a bit, and then leave behind the emotional equivalent of a wet towel on the floor. Anyway. That ended.

I soft launched a man via a journal entry, which feels very on brand for me, and then accidentally soft launched him via an Instagram story that was meant for close friends. He does not care, by the way. I am the anonymous one. Not him. He is very normal about being perceived, which I find suspicious but also refreshing.

I have also been writing in my actual journal a lot. I briefly considered scanning some entries for Substack, but I have a therapist’s handwriting, which is to say it looks like I am either processing trauma or prescribing antibiotics. Possibly both.

Also, my laptop died. My siblings in Christ, when did MacBooks get so expensive? At what point did buying a new laptop begin to feel like making a down payment on a morally questionable spaceship? So I have been writing on my phone, in notebooks, in scraps, in the notes app, in messages to myself, in that particular frantic way where the words still come but the infrastructure of your life has decided to collapse slightly.

I have also rewatched season 3 of JJK four times and I have zero regrets. I do, however, regret what this has done to my TikTok feed. My For You Page is now full of odd fan art of JJK characters, and all I am going to say is: the butterfly edit. If you know, you know.

Also, I hate him because he is beyond awful, but why is Naoya Zenin so hot? Like, damn. The slutty eyeliner is everything. A shame we next see him as a cursed spirit. My bad if you have not read the manga.

I am actually writing this on a flight to Melbourne, which feels fitting because there is currently no apparent structure to my life or this update. But we move.

What else has happened? I recorded vocals for a song with a friend of mine, which was very big and very scary and I will never repeat it. Probably. Maybe. I also had to come up with a pseudonym, which was kind of fun in the way choosing a fake name always feels like briefly handling a life you did not take.

There is something strange about hearing your own voice played back to you. I do not mean your talking voice. I am used to that. I talk for a living. I can hear myself explaining attachment patterns and emotional regulation and why no, babes, you cannot heal someone by becoming their emergency contact. I mean singing. I mean that softer, more exposed thing. The voice that comes out before you have had time to make it clever. I hated it and loved it and wanted to crawl out of my body, which probably means it was good for me.

I have also been going back to church again. Which has been… an experience.

I grew up in a cult, so religion is always a touchy subject for me. Not touchy like “I do not want to talk about it.” Touchy like a bruise you forgot was there until someone presses their thumb into it. I am not going to pretend I have some beautiful, clean relationship with faith now. I do not. I do not know if I ever will. There are words that still make my body tense. Songs I cannot listen to without becoming a child again. Certain phrases that make me want to leave a room immediately.

But I have been going anyway. Not because I have figured anything out. Not because I have become one of those women with glowing skin who says things like “God placed it on my heart” while somehow having a perfect linen wardrobe. I am going because some part of me still wants to know if there is a version of faith that does not require me to abandon myself.

I am going because I think there is a difference between God and the people who used Him as a weapon. I am going because sometimes I want to sit in a room where people sing and not have to be funny or useful or desirable or impressive. I am going because I am curious. I am going because I am stubborn. I am going because maybe I am still trying to take back every place that made me feel small.

And maybe that is what these last two months have been. A strange little reclamation.

Sydney. The club. The journal. The poems. The accidental man on the Instagram story. The dead laptop. The cursed spirit thirst traps. The vocals. The church pew. The flight to Melbourne. The not knowing. The trying anyway.

I think I disappeared from here because I was scared of being seen while I was changing. There is something humiliating about transition. Everyone talks about becoming like it is graceful, but most of the time it is just you, sweaty and unsure, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes, wondering why you thought a fresh start would not still involve your own nervous system.

You can move countries and still bring yourself with you. Annoying, but true.

The anxiety came too. The grief came too. The avoidance came too. The tenderness, unfortunately, also came. But so did the poems. So did the quiet mornings. So did the feeling that maybe I am not stuck. So did the strange relief of walking through a city where no one knows my history unless I hand it to them.

I do not have a grand lesson. I have not returned with a perfectly branded reintroduction post and a 10 step content plan. I have a suitcase. A notebook. A dead laptop. A few bruises from pole. A half-built life in Sydney. A seat on a plane. A man I accidentally posted. A faith I do not fully trust but keep circling anyway.

And this.

A little proof that I am still here. Messy, anxious, writing, hiding, trying, laughing at my own stupid little life.

Alive.
Unfortunately for everyone.
Lovingly,
her x

There is something particularly cruel about a house once most of your life has been packed into boxes.

It stops feeling like shelter and starts feeling like proof. Proof that you were here. Proof that something happened here. Proof that for a little while, this was home.

Tonight is my last night in Auckland. My last night in this house. It is quiet in that hollow, after-everyone-has-left kind of way. Every little sound echoes now. A cupboard door. My footsteps. The hum of the fridge. The kind of silence that makes you feel your own life more sharply.

My friends were here earlier. They brought sushi and my favourite dumplings from a place on K Road, and tequila, which is really a dangerous level of kindness for someone like me. I did not drink much, but I drank enough to feel warm around the edges. Softened, maybe. Less braced against it all.

Now it is just me in the empty living room, sitting with my thoughts because my mind is far too loud for sleep. I probably should have booked a hotel. That would have made more practical sense. Somewhere clean and temporary and anonymous for one last night before the flight. But I could not make myself do it. I did not want to spend my final night in this country somewhere strange. Not when this place, and the people in it, helped hold me together when I needed it most.

I have been trying to find the right language for what Auckland has been to me, and I keep coming back to the same thing. It gave me somewhere to fall apart without disappearing completely.

When I first got here, I knew a grand total of four people. Four. Which feels ridiculous now when I say it out loud, considering how much of myself was rebuilt here. I arrived carrying far more than luggage. I came with fear. With grief. With old hurt I had gotten far too used to dragging around. I came exhausted in the way that lives in your bones. The kind of exhaustion that makes even hope feel heavy.

And somehow, slowly, quietly, Auckland met me there.
Not in some dramatic sort of way. Not all at once. Healing never seems to happen like that for me. It was smaller. More ordinary. More stubborn than that.

It was school runs.
It was co-parenting my daughter properly for the first time in her life.
It was watching her go to school.
It was watching her go to her papa’s games in person instead of seeing through a screen from miles away and pretending that was enough.
It was routine. Stability. Being able to breathe without always feeling like I was catching up to my own life.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from realising how much you needed something only once you finally have it. I felt that here. In all the small, unglamorous moments. In lunchboxes and drop-offs and the rhythm of days that did not feel like survival dressed up as living. I got to give my daughter things I never had growing up, and I do not mean expensive things or perfect things. I mean steadiness. Presence. Familiarity. The comfort of her people being close enough to touch.

That matters more than I can explain.

I think this city healed me in ways I did not know I needed healing. Or maybe it just gave me enough room to start doing the healing myself. Maybe that is what certain places do. They do not fix you. They just stop demanding that you stay broken.

And then, of course, there are the people.

I do not think I will ever be able to thank them properly. The friends who showed up. The ones who made me laugh again when I genuinely didn’t think I had it in me. The ones who carried pieces of me without making me feel like a burden. The ones who let me be messy and sad and tired and still treated me like someone worth loving.

That kind of care changes you.

I think sometimes we talk about healing like it is this private, solitary thing. Like you go away somewhere and do the work alone and come back whole. But that has never been true for me. A lot of my healing has happened in company. In shared meals. In being texted to check I got home safe. In someone making me a drink. In someone making me laugh so hard I forget, just for a second, how bad things once felt.

There are pieces of myself I met again here.

Not the version of me from before everything hurt. I do not think she exists anymore, and maybe that is alright. But a newer version. A softer one, somehow. A steadier one. A version of me that could imagine a future again without immediately wanting to flinch away from it.

That does not mean I am leaving Auckland completely healed, wrapped up neatly with a bow on top.

I am not.

My heart is still bruised in places. Still tender. Still carrying the shape of things that hurt it. I suspect some of that will always live in me. There are some breaks you do not fully come back from. You just learn how to hold them differently. You learn how to build a life around the ache without letting it swallow everything whole.

And maybe that counts too.
Maybe healing is not becoming untouched.
Maybe it is being able to look at what hurt you and still choose a life.

It has just gone midnight now, which means tomorrow, or really today, Sydney begins. A new chapter. New house. New routine. New everything. I would be lying if I said I was not scared. I am terrified, actually. But I am excited too, which feels almost suspicious. Like I am waiting for one feeling to cancel the other out.

It does not, though.
They just sit beside each other.
Grief and gratitude.
Fear and hope.
Sadness and excitement.
I think leaving is often like that. Not one clean emotion but several messy ones, all talking at once.

Tonight I keep looking around this empty room and thinking about the woman who first arrived here. How tired she was. How heartbroken. How uncertain. How badly she needed somewhere to land.

I want to tell her that she makes it through.
Not perfectly.
Not gracefully.
But she does.
She laughs again.
She builds something again.
She gives her daughter a life that feels fuller and closer and more held.
She finds people who are gentle with her.
She cries on the last night because of course she does.
Because of course this place mattered.
I do not know if I will ever be able to explain Auckland without sounding like I am talking about a person I loved.
Maybe that is because, in a way, I am.

Not in the romantic sense. Nothing so tidy. But in the way you can love a place for who you got to be there. For what it gave back to you. For the fact it met you at your lowest and did not ask you to be less wounded before it let you stay.

That feels rare.
That feels worth grieving.
So this is my last night in Auckland.
The house is nearly empty.
My suitcases are zipped.
There is still the taste of tequila and crispy chilli sauce at the back of my mouth.

My friends have gone home.
My daughter is staying with her Auntie’s one last time.
And I am here, in the quiet, trying to say thank you to a city that helped me carry the weight of my life a little better.

I do not think I am ready to leave.
But I do think I am more ready for what comes next because I lived here.

And for tonight, I think that is enough.

Subscribe now

blacktown or bust

I’ve been thinking for a while that maybe I wanna move back to Sydney. Blacktown, specifically. It feels like a sentence I should whisper, like it might startle something.

Blacktown isn’t the kinda suburb people romanticise. It is not the safest, nor is it the prettiest, not the one you’d put on a postcard. When I lived there, it was loud in the same way danger is loud. There was one of sydney’s biggest gang wars that was spilling across the news and into the air, and I remember how other adults spoke in half sentences, like saying the wrong thing could summon trouble to your doorstep.
But anywhere is only as safe as you make it. Sometimes the places that scare you are the ones that hold you the gentlest.

My dad has lived there since I was seventeen. Back then, I was still a girl in the most inconvenient of ways. Full of sharp edges, appetite, denial. I watched him build a life in Western Sydney, open restaurants, learn the streets, learn the rhythm, learn the way the heat sits in your hair and makes you a little irritable by late afternoon.

There’s something comforting about knowing your father is somewhere specific in the world. Like a pin on a map. But also in the fact neither parent are close by that gives a certain edge, or it would if I hadn’t been effectively been disowned, because ya know teen pregnancy.

A few years later, after I finished university, I wandered over too. I didn’t arrive with some grand plan. I arrived with the kind of confidence you only have before life proves you can be wrong.

I had grown something of London. Not love, not hate. Just a familiarity, like a jacket you keep wearing because it already fits your body. I had my flat, my routines, the version of myself I’d become there. Then I got priced out of the one place that actually felt like mine, and suddenly London was teaching me a lesson I didn’t ask for.

So what does a girl do?

Obviously, she moved to Australia with her toddler to live with her boyfriend.

Subscribe now

I was young and dumb. Not literally dumb. I had two degrees by twenty-one, so I was technically impressive in all the ways that don’t keep you warm at night. I was educated and untethered. Someone with achievements but no direction. The kind of girl who could psychoanalyse anyone except for a way to save herself.

Moving to Sydney the first time wasn’t just about my dad or my boyfriend. It was about small, too.

Her Papa lived in New Zealand, and Sydney to Auckland is only about a four-hour flight. Suddenly, her Papa wasn’t a twice-a-year person anymore. He could be regular. Reachable. Weekends instead of a pilgrimage.

That mattered.

More than pride.

More than my need to feel independent.

Then Sydney came crashing down around me.

In a cruel way, In the way real life does it. Quietly, then all at once. The kind of thing you don’t want to relive. The kind of thing you don’t even want to name, because naming it makes it feel real again, like your mouth is the doorway.

After that, I had an opportunity to go to Auckland.

So I took it.

I didn’t overthink it. I didn’t do the responsible, measured thing. I just grabbed the offer like it was a lifeboat and threw myself into a new city the way you throw yourself into cold water.

Auckland became my coping mechanism.

I threw myself into work and routines and several bad habits. I built a life that didn’t have the same ghosts in the corners. I let small see her dad whenever she wanted and whenever he wanted to see her, because he was there and I could give her that. I could give her a kind of normal I didn’t always have.

It wasn’t perfect.

But it was steady.

Subscribe now

And steadiness feels like love when you’ve been living in survival mode for too long.

Now he’s gone (that sounded more dramatic than intended).

He’s in the UK playing rugby, and I’m happy for him in that complicated way. The way you can be proud of someone and still feel the sting of what their absence changes for you.

Small can’t just see her dad whenever she wants anymore.

There’s no quick drive. No “just pop over.” No easy handover that makes co-parenting feel like breathing.

It’s flights again. Calendar maths again. Distance again.
And suddenly I’m looking at Auckland like, why am I tethered here?

The thing that anchored me to this city has moved.

I hate that it sounds like I’m reducing my life to a man’s location, because that isn’t what it is. It’s logistics. It’s motherhood. It’s the way I built my whole sense of stability around one simple fact.

Her papa was close.

Now he isn’t and it’s going to be for quite a good while.

So the spell had broken a little.

I’m standing in my life like it’s a room I’ve been renting, wondering if it’s time to move out.

Part of me thinks Sydney could be the start again for me, and small.

Not the same Sydney. Not the version that broke me. Not the one with the thing sitting in the middle of it like a bruise, I keep pressing just to see if it still hurts.

A different one.

A new one.

Subscribe now

A Sydney where I’m older now. Sharper. Less willing to abandon myself for comfort. A Sydney where I know what I can survive, and what I refuse to survive again.

And if I’m being honest, I keep seeing my dad.

Family dinners without airports.

Help that isn’t a fantasy.

The possibility of being someone’s daughter again sometimes, not just someone’s mother.

I keep picturing boxes and paperwork, the kind of moving chaos that makes your skin feel thin and exhausts your brain.

I keep picturing small’s shoes by the door.

I keep picturing our little black cats, confused and offended, blinking at the world from a carrier like, what have you done now.

And I keep asking the same question until it starts to feel like a bruise.

Would moving be brave?

Or would it be repeating myself?

Would Sydney be a fresh start?

Or would it be the same familiar ache?

And then I catch myself picturing it.

The small parts.

Subscribe now

My dad is at the kitchen bench in Blacktown, in his crocs, pretending he’s not watching small like she’s the best grandchild to have ever existed (i mean she is technically his only grandchild). She’s talking too fast in the way she does because she’s excited, showing him a drawing, a cartwheel, a new way she can say a word in a language he doesn’t understand. My dad is laughing like it’s medicine that can stave off old age.

I keep imagining a Sunday that doesn’t require planning.

Just a drive.

Just turning up.

Just being held without having to ask.

I keep imagining myself in a house where the air feels warmer than it used to. Where the doors don’t slam in my memory. Where the cupboards don’t smell like the thing that happened. Where I can cook something simple without my body bracing for no reason?

Subscribe now

I keep imagining her tucked up asleep in the next room, two black cats on guard, limbs sprawled out like she trusts the world.

And I keep imagining our little black cats, offended by the entire concept of moving, curling up anyway in their respective crates. Finding the sun on a new carpet. Acting like they’ve always lived there. Acting like home is a thing you can lie down in.

Maybe that’s what I want.

Not a fresh start in the shiny, reinvent yourself kind of way.

Just a softer life.

A life where I don’t have to do everything alone.

A life where small has more hands loving her, more voices saying her name, more ordinary days that don’t feel like survival.

I don’t know if Sydney will be kind to me this time.

I don’t know if Blacktown will feel like a return or a repeat.

But I keep coming back to this one image.

Small on my dad’s back porch, barefoot, sticky fingers, laughing without apology.

The cats were circling her ankles like tiny shadows.

I’m watching from the doorway, not rushing, not bracing, not already halfway out the door in my head.

Just there.
Just breathing.
Like, maybe that’s enough.
Like maybe that’s the point.

Well if you made it this far congratulations and thank you for reading. I sort of spilled my guts about how life has been lately and where i’ve been.
appreciate you all,
her.

You Don't Know How Lucky You Are // The Crypt Sessions - Keaton Henson

I used to think that beauty was a kind of reward. Something you earned after facing life’s complexities. After healing, becoming, and fixing whatever it was within you that kept pulling the same thread until your hands bled. Beauty felt like a doorway you could only walk through once you had become the right version of yourself.

The reality is, I have spent most of my life waiting to become someone I can live with. I waited for the day when loneliness would disappear, fear would vanish, old memories would stop replaying as if they are trying to teach me a lesson, and tenderness wouldn’t feel like a liability. But life doesn’t always pause for your healing journey. Life continues to unfold through my avoidance, grief, and messy, contradictory desires.

And the proof of that is always annoyingly simple. Laundry. School run. Work. Dishes. The kind of ordinary that doesn’t care whether you are having an existential crisis. It still needs doing.

For a while, I hated it. I thought that if I had survived what I had lived with, my life should look more like a fairy tale, something that proved it was all worth it. Instead, it looked like any other Tuesday.

But Tuesday is where I live. If I’m honest, the ordinary is the only place that has actually held me. Not the big moments. Not the melodramatic love stories. Not the endings people appreciate because they make sense. It’s the ordinary that keeps putting its hand on my back and saying, “You’re still here. Keep going.

Beauty Isn’t Always Bright

When people say, “find beauty,” they seem to mean something pretty. A sunset, a candle, a clean aesthetic, something photographable. But the beauty I’m talking about is much quieter. It doesn’t arrive as a feeling. It’s more of a shift. A gentle loosening.

It’s that moment when you stop bracing. Sometimes beauty isn’t comforting. Sometimes it’s just pure disinterest. The absence of panic. The way your shoulders drop without you noticing. The first morning you wake up, and you aren’t bracing yourself. That counts.

I had to learn that it counts.

Because I am the kind of person who invalidates my own peace. Especially if it feels too small, I don’t trust it. If it’s too simple, it must be temporary. If it’s not theatrical, I question its realism. Self-sabotage can be cunning, convincing you that only intensity is truth and everything else is just a lull before the next big storm.

But intensity is not synonymous with intimacy. Sometimes intensity is just your nervous system doing what it learned to do to survive.

When I feel overwhelmed by chaos or weirdly suffocated by boredom, I try not to make it a personality flaw. I name it for what it is. A body that got used to alarms. A mind that thinks quiet means danger. Boredom can feel like a cliff edge when you are used to living in storms.

So I don’t tell myself to “be grateful” and magically metamorphose. I start smaller. I choose one ordinary thing and let it be enough.

One pile of laundry done. One email answered. One meal that doesn’t end up in the bin.

Not to become a better person. Just to come back to my own life.

The Mundane as a Form of Safety

There’s a reason that the mundane can feel unbearable for some of us. For many, boredom isn’t boring. It’s unfamiliar. When your life has been shaped by chaos, quiet can feel threatening. You finally sit down, have a moment to breathe, and your mind rummages through your worst parts, searching for proof that you don’t deserve this stillness.

You might start picking yourself apart, reach for old patterns, want to text someone you shouldn’t, or start a fight just to feel something sharp and familiar. Because the familiar is seductive. Known feels like home, even when it hurts.

This is one of the ways I’ve learned to embrace the ordinary when it feels impossible. I treat it like exposure therapy, but a little softer. Like I’m teaching my body that nothing is on fire right now, and that I don’t have to set fire to anything to feel alive.

Sometimes that looks like a timer. Ten minutes of doing something dull, on purpose, while my brain complains the whole time.

Sometimes it looks like a rule I made for myself when I know I’m prone to spiral. No big decisions when I’m dysregulated. No sending the message when I’m craving impact. If I want to blow up my own peace, I have to wait twenty minutes first.

It’s not a punishment. It’s an attempt at regulation. It’s me learning the difference between an urge and a need.

That’s why I’ve been learning to find beauty in the mundane. Not because I crave a dull life or want to turn survival into a Pinterest board, but because the mundane offers structure. The exact route, the same chores, the same everyday routine. Yes, they can be annoying, but they also provide stability. They are the opposite of a life where you’re constantly bracing for the next impact.

The small whispers, nothing is on fire right now.

It reassures you that you get to exist without having to earn it.

The Tiny Rituals That Keep Me Human

Some mornings, I make coffee like it’s a prayer. Not a beautiful one. Not a holy one. Just a practical one. I measure the spoonfuls of coffee and coconut syrup, watch the kettle boil, and listen to the small domestic sounds that remind me I’m in my own home, in my body, living a life that’s mine.

For a brief moment, I allow myself to simply be a person rather than a problem.

I used to think routines were boring. Now I know they’re scaffolding. They hold me up when I can’t hold myself up.

There are small practices that help me recognise the beauty in my daily routine, even when my brain insists none of it matters.

I try to notice three sensory things, on purpose. The ice chilled of the mug. The smell of my perfume. The hum of the fridge. The sun through the window at an angle that makes the dust look like glitter, even though it’s just dust.

I keep a tiny list, mentally, of proof. Proof that I’m here. Fresh sheets. Clean skin. Fruit eaten slowly instead of skipped meals called discipline. One email replied to instead of spiralling into all of them. Opening the curtains. Putting my feet on the floor and staying there.

And when I’m really not okay, when everything feels loud inside me, I lower the bar until it becomes reachable.

Drink water.

Wash face.

Stand outside for sixty seconds.

Choose a song that doesn’t make me miss anyone usually something absolutely ridiculous. (Recent personal favourite has been Farmcore by Joost and horsegiirL)

Care is consistency. It is choosing yourself quietly, over and over again. It is making tiny promises and keeping them. And every time you hold one, you build the kind of intimacy with yourself that doesn’t rely on adrenaline.

Where the world keeps offering tenderness

The supermarket aisle, fluorescent and ordinary, has humbled me more than any mountain ever has. It’s where you see how everyone is just trying. A woman counting coins at the checkout, her cheeks flushed, still buys something for someone else. A man in work boots picks out flowers, like he’s embarrassed to want softness. A teenager laughs too loudly, momentarily free. A tired mum juggles everything one-handed, the toddler’s head resting on her shoulder.

It’s easy to feel alone when you’re lost in your own thoughts. But the world offers quiet reminders that you’re not the only one dragging yourself through the day.

I don’t mean this as a comparison. I mean it as comfort.

Look around.

We are all simply doing the mundane thing of continuing.

The body as a place to return to

I used to treat my body like a vehicle. Something to style, control, or punish when I felt out of control in other areas of my life. But finding beauty in the everyday has, in some ways, taught me to make peace with my own physical presence.

The warmth of the sun on my thighs while sitting by a window. The salt in my hair after surfing. The way my skin smells like coconut oil and vanilla perfume. The simple act of breathing, moving in and out.

These sensations shouldn’t feel radical, yet sometimes they do.

After years of dissociating, numbing, performing, and floating slightly above my own life, simply being in my body feels like a return. And that return is beautiful. Not in a vogue cover way, but in the way that says, I’m still alive.

When self-sabotage shows up, I meet it here first. In the body. Not in the story.

I ask myself, what am I actually feeling right now?

Where is it sitting?

What does it want?

Sometimes the urge to ruin something is just the urge to be held. Sometimes the urge to run is just fear dressed up as self-preservation. Sometimes the craving for intensity is grief looking for somewhere to go.

Naming it doesn’t fix it, but it stops me from automatically obeying it.

And sometimes that is the whole win.

The ordinary doesn’t ask me to perform.

There is a relief in being unremarkable. In not being a story. In not having to turn my pain into something palatable. The ordinary allows me to be inconsistent. It lets me be soft and angry within the same hour, healing yet still haunted.

I can be a person who has survived without turning survival into an identity I must constantly prove.

I don’t need a grand transformation to be worthy of my own tenderness. I don’t need a new lover, a new body, a new job, or a new city. I need a life I can actually inhabit.

And much of inhabiting life is mundane.

What I’m learning, slowly

I don’t want a life that only feels real when it’s extreme. I don’t want to chase dopamine like it’s oxygen. I don’t want to treat ordinary days as something to endure until something “better” happens.

If I’m fortunate, there will be countless ordinary days. Filled with opportunities to make coffee, go surfing, and choose the music that fills the room each morning. There will be small moments where nothing is wrong that needs to be repaired.

And when I feel the old pattern rise, the part of me that wants to light a match just to watch something burn, I’m trying to practice a different kind of intimacy.

The kind where I stay.

The kind where I let peace be quiet.

The kind where I stop confusing chaos with connection.

Maybe the point isn’t to romanticise these moments. Perhaps it’s to stop abandoning them, to stop abandoning myself within them. I want to let beauty be what it is most of the time. A quiet noticing. A soft yes. A moment where you look at your life, precisely as it is, and you don’t flinch.

Not because it’s perfect.

Because it’s here.

And so are you.

If you’d like, share what your “ordinary” looks like right now. A detail from a day you usually rush through. A small thing you do on autopilot. I want to hear it. I want to notice it with you.

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading,
Always,
Her

Somewhere along the way I got very good at being fine.

Good at making jokes. Good at showing up. Good at keeping things light so nobody has to worry about me. And I didn’t do it because I’m strong, or healed, or above needing anyone. I did it because needing people has felt like a risk I don’t know how to take without flinching.

This is about the kind of loneliness that doesn’t look like emptiness. It looks like a full room and still not knowing who to turn to when the weight finally lands.

I came across a quote on Instagram that hit me hard. It caught on me and wouldn’t let go, like fabric snagging on a nail: “I don’t know who to turn to when everything feels heavy.” That sentence has felt like a hand at my throat. Not dramatic, just true.

The strange part is I don’t necessarily feel lonely. Lonely implies I’m missing people. I’m not missing bodies. I’m missing a place to land. I’m missing someone I can turn to without rehearsing first, without editing myself into something softer, easier, more palatable. I miss the confidence of not having to do the silent math of how much space I’m allowed to take up before I become “too much” and get quietly put back on a shelf.

I know I’ve contributed to this. I have a knack for burning bridges and then standing in the smoke like I didn’t strike the match. I disappear first because it feels safer than being left. It’s not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s me taking longer to reply. Cancelling plans. Saying I’m tired when what I really mean is I can’t bear being seen. I turn my feelings into something neat and palatable so nobody has to deal with the mess of them.

Still, sometimes I wish I had just one person. Just one. Someone I can text with trembling hands and no shame. Someone who doesn’t require me to build a case file for why my pain deserves a response.

There’s a difference between being lonely and being alone. I can be surrounded by people and still feel like I’m living in a sealed room.

I have friends. Good friends. People who laugh with me, know my favourite jokes, have seen me cry without flinching. But there’s a specific kind of heaviness that doesn’t want a group chat. It doesn’t want reactions, advice, or a “babe, you’ll be fine” sticker. It wants a door I can knock on at midnight. It wants someone who can hear the difference between “I’m okay” and “I’m barely holding it together.”

Lately, when things get heavy, I don’t reach out. I scroll. I clean. I make lists. I rewrite my feelings into something smaller. I brew vanilla chai that I don’t drink. I keep moving so I don’t have to admit I’m tired.

Alone isn’t always about having no one around. Sometimes it’s about not trusting myself to be held.

Self sabotage is a kind of arson. It’s cruel because it doesn’t show up looking like an enemy. It appears dressed as logic. It whispers, “Don’t text them, you’ll look needy. Don’t tell the truth, you’ll make it awkward. Don’t get attached, it’ll end anyway.” And the worst part is it speaks in my voice.

It sounds like wisdom. It sounds like self respect. It sounds like boundaries. But half the time it’s fear with better PR, and I fall for it because it knows exactly how to sound like me.

I used to romanticise the idea of the phoenix, burning and reborn with a fresh start. But lately it doesn’t feel mythical. It feels repetitive, like I’m constantly setting myself on fire and calling it growth because I still manage to stand up afterwards. There’s no glamour in it. It’s exhausting.

The aftermath is always the same: quiet guilt, scorched earth, the echo of “Why did I do that?” in the bathroom mirror while I wash my face, like if I scrub hard enough I can rinse the pattern out.

Then there’s this other strange thing. I write love poetry even when I’m not actually in love. I can write tenderness like it’s muscle memory, like a language I’m fluent in. Then I look up and realise I live in a world where I don’t let anyone touch the part of me that wrote it.

My friends don’t really ask me if I’m seeing anyone anymore. Not because they don’t care. Because I’ve trained them, gently, to stop expecting much from me in that area.

I don’t date anyone more than once. I don’t let things breathe. I keep it light. I can be funny, charismatic, the easy version of myself, the one that makes other people feel comfortable.

But I dread anyone getting too close.

Close means complicated. Close means being seen in an unflattering light. Close means someone noticing that underneath the jokes, I am scared.

I am terrified of becoming work. Terrified of being the girl someone describes later as intense, fragile, too much. The kind of story people tell like a caution sign. So I keep people at a distance where I feel most impressive.

And then I wonder why I feel alone.

There’s a line in “Death of a Heart” by Sign Crushes Motorist that has been sitting with me: “Nobody normal hurts like this. Everything’s hot, and I’m alone.”

It doesn’t try to rescue you. It doesn’t wrap things with a bow. It just sits on the floor beside you and lets the room be what it is.

That’s the kind of isolation I’ve been carrying lately. Feeling too much, feeling ashamed of it, and then performing numbness like it’s maturity.

Sometimes I think that’s what I’m grieving. Not a specific person. Not even a specific relationship. The version of me who used to believe she could reach out without calculating the cost first.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this. I don’t trust tidy endings. They make me suspicious, like I’m being sold something.

What I have is smaller, but it’s real. I’m trying to notice when I start to disappear.

I’m practising reaching out in ways that don’t terrify me. I send a voice note instead of delivering a confession. I say, “Can you talk?” instead of “I’m fine.” I let someone witness me without turning it into a performance.

Because I don’t want to be impressive anymore.

I want to be held.

And I don’t want to wait until I’m on fire to ask for water.

Thanks for reading,
always,
her

I didn’t leave all at once. I left in tiny pieces, like pulling my hand back from something hot while pretending it wasn’t burning me.

This is what it looked like when I stopped confusing effort with love and started treating my own heart as something worth protecting.

The Day I Stopped Throwing Myself at a Closed Door

There’s a particular kind of humiliation in being softly shut out. Not with cruelty, or a dramatic ending you can point to and say, “See, that’s where it died.” More like the slow erosion of someone who keeps their distance while you keep offering yourself as proof, as evidence, as a petition.

I used to tell myself I was brave for trying. For being honest. For not playing games. For showing up with my whole chest. But bravery and self-abandonment can look identical when you’re desperate to be chosen. And I was. Not in a romantic, movie-like way, but in a small, daily manner.

It was the kind where you keep your phone on loud, reread messages like scripture, and measure your worth by response times. I kept throwing myself at someone who was essentially shutting me out.

The worst part is, they didn’t even have to push me away. They just had to keep the door closed and let me do the rest.

The Way You Start Making Excuses for Silence

It starts innocently. You tell yourself they’re busy, stressed, not good at communicating, or going through something difficult. You become a tender little translator for someone who isn’t actually speaking to you.

You begin to do all the emotional labour for both of you, building a relationship out of pauses, crumbs, and the occasional moment where they let you in just enough to feel warm. Then the next day they’re cold, as if nothing happened. You’re left holding the entire weight of what you imagined.

I think that’s where the addiction lies. Not in who they are, but in who you become when they give you just enough to keep you hoping. I used to tell myself I was low maintenance, a cool girl, understanding, and patient. But what I was really doing was shrinking.

I was making myself smaller in real time, trying to fit into the parts of them that were available. I thought that if I didn’t ask for much, I wouldn’t be disappointed. If I didn’t name what I needed, they couldn’t deny me. And because I didn’t name it, it stayed blurry. Convenient for the person benefiting from that blur.

If you want to start establishing healthy boundaries, it begins in the unsexy places. It starts with deciding what you will no longer accept as normal. It involves honestly writing down the things that make you feel small. Things like:

• I don’t feel safe bringing up my feelings.

• I feel punished when I ask for clarity.

• I feel like I’m always waiting.

Then practice saying one clear sentence out loud, even if your voice shakes:

• “This doesn’t work for me.”

• “I need consistency.”

• “I’m not available for this kind of dynamic/relationship anymore.”

No threats, no speeches, no pleading. Just the truth.

What people often overlook is the follow-through. A boundary isn’t really a boundary if you say it and then keep allowing the same thing to happen because you miss them. A boundary is defined by what you do next. It’s what you stop replying to, what you stop accepting. It’s the moment you choose the temporary discomfort of holding your line over the long-term agony of betraying yourself.

I learned their silence the way some people learn a second language. It meant not now, not tonight, not you. And still, I stayed. I kept offering, kept performing softness as if it were a service.

There is a kind of desperation that can look like devotion, and I wore it like perfume. I don’t say this with judgment. I say it like a confession. I understand what it’s like to feel your own dignity slip away and still keep reaching anyway.

You keep hoping that if you say the right thing, if you are beautiful in the right way, if you are quiet in the right moments and loud when needed, if you manage to be easy enough to love, they will finally open the door.

But closed doors don’t open because you bleed on the doorstep. They open because the person on the other side wants you in. And if they don’t, you can write poems about it until your hands ache. You can send one more message, soften your voice, swallow your pride, offer your body like a peace treaty. You will still be outside.

The Moment Self-Respect Starts to Feel Louder than Longing

The real shift didn’t come from anger. It came from exhaustion. One day, I caught myself mid-spiral, phone in hand, thumb hovering, about to send something I didn’t even fully believe. Something like, “Hey, just checking in, hope you’re okay.”

That message was dressed up as kindness, but it was really a plea, a test. Me asking, “Do you still want to see me?” And I felt this wave of disgust, maybe. Not at them, but at the way I kept volunteering to be the person who could be ignored. At how I kept showing up to an emotional job interview, I was failing on purpose. At how I made their absence my entire personality.

Boundaries are how you stop abandoning yourself.

Detachment doesn’t arrive as a grand speech. It arrives as a quietly enforced boundary.

• No more double texting.

• No more rearranging your day for someone who can’t even rearrange a sentence to ask how you are.

• No more accepting confusion as a dynamic.

• No more being available to someone who is only available when it suits them.

It’s not dramatic. It’s mundane. It’s about choosing not to chase the high. It’s about sitting with the discomfort of your own loneliness without using someone else as a distraction. And it is hard. Because when you’ve been starving, even a crumb feels like a feast.

So you have to learn hunger again. You need to understand the ache of your own emptiness without filling it with the wrong person. You have to stop confusing attention with care. You have to realise self-respect isn’t just a feeling. It’s a practice. It’s doing what hurts now so you don’t keep hurting later.

Boundaries aren’t punishment. They’re protection. They are the part of you that finally says, “I am not doing this to myself anymore.”

I used to think boundaries were cold, like shutting the world out or becoming hardened. But boundaries aren’t about being hard. They’re about clarity. They’re softness with strength. They’re the quiet decision to stop negotiating your worth with someone who benefits from making you doubt it.

When someone shuts you out, it isn’t always personal. Sometimes they’re damaged, avoidant, scared. But none of that changes the outcome. You are still the one left waiting, still the one doing the emotional heavy lifting, still the one contorting yourself to become more acceptable. And I don’t want to live like that anymore. I don’t want to be a woman who has to beg for inclusion. I don’t want to romanticise being ignored. I don’t want to turn my tenderness into a currency spent on people who don’t value it.

Rebuilding self-worth after emotional neglect is a slow and annoyingly practical process. It’s not just affirmations in the mirror, although sometimes it starts there because you need to undo the way you’ve been talking to yourself. It involves making promises to yourself and keeping them, small ones.

• I won’t send the message I’ll regret.

• I’ll eat something even if I feel sick with longing.

• I’ll go outside.

• I’ll tell the truth to a friend instead of protecting the person who keeps hurting me.

Self-worth rebuilds when your actions align with your needs. When you stop treating your feelings as problems to manage and start treating them as information. When you stop asking, “How do I become lovable to them?” and start asking, “Why am I trying to be loved here?”

It also includes grieving. Not the romantic kind, the real kind. The grief that admits you were neglected, that you made do, that you accepted less because you were scared wanting more made you “too much.” Sometimes rebuilding self-worth means relearning what normal should feel like. Someone who replies. Someone who doesn’t punish your honesty. Someone who doesn’t make you feel like asking for the bare minimum is too much.

Sometimes it means being that someone for yourself first. Letting go isn’t about becoming indifferent. It’s about being loyal to yourself. It’s taking your heart out of someone else’s hands. It’s learning to stop touching the bruise just to prove it still hurts.

So yeah, sometimes I still miss them. Or I miss what I thought we could be. Or I miss the version of myself who believed enough for two people. But I miss myself more, and I’m not willing to lose her again. Not for a closed door. Not for a silence that keeps teaching me I’m too much and not enough at the same time. Not for someone who only wants me when it’s convenient.

I’m learning a new kind of love now. The kind where I don’t have to audition, where I’m not punished for having needs, where I don’t have to prove I’m worth staying for. Until I find it, I’ll practice it on myself. One boundary at a time, one unanswered message at a time, one quiet, aching, self-respecting choice at a time.

And that is what detachment looks like in real life. Not cold. Not cruel. Just finally choosing not to abandon myself.

If you’re reading this and you feel that familiar ache in your chest, the one that makes you want to send the message anyway, let this be your pause.

Let this be the moment you choose yourself, even if it feels wrong at first.

Thanks for reading,
always,
her

TW: abortion, pregnancy, religion/cult dynamics, misogyny, motherhood, medical settings

I had an abortion just before Christmas, which is the season of lights and sparkle and everyone pretending they’re fine. My best friend, in her dark humour way, said, “Well, you got yourself an abortion for Christmas,” and I laughed because the alternative was crying in public, and I didn’t have the energy to do that.

It’s a weird kind of whiplash, having your body go through something real while the world outside is busy buying wrapping paper.

Outside, there were carols and tinsel and people saying, “Can’t wait to see the whole family,” like that sentence doesn’t make some of us flinch. Inside, I was checking appointment times in my calendar app, checking my phone the way you do when you’re waiting for someone important to text back, except it was a clinic confirming a slot. Same little spike in the chest. Different reason. Same stupid human hope of being answered.

The waiting room was too bright and too quiet. It smelled like disinfectant, antibacterial hand soap and fresh flowers. And felt the kind of clean that doesn’t feel clean, just controlled. Plastic chairs. A receptionist calling names in a gentle voice that still felt official, like a stamp on your forehead.

There were other women there, but not in a sisterhood way or a movie way. Just women. Hands in laps. Eyes on the floor. Phones held like shields. We weren’t swapping stories, holding hands, or looking brave. We were seeking small distractions. The kind you do when you’re trying to stay inside your body without falling apart.

We weren’t sharing our stories, but you could feel them anyway, thick in the air like steam. I remember thinking: we’re all just trying to get through today. That’s all. And even in a room full of people, you feel alone because the decision is yours. Yet somehow everyone acts like it’s theirs to comment on, their morals, their opinions, their imagined baby, their God, their politics, their discomfort.

People don’t really want you to have an abortion. They want you to quietly carry the consequences of being a woman. They want you to learn your lesson without it becoming anyone else’s problem.

I didn’t tell many people. Not because I felt ashamed exactly, but because I didn’t want to be managed. I didn’t want someone to tilt their head, soften their voice, and turn my experience into a tragedy. I didn’t like the “Are you okay?” that actually means, “Are you sure you’re not secretly a monster?” I didn’t want to reassure anyone that I was still good, still worthy, still a woman they could respect.

I grew up learning how conditional respect can be.

I grew up in a cult. I hate how that word lands because it makes people curious in a gross way, like it’s entertainment or a documentary they can watch while they eat dinner. But it wasn’t quirky. It wasn’t misunderstood. It was a place where women were measured like livestock, where a woman’s body belonged to God and God belonged to men. Where motherhood wasn’t a choice, it was the price of being allowed to exist. Women were baby-making machines. That’s what we were taught. That’s what I watched happen.

I saw women disappear inside that system. Their laughter got quieter. Their softness rationed. Some of them didn’t hate their children; they didn’t have room for them, not emotionally, not spiritually, not after being forced into a life they didn’t want and being told to feel grateful for it.

I was one of the kids who could feel that.

It’s a specific kind of heartbreak, realising you are an obligation before you ever become a person. It teaches you to be small. It teaches you to accept crumbs and call it love. It teaches you to make yourself easy to hold because you can sense, even as a kid, that the person holding you is tired, resentful, or already gone.

Then you grow up, and you do that adult thing where you try to be fair. You look back, and you try to understand. You try to hold compassion for the women who were trapped in that system, because they were. But compassion doesn’t undo the damage. It doesn’t erase how my body learned fear, or how my nervous system still reacts to “duty” like it’s a threat.

So when I say I will not force myself into motherhood against my will, I’m not saying it like a slogan. I’m saying it like someone who has lived the consequences of women being forced.

I became a mother as a teenager. I know what it costs. I know what it costs when you don’t have a choice, but everyone around you treats it like a real choice anyway.

“Teen mum” sits on me like an old bruise. People think it’s a cautionary tale, a moral lesson, something that happened because I was stupid or careless or rebellious. What it actually was was me being a child and suddenly not being one. There was no sleep, cold coffee, adrenaline. It was me trying to be gentle while still being hurt by the world. It was me doing it essentially alone, no safety net, no one catching me, just me and this tiny person who needed me, whether I was okay or not.

And I love her. I love her in a way that terrified me, and it still does, because love doesn’t magically make you stable or resourced. Love doesn’t pay rent. Love alone doesn’t regulate your nervous system. Love doesn’t stop you from collapsing.

So when people talk about abortion like it’s selfish, I want to laugh or scream. The people who say that have often never had to make a decision while calculating their survival. For me, choice isn’t theoretical. Choice is numbers, timelines, and mental health. It’s whether your life can accommodate another human being without breaking apart.

And the judgment never stops, does it?

“Oh, she’s too young.”

“Oh, she’s too old.”

“Oh, she’s selfish.”

“Oh, she’ll regret it.”

There is no version where a woman exists without being evaluated. Pregnancy is treated like a sacred obligation we all have to respect, as though if your body can do it, you should. Like, not wanting it is a moral failure. Motherhood is the one role you’re allowed to desire less of, and you’re punished for admitting it.

Abortion disrupts the fantasy. The fantasy that pregnancy is always a blessing. That motherhood is always beautiful. That women are made for sacrifice and should be grateful for the opportunity to prove it.

My abortion wasn’t a tragedy, but it also wasn’t nothing. It was quiet and clinical. It was me making a decision with a clear mind and a trembling body. Afterwards, I stepped back into the world and saw Christmas decorations and felt nauseous because the contrast was so illogical. I went home, washed my face, and looked in the mirror like I was checking for proof.

Are you still you?

I felt relief and grief and numbness and anger all at once, like four weather systems happening in the same sky. I realised how many people want you to suffer, but only in the exact way they approve of.

I’m sharing this because I’m tired.

I’m tired of women having to carry this alone. I’m tired of pretending it’s rare. I’m tired of the silence that protects everyone except the person living it. I’m tired of how we’re expected to bleed quietly, cope quietly, choose quietly, and disappear quietly.

I had an abortion just before Christmas, and I’m not ashamed.

If anything, I’m angry that I ever thought I needed to be.

I’m still here.

That’s the point.

I’m still here.

I keep trying to date again
trying to pretend I’m open
but every guy feels like a bad copy
of someone I’m still trying to unlearn.

They talk about gym routines
and crypto
and whatever podcast told them
how to be a man this week
and I’m just sitting there thinking
god you were a nightmare
but at least you were interesting.

It’s embarrassing
how fast I check out
how bored I get
because no one has your stupid laugh
or your stupid confidence
or that stupid way you made me feel
like the room bent toward us
without trying.

I don’t even want you back
I just hate that you’re still the standard
I measure strangers against.

But one day someone good will show up
someone soft around the edges
someone who doesn’t drain me
just by walking into a room.
And maybe I’ll think of you
for a second
out of habit

before remembering
I finally healed past you.
And you’ll realise
you should’ve treated me better
because someone else actually will.

But right now
other boys are boring
and I can’t pretend
I’m not still wired for you.

I’m sitting on a beach in Papua New Guinea, drinking a Coke no sugar (nectar of the gods, if you ask me), watching boats go by.

It feels like the kind of moment that’s supposed to deliver clarity. The kind where you suddenly know what you want from the year ahead.

Mostly, I feel present.
Sun on my skin.
Salt in the air.
Life happening around me without asking me to keep up.

I keep thinking I should want more. A vision. A plan. A version of myself that sounds impressive when I say it out loud.

But the honest answer is I don’t want much.

I don’t want a reinvention, a glow up or a year that requires me to be constantly striving toward something shiny and exhausting. I don’t want to chase anything just to prove I’m moving forward.

I think I just want more stability than last year.
And a little more sanity.

Not enlightenment.
Just fewer moments where everything feels like it’s about to tip.

Lately, I’ve been trying to approach my life with a bit more humour. A bit less, the world will end over a minor inconvenience. I’m learning that not everything needs a reaction. That some things can just be mildly annoying and then pass. That I don’t have to treat every disruption like a personal failing.

That said, if my favourite coffee place doesn’t have coconut syrup, it actually might end.

I’m evolving, not cured.

There’s something grounding about sitting here, watching boats move without urgency, the water doing what it does whether I’m paying attention or not. It makes me realise how tightly I’ve been holding everything. How often I’ve been braced for impact.

This year, I want to loosen my grip just a little.
Let things be easier where they can be.

I don’t know what this year will bring. I don’t have goals neatly lined up or promises to make to myself. But sitting here, Coke warm in my hand, sun on my skin, I know this much feels true.

More stability than last year.
A little more sanity.
A sense of humour when things wobble.

And if the coffee place could please keep coconut syrup in stock, I think I’ll be just fine.

Always,
her

It’s been a while.

December was heavy for me. For a lot of reasons, I don’t feel like untangling. I survived it, but it took more out of me than I expected. I’m coming into this year tired, softer in some places, harder in others.

It’s a new year. Not a new me. Just me, with a bit more information than I had last time.

So here are my ins and outs for 2026.
Not aspirational. Just honest.

ins

• doing things slower, even when it makes me feel behind
• protecting my energy instead of explaining myself
• writing more even if it sits unfinished
• letting joy be small and quiet
• routines that hold me when motivation disappears
• choosing rest without turning it into a reward
• softness that isn’t apologetic
• boundaries that don’t come with a speech
• creating because I want to, not because it performs well
• staying present instead of fantasising my way out of discomfort
• asking for help before I hit a breaking point
• trusting my body when it says enough

outs

• romanticising burnout
• forcing productivity on days that are clearly not built for it
• staying in conversations that drain me
• explaining my pain to people committed to misunderstanding it
• chasing validation from places that have never fed me
• calling survival a personality trait
• guilt disguised as ambition
• ignoring my intuition because it’s inconvenient
• staying silent to keep the peace
• treating rest like something I have to earn
• pretending I’m fine when I’m not
• starting the year with punishment instead of care

I don’t know what this year will bring. I’m not pretending I do.
I know I want to move through it with a little more care than I did before.

If this year is about anything, I hope it’s about staying.
Staying with myself.
Staying present.
Staying long enough to feel what’s actually here.

That feels like enough to begin.

Thank you for reading,
Always,
her

Trigger Warnings:
parental abuse, emotional neglect, teen pregnancy, religious shame, grief

Introduction

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we talk about grief, especially the kinds of grief people don’t recognise. The kind that doesn’t look like a breakdown or pure devastation. The kind that feels more like confirmation than loss. This is about joining the dead mum club when the mother you lost was never really yours to begin with. It’s about the cruelty I lived through, the softness I’m choosing now, and the vow I made to break the cycle.

There should be a different name for it. Something less dramatic. Something that fits people like me, the ones who don’t fall apart when the call comes. The ones who don’t feel their world tilt. The ones who don’t grieve in the way others assume you will.

My mum died. And I say it the same way you’d mention a change in the weather. A fact, not a rupture.

People tilt their heads, soften their voices, wait for the ache to show on my face. But truthfully, there isn’t a wound to press on. Not the kind they imagine, anyway.

She wasn’t a maternal person. Not soft. Not safe. Love was not a language she ever learned to speak. And being the youngest meant I absorbed more of it. My siblings were older, already scarred over. I was still forming when she sharpened her voice on me.

When I got pregnant at seventeen, she kicked me out. Stood in the doorway screaming that I was unclean. That I was an embarrassment. That I would die in hell for carrying a bastard child. I remember the way she looked at me, like I was something rotting she’d found under the floorboards. I still see that look sometimes when I’m trying to sleep.

And later, when I experienced my own loss, when I told her with shaking hands and a world falling apart beneath me, she said, “Don’t worry. He deserved to die.” As if that was comfort. As if that wouldn’t leave a bruise on a part of me I still haven’t found the language for.

People tell me grief is universal. But what do you call this? What do you grieve when the person you lost was never truly yours?

Maybe I’m mourning something else. The version of her I used to fantasise about. The mother I kept hoping she’d turn into if I just behaved better, needed less, softened more. The childish superstition that she’d wake up one day and finally be gentle.

Her death was the confirmation that this will never happen. No late apology. No sudden warmth. No moment where she finally sees me. The book is closed. And I’m left holding the chapters that raised me with teeth instead of hands.

But here’s the truth: I’m only now willing to write into the world:

I vowed I would never be the kind of mother she was.

I vowed that my daughter would never have to check the temperature of the room before speaking. She would never stand at my bedroom door rehearsing the safest version of herself. She would never be punished for needing me.

She would never walk on eggshells in her own home.

My child will grow up knowing she can come to me with anything. Any confession. Any mistake. Any fear. And she will be met with softness. With listening. With safety. No judgement. No cruelty masquerading as discipline. No weaponised silence.

Maybe that’s my grief. The vow itself. The knowledge that I had to learn mothering from absence. That everything I give my daughter is something I had to build from scratch.

People expect warm memories when someone dies. But all I have are moments I clawed my way out of. Moments that shaped the woman I became out of survival, not inheritance.

So no, I’m not shattered. I’m not undone. I’m not wearing black or lighting candles in her honour.

I’m simply sitting with the truth of it.

The little girl inside me isn’t crying because her mother died.
She’s crying because she never really had one.

And maybe joining the dead mum club isn’t about grief for me.
Maybe it’s about a quiet exhale, a closing door, a confirmation of what I’ve known my whole life.

She wasn’t a mother to me.
And now she’ll never get the chance to be.

There’s pain in that, yes.
But not the kind they expect.

Just a low hum.
A bruise you press sometimes to see if it still hurts.
And it does.

But I’m here now.
Mothering myself.
Mothering my daughter.
Choosing a softness she never gave me.

Maybe that’s the real inheritance.

Thank you for reading, for holding space for stories that don’t fit inside the usual shape of grief.
Always,
her

Trigger warning: mentions of suicidal ideation, mental health, and therapy.

There’s a strange comfort in realisation, the kind that doesn’t arrive with fireworks, just the slow understanding that you’ve been living alongside something for so long you’ve stopped noticing it. This essay isn’t about an attempt or a crisis. It’s about the quieter part of survival: the day-to-day coexistence with thoughts that used to terrify me, and how learning to live with them has, in its own way, kept me alive.

A farmer friend of mine once told me sheep are continuously looking for ways to die. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You are a sheep, [redacted].” I laughed at the time, but it stuck with me. There was some uncomfortable truth to it. I think what he meant, though maybe he didn’t realise, is that some of us spend our whole lives trying to survive our own instincts. The quiet pull toward self-destruction, the urge to test every boundary to see if something will finally give.

We often talk about being suicidal in terms of finality, but not always about the ideation itself. Those thoughts are rarely cinematic or loud. They’re small, habitual, and almost boring after a while. I once joked to a friend that I was doing good because I hadn’t thrown myself in front of a car on the way there. They laughed, thinking I was joking, and maybe in part I was. But the truth is that wanting to die and thinking about dying have become so normal to me that I sometimes forget it isn’t like that for everyone.

I don’t mean that dramatically; it’s just part of the landscape of my mind. Some people daydream about holidays or promotions, or falling in love. I daydream about quietness not existing, not feeling, not having to keep trying so hard. Therapy taught me to look at that honestly. My therapist once asked, “When you imagine dying, what is it that you actually want?” I remember saying, “Peace.” Not death, just the absence of struggle. She nodded, which somehow made it easier to breathe. Because it meant I wasn’t broken, only exhausted.

Living with suicidal ideation changes over time. In the beginning, it’s terrifying. Later, it becomes routine, like background noise you learn to live alongside. You can still laugh, still cook dinner, still scroll through your phone, and the thought sits there quietly, like a low hum. “You could stop,” it whispers, and I answer, “Not today.” There’s an odd kind of power in that. The choice to stay becomes deliberate, not passive.

At some point, I stopped treating those thoughts like threats and started treating them like information. They became signals rather than alarms, ways of saying, “Something isn’t right here.” It’s my mind’s clumsy way of asking for rest, softness, change. When I listen closely, what I really hear is a plea for gentleness, not an ending.

Humour helps too. People who’ve lived through this understand that laughing at your own darkness isn’t morbid; it’s survival. I make jokes that make others uncomfortable, but for me, they’re proof that I’ve taken back control. You can’t terrify me with what I’ve already lived through. There’s freedom in that.

Sometimes I think about that farmer again and wonder if he knew how accurate he was. Maybe I am a sheep, restless, easily startled, always wandering too close to the fence line. But what he didn’t say is that sheep survive because they stay together. They’re herd animals. They don’t make it alone. And I suppose that’s the quiet truth beneath all of this: survival isn’t a solitary act. It’s built in the conversations, the therapy sessions, the text messages, the reminders from people who love you enough to keep you close to the field.

So yes, I still have those thoughts sometimes. But I also have the rest of it, the music, my child pointing out the moon, the friends who send me bad jokes, the tiny routines that make staying feel possible. Those are the things that tether me here.

The realisation, I think, is that the darkness doesn’t leave. It just loses its authority. You learn to live with it instead of for it. And maybe that’s what healing really looks like, not a clean escape, but a quiet choosing. Every day, I wake up, brush my teeth, feed my child, step outside, and choose to stay in the field. And for now, that’s enough.

Thank you for being here with me,
Always,
her

October came in soft and strange. The kind of month that smells like rain and burnt coffee, where the light starts getting brighter and the evenings seem shorter than you expect.

Most weekends, I’ve been heading up to the Far North, chasing salt air and stillness. There’s something about that part of New Zealand that slows everything down. The roads curve along the coast like they’ve known you forever, and the wind always smells faintly of seaweed and sunscreen. I’ve been surfing, hiking, swimming, letting the ocean rinse out whatever the week leaves behind.

I spend the drives with my windows down, the radio humming, passing fields dotted with cows and bursts of bright pōhutukawa. It’s become a ritual now. A way of grounding myself. No signal. No pressure to create. Just me, the salt, and the sound of waves turning over themselves again and again until my brain finally quiets.

And when I come back home sunburned, freckled, and sticky with salt. I slip back into my other rituals: books, music, films, words. The things that remind me who I am when I’m not trying so hard to be anything.

Here’s what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching while I wait for November to bring something new.

✧ Books

Hekate - Nikita Gill
I adore Nikita’s poetry; she’s been one of my biggest inspirations for years, but Hekate fell flat for me. I wanted to love it. I really did. But something about it felt disjointed, like a series of beautiful fragments that never quite wove themselves into a whole. I think I’ve been spoiled by authors like Jennifer Saint and Natalie Haynes whose mythological retellings have such weight and texture that this one, sadly, didn’t reach.

Dead Animals - Phoebe Stuckes
This book had so much potential. The plot was deliciously dark, messy relationships, brittle women. The kind of emotional rawness I usually eat up, but it ended too soon. I kept wishing she’d let it breathe a little more, explore the edges of what she created. It could have been devastating in the best way, but it only grazed the surface.

✧ Music

Lovercore - Artemas
Perfection. Actual perfection. It’s the kind of album that makes you want to drive at night with the windows down, hair everywhere, singing to no one. It’s soft but confident, romantic without being naive, exactly what I’ve been craving musically.

Fred again.. & Amyl collaboration
Special shoutout because I haven’t stopped replaying it since it dropped. It’s emotional chaos bottled up into rhythm, melancholy and movement at once. Fred always gets it.

West End Girl - Lily Allen
Pure perfection. The kind of album that feels both nostalgic and brand new. Lily’s wit, her melancholy, her Londoner honesty, all wrapped up in sleek, clever pop. It’s sharp but tender, full of little lyrical punches that stay with you. I’ve had it on repeat while cooking, writing, everything. It’s the perfect soundtrack to feeling a little older, a little wiser, but still soft.

✧ TV

Gen V (Season 2)
I don’t even know if I liked this season or not. It just… existed. It had moments of brilliance and then moments that felt like filler, like the writers were stalling for something bigger that never arrived. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either, which somehow feels worse.

Madam
Now this one surprised me. A woman finds out her husband was seeing a sex worker, and instead of the typical “woman scorned” revenge arc, she opens a brothel. It’s bold, funny, and oddly tender. Sex work is legal in New Zealand, and the show treats it with a kind of respect and normalcy that’s rare. It’s about autonomy, reinvention, and women taking control of their own narratives and easily my favourite discovery of the month.

✧ Movies

Tinā (2024)
This film absolutely wrecked me in the best way. It’s tender, raw, and full of heart. You’ll need a box of tissues, maybe two. It captures womanhood, grief, and resilience with such warmth and honesty that I was still thinking about it days later. It’s the kind of movie that sits quietly with you long after the credits roll.

City of God (2002)
I rewatched an old favourite this month, and it still holds up beautifully. Gritty, chaotic, heartbreaking, but also full of life. The cinematography and storytelling are unmatched, and even after all these years, it remains one of the most powerful depictions of survival and humanity I’ve ever seen.

Where the Wind Blows (1986)
Utterly devastating, but powerful. It follows a retired couple trying to carry on with ordinary life during nuclear fallout, and it broke me. The innocence, the denial, the way it reflects the attitudes of the time — it’s haunting. It’s one of those films that reminds you how fragile and human we all are, and how easily routine can mask tragedy.

The Boy and the Heron (2023)
I had such high hopes for this one. As a lifelong Studio Ghibli fan, I wanted to fall in love instantly. But it didn’t quite get there for me. The concept was fascinating, the world was beautiful as always, but it never really got going. I kept waiting for that quiet Ghibli magic, the emotional gut punch that lingers and while it had moments of brilliance, it left me a little adrift. Still, it’s one I’m glad I watched, even if just for the artistry.

Subscribe now

✧ Final Thoughts

October felt like a month of almosts. Almost loving a book, almost connecting to a show, almost feeling that creative spark again. But maybe that’s the point. Not every month has to be a revelation. Some months are just a quiet sifting, seeing what still fits and what doesn’t.

Here’s to softer Novembers, warmer words, and art that actually makes us feel again.

What about you?
What have you been reading, watching, or listening to lately that’s actually lived up to the hype? Drop your October favourites in the comments. I’m rebuilding my to-consume list for November.

✦
Thanks for reading Letters to No One - subscribe below to keep up with new poems and essays.

It’s been almost a month since I’ve written anything that felt like me.
Not a caption, not a poem, not a paragraph that didn’t sound like I was trying too hard.

For a while, I thought maybe I’d used up all my words. That I’d said everything I had to say, that the version of myself who used to write until 3am had disappeared for good. I tried to force it at first, I’d sit down with a coffee, open a blank page, and wait for something to happen. But nothing ever did. The words stayed stuck somewhere just out of reach.

And eventually, I just… stopped trying.

It’s strange how easy it is to slip into silence when you stop fighting it. The world doesn’t fall apart. No one comes knocking, demanding to know where your art went. Life keeps happening. The dishes still need doing, school runs still happen, dinners are still made, time still moves. But something inside me felt quieter. Not in a peaceful way, more in the way an echo dies in an empty room.

I think what I was feeling was creative grief.
The loss of something I loved that I couldn’t quite reach anymore.

I even gave up my long-term poetry project, the one that had carried me through so many seasons of my life. For a while, it was my anchor, my outlet, my reason to show up. But somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like growth and started feeling like repetition. I didn’t want to keep writing versions of the same girl, the same ache, the same heartbreak dressed in slightly different words.

So I let it go.

Not because it wasn’t beautiful, it was. It saved me more times than I can count. But I think there’s a quiet bravery in admitting when something has done its job. In letting yourself outgrow what once kept you alive.

The truth is, I don’t know what comes next.
And for the first time, that doesn’t scare me.

There’s something soft about standing at the edge of not knowing. About waking up without a clear direction but with a quiet, hopeful hum in your chest. I don’t have a new project. I don’t have a plan. I don’t even know what I want to say yet. But I do know that something is beginning to stir again, small, uncertain, alive.

I think inspiration is like that sometimes. It doesn’t always arrive with lightning or clarity. Sometimes it just returns in small ways: a sentence that lingers, a thought that feels worth writing down, a walk that makes you notice the world again. Sometimes the only thing you can do is make space for it to come back.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe starting over isn’t about reinventing yourself. Maybe it’s about remembering that you’re still allowed to create even when you don’t know what it’s all leading to. Maybe it’s about trusting that the next chapter will find you when you’re ready, that you don’t have to chase it.

I’m not the same writer I was a month ago, or a year ago, or five years ago.
And that’s okay.

I don’t know what my next project looks like, but I’m still here, pen in hand, heart a little steadier, still full of hope.

Thank you for still being here, too.
Thank you for reading me even when I go quiet.
Thank you for letting me grow, wander, and come back again.

I think I’m ready to begin again.

If you’ve ever stepped away from something you love, whether that’s writing, painting, music, or even just a version of yourself. I’d love to hear what it was like for you. Did you find your way back to it, or did something new find you instead?

Either way, I hope you remember that breaks don’t mean endings. Sometimes they’re just pauses. Space to breathe. Space to live enough to have something new to say.

Thanks for waiting for me.
And if you’re in your own quiet season right now, I hope this is your sign that it’s okay to start again, slowly.

⚠️ Trigger warning: This essay contains references to trauma, hypervigilance, insomnia, and disordered eating. Please read gently and take care of yourself.
Crisis Lines;
New Zealand - Need to talk - Call or Text 1737
Australia - Beyond Blue - Call 1300 22 4636, also has an online chat
UK - HOPELINE247 - Call 0800 068 4141 or Text 88247
United States - 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline - Call or Text 988
For all other countries not listed, please visit findahelpline, where you can find resources closer to you.

When the Body Refuses Rest

I am not sleeping. I am not eating. I am moving through the days like a hollowed thing, convincing myself I am functioning while everything inside me is on fire. When I close my eyes, I see it again, what it means to be threatened, to have your body register danger so clearly that even days later it still refuses to stand down. I tried to write my way out of it, and this poem came:

i stopped eating,
stopped sleeping,
because every time i try,
you place flowers in my hands.

they should be gentle things,
but they bloom too violently,
lilies with teeth,
roses with their thorns pressed
a little too deep into my skin.

my body remembers them
as if petals could pierce,
as if colour itself
could bruise me.

so i keep the lights on,
keep my mouth closed,
pretend to be a functioning thing
while a whole garden waits
to open inside me,
and i am terrified
of its beauty.

That poem is a map of what trauma does. It dresses the same wound in different clothes. It tells the truth that something that’s meant to be soft can become an instrument of harm. It names the strange arithmetic of survival where beauty and violence add up to the same thing. And it explains, without needing a clinical sentence, why the body refuses to work the way it used to.

When someone points a gun at you, or when you carry the memory of that threat inside your skin, your nervous system becomes a witness and then a guard. It is less interested in taste, or sleep, or the slow economy of digestion, and far more invested in readiness. Hunger becomes a risk because the body is running on alert, not on pleasure. Sleep becomes dangerous because closed eyes mean vulnerability. Food, sleep, laughter, sex, trust. These ordinary currencies of living are taxed by fear.

A hand that once accepted a flower now expects a weapon. A smile can mean a trap. In the poem, the petals bruise. That is not a metaphor alone. The body encodes experience. Memory is not only in the head, but also layered into the muscle, gut, and skin. You remember by responding. You forget by surviving. Between remembering and forgetting are choices you cannot make until the system decides it is safe enough. Until then, the lights stay on.

Living like this is an exhausting economy of pretending. You move through days as if you are a functioning thing while the interior is occupied. You keep your mouth closed. You rehearse behaviours that signal normality. You nod at the correct times. You show up. You are present enough that no one can pinpoint exactly when the fracture occurred. But inside, a whole garden waits. It is terrifying because it promises both the possibility of flourishing and the probability of more pain.

There is something important in the image of violence that appears as beauty. Flowers are meant to heal. They are meant to softly voice condolences, to scent a hospital room, to be picked and admired. When those same gestures are instruments of control or memory, they become uncanny. They teach you to mistrust tenderness. You learn that being given something can be a theft. You learn that love can carry the machinery of harm.

If you are reading this and you recognise the cadence of being awake to danger, please know two things that are both true and sometimes feel mutually exclusive. First, what you are experiencing is a real, valid reaction to what happened. Your body is doing the sensible thing it can: it is trying to keep you alive. Second, that system of survival can unlearn the immediacy of threat, to be practised into quieter rhythms again. Neither of these happens quickly. Neither should be forced. Both require help, time, and small acts of stubbornness.

So what does care look like when your appetite and sleep have left town? I am not offering a cure. But I am sharing a few practical ways that have helped me and friends I’ve spoken with who have been here, small tools that respect the pace you are moving at.

1. Start smaller than you think. If eating a meal feels impossible, try a single spoonful of something nourishing. A sip of soup in your favourite mug. A banana pulled into thirds spread across an hour. The point is not the nutrition alone. The point is to teach your nervous system that you can hold food without immediate danger.

2. Reintroduce lights and darkness on your terms. If staying in darkness is terrifying, use a dim lamp rather than a bright overhead light. If the lights feel like a safety measure, allow them to sometimes be a comfort. If they feel like a vigil, pick a small ritual before sleep: a warm shower, a cup of something with protein, a hand pressed over your heart for a minute. These are not magic, but they are small ways to calm yourself.

3. Grounding is low tech and surprisingly effective. When you feel the panic rise, name five things you can see, four things you can touch, three sounds you hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. Do it in a whisper or even just in your head. Repeat as needed.

4. Reclaim gentleness one tiny moment at a time. Let one part of your day be soft. Fifteen minutes of sitting with a song. A minute holding a plant that you know will not hurt you. A single paragraph of a book read aloud. Practice tells the body that tenderness is survivable.

5. Find the right witness. If you can, tell one person who is steady and nonjudgmental. You do not need to explain everything. You do not need to be fixed. Say, I am not sleeping. I am not eating. I am scared. Let them hold that with you.

6. If you can access professional help, consider a trauma-informed therapist. Therapies like EMDR or trauma-focused CBT have helped many people, but what matters most is finding someone who believes you and moves at your pace.

7. If the dark thoughts cross into self-harm or you feel unsafe, please seek immediate help from local emergency services or a crisis line. You are not a burden. You are a person in need of care.

There will be setbacks. There will be days when the body remembers more loudly than the mind comforts. There will be people who offer you flowers that feel like tests. There will be nights when the light is on and the room is full of the rustle of memory. That is all part of the work. The work is not to make yourself a robot. The work is to be human enough to hold your remembered pain and tender enough to let yourself and other people care.

If you found this resonant and you want more words like this, subscribe to Letters to No One. If you are comfortable, leave a note in the comments about a small thing that helped you through a hard night. If you are in immediate danger, reach out to local emergency services or a crisis line now.

I will leave you with one practical tip you can use tonight. Before you sleep, find one object you can hold that is safe and small. Keep it by your bed. When panic comes, press it into your palm and name its texture. Let the repetition be proof that your body can hold other things besides threat.

You are allowed to be more than the place they left you. You are allowed to want tenderness again. You are allowed to move at the pace your body dictates.

🖤 Thank you for being here with me.
If this resonates, share it with someone who might need the reminder that even the most terrifying gardens can bloom. And if you'd like, feel free to leave a note in the comments. What has helped you through the nights when the body refused to rest?

Love always,
artisticpursuitsofher

Katie Gregson-MacLeod - complex (demo)

Some songs don’t just play in the background; they take root. They sit with you, gnawing at old wounds, pressing against the truths you’d rather keep buried. Lately, I’ve had these lyrics buried in my head:

“I need him like water, he thinks that I’m alright
I’m not feeling human. I think he’s a good guy
But it is complex, it’s a complex…”

It’s the honesty that gets me. Love can feel both essential and entirely impossible at the same time. The way you can adore someone yet still wonder if you’re showing up wrong, if you’re making all the wrong moves in a game you don’t even understand.

The complexity of need

I’ve needed people like water before. Needed them to survive, to feel alive, to convince myself I was worth something. That hunger never felt like romance; it felt like desperation disguised as devotion. It made me pour myself into people until there was nothing left.

And yet, even when the love is mutual, even when he’s kind, even when he really is a “good guy,” I still catch myself shrinking. I still fall into old habits, letting the quiet doubts whisper: You were just a girl then, so what’s your excuse now?

The three points of failure

The lyric about three points, a triangle of letting yourself down, hit me hardest; the points always remain the same:

• Silence. Swallowing words I definitely should have said out loud.

• Performance. Pretending to be fine when I’m not.

• Fear. Believing that if he knew the real me, he’d leave.

They form a pattern I’ve lived out again and again. A map of self-sabotage I can’t seem to stop redrawing.

Growing out of girlhood excuses

When I was younger, it was easy to blame everything on being too naive, too fragile, too new to it all. But I’m older now. And the weight of the words “I was just a girl, what’s the excuse now?” is heavier than I care to admit.

Maybe the answer is that there doesn’t need to be an excuse. Maybe the complexity is the point. Love is never clean. It’s jagged, layered, contradictory. You can both need someone and fear them. You can both feel safe and feel like you’re drowning. You can both grow and still carry the old versions of yourself that never learned how to be held.

So where does that leave me?

I don’t have a neat resolution, just a messy truth: sometimes love feels like water, sometimes like a flood. Sometimes, like salvation, sometimes like drowning.

But maybe admitting it’s complex is its own kind of clarity. Maybe it’s enough to stop excusing and start accepting. That I am not broken for finding love overwhelming. That complexity doesn’t mean failure. That my heart can hold contradictions and still be worthy of being held.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to know: what are the “three points” where you find yourself letting yourself down? Do you believe complexity can coexist with love?
Thank you for reading,
Love always,
artisticpursuitsofher

I’ve always said I write letters to no one. It feels safer that way, like dropping words into a well and never expecting them to echo back. But the truth is, I don’t write into emptiness. I write into a strange in-between place where my words are both private and public, diary and performance, confession and conversation. I tell myself it’s “no one,” but I know it’s thousands. Strangers who know my heartbreak, my coffee order, my innermost thoughts. People who have never met me and yet, in some ways, know me more intimately than friends I see every week.

So, who am I really writing to?

Writing to “no one”
When I sit down to write, I tell myself no one is watching. I imagine the words are only for me, to keep myself company, to keep from unravelling, to give my feelings somewhere to go. Writing to “no one” is what makes me honest. It’s why I can admit to softness, to longing, to mistakes that still sting. If I thought about the audience first, I’d hold back. I’d edit myself into palatability. But “no one” doesn’t need me to be pretty. “No one” lets me be raw.

Being read by “everyone”
And then I hit publish. And suddenly, it isn’t no one anymore. It’s everyone. It’s the stranger who whispers in my inbox, “You wrote my heart.” It’s the woman who shares my poem with a friend because she’s been there too. It’s the man who leaves a comment that stings because he’s misunderstood me completely. Writing online means you are always both seen and mis-seen. Every word is an invitation, and not everyone accepts it with kindness.

I’ve written before about hate comments and misogyny, about how men online sometimes treat vulnerability like an offence. That’s part of this invisible audience, too: the risk of being consumed by people who don’t see you clearly at all.

Subscribe now

The ghost audience
There’s something eerie about it. I walk through my daily life working, parenting, making peppermint hot chocolate, all while unseen readers carry pieces of me in their pockets. My partners, friends, old loves, they’ve all been here in one way or another, sometimes in the background of poems, sometimes in the centre. Some of them know, some of them don’t. The invisible audience watches me weave my real life into something readable, and I can’t control how they hold it. Sometimes they cradle it gently. Sometimes they don’t.

Reclaiming the narrative
But here’s the truth I hold onto: I choose what to reveal. I choose the angle, the detail, the softness or sharpness of the memory. Even when I am writing about my most vulnerable moments, I’m still the one steering the ship. I write to “no one” because I need the words to exist, regardless of who reads them. Whether a thousand eyes land on them or only a handful, the act of writing belongs to me first.

So yes, there is an audience. Invisible, countless, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel. But when I sit down to write, I return to “no one.” That’s where the honesty begins. The audience may be real, but so is the solitude. And maybe that’s the mystery of it. I’ll never really know who I’m writing to.

Maybe that’s the beauty, too.

And if you’re here, reading this, maybe you were the “no one” all along.

✨ If this resonated with you, I’d love to know: do you ever feel the weight of your own invisible audience? Leave a comment, share this letter with a friend, or subscribe if you’d like more words like these delivered to your inbox. Thank you, as always, for reading,
artisticpursuitsofher

P.S. I’ll be doing a Q&A as a bonus letter next week, as our community has grown quite a bit since the last one, so if you have any questions, please leave them below

Yearning has been on my mind lately. The way it lingers, the way it stretches inside us, even when we think we’re already full. It’s one of those emotions that feels almost impossible to describe, half ache, half hope, equal parts hunger and heartbreak. I wanted to write about it because sometimes I think yearning is the truest proof that we are alive. That we still want, reach, and believe there is more waiting for us than what we already have.

I was talking to one of my favourite people, and we were talking about yearning, about how heavy it can sit in the body. He told me he didn’t think it was possible to yearn any more than he already did. And I couldn’t help but think, oh, but it is.

Yearning is elastic. It stretches. It makes room for itself even when you think you’re already full. It is that quiet pull in your chest when you see their name light up your phone. It is the way your body leans toward the door before it even opens, hoping it’s them. It is the silence after a conversation ends, when you replay their voice in your head like a favourite song and wonder how something so ordinary could feel like scripture.

The thing about yearning is that it doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t wait for timing, or circumstance, or logic. It arrives like an ache and refuses to leave. And sometimes, it hurts. Because to yearn is to admit you want. To yearn is to expose yourself to the possibility that what you want might never be yours.

I think of Mitski singing, “I bet on losing dogs”, that quiet desperation of choosing something that will never quite choose you back. Or Lorde whispering in Ribs, “It feels so scary getting old”, which is really another way of saying: I want time to slow down because I don’t want to stop wanting the things I haven’t yet lived. Music, Poetry and art have a beautiful way of putting language to the ache in our bones, that restless reaching for something just out of hand.

And then there’s Mac Miller’s 2009. The way he spoke about the past, about how much it hurt and how much he missed it, but also how he had grown. Every time I listen, I think about how yearning isn’t just for people. Sometimes we yearn for places we can’t go back to, for versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown but can’t forget. Nostalgia is just another kind of yearning, softer maybe, but no less consuming.

Yearning is both ruin and renewal. It can keep you awake at night, but it can also remind you that your body is capable of hope, even when your mind insists you’ve given up. It isn’t just an ache for what’s missing; it’s a reminder that your heart hasn’t gone numb. That your softness hasn’t calcified. That you are still alive enough to want.

Maybe the question isn’t whether yearning can grow deeper, but whether we are brave enough to sit with it. To hold it without smothering it. To see it not only as absence, but as possibility.

Because yearning, at its core, is hope disguised as ache. It’s the part of us that still believes, even when belief feels foolish. It is the stubborn flame that refuses to go out, even when the wind is strong.

Thank you for reading this piece, for making space for both the ache and the hope in these words.

If you’ve ever found yourself caught in yearning, whether it was for a person, a version of yourself, or a life that feels just out of reach. I’d love to know how you hold it. Do you let it spill out of you, or do you tuck it into the quiet corners of your day?

Until next time,
always,
artisticpursuitsofher

✨ If this essay resonated with you, consider subscribing to Letters to No One to read more of my poems and reflections. It means the world to have you here.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how softness is often mistaken for fragility, when in truth it’s one of the strongest things we can offer. both to the people we love and to ourselves. There is a quiet resilience in kindness, a steady power in gentleness, and a kind of courage in choosing softness in a world that demands hardness.

be kind in the way rain falls
without asking permission,
soft enough to nourish,
strong enough to change the earth.

be gentle like hands brushing hair
from a tired face,
like the pause before a word
that could wound or heal,
choosing always the latter.

be soft, not because the world allows it
but because you deserve to live
as a place of refuge,
a harbour of warmth
where even your own weary heart can rest.

kindness is not weakness,
gentleness is not smallness,
softness is not surrender.
they are the roots that grow quietly beneath us,
holding us steady
when the storm comes.

Because the truth is, we don’t need to sharpen our edges to survive. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is stay soft, even when the world tells us not to.

love always,
artisticpursuitsofher