And while that gap may not seem that significant at first glance, when you’re used to writing every week, that’s about thirteen missed posts. But who’s counting?

Writing used to feel easy. I'd notice something or experience something, and there was always something to say. That tends to happen when you're constantly on the move in exciting places like Marrakech and Tokyo. The stories basically seeped out of my pores.

I started reading through some of my old posts, thinking it might help pick up momentum again. Except in reading them, it dawned on me that the woman who wrote them sounded less like me and more like someone I used to know. Almost like reading an old letter from a good friend you’ve lost touch with.

I kept waiting to feel like her again before I picked up the pen to write (I’m lying, it’s a keyboard). I called it writer’s block. A readjustment phase. A creative break.

It took me three months to consider that maybe she's not coming back. I don't mean that dramatically, although my brain does immediately cut to Moody's Point from The Amanda Show where Moody's mom floats away forever in a hot air balloon.

Dramatic or not, she isn’t here anymore.

And I miss her.

I miss the woman writing from Bali and Nice, running into friends in cities of nine million people, riding on the back of strangers' motorbikes, and staring out train windows as entire countries slipped by. Her life was built around movement, momentum, and free exploration. Mine isn't. At least not right now.

She isn't gone because something's wrong. She's gone because that chapter ended. She was shaped by a particular version of my life and by a particular version of me.

Although even in writing this now, I’m keenly aware that I’m writing as if the traveling Caroline abandoned me. She didn’t. I came home. I chose stability. I chose the next chapter. None of those decisions were wrong, but they did ask me to become someone else.

I’ve been waiting for the wrong person to start writing again. And I think part of me was afraid that if I started writing again, everyone would notice she was gone too.

But if there’s going to be another post after this one, it has to be written by the person who's here.

The problem is, I hardly know her yet. And I don't always know what to write about when nothing extraordinary is happening.

Travel made stories easy because the world kept handing them to me. A new city, a new person I’d meet, a new way to get lost. My curiosity always had somewhere obvious to go.

It's easy to write about watching the sun rise over the Sahara.

It's harder to write about wondering whether I peaked in a chapter of my life that's already over.

Or going back to the corporate job I left.

Or living at my dad’s house while I get my footing again.

Or admitting that coming home has been lonelier than traveling ever was.

I don't just miss the previous me for who she was. I miss how easy she was to explain. The traveling Caroline came with a built-in narrative. One that I felt proud of.

“I’m living abroad and traveling the world.”

And now?

“I’m back home. I’m figuring things out.”

Doesn’t slip off the tongue quite as easily. It feels clumsy and small. It feels a lot like sitting at my dad’s kitchen table drinking matcha out of a mug with a picture of my face on it, wondering what on earth comes next.

But the alternative is waiting around for the girl on the motorbike to come back and rescue me. And she’s not coming. She’s still in Slovenia, or Turkey, or floating away in Moody's mom's hot air balloon.

Travel taught me how to record an extraordinary life. I guess this is where I learn if I actually know how to write.

walk boldly,

Caroline

which side

woke up and forgot 
which side of the bed
was the right side
chest already doing that thing
mind already somewhere 
i didn’t send it
i check my pulse 
to see if it's fast
which makes it faster,
worry getting fatter 
on my attention
so i run 
but i’m not even running 
from a debt, a deadline, a disease
or the memory of washington street
or the girl my mother broke
i'd almost rather
be running from something
but im just running 
from the sound of my own feet 
hitting pavement
afraid of being afraid 
until the sun goes down
i go to bed
and wake up 
and forget which side 
is the right side.

shit.

walk boldly,

Caroline

The hibachi chef had just finished cleaning off the grill and scraping away all the smoky, caramelized grime. I had the benevolent idea to donate my leftovers to my dad. I pulled out my phone to text him my plan, because my dad is the kind of person who will absolutely not feed himself if left to his own devices (sorry dad).

That’s when I saw it, one missed call. I hardly ever answer numbers I don’t recognize and even more rarely call them back unless they left a voicemail, but I had a weird intuition about this one.

I quickly copied the phone number into a Google search. 24/7 PetVets. My heart dropped so heavy in my chest that I swear, if it weren't for all the sizzling, the hiss of oil, and the percussion of spatulas, you would have heard it hit the floor.

I pushed back from the table and slipped through the restaurant until I found a quiet corner near the exit. My hand was already shaking as I tapped the screen to dial them back.

“24/7 PetVets”

“Hi I just missed a call from you about 5 minutes ago?”

“Phone number?”

I rattled it off, the shakiness in my hands having traveled up to my voice.

"Is this Eloise's mother?"

There it was. That specific, particular dread. A stranger's voice, careful and neutral in the way that only delivers bad news. I've been in this situation enough times in my life to know that careful-neutral means brace yourself.

”Yes,” I said so softly I’m not even sure a sound came out of my mouth.

“Eloise was just brought in. There’s been an accident. You need to get here as quickly as you can.”

All the color left my face. I went back to the table, barely able to remember where it was, silently cursing the restaurant for its confusing layout. I looked at my dining companion, said nothing, just shook my head and grabbed for my bag.

I don't remember the drive. Before I knew it I was pulling into the parking lot. I had never been to this vet before. It was right across the street from my high school, a building I had driven past a thousand times and never once seen.

“I’m here for Eloise,” I said to the receptionist, not even attempting to hide the worry in my voice.

She handed me a clipboard. I panicked at the section marked "Pet Information." Age. Breed. Weight. Eloise was a street cat who followed me home from a park. I muddled through what I could. I'm a horrible mother.

They put me in an exam room immediately. That's never a good sign. When you wait in the waiting room, there's hope. An exam room means: we need a contained space for whatever is about to happen.

A nurse came in. She had the practiced, gentle delivery of someone who does this part of the job every day.

“Eloise appears to have been hit by a car. The impact seems to be mostly located in his head.”

His.

I blinked.

“I’m sorry — his?”

A small, involuntary wave of relief washed over me. Wrong cat. They had the wrong cat. My cat was a girl. My cat was named Eloise, after the chaotic, irrepressible little girl who lived at the Plaza Hotel, and she was absolutely, obviously a girl.

"What does the cat look like?" I asked.

"Black and white. Slightly on the heavier side."

She’s not heavy, I wanted to say. She’s just tall. Big-boned. She carries herself with gravitas.

The nurse looked at me patiently.

“I’ve taken her to the vet every year,” I said. “They’ve never…how could they have missed…”

“If a cat is neutered very early in life, it can sometimes go undetected,” the nurse said. “But this cat definitely has a penis.”

Alright.

She carried him in a moment later. A nearly lifeless tuxedo cat, placed gently on the exam table.

I stood over his body and struggled to process the image. His white paws were covered in dirt. His ear was badly damaged and crusted with blood. His eyes were totally still, and his little pale tongue hung slightly out of his mouth.

This isn't Eloise. My mind didn't want to accept what was staring back at me, and it kept searching for exits, kept trying to build the case that there had been some clerical error, some cosmic mix-up. And then my eyes landed on his left ear, an unmistakeable marker. His clipped ear. There was nowhere left to go.

It was Eloise.

I held his little paw. Of course Eloise was a boy. It seemed so obvious now. He liked hunting. He peed outside with the confidence of someone who had never once considered doing otherwise. He climbed tall trees and shimmied down unbothered, not a single thought spared for the worry he caused me. He was a shameless flirt— with every person on the block, with the dog down the street, with my roommate who swore she wasn’t a cat person. He strutted. He swaggered.

The doctor explained things. I couldn’t hear any of it.

I thought about the leash. In the early days after she adopted me I was so torn between taking away her freedom and losing her entirely that I started walking her around the neighborhood every morning like a dog. I ran into a coworker once, him with his actual dog, me with my cat, and thought, shit, I'm going to be known as the weird cat girl forever. I didn't mind. As long as Eloise was happy.

Eventually I stopped walking her. I let her be free. Standing here now, holding his little paw, I wondered if I should have.

I made the decision that felt least cruel. And then I sat with him until he was gone, my hand moving in long, slow strokes down his body.

I’m so sorry I called you the wrong thing. I’m so sorry I didn’t give you more turkey this morning. Please find me again. Whatever form, whatever name, whatever gender, just find me.

As I walked out of the vet I thought about the time I’d asked Eloise, half-joking, if she was my soul mate. He reached out his paw and touched my face. Just placed it there, gently, and looked at me.

Here is what I know now: the gender doesn’t matter. Eloise was never a she or a he. Eloise was a soul, an adventurous, bold, fearless, ridiculously loving soul who happened to land in my life and decide to stay. He wasn’t really mine. He belonged to the world, to every backyard he wandered into, every tree he climbed, every person whose day he interrupted and made better. I was just lucky enough to be the place he came home to at the end of it.

I couldn’t believe something so special chose me.

I still can’t.

walk boldly,

Caroline

there is a wolf
living in my ribcage
teeth pressed against the inside
of everything i feel

she is not subtle
she does not wait
she wants to be fed 
so i feed her

she chose him 
and him 
and the intensity 
and the closeness 
and all of it
every beautiful dangerous thing 
i have ever loved

she has taken me 
to new cities 
before i knew their names
to dance floors 
throwing myself in 
until i was only body
to trails of jagged granite
where the air grows thin 
and the path narrows
to a ledge 
barely wider than my breath
and when the drop opens beside me
she never looks down
just moves my feet forward
one step
and the next
and the next
because if i stopped to take in the view
i would never move again

i have devoured
and been devoured 
followed her 
into the highest highs 
and the places 
where i lost myself 
trying to satisfy 
something that cannot 
be satisfied

i don't regret her

she is not a flaw 
she is not a gift

she is just 
what lives here 
gnawing on my bones
reminding me 
i am still 
hungry

i almost told you not to come

said it wasn’t a good night for it

dishes in the sink
a chair collecting clothes
the kind of clutter
that says i’ve been here

i thought about buying flowers
opening windows
lighting a candle
so you look there first

i wiped the counter again
moved the same glass twice
shut drawers i’d already shut
stood in the middle of the mess
trying to decide
what could be hidden in ten minutes
what could pass for charming
if i laughed first

but the truth is

i don’t know where to put the parts
that don’t fold
or stack
or tuck away
or rinse clean

and i was afraid
you’d walk in
look around
and see exactly how i live

so i almost told you not to come

but i think
what i meant was

i’m not sure
how to be seen
like this.

Subscribe now

walk boldly,

caroline

i read the text on the screen from my brother, who had confided in me about a mistake he’d recently made.

i looked at the flat gray bubble of his text and felt the phantom ache of my own recent wreck. i didn’t know his situation, but i knew that feeling. that sudden, vertiginous disappointment that isn’t really about what happened, but what it says about who you are.

it’s that strange, muted kind of sadness where you feel yourself get smaller. you watch the version of yourself that felt invincible because it was “smart” or “aware” disappear in real time. and then it lands, that sudden recognition that you were there the whole time and still didn’t stop it. how did I miss this?

i began to type, then deleted, then typed again.

“it doesn’t really matter how smart you are.”

my thumb hovered over the arrow before pressing send. it sounded too simple. maybe even dismissive. but i remembered my own tearful admission to two close friends while sitting along a slow-moving river in Vietnam, clutching a tissue that was rapidly disintegrating in my hand.

“i just feel so stupid,” i told them, the realization moving through me and taking up all the air in my ribcage.

there is a specific kind of pain in realizing that all your "intellectual" defenses (your ability to read people, your pattern recognition, your intuition) didn't protect you. you think your brain is a safety net, but sometimes it just helps you build a more convincing lie.

we think awareness will protect us from our own wants. but it doesn’t. because the real conflict isn’t intelligence vs. ignorance; its clarity vs. desire. and desire wins more often than you think.

i read his message one more time.

“i thought I was smarter than that.”

i wasn’t sure who I was replying to.

walk boldly,

caroline

there’s a moment, usually first thing in the morning as i wipe sleep crust from my eyes, where i wake up and have no idea what the day is supposed to be.

while i was traveling, this felt exciting. i liked being able to indulge my most whimsical desires and flow in whatever direction the wind blew me.

now, i’m settled back into home life where there’s nothing pressing on me. no schedule to follow, no deadlines i didn’t choose, no one expecting anything specific of me. the day is entirely mine.

at first, this feels like relief. freedom. like floating in the center of a very calm lake.

but then something else shows up. instead of feeling clear, things start to feel… wide. like i’m staring at a blank white sheet of paper. too much space.

i used to think that structure was the thing that kept me stuck: the job, the expectations, the corporate ladder. i thought if i removed all of it, what was left would feel obvious.

but that’s not quite what happens.

without structure, there’s nothing to push against. removing it isn’t just expansive, it’s exposing.

my former life wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t even fully mine, but it was decided. the system did the thinking for me. it provided a pre-packaged rhythm where mondays were for starting and fridays were for finishing. progress had shape. there were markers and metrics to know if i was doing well.

now, the mechanical feedback loop is gone. there’s no external engine to keep me moving, no obvious next step, no voice confirming i’m on the right track.

just choice, over and over again.

what to do with my time, what matters, what doesn’t, what is enough.

no one to check my answers. no gold stars.

i’m starting to understand that structure didn’t just limit me; it also absorbed the burden of my own agency. it held me. it decided the small things so I wouldn’t have to.

without it, the weight of every direction, and every hour, returns to me.

there is nowhere to hide excuses. no one to blame, no system to point at, no path already laid out.

just a lot of open space and me standing in it.

it turns out, nothing holds you more accountable than a life with no instructions.

walk boldly,

caroline

It’s funny how much we miss when we think we’ve already seen everything.

Last week I met a friend for coffee and we decided to take a long walk through a park that I thought I knew like the back of my hand, every bench and bend in the path.

We wandered with no real direction and stumbled into a nook of the park I’d never ventured into before: the Shinzen Friendship Garden, built by our local Japanese-American community.

We moved through the cherry blossoms and past the koi pond, eventually finding a hidden gem: The Clark Bonsai Collection. The incredibly well-curated sanctuary features a wide variety of beautifully maintained bonsai trees. I didn’t know much about bonsais, but my friend did; he spoke with infectious enthusiasm about the long, careful work behind each tree.

"This one," he said, pointing to a gnarled juniper, "must be over a hundred years old.”

I lingered, staring at it. When I got home, I did a little research. I couldn’t shake the image. I learned that the word bonsai literally translates to "planted in a container." It is the art of creating a harmony between the tree and the pot.

A bonsai is never "finished." Unlike a painting or a sculpture, it is a living piece of art that requires a partnership across generations. Some of the trees I saw might have been tended to by three or four different caretakers over a century.

The more I thought about and reflected on the bonsai we saw, the more I noticed the mechanics of their beauty. To keep a tree that should be forty feet tall small enough to carry in your arms, you have to be relentless. You prune the roots so they have nowhere to go. You wrap copper wire around the branches to dictate their direction. You create a masterpiece by systematically denying the tree its own nature. It’s a practice of controlled imperfection.

I don’t know what it was about these tiny little trees that made me see myself, but the parallels started feeling urgent. Suddenly the garden felt less like an exhibit and more like a mirror.

Because the truth is, the bonsai isn’t striking just because it’s controlled. Everything living is shaped: by light, by wind, by what it’s given and what it’s denied. Even a tree growing wild is being trained by its environment.

What unsettled me wasn’t the shaping itself. It was how easy it is to become something small without ever realizing you agreed to it. I realized I didn’t want to be a bonsai. But I also didn’t want to grow by accident.

That delicate tension, that urgent mirror, was exactly what this new kind of freedom has been asking of me.

Since returning to the States a few weeks ago, I’ve been living in a sort of porous quiet. I am finally forced to confront the unsettling silence that comes when you’ve stripped away the rails of a life: the identity, the career, the predictable 9-to-5 schedule. I had assumed removing the walls would give me space to grow wild.

But freedom, I’ve learned, is fragile. When you step off the path, you don’t just gain space, you lose insulation. Without walls, every question, every opinion, every passing expectation has a way in. Every “What’s the plan?” or “Are you looking for work?” isn’t just a question, it’s a seed of doubt dropping into the empty space of a Thursday afternoon.

And they don’t feel like doubt. They feel like momentum. A recruiter’s “quick catch-up” for a role that looks familiar. The reflex to update my LinkedIn so I have something to hand people when they ask who I am. Step by step, the momentum carries you, not toward choice, but toward the familiar.

That’s what struck me about the bonsai: every shape is the result of deliberate attention. Its form is controlled by the gardener, not the tree. Just as the tree will grow according to what it’s given (or denied), so too will your life if you aren’t deliberate.

Freedom is a vacuum. And if you’re not intentional, it fills with whatever is nearby.

Every passing opinion, suggestion, or expectation can start to dictate your shape. Neglect the soil of your mind, and your wildness bends quietly into forms you didn’t choose.

I realized that in the absence of a cage, the responsibility of the shape is entirely mine. And you have to be a ruthless gardener of your own mind.

Not because the world is mean, but because life happens from you. If you aren’t tending to what is coming out of your mind, you will accidentally become a product of what is flowing into it. You’ll wake up in a year and realize you’ve built a life that looks exactly like the one you just left.

I didn’t leave the path to become a more beautifully controlled version of myself. I left to see what would happen if I finally chose what was allowed to take root; to see what grows when the soil is reserved for poetry, for community, and for the slow, unimpressive work of finding my own way.

Being a good gardener isn’t just about what you pull out; it’s about what you deliberately let in. The life that grows from you should be nourished by your choices, not shaped by someone else’s plan.

If you don’t choose the soil, the climate, and the shape of your own life, the world will do it for you.

And you might not even notice until you’re something small, carefully shaped, sitting in a very pretty pot.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

This isn't just about the 'big' vices. It’s about the quiet, respectable ways we stay small to avoid the cost of being ourselves.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about change. People are always talking about changes they want to make in their lives: I want to be healthier, I want to be more present. And the more you listen, the more you realize most people don’t actually want to change; they want their current life, only better.

We want the view without the climb. We want the peace of the monk while keeping the frantic ego of the striver. We treat transformation like a trip to the grocery store. We think we can just walk down the aisles, pick “Patience” or “Confidence” off the shelf and be done.

But that’s not how it works.

Change isn’t an addition; it’s a replacement.

During my travels, I found myself sitting across from a hypnotherapist as she handed me a single sheet of paper. A questionnaire. I remember thinking I’d seen this before. It asked all the usual things: What behaviors do you want to change? How would your life improve if you succeeded? I moved through it almost automatically. But then came a question I had never seriously considered: “What are you willing to give up in order to bring about this change?”

I paused. A cascade of attachments ran through my mind—identities, relationships, patterns, entire versions of myself. How bad do you want it?

“Everything,” I wrote.

The moment the ink hit the paper, I realized I couldn’t take it back. I meant it.

There is a specific, painful clarity that only happens at what I call the “pit”, that point where you simply can’t keep operating the way you have been. And when you reach that point, the question stops being what do I want? and becomes what is it costing me to stay the same?

You realize your old habits are suffocating the life you're trying to start, your negative patterns keeping you loyal to a life that no longer fits. This is the great contradiction of transformation: The person who wants the change is the very person preventing it.

We say we want “X,” but we are still deeply attached to the version of us that doesn’t have it. We want the freedom of sobriety but the social safety of the party. We want the depth of a great career but the comfort of our procrastination. So we offer the Universe conditions:

I want to be free, if I can still have a guarantee that I won't fail.
I want to be at peace, if I can still keep my grudges against the people who hurt me.
I want to change, as long as my friends still recognize me.
I want to be 'healed,' as long as I don't have to lose the attention I get from being the victim.

But the Universe is a savvy investor. It does not waste resources on a half-hearted pivot. Change is a divine gift, but it isn’t a handout. It’s a power moving through us, and the Universe only grants it when it senses that the old version of you is finally out of the way. It will not move through you in vain.

So how does the Universe know you’re ready? It senses a specific frequency. There is a certain kind of energy you emit when you are literally willing to give up anything to change. It’s the moment you place everything on the altar and say:

“Take my pride. Take my decency. Take the ‘good’ parts of my ego along with the ‘bad.’ Take my identity and all my earthly follies. Take the things I’ve been using to stay the same— and take them far enough away that they don’t find their way back.

Call it surrender, call it prayer, call it sacrifice. Call it whatever you want. But the message is clear: this is my offering, and it is everything I have.

When you arrive at this level of total forfeit, the true “magic” happens. Because you’ve finally decided there’s nothing left you’re unwilling to give up for it.

This is why the patterns finally break. They weren't just random habits; they were the necessary architecture of the person you used to be. They were the defenses, the distractions, and the survival at any cost. When you place that identity on the altar, the patterns lose their anchor. They don't leave because you fought them; they leave because they have nothing left to hold onto.

But that doesn’t mean the transformation happens like a lightning bolt. Usually, it settles into the corners of your day, maybe weeks later. You wake up one morning and feel different. You feel lighter, like there’s more space in your chest. Like something that used to sit heavy there is gone.

You are not the same person anymore. Not necessarily someone new, just no longer weighed down by what was never really yours to carry.

You changed. You did the thing that once seemed impossible, the thing you had tried a hundred times before and failed. The unseen force that once ran your life—the smallness, the paralyzing fear, the compulsive cycle—is gone. You are free, though not without loss.

You did lose things. Friendships that only worked because of who you used to be. The innocence of your excuses. Even parts of your personality you may have actually liked.

But you don’t miss them. Somehow, the losses feel smaller than what you’ve gained.

At first, you might not trust this change to stay. Slowly, you start to trust it.

Because the proof starts to accumulate in your new choices. Every time you act differently than the “old you” would have, you build a new kind of credit. You begin to see yourself in a different light. The things that once plagued you begin to shrink, becoming tiny ants on a distant, receding horizon. They belong to a version of you you barely recognize now.

That is the beauty, and the brutality, of change. It costs you everything, but it gives you yourself.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

I still vividly remember reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini in my high school English class. It was one of the first books that refused to let me read passively.

The story haunted me. It left me emotionally unsettled, forcing me to sit with questions about friendship, betrayal, and redemption.

There was one quote in particular that I have clung to and revisited time and time again. Each time I return to it, I find either a new understanding or a new set of questions:

“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”

The first time I read that, it broke my heart. Hassan, the character referenced by the quote, was so pure, so innocent, so loyal. The boy with the slingshot and the "faithful" eyes, was the embodiment of a purity that felt impossible. He possessed the kind of naïveté that only comes from complete, bone-deep sincerity.

His loyalty to his friend, Amir is unconditional. He doesn’t expect cruelty because cruelty isn't a language he speaks. When Hassan says something, he means it. And because he is incapable of a double-meaning, he assumes the world is equally transparent.

At seventeen, I felt sorry for him. But I was also frustrated. What a tragic way to exist, I thought. To be that blind to the evils of the world seemed like a character flaw. I viewed his trust as a target he had painted on his own back.

Over time, I realized my frustration with Hassan was actually a defense mechanism. I wasn't judging his naiveté; I was judging my own. I recognized that same uncomfortable part of myself—the part that believes too easily, that assumes goodwill where there might be none.

I’ve been that person. I have fallen for the lie, the hollow promise, and the betrayal that’s delivered with a smile. I know the specific, nauseating sting of realizing you were the only one playing by the rules of "sincerity" while everyone else was playing a different game entirely. And sometimes, I find myself returning to those same pitying thoughts I once reserved for Hassan: How could you be so blind? Because I never see it coming.

Recently, I sat alone in my room, staring at a screen that confirmed someone close to me had deliberately tried to hurt me. It wasn’t a misunderstanding, it was a calculated strike. I felt that familiar, cold hardening begin in my chest. That urge to build a wall so high nothing could ever get over it again. I told my friend, my voice barely a whisper:

“Sometimes… it makes me not want to be a good person anymore. It just leaves me vulnerable.”

I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I was trying to understand what it means to stay open when the world seems bent on teaching you to close.

It’s ugly. It hurts. It makes you want to shut down, to lie, to lash out, to turn ugly yourself, to just stop giving a damn.

The thing is, I’ve never really tried to be different. I don’t know how to be cynical, and I wouldn’t know how to wear armor if someone handed it to me. But there is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with being stuck in a nature that leaves you wide open, of knowing you’re walking into the world without a shield because you simply don’t know how to carry one.

But maybe that’s the point.

The contradiction I’m finally starting to grasp is this: the very thing that makes you a target is the only thing that makes you real. To harden is to survive, yes, but at the cost of feeling anything at all. To stay open is to risk being shattered over and over. But it is the only way to actually experience the world.

Hassan isn’t pure because he’s stupid or naive. He’s pure because he is a practitioner of a difficult, dangerous art. He stays open even when the cost is brutal, not because he doesn't see the risk, but because he knows the risk is the requirement.

You take the hit. You feel the sting. And then, somehow, you show up anyway. You say the words again. You mean them. It doesn’t feel heroic; it feels like bleeding. It feels like a long, exhausting stubbornness. But it’s the only way to belong to yourself.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

I’m lying in my hotel bed in Tokyo, a city where no one knows me, typing away on my phone because I thought leaving my laptop behind would feel freeing (it doesn’t).

I’m quite content. There’s not much to it, this tiny, efficient little room. Every few minutes a train passes somewhere nearby, the tracks rumbling rhythmically, vibrating through the mattress for a moment before stillness returns.

No one here has an idea of who I am.

No expectations.

No history.

I like that feeling more than I expected to.

Because when no one knows you, the version of yourself that usually exists in other people’s minds disappears.

You’re not the friend who always gives advice.

Not the ex-girlfriend.

Not the competent one.

Not the sensitive one.

You stop acting like the version of yourself people are used to.

You become just a person in a small room, listening to trains pass through a city that doesn’t need you for anything.

And when no one knows you, there’s nothing left to reinforce the person you think you are.

Which is when it occurred to me I might not know myself as well as I thought.

And I know that sounds dramatic.

Don’t worry, I’m not having an identity crisis.

I don’t mean it in this huge, life-altering way. Just small things I’m starting to see a little more clearly.

Like how I’ve always thought of myself as a self-aware person.

I reflect a lot.

I think about my patterns.

I try to understand why I feel the way I do.

But I’m starting to realize something strange about that.

If you’re articulate enough about your emotions, you can explain almost anything away.

You can take something that doesn’t quite feel right and build a thoughtful explanation for it.

And once the explanation makes sense, you stop questioning it.

You mistake understanding for truth.

I’ve also always thought I had pretty good instincts. That I could tell when something was right for me.

But looking back, I can also see how easily I could talk myself into things once I’d already decided they made sense.

And once something makes sense in your head, it’s not that hard to start believing it feels right too.

You build a story around it.

You remind yourself why it’s good.

Why it’s healthy.

Why it’s exactly what you need.

After a while, the story becomes the truth you live inside.

Which is how you can spend a long time believing you’re happy, simply because you have a very logical argument for why you should be.

And I think that’s the part I’ve been slowly realizing.

It’s not just that I misunderstood myself.

It’s that I was deeply invested in being right about who I was.

Because if you spend enough time reflecting on yourself, trying to understand your patterns, you start to believe you have a pretty good handle on things.

You believe your life reflects that understanding.

So when something doesn’t quite fit, you don’t immediately assume you’re wrong.

You assume there must be an explanation.

And if you’re good with words, you can usually find one.

Good enough that the story holds. At least for a while.

It’s strange how the more you try to understand yourself, the easier it becomes to believe you already do.

I used to think my ability to explain myself was my greatest strength.

Now, lying here in this small room, listening to the trains pass through the city, I’m starting to wonder if it was just a very sophisticated way of staying lost.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

The problem wasn’t that I had too much masculine energy. It’s that my masculine energy was operating from fear. And it was making me sick.

I always tell people I was a major tomboy growing up, which is partly true. I loved sports. I mostly wore my hair up in a messy ponytail. I practiced soccer with my older brother’s team. I often came home caked in mud from catching frogs and climbing trees.

But in true “don’t judge a book by its cover” fashion, I was also deeply feminine.

I loved to dance. At my dad’s office parties, I’d be center stage all night, moving without the slightest trace of self-consciousness. In second grade, I performed an entirely unchoreographed solo dance to a Cheetah Girls song in my school’s talent show (a decision I still stand by).

I was always creating. Painting. Writing. Building forts. Turning trash into treasures. Sometimes I held “art shows” in my driveway and sold drawings or painted rocks to passing strangers who were complete victims to this precocious child’s freckled nose and strawberry blonde pigtails.

I had a lot of emotion. I cried easily. I felt everything. But I didn’t just feel my own emotions, I felt the room. I noticed tone shifts before anyone named them. I could sense when something was off, even if no one said it out loud. I was intuitive and curious, yet strangely unafraid. When my older brother wouldn’t walk into our dark bedroom alone, I’d flip the light on without hesitation.

I suppose even then I was a walking contradiction: this scrappy little tomboy with a deeply feminine core.

But the strange thing is, I often forget I was ever like that. Somewhere along the way, I learned that competence felt safer than vulnerability, so I chose it instead.

If I’m honest, I remember the thought that started it all.

There was this one night where I was crying alone in my room. I don’t even remember what for, but I remember how big the emotion felt and how small I felt inside it. And I remember having the thought: I am ill-equipped for life. I thought something was wrong with me. I thought I couldn’t handle life the way other people seemed to. I thought if I let myself feel this much, I would fall apart.

So I built a version of myself who would never have to find out.

My masculine energy—my inner protector—took over. I stopped dancing. Mostly stopped creating. Stopped trusting instinct. I replaced spontaneity with structure. Emotion with composure. Expression with achievement.

In sports and school, I became insatiably driven. Straight As. Captain. President. Valedictorian. The more recognition I received, the safer I felt. And the safer I felt, the harder I worked to never feel unsafe again.

I prided myself on being unshakeable. Low maintenance. High functioning. I liked that no one could accuse me of needing too much. I told myself it was maturity, but underneath, I think it was just the fear of being seen wanting.

For years, I operated almost exclusively from this armored place. My masculine built my career. It made me competent. Impressive. Resilient. It got me out of situations that didn’t serve me. It allowed me to leave.

But it also cost me.

It cost me trust in myself. I didn’t believe I could ride out a wave of emotion without drowning, so I never let the wave rise.

It cost me intimacy. I chose connections that felt “safe” instead of ones that felt expansive, gravitating toward people I didn’t have to fully risk myself with. I always kept one hand on the exit; I liked knowing I could leave first.

It cost me presence. Even in success, I was bracing for the fall. Every goal I crushed only raised the bar. Every achievement bought me temporary relief, never real safety. I never arrived, only managed.

And sure, there were moments where my feminine would try to peek back out, but my masculine would eventually lock her back in her tower. It’s not safe for you out here in the real world.

Last year, it hit a breaking point.

Between a mixture of burnout and identity erosion, I knew the way I was living was unsustainable. After years of suffocating under discipline and achievement, my feminine wanted out of her cage.

I made it a priority to reconnect with her and invite her back into my life. I moved more slowly and intuitively. I started creating again. I even invited emotion back into my life. Convinced my relationship with the feminine was the problem, I tried to “be in my feminine”.

But something still felt off. I was softer, yes. More expressive, sure. But I was still hyper-vigilant. My mind said “ease,” but my jaw was still clenched.

I thought I was “becoming more feminine,” but the truth was staring me in the face: I was performing softness while my internal masculine was still running surveillance.

I had changed my lifestyle, but my nervous system remained untouched.

And that was the problem.

Feminine energy does not live in the mind. It is not a strategy. It is not something you perform. It lives in sensation. In breath. In instinct. It lives in the body.

I had been so disconnected from my body for so long that I had literally no clue what it meant to be embodied. I was living from the neck up. I didn’t know what my hunger felt like. I didn’t know the difference between being tired and being overwhelmed. I was still in my head, controlling, bracing, and negotiating every emotion before it reached my mouth.

I finally saw my masculine energy for what it truly was. Not strong, but deeply wounded. With the veil of armor lifted, I saw the ways it overcompensated.

I wasn’t “too masculine.” I had been operating in distorted masculine overdrive.

I equated control with safety.

I over-functioned so I would never have to be carried.

I stayed in my head and called it strength.

I mistook vigilance for wisdom because it felt safer than trust.

And here’s the contradiction: the part of me that was trying to keep me safe was the very thing keeping me disconnected.

I didn’t suffocate my feminine because she was reckless. I suffocated her because I didn’t believe she would survive. I didn’t trust that if she felt everything, she’d be able to steady herself again. I didn’t trust that anyone else would help her.

So I built a system that didn’t require her.

Years later, I misdiagnosed the problem. I thought I just needed to soften more. To receive more. To surrender.

But I didn’t realize that surrender feels like collapse when you don’t trust your own capacity.

I didn’t need to “be more feminine.” I needed to update a nervous system that didn’t feel safe. I needed to reconnect to a body that had been desperately trying to get my attention.

I didn’t understand that yet. So life showed me.

I got sick. Not once. Not dramatically. Relentlessly.

Strep throat. Missed periods. Bacterial infections. E. coli. A puffy face and swollen tongue. Skin issues. Widespread inflammation. Hip pain so sharp I couldn’t run. And at one point, several spots of ringworm on my arm (which I adamantly refuse to blame on petting too many stray cats).

I remember thinking what the actual fuck is happening??

It was not an entirely glamorous seven months despite what my Instagram feed said. There were mornings I woke up already exhausted. Nights I lay in bed googling symptoms. I kept thinking this can’t be stress. I left the job. I was doing everything right.

I spent over a thousand dollars on doctors and supplements trying to fix symptoms I couldn’t fully explain.

But it wasn’t random.

I was holding grief I hadn’t processed. Anger I hadn’t expressed. Uncertainty I refused to admit scared me. I was navigating the erosion of safety in a relationship, identity shifts, and loss of stability, all while telling myself I was fine. I kept overriding my body because I believed my mind was safer than my instincts.

The humbling part is that I wasn’t naive. I meditate. I move my body. I understand nervous systems in theory. My incentives to ignore it were just stronger.

And I didn’t want anyone else to see what was really happening. I stopped calling my mom because I knew she would have heard it in my voice. I told my friends everything was fine. I didn’t want them to worry. I wanted them to believe I was totally happy and thriving. Because if I wasn’t, the story would fall apart. I wasn’t ready for that.

That’s what distorted masculine does. It protects structure at all costs, even when the structure is cracking.

The collapse I feared didn’t come from feeling too much. It came from suppressing what I felt for too long. My masculine had been on duty for years. It never clocked out. It didn’t trust anyone else to take over, but it was tired.

I realized I was running out of options. All my usual strategies stopped working. I couldn’t out-think ringworm. I couldn’t out-discipline exhaustion. I couldn’t simply power through it all.

So I stopped trying to fix the symptoms and I started listening to the source.

I noticed how often my jaw was clenched, even in my sleep. I noticed how shallow my breath was, never quite reaching my belly. I noticed how my stomach tightened when I agreed to things I didn’t want, and how my throat closed when I swallowed the words I actually wanted to say. I noticed how much I was bracing in something that didn’t feel stable, and how quickly I blamed myself for it.

I began to realize that my feminine didn’t need to be “unleashed”, she needed to be held. To feel safe. And my masculine didn’t need to disappear. It needed a new job. Not guarding against collapse, but building that safety.

So I started intentionally creating it. Not in theory, in practice.

I gave my body what it was asking for. I nourished it differently. I said no when it recoiled, even if my mind had a convincing argument. I let myself cry without explaining it. I rested without earning it. I stopped overriding the “this isn’t right” feeling in my gut. I did the slow, deliberate work of teaching my nervous system that it didn’t have to brace anymore.

And I started telling the truth. Not to everyone. But to a few people.

Slowly my body began to respond. The inflammation eased. My cycle returned. My gut healed. The hip pain that had grounded me for months began to soften and was soon gone. My body stopped fighting me. I felt more like myself.

I realized that my intuition wasn’t a weakness that made me porous, it was a high-frequency radar that told me exactly what to do, who to trust, and when to walk away.

And that’s when I understood something I hadn’t been able to see before.

My masculine was never the villain. It was a bodyguard working off an old threat. It thought it was protecting me, but it was actually blocking me from trusting my own body. It turns out the body knows exactly what to do.

A healthy masculine doesn’t silence the feminine. It steadies her. It provides the container. Not as armor, but as an anchor.

It sets the boundaries so she can stay open. It holds the standards so she doesn’t over-give. It stays grounded when she feels deeply.

My feminine was never the liability.

She was the life force.

So no, I didnt need to become “more feminine.”

I needed to update the belief that I was too sensitive for my own life.

I was never ill-equipped.

I was unpracticed.

And I am practicing.

I started a walking contradiction for a simple reason: to give my most curious readers a place to look at the world sideways. No posturing, just my honest attempts to decode the contradictions we all live in.

My goal is to keep this free forever, but I do ask for one thing in return: connection.

If this piece shifted your perspective even an inch, send it to one person. Or leave a comment—I read and reflect on every single one.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

When I planned my trip to Bali, I decided I wanted to do a surf camp. I’d taken a few lessons in San Francisco and figured that without the freezing temperatures and the mild paranoia of sharks lurking nearby, I could finally let my talents shine.

I confidently labeled myself an “experienced beginner” on the intake form, unwilling to start from zero, but not bold enough to claim mastery.

However, I showed up for my first lesson having forgotten virtually every scrap of information from my previous life as a surfer.

I met my instructor, Rey, a Balinese man who had practically grown up in the water and surfed for longer than I’ve been alive. Assuming I knew the basics due to my inaccurate labeling of skills, we took right to the water. It was clear almost immediately that I had no innate grace, as I slipped and slid off my board like a seal on a greased slide. He watched me, amused, and giggled, “This is going to be entertaining for me.”

Despite the rough start, muscle memory kicked in. I began standing up and catching waves on almost every attempt. We reviewed the photographs after the session. “Your feet are too far apart,” “You need to stand up straighter,” “You keep looking down; look where you want to go,” he told me, taking his job (and my improvement) very seriously. Continuing my trend of complete overconfidence, I replied, “Easy, that’s only three things!” Not expecting my cheerful response, he smiled indulgently. “Yes, just three things.” I walked off feeling like a winner.

After a couple of days, I was really getting the hang of things. Surfing is great! You feel a high when you catch a wave and the world feels like it’s narrowing down to a single, crystalline point of focus. It’s just you and the water, and you begin to feel a sense of peace and clarity.

Yes, surfing is wonderful… it’s the paddling back and getting clobbered by waves that’s not so fun.

On my fourth day, we moved to a new beach. I stood on the shore gazing out at the water and noticed the waves were a lot bigger and more powerful than I was used to. The training wheels were coming off.

On this particular day, I was operating on depleted iron reserves and feeling a bit frail and vaguely Victorian. I was not my most energetic, cheerful self and had considered taking a day off, but seeing Rey eagerly awaiting my arrival gave me all the motivation I needed to get in the water.

I caught several great waves, riding the high of thinking I was on my way to semi-pro status and considering if I should invest in my own board when I return home. I finished a long ride and blissfully floated in the water, staring up at the sky like I’d personally conquered the ocean. Then reality, and a rather large wave, smacked me right in the face.

Quickly after came another. I barely had a chance to catch my breath. Wiping salt water from my eyes, I saw several larger waves rolling in. I remembered the “Eskimo roll,” Rey taught me while staring up at the Goliath coming my way. I grasped my board and rolled under the wave, although it was quickly ripped from my fingertips as the full force of the wave took us with it. I was under water for what felt like an eternity, and upon attempting to surface my head for air, the next wave crashed and I was forced under again without a breath.

For a moment, panic set in as I thrashed under the water. This is how people drown. When I finally reached the surface, I was shaken. I felt a visceral, childlike tremor. The voice in my head was small: That was scary. These waves are too big. Let’s go back to the shore. A lump formed in my throat that had nothing to do with salt water. Instinctively, I started retreating. But then I saw Rey, sitting calmly on his board, giving me a smile and a thumbs up. I waited for a lull and made the long paddle back to him. “Take a rest,” he said gently. We sat in silence.

“I tried to dive under... and I got stuck,” I said, my voice shaking.

“I saw that,” he said. He didn’t rush to comfort me, he just sat with me while I let the adrenaline ebb away. “Let me know when you’re ready to go again.”

At this point, my body was spent, my confidence bruised, and my “experienced beginner” ego was completely submerged. I fell almost immediately on my next two attempts. “I’m too tired, Rey,” I croaked.

“I know you’re tired, but we will catch one more wave and then you can be done.”

“I can’t do it,” I almost whispered, my body heavy with defeat and dangerously close to indulging the narrative of my own fragility.

“Of course you can. Plus, if you don’t, you have to paddle all the way back.”

That was all the incentive I needed.

A large wall of turquoise headed our way. “Paddle!” he yelled. I mustered every ounce of energy and swiftly started churning my arms. “Up!”

My body jolted upright in perfect synchronicity. I rode the wave almost all the way to shore before jumping off happily into the water. Like a child, I turned to see if Rey was watching. He was pumping his fist in the air and grinning from ear to ear. I mirrored his joy as I dragged my board back to shore to pass out like a starfish on a beach chair.

When he caught up to me, he was still smiling. “I saw you wobbling and I thought you were going to fall, but you didn’t. I was so proud of you.”

My heart cracked open. He was so sincere. I’m proud of me too. Sure it was just one wave, but it wasn’t just that. I was proud of myself for trying something new, for risking looking like a fool, for pushing myself when I wanted to quit (I guess it’s not the end of all effort…)

In between long lulls during our final days, we talked about life, our ambitions, and the strange paths that lead people to the same patch of ocean. I no longer viewed him as just a teacher, but a friend. And I think he started to see me this way too. When he saw I was tired, he’d catch a wave just to give me a push as I battled against the current. When I executed some of the feedback he gave me, he’d immediately point out “I noticed how you timed that turn perfectly,” with a nod of approval. I had never experienced a stranger become so sincerely invested in my incremental victories. It felt like being seen for the first time without the mask of competence.

Somewhere between the wipeout and that final wave, I understood what this week had really been about.

The contradiction of the “experienced beginner”

Sometimes in life, we walk into new experiences clutching titles and past versions of ourselves because starting from zero feels humiliating. We want to be good immediately. We want to skip the wobbling. We want proof that we are already capable.

But experience is not something you inherit from your resume. It is something you earn in real time.

The contradiction is this: to actually become experienced, you have to fully embrace being a beginner. You must learn to tolerate being inexperienced.

By the end of the week, I wasn’t better because I had corrected “three simple things.” I was better because I stopped pretending I already knew. I let myself look foolish. I admitted I was scared. I stayed in the water when every instinct told me to paddle back to shore.

It turns out progress has less to do with talent and more to do with humility. And sometimes, when you’re too tired to reach the shore on your own, the only way forward is to accept the push.

Maybe the ocean isn’t the only place I’ve been pretending to know what I’m doing.

I started a walking contradiction for a simple reason: to give my most curious readers a place to look at the world sideways. No posturing, just my honest attempts to decode the contradictions we all live in.

My goal is to keep this free forever, but I do ask for one thing in return: connection.

If this piece shifted your perspective even an inch, send it to one person. Or leave a comment—I read and reflect on every single one.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

Not this week.

I’ve reached this point where the illusion of control in my life finally feels ridiculous. I’ve lived my entire life believing effort was a currency, that if I worked hard enough, I could buy a specific outcome.

I was wrong. Control isn’t power. It’s just what we reach for when we don’t have trust.

I’ve been in Bali for less than a week, surrounded by every spiritual guru, healer and spiritual growth tool you could imagine. It’s made me realize: you don’t actually need any of it.

Because the most advanced form of self-improvement is simple. It’s surrender.

Not surrender in a dramatic waving of the white flag “i give up” kind of way. Just the sobering realization that control has become useless.

When you finally admit you don’t know what you’re doing, you stop negotiating with reality. You stop performing. You stop trying to manage how you are seen.

There is a feral confidence in having nothing on the line.

I’m still ambitious. I still want to evolve. I still want to master the art of living and loving freely. But the most evolved move available to me right now is letting go of the need to become anything.

My prayers have changed. They aren’t requests anymore. They sound like:

Guide me. Take it. Show me the way. Do what you will.

Surrender isn’t about the outcome. It’s the moment you realize your fear was never the thing holding your life together.

For someone who built her life on effort, this is the boldest move I’ve ever made.

walk boldly,

Caroline

My friend (and fellow talented writer) recently asked me what my favorite sunset I’ve ever seen was.

I’m horrible at the favorites game. I take these questions way too seriously. I treat a casual “what’s your favorite color?” like I’m testifying under oath in a trial that determines my entire personality.

Most of the time I need at least 2-3 business days to contemplate a response (if I can conjure one at all). Mostly because I suffer from the delusion that my answer actually matters?? To me, picking a “favorite” feels less like a fun fact and more like a high-stakes form of betrayal.

How am I supposed to choose just one? It’s like being asked to pick a favorite child in front of the other children. I imagine myself mentally apologizing to all the runner-up horizons I’ve loved like, “I’m so sorry, 2016 sunset in the Bloomington, IN Target parking lot, you were vibrant and soul-stirring, but you just didn’t have the emotional complexity of that one above Lake Ohrid, Macedonia that made me cry”. I don’t want to be the parent who plays favorites, yet here I am, being asked to choose one specific sky while the others watch from the minivan of my memory, wondering where they went wrong.

Needless to say, I didn’t answer her question.

But as I chewed on it for the next few days, something hit me while I watched a gorgeous, awe-inspiring sunset over the Gulf of Thailand from Koh Tao island.

I’ve seen so many sunsets. Chat GPT tells me 11,049 to be exact (because god forbid I do mental math or type in a calculator when I can delegate my existential tallying to AI). Of course, I missed the early ones because I was a baby, obviously, and probably sleeping all the time, and I missed others because I was stuck in a windowless office or busy folding laundry. So let’s call it a conservative 8,000.

You would think that by the eight-thousandth time you’ve witnessed something, you’d be bored. But here’s the thing about seeing the sun go down every single night— I’ve seen enough of them to expect them, yet they still managed to catch me off guard. I remain utterly shocked and mesmerized by the redundant miracle.

I think there exists this subtle pressure to reserve awe for the rare things in life: the total eclipses, the shooting stars, or the once-in-a-decade lightning storms. By all accounts of human psychology, I should be bored by now.

But I’ve found a contradiction: we are wired to crave “newness” to feel alive, yet the things that actually sustain us are the ones that happen every single day. We expect the repetition to tire us, to turn the spectacular into the “standard.” But repetition, as it turns out, is not the enemy of wonder; it is the architect of it. It doesn’t ruin beauty, it’s what builds our capacity to see it.

So why do we so often miss this?

Maybe we use familiarity as a sedative. We treat the repetition of our lives like wallpaper, so we can get through the day without being constantly moved to tears by the sheer existence of light or the person sitting across from us at breakfast. Maybe we tell ourselves “it’s just another Wednesday” because if we admitted it was a one-time-only miracle, we’d have to acknowledge how much we have to lose.

We think the danger in repetition is that we’ll run out of things to discover. But the real danger is that we’ll stop being the kind of person capable of discovery. And when that happens, life doesn’t become smaller all at once, it goes slowly dim.

There is a stubborn discipline in not training yourself out of awe. It’s the refusal to let the world become background noise just because it’s always there.

It’s how you can stop to admire a flower as if it’s the first one you’ve ever seen, even if you’re running late and the flower is technically a weed poking out of a cracked sidewalk. It’s noticing the sound of a door hinge you could recognize anywhere and realizing you’ve never once thought to name it. It’s knowing who in your family is coming up the stairs by the unique rhythm of their feet hitting the wooden steps.

It is the active choice to remain a beginner.

Which is how I know this isn’t really about sunsets at all. Because it’s the same way you can look at the person you love after a decade and still feel that hitch in your breath. You don’t love them less because you’ve seen them ten thousand times. You love them more because you’ve learned all the ways their face can catch the light: you’ve seen them in the fluorescent light of a hospital waiting room, in the sleepy, hazy glow of a Sunday morning, and in the harsh glare of a Tuesday argument. It’s noticing a freckle you’ve seen every day for years and realizing you know exactly where it lives on their skin. It’s gazing upon the face you’ve memorized, the one you could recognize in any crowd, and still being caught off guard by how beautiful it is.

Maybe the eight-thousandth time you notice something is actually the most dangerous. Because now, the awe is layered with the knowledge of how fragile it all is. You don’t just see the colors in the sky; you see the years moving through you. You don’t just see the person you love; you see the life you’ve built, and the terrifying truth that you won’t get to watch them forever.

I don’t want to be used to anything.

I want to live in the wound of the present tense. I want to be the person who is still halted by the sun, not because I’ve never seen it, but because I can’t believe I get to see it again.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

Over the past twelve months, I’ve gone through a process of ecdysis.

Did you know that was the technical name for the shedding or molting that most reptiles go through? I didn’t, but I did some research, particularly as it pertains to snakes.

Ecdysis for a snake starts with internal separation. There’s a period right before a snake begins to shed its skin referred to as “the blue phase,” where a milky, bluish fluid builds up between the old skin and the new. This fluid also gets behind the clear scale covering the eye, and the snake goes partially blind. The world becomes a blur of shadows and threats.

Because they are blind and their bodies are diverting every ounce of energy to creating the new layer, the snake becomes lethargic. It hides. It stops eating. It isn’t a graceful change; it’s a biological crisis.

Then comes the pressure. The snake’s body swells to crack the old skin open at the snout. It has to find something sharp (ex: a jagged rock, a rough branch) and rub its face against it until the old skin finally tears. Once the tear begins, the snake must literally crawl out of its own mouth. It is an exhausting, muscular labor of peeling away from a former self, inch by agonizing inch. When it’s over, the snake leaves behind a perfect, translucent version of itself, still shaped like its body, but hollow.

Sound familiar? It might for a lot of you. It certainly did for me.

In Chinese Astrology, 2025 was the Year of the Wood Snake. A Wood Snake year is a cycle of grounded transformation. It’s where the snake’s intuitive, shedding nature meets the Wood element’s drive for rooted growth. It acts as a cosmic pruning.

In nature, a snake doesn’t shed because it wants to; it sheds because it has outgrown its container. If it doesn’t peel back that restrictive layer, it becomes a prisoner to its own past. It goes blind. It ceases to move. It dies. The Wood Snake year proves that you must often lose the branches to save the tree.

For me, shedding definitely didn’t feel like a spa treatment. I spent months in my own blue-eye phase, certain that the darkness I was feeling was the end of the road. I had to find my own jagged rocks to rub against just to break the seal of my old life.

And herein lies the contradiction: to stay myself, I had to start subtracting. We are taught that growth is an act of accumulation: more titles, more belongings, more “yeses.” But as the Wood Snake teaches, to keep my soul intact, I had to let the external layers go.

I walked away from a steady paycheck that rewarded my competence but dulled my thinking. The job was asking for parts of me I didn’t want to trade: my curiosity, my creativity, my integrity. I realized that a golden cage is still a cage.

I stepped away from relationships that required me to contort myself to be loved. I realized how much I had abandoned myself to keep others comfortable, and how much of that came from the fear that if I stopped, I wouldn’t fit in their world anymore. I was right; I didn't. But you cannot keep your soul intact while giving pieces of it away to buy a peace that isn't real.

In this final stage of the shed, I’m letting go of my identity as the woman who earns her belonging. The idea that my place in rooms, relationships, and roles is conditional. I’m done telling myself that if I just do “this” well enough, I get to stay. A life isn’t something you deserve, and love isn’t a reward for good behavior.

I didn’t become anyone new; I just became more myself. I had to give up the world’s version of me to keep my own. I had to lose the things I owned so they would stop owning me. I didn’t give up ambition, care, or depth, I gave up performing worthiness.

My soul feels intact, even if my bank account is currently undergoing its own transformative shedding…

It is a terrifying trade: to be rich in self but poor in certainty.

After ecdysis, when the snake slides out of its husk, it isn’t always met with a burst of confidence. The new skin is incredibly thin and soft. Every vibration in the ground feels like an earthquake; every gust of air is a shock to the system. The scales haven’t hardened yet. It enters a period of hypersensitivity, where it is vitally alive but completely unprotected. A true paradox of being at its most beautiful and its most terrified.

I, too, am smaller now, perhaps. Certainly more exposed. I’ve traded the safety of a cage for the danger of open air. But I am also iridescent. I am vibrant. I’m learning that it’s okay to stay quiet for a while longer while my scales toughen and my new colors set.

Staying “myself” is the most expensive thing I’ve ever done. It’s a high-stakes trade where the currency was everything I thought I needed. But the reward is finally living in a skin that fits.

We are at the tail end of the Snake year. If you are currently blind in your own blue phase, if you are currently rubbing your face against the rocks just to feel a tear in the fabric of your old life, keep going. We are moving toward a new year soon, a faster energy. But for now, let the old skin go. The air might be cold on the other side, but I promise you, you’re going to want to feel it.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

I was sitting on a beach chair along the coast of Vietnam, happily sipping a coconut and basking in the sun. It was the first truly sunny day we’d had so far, and I was soaking up every minute of it. As I watched the waves roll in, I had the most dangerous thought a human can have: could life get any better than this?

The universe, never one to pass up a punchline, answered immediately.

A dark, bruised cloud began to roll in. Ten minutes later, the tropical “perfection” dissolved into a frantic evacuation. As people scrambled for cover, my friends and I huddled under a single, pathetic umbrella. I fished my emotional support rain poncho out of my purse, bracing for the storm. I sat there, annoyed in my discomfort, waiting for the sky to clear so my life could resume its scheduled programming.

But then I saw them.

A little girl, maybe two years old, and her father dancing. They were the only ones still on the beach, unconcerned with the logistics of staying dry. The girl didn’t just endure the storm— she didn’t even seem to notice it. She was laughing hysterically as her dad jumped over her head, chasing her through the downpour.

I watched them, entranced. In a moment where everyone else was concerned with the “ruined” moment, they were focused on the sheer, kinetic joy of being alive.

I’ve always been a “kid person.” I started babysitting when I was practically a baby myself, though looking back, I have to wonder who lets a twelve-year-old supervise human life?!? I suppose I’ve always seemed mature for my age. When I moved to San Francisco at 26, I picked up babysitting again on the side while working a demanding sales job. I told people it was for the extra cash, but really, it was because being around children made me feel tethered. They have a way of anchoring you to the present moment that a 401k or a career path simply cannot.

Yet, despite that affection, I sat across from my father a little over year ago and laid out my “rational” case for a childless life while we dined on sushi.

“I can’t imagine bringing kids into this world,” I said while fumbling with my chopsticks. My voice was firm with the practiced cynicism of my generation. Between my desire for a nomadic lifestyle and my mounting concern for the state of our burning, polarized planet, having kids felt like a high-stakes act of irresponsibility. Why build a nursery in a burning house?

My dad pushed back, but I stood my ground. I had the headlines on my side. Intellectual nihilism felt like the only responsible stance. I didn’t want my children to inherit this wreckage.

Given everything that has happened in our country over the last several weeks, you’d think that conviction would have calcified into stone.

But as I watched that father and daughter play through the storm, the logic started to leak. It hit me, a realization as sudden and unbidden as the rain. I want this. I want to bring a child into this world.

Not because the world is perfect, but because the world has never been perfect.

We treat the “end of the world” like a modern invention, but our ancestors raised children through the Black Death, through the Blitz, through the Great Depression. They didn’t wait for the storm to pass; they realized that the dancing is the point.

My feeling was cemented days later at the airport. I was waiting for my flight to Cambodia, sitting next to another tiny girl who wore a smile so wide it looked like it could power the entire terminal. Her father walked over, precariously balancing three coffees: two large ones for him and his wife and a tiny, miniature cup filled only with milk foam.

“Babyccino!” she squealed, her eyes lighting up in a way so infectious it was impossible not to be enamored with her.

In that moment, the “macro” vanished. The geopolitical tensions, the climate anxiety, the endless digital noise. It all bowed down to the “micro.” The tiny joy. The milk foam. The radical, beautiful, and completely illogical hope of a new human.

The contradiction lies here: ‘information reality’ tells us the world is a series of data points trending toward disaster. But ‘physical reality’— the warmth of a Vietnam sun, the taste of a coconut, the laugh of a child—tells us that being alive is a miracle.

I realized that my hesitation wasn’t actually about the world, it was about my own ego. I want the world to be “fixed” so I could be a perfect parent in a perfect environment. But there is no such thing.

And yes, I am still worried. But I figure if the only people who have kids are those who aren’t worried about the state of the world, we end up with a future populated only by the indifferent. Choosing to have a child as a “concerned person” feels more like an act of curating the future. You are raising a person who will care, which is the only way the world actually gets fixed.

I want to have kids because I think I’ll be a good mom. Not perfect, but good. I think I’ll listen well and be patient with the difficult moments. I think I’ll be the kind of mom who understands that a child doesn’t need to be fixed, just accompanied. I think I’ll ask better questions than I give answers, and I’ll let who they are surprise me. I think I’ll offer steadiness instead of certainty, and honesty instead of false reassurance. I think I’ll raise someone who trusts their inner life because I never taught them to doubt it. For now, I think. Hopefully someday, I will know.

Choosing to bring a child into a failing world isn’t an act of ignorance; it’s an act of war against hopelessness. Maybe the future won’t be pristine, but it will be theirs. I’ve decided that I’d rather give a child the chance to taste the milk foam and dance in the rain than opt out of love just because it comes with risk.

To my future child, I don’t know what kind of world this will be, but I think you will be the kind of person who can handle it.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

A week ago, I was on the back of a motorcycle in the Ha Giang Loop, a remote stretch of Northern Vietnam where the limestone mountains rise up like jagged teeth against a blue sky. I was with two of my best friends, feeling free and alive, witnessing a version of the world so raw and reverent it reminded me what it’s like to live in an “unedited” reality.

We reveled in the untouched beauty. We laughed until we almost peed our pants. And we were reminded exactly how little a human actually needs to feel full.

Forever a sentimental girl, I had my headphones in while we rode, letting my hair get tangled into impossible knots by the wind (literally needed a professional hair washing post-loop). I threw my hands up in the air, pretending I was flying, while I listened to this song on repeat:

I was living a moment so vivid, so fully inhabited, that I could already see a future version of myself—maybe eighty years old, sitting on a porch with a glass of iced tea—thinking about when I was thirty and quit my job to travel the world and chase horizons with people I love.

What a paradox: to feel nostalgic for something that hasn’t ended yet. To be so engrossed in a moment that your first instinct is to wonder how much it will hurt to lose it. To realize this will matter later.

On the surface, maybe this seems like anxiety. A frantic clinging; an inability to just be without narrating the experience. But I don’t think that’s what it is really.

I think this kind of tenderness appears when you finally stop dissociating from your own life.

Most of us move through our days slightly removed. We plan, we optimize, we protect ourselves from disappointment. We stay just far enough away from the present to avoid feeling how much it matters.

We tell ourselves we’re being “grounded,” when really, we’re just buffering against the inevitable impact of loss.

But when you are truly awake inside a moment, you feel time moving. You feel the cost of loving something while it’s actually happening instead of waiting until it’s gone.

The sadness of pre-emptive nostalgia doesn’t mean the moment is ending. It means you’ve stopped pretending it won’t.

Presence isn’t always light. Sometimes it is heavy. It asks a massive task of you: to hold joy without grabbing it by the throat. To accept that every meaningful thing comes paired with an expiration date.

We tend to praise people for being “easygoing” or “low-maintenance,” but often, those are just masks for a refusal to attach. Many of us only allow a moment to matter in retrospect. We look back from a safe distance and decide, “that was important.” But occasionally, if you are paying enough attention, a moment lets you know its value in advance.

When that happens, the ache isn’t a flaw in the experience, it’s proof that you’re actually inside it. The goal isn’t to avoid the sting; it’s to let the moment bruise you. To accept that future grief is simply the tax we pay for present aliveness.

Someday I will dream about today. And today, I am here enough to know it.

A question for the comments: Is there a specific song or place that makes you feel this “pre-emptive nostalgia”? Where were you when you realized a moment was going to matter forever?

Walk boldly,

Caroline

I promised myself when I started this journey that I would never post just to post. I would only do so if I had something true and honest to say. Something that felt like it had weight. Something that mattered.

This week, I didn’t feel compelled. When Monday hit (the day I normally write), it was like I had lost my voice. Not in the way that happens after a night out, talking over strangers in a loud room. Not in the way where you’re stunned, breath taken away.

More in the sense that I had actually misplaced it. Like I didn’t know where it went. Silence had moved in without announcing itself.

At first, I was fine with it. Resigned. It’s not like anyone but myself would notice if I broke the streak. I don’t have hundreds of followers anxiously awaiting my next post.

I told myself I was probably just tired. Or uninspired. That whatever it was would pass and my voice would return on its own.

And then this morning while brushing my teeth, I stumbled upon a realization without meaning to.

I caught my reflection in the mirror— not in a cinematic way, not in distress— just a quick glance. I looked familiar, but oddly undefined. Almost like a sketch of me drawn in pencil.

I stared a little longer.

Nothing was different, really: same hair, same eyes, the same left ear that sticks out just a bit too far. And yet something felt missing. Not gone, just unformed.

I realized it wasn’t just my voice that felt lost.

It was me.

My shape.

Looking at my reflection, I saw the problem: To be seen, you have to have a border. You have to have a limit. But I had become like that bit a mime does where he’s trapped in an invisible box, except the opposite. I was standing there, but there were no walls. No container. I was spilling out everywhere.

Where are my edges?

Where am I?

The realization stunned me because what we often miss about losing ourselves is that it rarely happens all at once. There isn’t always a rupture. No obvious breaking point.

Most of the time, it’s a slow erosion — the kind you don’t notice until you look back and realize the shoreline has moved. Or you look in the mirror and suddenly don’t recognize yourself.

My edges used to be there. Opinions that arrived quickly. Instincts that spoke in full sentences. A body that knew when something was a yes or a no.

But somewhere along the way, things shifted.

I started walking around without skin, no membrane between myself and the world.

And when you think about it, skin is pretty interesting. We tend to think of it as a wall. But it’s actually more of a translator.

It lets the right things in.

Keeps the wrong things out.

Tells the nervous system what’s safe to feel.

I didn’t realize how much shape I’d lost until nothing wanted to move through me anymore. Creativity, I think, is the first thing to go when the self becomes too porous. It needs edges to push against. It needs friction. It needs form.

When I set out on this journey, I told myself I wanted to be open— to new experiences, new places, new emotions, new relationships. To more life.

But somewhere along the way, I became so open that I stopped having form. No one teaches us how much openness is too much.

I thought being open meant being alive. I didn’t realize it could also mean being undefined. We talk so much about staying open. We don’t talk nearly enough about staying intact.

I am reminded that form is what makes feeling possible in the first place.

Edges aren’t walls, they’re orientation. They tell us where we end so we can actually meet the world without dissolving into it. Skin doesn’t exist to block sensation. It exists so sensation doesn’t overwhelm us.

Maybe staying intact isn’t the opposite of openness at all. Maybe it’s what allows openness to be sustainable. Because without edges, everything hurts. And with them, we don’t disappear when we let life in.

A house with no walls isn’t a home; it’s just a plot of land. I’m ready to start building the walls again, not to shut the world out, but so I have a place to invite it in.

Walk boldly,

Caroline

For example, if my word were peace, I choose the option that leads to the most quiet. If it’s courage, I say the thing that makes my hands shake.

I’m not entirely sure why I started this ritual, but I suppose I just wanted a simpler compass. Decision-making has never exactly been my strong suit. An ex-boyfriend used to tease me for my "menu paralysis." Whenever we’d go out to eat, I’d study a dinner menu for ten minutes, agonize over the options, narrow it down to two... and then ask the server what she liked and order that instead.

Maybe if I’d had a word of the year back then, I wouldn’t have needed to crowdsource dinner.

Clearly, I didn’t trust my own palate, let alone my own soul. But I eventually realized that my indecision wasn’t a lack of will; it was a lack of vision. I was squinting through a fog of societal "shoulds" and other people's expectations, overwhelmed by the clutter of it all. I felt the pressure to make the “right” choice instead of an honest one that felt true to me.

So, last year, I chose clarity as my word of the year.

And in pursuit of clarity, I did some pretty radical things. I quit my job, cut my anchors, and bought a plane ticket. I spent half a year traveling (mostly) solo, convinced that if I just stripped away the noise of my "real life," the truth of who I am would finally stand still and let me see it.

At first, it was terrifying. When you have no safety net and no boss, you are forced to become your own North Star. I took long, lonely walks. I journaled until my hands cramped. I pushed myself to the edge of my physical and emotional limits.

And I did find things. I saw my fears clearly. I saw my habits clearly. But the more I chased "the answer" to what I wanted, the more it behaved like a mirage. In moments I thought I had it, the next thing I knew, it was gone. Even after all that time chasing clarity, it felt like I still barely knew myself.

I discovered that clarity is a lot like sand; the tighter you squeeze, the less you have.

Here’s the contradiction: the things we want most—clarity, peace, certainty—cannot be grabbed or forced. They recede when hunted. They only appear when space is made for them.

Things like clarity, understanding, insight, or self-knowledge can’t be acquired, achieved, or earned. You can’t chase it, control it, or plan it into existence. It only comes when you stop trying to make it happen and start actually paying attention to what’s true in the moment: your feelings, your choices, your limits.

That’s why my word for this year is “receive”.

In our culture, “receiving” sounds passive, but I’m learning it’s an active, brave state of being. It’s about being open to what life actually gives you, rather than what you demand from it. It’s the willingness to notice a feeling, a limit, or a lesson without immediately trying to optimize it.

Clarity taught me how hard I could push. I have a feeling receive will teach me how hard I can soften.

I’ll probably still feel lost, still overthink the menu, and still want answers yesterday. But this year, my practice isn’t about solving it all. It’s about letting the world meet me halfway and trusting that it will.

I’ve put together my own guide to help you find your word for the year ahead. I hope it helps you cultivate your frequency for 2026!

my "word of the year" worksheet

walk boldly,

Caroline