For weeks, R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion has been playing in my head.

Yes, I know the song isn’t actually about losing your religion. It’s about being at the end of your rope. Maybe there is something in that for me too. But mostly, I keep thinking about what it means to lose the things I once built my life around. The beliefs, identities, and rules I thought would always be part of me.

Over the past few weeks, I have been deconstructing Old Danica’s life by cleaning out my storage unit. I talked about that in last week’s Tea Time with Danica. If you’re new to my Substack, I go live on Sundays for Tea Time with Danica and I share what’s on my mind. Lately, I’ve been talking about resistance and other random things like clearing out my storage unit.

When I left my marriage, I put the things I could take from my old home into a storage unit. I am finally beginning to clear it out. There is grief in knowing that many of my most prized belongings are still in my ex-husband’s house and that I will probably never see them again. There is nothing in the world that could entice me to return for them. I gladly leave those physical objects behind as part of the price of my freedom.

I am happy with my life now. Happier in ways I struggle to explain. But that happiness exists alongside sadness, grief, and the pain of the people and pieces of myself I lost along the way.

As part of the cleanout project, I went through all my old knitting supplies and combined them into a single container. I untangled the yarn, which was weirdly satisfying and lovely. But then I looked at my unfinished projects and the yarn I had bought on special trips or chosen with a specific creation in mind, and I felt the grief of recognizing that I am not that person anymore.

I am not the person who knits.

Maybe I will be again someday. Maybe I won’t. Either way, I miss her.

That is the part we don’t talk about enough when we move on and create new lives for ourselves. We celebrate the life we gained, as we should, but creating a new life also means grieving the person who lived the old one. There are parts of her I really liked. There are parts of her I miss. And loving the woman I am now means acknowledging that I may never get some of those pieces back.

This week, I began to wonder whether writing might be one of them.

The Writer I Used to Be

I have made no secret of my struggle to write. I have spent a lot of time examining the block, trying to understand why the thing I have wanted to do for most of my life has become one of the hardest things for me to do now.

I will perform astonishing acrobatics to avoid working on a book. The whole reason I went to clean out the storage unit was because I thought, “I should write.” My immediate response was, “Nah, let’s go do this other emotionally and physically exhausting thing instead.”

For years, I pushed through that kind of resistance. I wrote because I had a contract, a deadline, or an obligation. I followed the familiar writing advice: write every day, be consistent, and don’t let yourself off the hook because you don’t feel like it.

Sometimes that advice is useful. Sometimes resistance means a scene isn’t working. Sometimes it means you’re stuck. Sometimes you do need to sit your butt in the chair and write the thing, especially when you have signed a contract promising that you will.

But before I conquer resistance, I am learning to listen to it.

Am I stuck? Am I tired? Is something else happening? Do I simply not want to write this particular thing? Is my resistance keeping me from becoming myself, or is it keeping me from returning to a version of myself I have already outgrown?

The advice that once helped me build a writing career also helped carry me into burnout. My body knows that, even when my ambitious little brain would prefer not to acknowledge it.

So I am learning to respect the no.

The Intention That Failed

Every new moon, I set an intention. I began the practice a few years ago when a friend who owned a bookstore hosted new moon gatherings there. The bookstore eventually closed, but the woman who led them continued welcoming a small group into her home. Life, travel, and my RIM™ training have kept me from attending recently, but I still practice the ritual on my own.

At this month’s new moon, I realized that the August new moon three years ago was the beginning of this entire transformation.

At that point, I knew I needed to leave my marriage. I had done everything I knew to do to save it. We were both miserable, and our misery was affecting the people around us. Therapists had been telling me for a long time that I needed to leave, but I wasn’t listening. I wanted to protect my family. I wanted to keep it intact.

I also had no idea how I could afford to go.

My ex-husband’s income had always been our primary means of survival. I had never needed to arrange my own health insurance, and because I am technically a contractor at my day job, coverage wasn’t available through work. I needed money for a lawyer, deposits on an apartment, and the many other expenses involved in starting over.

At the time, I thought the answer was obvious: I needed another book contract.

I had recently completed the final book in my existing contract. I did the math, and the signing payment from a new one would give me enough for a deposit on a small apartment and the other costs of leaving. My regular income, supplemented by the writing money, would allow me to survive on my own.

I created a proposal for a series I loved and sent it to my editor. Then I went to my first new moon ceremony and made receiving that contract my intention. I did all the things I knew to do to support it, and I felt certain this was the solution.

Later that month, my editor rejected the series. She didn’t believe the concept was sellable enough.

Fine, I thought. Maybe it isn’t this project. Maybe it’s another one.

I began working on a different idea that excited me even more. At the next new moon, I held the intention more loosely and asked for financial provision. Instead, I encountered even more financial difficulty.

What the heck, universe?

Looking back now, I can see that the rejection was not the failure of my intention. It was protection.

If I had received that contract, I would probably still be writing under it now. And I no longer have those books in me.

The audience for them was largely conservative Christian women. In the years that followed, I watched many of my readers and fellow Christians embrace beliefs that were completely incompatible with my values and with everything I understand Jesus to represent. I unfriended people who had been loyal readers, including people who regularly asked when my next book would be available, because I could no longer bear what they were celebrating and sharing.

I could not keep writing for an audience that expected me to fit inside a version of Christianity that was destroying me.

The contract didn’t come. The money did.

I received an unexpected bonus from my job, and it gave me what I needed to begin my new life.

The answer arrived. It just refused to come through the door I had assigned it.

The Religion I Lost

Some people will hear that I work with the moon, crystals, herbs, and other spiritual practices and tell me those things aren’t Christian.

I disagree.

Who created the moon? Who created the crystals and herbs? Who gave nature its beauty, energy, and power? I don’t worship any of those things as gods. I see them as part of creation, offered for our benefit so we can live in relationship with nature rather than acting as though we are separate from it.

I still love Jesus. I still experience him as an important higher power in my life. But I no longer believe that the churches represented most loudly in American culture reflect his values.

I will not soften this part anymore.

Black lives matter. Trans lives matter. Indigenous lives matter. Immigrant lives matter. Women’s lives matter.

I cannot reconcile the Jesus who noticed the people everyone else ignored with a Christianity that celebrates cruelty toward people who are poor, queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, or immigrant. I cannot reconcile the Jesus who showed compassion to people without social power with Christians praising someone as the most godly president this country has ever had, even after a civil jury found him liable for sexual abuse.

That is not my faith. That is not my Jesus.

The rupture became personal when I needed support in my marriage. After one particularly painful incident, I reached out to church friends. Instead of helping me recognize that something was deeply wrong, they gave me resources about becoming a better wife and submitting more.

I am not prepared to share those details publicly, especially when they involve people I love who may someday read this. But I can say with certainty that the answer was not for me to submit more. The answer was to recognize that the marriage was harming me and that I needed to leave.

I had spent years trying to become better. I am the queen of self-improvement. I read the books, took the classes, worked with therapists and coaches, and tried again and again to fix myself.

Through my RIM™ training, I have finally understood something radical: there was never anything wrong with me. I have always been, always will be, whole.

Every one of us possesses an innate wholeness that we sometimes forget but never lose. We do not have to earn it by following the rules correctly. We do not need to repair ourselves until we become acceptable. We need to return to the wholeness that has been within us all along.

This is why I no longer believe in religion as a system of rules enforced against other people. Too often, religion invites us to examine the speck in someone else’s eye so we never have to confront the plank in our own. I am no longer willing to spend my days inspecting everyone else’s specks. I have a plank of my own to tend to, thank you very much.

The people I choose to keep close now are also more interested in their own planks than in policing everyone else.

When Writing Becomes Another Religion

For three years, many of my new moon intentions have included my writing. I have intended to publish more books, sell more books, and build a more successful writing career. Some of that desire is financial, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

I live in a small apartment without air conditioning. I have asthma and terrible allergies, which make opening the windows during wildfire season a terrible idea. I would love to own a home with room to create, a garden where I could sit, and air conditioning that I am allowed to install. I don’t need a mansion. I want space to breathe, make art, grow things, and keep my belongings without playing an endless game of apartment Tetris.

Because I am a contractor and don’t have a large down payment sitting in the bank, I kept deciding that writing would get me there. I would publish a pile of books, bank the money, and turn it into a home.

Writing would rescue me again.

But when I looked at my writing during this new moon, I recognized that it has been asking something entirely different of me. Not, “How can you monetize me?” Not, “How can you make me solve your financial problems?”

It has been asking, “Do you remember the joy you once found in telling a story?”

Old Danica could write a book, work full time, endure a difficult marriage, take care of her children and their activities, manage a home, and volunteer any time someone needed help. For a long time, I looked at everything she accomplished and wondered why I couldn’t still do it.

Now I look at her with enormous tenderness and think, “You had so much on your plate. No wonder I am exhausted.”

Current, wiser Danica honors all the Danicas who came before her by refusing to load the plate that full again. When my body says it is tired, I listen. When it wants food, I feed it. When it wants to play, I play. And when it says no to writing, I try to become curious about the no instead of treating it like a defect.

The stories I am working on now are more aligned with who I am and what I believe. There will still be faith in them because faith is part of me. But it will not necessarily look like people attending church every Sunday. I am writing about what happens when life refuses to follow the plan. I am writing about rebuilding from nothing. I am writing about women discovering that the boxes they tried so desperately to fit were never shaped for them.

Years ago, an editor told me I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole in the books I wrote for her. It hurt, but she was right. I knew how to write those books. I probably still do.

But when I try now, my body says, *This isn’t true for you anymore.*

Even fiction must contain something true enough to resonate with the writer’s soul.

I don’t know whether I will ever write with the consistency or output I once did. I don’t know how much of what I write now will be published and how much will exist solely for my own healing. I don’t know whether writing will ever buy me that house and garden.

And I am not attached to those outcomes.

I don’t want writing to become another religion, another system of obligations and rules that teaches me to ignore my body and distrust my inner knowing. I don’t want to force the thing that once brought me joy to prove it can still earn its right to exist.

Right now, writing is helping me heal. That is enough.

Reclamation

Maybe Christian women will still like what I write, but now I am writing for the ones who don’t fit. I am writing for every woman who is barely holding herself together while trying to meet a standard she was never meant to embody.

My faith is bigger than the box of Christianity I tried to squeeze it into. God is bigger than Christianity. The universe is bigger than our rules. There is more power, beauty, and connection here than many of us have been willing to see.

As I looked back at three years of intentions, I realized that the most profound growth did not happen in my sales numbers or publishing schedule. It happened inside me. It happened in the woman I am choosing to become and, even more importantly, in the woman I am finally allowing myself to be.

My intention for this new moon is reclamation.

Not reinvention. Not improvement. Not fixing.

Reclamation.

I am reclaiming that which I already am. I am peeling away the expectations, rules, and lies that taught me to abandon myself. I am learning to trust my body and my inner knowing. I am writing when something inside me says it is time to write, as it did today.

I am not becoming whole.

I am remembering that I always was whole. I AM whole.

And so are you.

A Note About RIM™

RIM™ has been an important part of helping me reconnect with my innate wholeness. I am currently completing practice sessions as part of my certification training. If you are curious about the process and would like to experience a complimentary session, reach out to me and we can work out the details.

Apparently, Rest Is Part of the Work

I did not get as much accomplished in July as I’d hoped.

My goal was to finish editing the second book in a series I planned to rapid release over Christmas. It seemed reasonable. The book was already written, so I wasn’t asking myself to create an entire novel from scratch. I simply needed to edit it, prepare it for publication, and move on to the next step in the plan.

Except, apparently, there is no such thing as “simply editing” when writing is one of the ways you process your emotions. Every book I write comes from an emotionally deep place in me. It’s why I find the anti-AI brigade so offensive. Yes, I use AI in my process. AND, there is still such a deep part of me in everything I create, including things I create with AI assistance, that it is completely ludicrous for anyone to call my work slop. And I believe this to be true of everyone I know who uses AI in their creative process. In the case of the book I’m editing, I thought AI would make the process faster, and it has, but you also cannot rush the emotional process that is integral to my writing.

This month, I had to come to terms with the fact that I’m running on empty and have been for a while. In case you haven’t watched my recent lives, I’m currently training in a healing process called RIM®, which stands for Regenerating Images in Memory. RIM® is a mind-body technique that helps us access and release the emotions, core beliefs, and internal patterns that keep us stuck. It can help us get to the root of something, whether that root is connected to a recent event, an earlier experience, or even something passed down through our families.

Rather than trying to think or reason our way through a problem, RIM® uses a facilitated, closed-eye process to let the body and imagination reveal what is happening beneath the surface. The images that emerge are often surprising, sometimes strange, and occasionally hilarious. However, they can help us connect with emotions and experiences we haven’t been able to reach through conscious thought alone. RIM® is not therapy, although it can have significant therapeutic benefits, and one of its foundational philosophies is that you have to feel it to heal it.

As part of my training, I have to both give and receive sessions. That means I’ve been doing a lot of deep emotional work over the past several months, and I badly underestimated how much bandwidth it would take. I started this training right after Christmas, around the same time I expected to be writing and releasing this series, and somehow I thought I could continue producing at my usual pace while also excavating years of old emotional material.

In retrospect, this may have been a slight miscalculation.

I received a RIM® session yesterday, and although it didn’t feel especially deep or intense while I was in it, the mentor observing us challenged me about resisting the process and not allowing myself to go deeper. I sat with her feedback afterward and continued to process what had come up. The more I did, the more I began to realize that the session was having a much greater impact than any of us in the session thought. It may turn out to be one of the most important sessions I’ve received, not because of what happened during it, but because of what I began to recognize afterward. And, this is one of the beautiful pieces of RIM®. Sometimes the depth and power isn’t obvious until much later.

We often expect healing to produce an immediate, visible breakthrough. We want the dramatic moment when everything clicks into place and we can point to the exact second when we changed. Sometimes that happens, but sometimes the result arrives later, after we have had time to let the experience move through us. What looks like resistance might be part of the process, especially when we are willing to stay curious about it instead of using it as an excuse to walk away.

What I’m learning about emotional physics is that the things we avoid don’t simply disappear. They keep returning, often in different forms, until we are ready to acknowledge them. Part of learning to support other people in this work is being willing to continue doing my own work, because I can’t help someone else go to a place I am unwilling to visit myself.

I did eventually get there. I simply needed time and space to process it in my own way.

That realization has also helped me understand why I haven’t been able to force my way through the edits. My body has been asking me to have fun for a while now, and I have responded by pushing myself to work more and harder. When I feel depleted, my instinct is apparently to build a better plan for overriding the depletion. If I can find the right schedule, organizational system, or burst of discipline, surely I can optimize my way out of exhaustion.

My body does not appear to be cooperating with this strategy.

So now I’m looking at my relationship with productivity, rest, and play on a deeper level. I’ve already done the work of recognizing that play matters, and I no longer believe it is something I have to earn by being productive first. I have intentionally incorporated more creativity and play into my life, but I’m realizing that I still tend to treat them as tools. I play so I can refill my tank, recover my energy, and return to my work as a more productive person. That may sound healthier than treating play as a reward, but it still makes productivity the ultimate goal. Even my fun has been given a job. What my body seems to be asking for now is play that does not have to restore me, inspire me, make me more creative, or prepare me to accomplish something else. I need more play simply for the experience of playing, without an aim or a useful outcome, not even the aim of filling my tank.

This is where I am allowing my friend Jill Cooper to bully, I mean, convince me to write the wacky series idea that she and Dana Sacco cooked up. I don’t entirely know what I’m doing with it yet. It will be weird, it will be ridiculous, and it will not fit neatly into the serious and sensible plan I made for myself.

That is probably the point. And why I said yes, even though it’s fun to say she’s making me do it. No force here, I promise. I love those two, and I’m so grateful for their friendship.

So, my plan for August is to continue exploring my relationship with rest and productivity while writing this weird little thing. I’m going to follow the fun, see where it takes me, and try to remember that creativity does not always have to be useful, strategic, or optimized.

I’m going to have fun with it, even if it kills me!

And yes, I’m aware that sentence suggests I still have some work to do.

Speaking of work I am still doing, I am currently looking for practice clients who would like to experience RIM® with me as I complete my training. A RIM® session is a facilitated, closed-eye inner journey that typically lasts around 90 minutes. You do not need to know exactly why you feel stuck or arrive with a perfectly defined problem. We can begin with an emotion, a recurring pattern, a limiting belief, or simply the sense that you want to move forward but something is getting in the way.

You remain aware and in control throughout the session. My role is not to interpret your images, decide what they mean, or tell you what you should do. I guide you through the process while your own mind and body reveal what is meaningful for you. Sometimes the experience is intense. Sometimes it feels gentle and takes time to unfold. Sometimes, apparently, a gingerbread man shows up, as it did for me in this most recent session.

Because I need additional practice sessions as part of my training, I would love to connect with anyone who is curious about RIM® and interested in working with me. At this time, I am not charging for these sessions. If that sounds like you, reply to this post or contact me, and I’ll send you more information.

Perhaps this is part of what I’m learning, too: progress doesn’t always look like completing the plan I made at the beginning of the month. Sometimes it looks like recognizing why the plan is no longer working, listening to what my body has been trying to tell me, and allowing myself to choose something different.

Even if I have to be “bullied” into having fun.

Share one time support

This is the post I have been promising for a while.

For those of you who watch Sunday Tea with Danica, thank you for having tea with me. I love having tea with people. You already know that I am about to embark on a big summer trip to Europe.

Yay me.

I have been meaning to write about it for weeks, but I kept getting distracted. And now here I am, leaving in just a couple of days, finally sitting down to tell you what I’m doing, where I’m going, and why this trip has turned into something much more interesting than I originally expected.

Here is the basic premise.

Every June, I go to Budapest, Hungary, for work. The company I work for is headquartered there, so our leadership team has its quarterly planning meeting, and then we have a company picnic. It is always such a wonderful experience because I work with these people all the time on Zoom, but being together in person is completely different. There is a team-building energy that just doesn’t happen the same way through a screen.

This is my fourth summer traveling to Budapest. One of the things I like to do with my summer trip is add on a few days to explore more of Europe. I go to Budapest every December and every June, but the June trip is the one where I usually give myself extra time to wander a little.

This year, I originally had plans to do something fun with friends. Then, because of world events and concerns about air travel, those plans shifted. Since I was already going to be in Europe for work, I still wanted to do something. I just decided I would avoid extra flights and build the rest of my trip around trains.

That led me to the question: if I’m already in Budapest, where can I go by train that feels like summer?

The answer was obvious.

I wanted to go to the beach.

Living in Colorado, I do not get to do that very often.

So I did some research. And by research, I mean I asked ChatGPT.

I said, “ChatGPT, I want to go to the beach from Budapest. What is the best way to do that by train? What are the closest beaches? How do I accomplish this goal?”

ChatGPT gave me two main options: Croatia and Trieste, Italy.

A couple of years ago, I went to Croatia, and I loved it. It was amazing. Highly recommend. I would absolutely go again. In fact, for a while, even before my plans shifted, I kept getting ad after ad for Croatia, which was hilarious.

But one of my goals for this trip was to go places I had not been before. So I decided on Trieste.

Here’s the thing about getting from Budapest to Trieste by train. It is a long trip. The fastest route I found was around twelve hours, but most of the trains I saw were closer to fifteen. And given that I don’t even love being on a nine- or ten-hour transatlantic flight, I knew I did not want to spend fifteen hours straight on a train.

So I started looking at the map and figuring out what major cities were between Budapest and Trieste. I also had to solve another logistical problem: how would I get home? Trieste is not a major international airport city, so I started researching international airports near Trieste and places that would be easy to reach without getting on another plane.

What I realized is that a lot of train routes from Budapest into the rest of Europe go through Vienna. And I have a friend in Vienna. So I decided I would take the train to Vienna, spend the night, and start my journey from there.

But before that, I need to rewind a little.

As I was planning this trip, there was one other thing I really wanted to do. There is a famous lake in Hungary called Lake Balaton. It is their version of going to the beach because Hungary does not have ocean access. It is this huge lake in the middle of the country, and it is a very popular vacation spot in that part of the world.

Everyone I know in Hungary goes to Balaton, and every time I hear about it, I think, “I really want to go there.”

So I added Lake Balaton to the trip.

Once I started planning the rest of the route, it looked like this: Budapest, Lake Balaton, Budapest, Vienna, Ljubljana, Trieste, and then Venice, where I will catch a flight home.

Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia, and Slovenia is a new country for me. I have always wanted to go there. It is also where my ex-husband’s family is from, which makes it feel a little strange that I am going now, after the divorce. But I was married to him for twenty-five years. I was around his family for a long time, and they had some lovely Slovenian traditions. That was a big part of my life.

So yes, it is weird that I am going to Slovenia now. But that is just how the cookie crumbles. I am going to go, and I am going to have a lovely time. I think there is something meaningful in being able to experience a place that was part of my life in a different way now.

Then comes Trieste, Italy.

Woohoo. Beach trip.

And because Venice is the closest major city that was easy to reach by train, bus, or another form of simple transportation, I will end my trip there and fly home from Venice.

Weirdly, while I know a lot of people dream of going to Venice, it was the place on this itinerary I was least excited about at first. Venice has never been at the very top of my bucket list. But here we are. I’m going to Venice, and I know there will be beautiful things to see and do.

Also, there is a beach nearby. Not in the canals, obviously. I am not swimming in those. But there are islands outside Venice with actual beaches, so this has become a double beach vacation.

No complaints from me.

While I am in Budapest, I also get to do one of my favorite things. There is a big music festival called the Tilos Maraton that always seems to happen when I am there. I love it so much. The only sad part this year is that my favorite band is playing the night I leave for Balaton. And I am already making my Balaton weekend shorter than I would like so I can head back to Budapest for another concert. So, apparently, music is a theme for this trip as well.

I arrive in Budapest on Sunday, and then we have our work meetings during the week. On Friday, we have the company summer party, which I am very excited about. Every year, they plan something different for us to do as a team. This year, we are going to a Hungarian winery.

I love Hungarian wines, and I have always wanted to visit wine country there, so I am very excited about that.

The next day, I take the train to Balaton.

This is where the project really began.

Lake Balaton is not one single place where you arrive and say, “Here I am at Balaton.” It is a giant lake with many towns around it, and each town has a different vibe. So I started asking my Hungarian coworkers for recommendations.

They gave me ideas, and then I did more research because the key thing about this trip is that I am doing it almost entirely by public transportation. I am not comfortable renting a car or driving in Europe. In Budapest, you absolutely do not need a car. Parking is terrible. Traffic is terrible. Public transportation is easy, and I am comfortable using it.

So my question became: where can I go around Lake Balaton that is easy to reach by train and where I do not need a car?

That research led me to Balatonfüred, which was also what my coworkers recommended. It just confirmed that this was probably the right place for me. It has the lake, it has a peaceful vacation feeling, and it is close to Tihany, where there are lavender fields, Tihany Abbey, and nearby wineries.

Lavender is my jam.

It is my favorite herb, my favorite scent, one of my favorite things in the whole world. When I am in Budapest at Christmas, some of the things I buy at the Christmas markets come from Tihany, so I am very excited that I finally get to go there.

That will be my Balaton trip.

As I was researching all of this, it occurred to me that I had already used ChatGPT to help me figure out where I was going. So I wondered what the other AI tools would do.

I tend to use ChatGPT for my daily AI work. I am one of those OG people who, once I get stuck in a rut, I stay in my rut. But I thought, okay, I have found all this useful information through ChatGPT. What would Gemini and Claude do for me? Could I use multiple LLMs to plan the perfect trip?

So I started putting my travel questions into Gemini and Claude too.

I gave them the vibe I wanted. I told them where I was going. I told them what mattered to me.

Because yes, this is a vacation. But I want it to be more than that.

I want this trip to feel deeply soul-filling. One of my goals for this summer has been to go deeper into the divine feminine. So I started asking: how can I bring that theme into the trip, even if I am not necessarily visiting obvious goddess temples or Mary Magdalene sites? How can I experience the wineries, the lavender fields, the history, the culture, the water, the art, the literature, and the cities themselves in a way that feels meaningful?

That is how this became an experiment.

I planned this trip using ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and I kind of pitted them against each other.

My goal is to turn this into a book. Or maybe a couple of books. I am not fully sure yet.

It feels strange to commit to a project when I do not know exactly how it will turn out, but that is also part of the experiment.

The first book idea is about planning a trip with AI. I want to show how I used these tools, what worked, what did not work, what was surprisingly helpful, and what was absolutely ridiculous.

Because spoiler alert: Gemini, in particular, still hallucinates like a psychopath.

There were moments when Gemini would say, “I put this all into a Google doc for you.”

And I would say, “Really? Could you please show me the document you created?”

Then Gemini would come back and say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I hallucinated that.”

At least it admitted it, I guess.

To be fair, Gemini also gave me some very helpful tips. So I cannot totally give up on it. But my goodness. It has been a lot.

This experiment has been fun because I have been learning and playing with AI, but it has also reinforced something and I talk about all the time on the Brave New Bookshelf podcast: at some point, the human has to do the thing.

AI can suggest. AI can organize. AI can brainstorm. AI can point you in interesting directions.

But the human still has to verify.

One pilgrimage site in particular was talked up by Gemini, and a couple of the other LLMs mentioned it too. I thought, okay, I want to go there. Then I tried to book tickets and discovered that the day Gemini told me to go, the place is actually closed.

So, okay, Gemini.

But that alone has already taught me the same rule we repeat constantly on Brave New Bookshelf: you have to verify and validate AI responses.

When people say AI is not that good, I always think, well, of course not. The human is still necessary. The human is the one who brings discernment, context, taste, and lived experience.

So yes, I want to write about how AI helped me plan this trip and what actually happened when I followed, ignored, adjusted, or corrected its suggestions. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the cool.

But there is another layer to this trip.

I did not know much about Ljubljana or Trieste when I started planning. So I began looking for books that would help me understand them.

The first book I read was Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris, which I talked about during one of my live Tea Times with Danica. It was such a fascinating read. It gave me a sense of the history of the city, the layers of culture, and the literary legacy of Trieste in a way that made the place feel alive before I had even arrived.

After reading it, I decided that one of the things I wanted to do was turn this trip into a kind of literary pilgrimage.

Last summer, I went to Paris, and I saw many places connected to writers, artists, and thinkers. One of my favorite moments was getting to see where Marie Curie was buried. She was a lifelong idol of mine, and seeing the Sorbonne, seeing her name, and standing in that space was powerful.

But I was not intentional about the literary side of that trip. Toward the end, I wished I had planned more around it. Paris is such an important place for writers and artists, and I was there with writer friends. I missed an opportunity to go deeper.

So I decided that the next time I traveled, whether it was Paris or anywhere else, I would pay more attention to the literary and creative history of the places I visited.

Trieste gave me that opening.

James Joyce spent a lot of time there. He taught at the Berlitz language school, and a lot of his famous work was written there.

I will be honest. I know I had to read his books in literature class thirty years ago, and I do not remember them well. They are currently in storage. At some point, I will get them out and reread them. I think it will be interesting to read his work again after being in Trieste and understanding that his writing was shaped by his experience living there, even when the books were not necessarily about Trieste.

I also want to highlight Jan Morris herself because this is Pride Month. Jan Morris was trans. In the opening of Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, it notes that she lived and wrote as James Morris until she completed her transition in 1972.

I know that does not directly have to do with my itinerary, except that it does.

Because we are talking about place. Identity. Memory. How we experience the world. How we are seen. How we tell the truth of who we are.

And because it is Pride Month, it feels important to me to say that trans people have always been here. This is not new. The only thing that is changing is whether people are allowed to be seen, named, respected, and heard.

What moved me about Jan Morris’s book was that it was not a book about being trans in Italy. It was a travel memoir, a meditation on a city, and yet her presence and perspective shaped the whole experience of reading it. Trieste shines through her words, but so does she.

I really enjoyed the book. It is a bit of a dry read at times, but in that travel memoir way, and I do recommend it.

The other book I read was Forbidden Bread by Erica Johnson Debeljak, which is about Ljubljana. This one is a memoir by a woman who moved to Slovenia in the early 1990s, right after the fall of Yugoslavia, while the region was still shaped by war and political change.

It gave me historical and cultural context I would not have had otherwise. Slovenia is a very different place now, of course, but reading about that time helped me understand more about the former Yugoslav states, what people lived through, and how much has changed.

So now I am going into this trip with a deeper knowledge of the places I am visiting.

And because I had read those two books, I started wondering what else I could read to prepare.

Once again, I turned to the three LLMs. I have projects set up in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude with the context of the trip, so I asked all three of them to recommend books connected to the places I am going.

They all gave me different answers. Some overlapped. Some were better than others. That will be part of the AI travel book too.

But the literary side also connects to another project I have wanted to do for a while.

Two years ago, during my Europe trip, I had this idea that I would write a travelogue. That trip included Budapest, Vienna, Croatia, and a couple of places in England because it was tied to a conference I used to attend in London.

I planned to write ongoing posts that people could follow as I traveled, and then eventually turn them into a book. I even had the idea that higher-level subscribers would get little gifts from the trip. When I got home, I would send them a small package of things I had picked up along the way.

It did not work out the way I planned.

I posted some of it on Ream, if anyone ever wants to look at it, but it is incomplete. You can find it here: https://reamstories.com/travelwithdanica?storyKey=lwznrzydss&mediaType=ebook I did not do a great job. I did not get subscribers. I also did not promote it very well.

And that is okay.

There is a whole longer story behind why that project did not work out, but the short version is that I still love the idea.

My friend Jewel Allen has written some wonderful little travel books about the places she has visited, and she also has a great book on writing travel memoirs, Rapid Travel: How to Write & Publish a Travel Book Fast (Rapid Release Series 7). Reading her work inspired me to try again.

So while I have this “AI planned my trip” book idea happening, I also want to write a travelogue. I want to write about what I saw, what I experienced, what surprised me, what moved me, and how travel can invite us to connect more deeply with ourselves and the world.

For me, this trip is becoming a pilgrimage of sorts. A pilgrimage into the divine feminine. A pilgrimage into literature. A pilgrimage into creativity. A pilgrimage into the reminder that other cultures, other histories, and other landscapes can reflect parts of ourselves back to us.

I do not yet know what shape the travelogue will take.

Maybe it will be one book about the whole trip.

Maybe it will be one book for each place.

You’ll get to see it all unfold here.

I am also low-key working on a book about Budapest because I have been there multiple times now, and every time I go, I experience the city in a new way.

I remember my second summer there, I was talking to a man who drove a shuttle for one of the places I visited. When I told him it was my second time in Budapest, he was surprised.

He said, “People don’t come back.”

And I thought, why wouldn’t they?

Budapest is amazing.

Yes, I go back for work, but every time I return, I get to experience the country and the people in a new way. I have grown to deeply care about Budapest. It has become one of my favorite places in the world, and I want to share that.

So maybe there will be a Budapest book. Maybe it will be part of this larger project. Maybe it will be its own thing.

Again, stay tuned.

What I do know is that I will be posting as much as I can on Substack while I travel.

I have not been great about writing longer Substack posts lately. Most of what I post has been in Notes. So if you are missing that connection with me and mostly seeing my posts by email, I recommend following me in the app too, because I post Notes there pretty regularly.

A lot of them are me sharing things other people have written that I found meaningful, so if you like that sort of thing, you will probably enjoy following along there.

But for this trip, I am going to try to post more. I will also try to do a few special things for my paid subscribers.

I want to be careful with that because I do not want to fully gatekeep the experience. If you are not a paid subscriber, that is completely okay. You will still get a lot of fun and meaningful things from following along with me.

If you are a paid subscriber, I will have some cute little extras.

And, if you don’t want to commit to subscribing, but want to send something my way, go ahead and click the button below.

Buy me a tea (or a glass of wine!)

One thing I mentioned during my Substack Live the other day is postcards. If you want a postcard, let me know. You don’t have to be a subscriber, or send me anything, I’m happy to send a postcard to anyone. Send me your address, and I will send you one. It may or may not actually be mailed from Europe because I do not know what the logistics will look like. But if nothing else, when I get back, I will send something out.

So that is the plan.

I am going on a big, beautiful, slightly weird trip through Europe.

I am starting in Budapest, spending time at Lake Balaton, going through Vienna, visiting Ljubljana and Lake Bled, heading to Trieste, and ending in Venice.

The trip was partly planned by me, partly planned by AI, and partly shaped by whatever strange combination of logistics, longing, books, trains, lavender, beaches, and divine feminine energy decided to show up.

Some things I already knew I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to go to Lake Bled, so I booked a day trip. I knew I wanted to see Balaton. I knew I wanted water and rest and beauty.

Other parts came from asking AI to help me think through the possibilities. Then I went through and validated as much as I could.

And there are still things I am not sure about. Room to allow for fun surprises on the trip, and experience the things that end up delighting me.

Because even though AI has given me some very full itineraries, I have been clear from the beginning: I want this to be a slow, relaxing vacation.

I do not want to cram as much as humanly possible into every day.

I want space.

I want beauty.

I want to sit by the water.

I want to drink wine.

I want to smell lavender.

I want to walk through old cities and let them speak to me.

I want to read books in the places that inspired them.

I want to see what happens when technology helps me plan a trip, but my own soul gets to decide how I actually experience it.

And, of course, I will report back.

So consider this your official invitation to come along with me.

If you have been to any of these places, Budapest, Balatonfüred, Ljubljana, Lake Bled, Trieste, or Venice, I would love to hear what you loved, what surprised you, and what you think I should not miss.

If you have ever used AI to plan a trip, I want to hear about that too. Did it help? Did it hallucinate wildly? Did it send you somewhere magical? Did it try to send you to a museum that was closed? Please tell me everything.

And if you are here for the slower, soul-filling part of the journey, the books, the divine feminine, the old cities, the lavender, the beach, the trains, the wine, and the question of what happens when technology helps plan a trip but the soul gets to decide how to experience it, I hope you will follow along.

I will be sharing what I can here on Substack, both in posts and Notes, and I would love to have you with me.

Tell me in the comments: which part of this trip are you most curious about?

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This is a quick reminder that I’ll be speaking today on Writing and Healing Through Big Transitions and Recovery at the Create Summit.

This is a topic that means a lot to me because so many of us go through seasons where life changes us, and our writing changes too. We hear a lot about productivity and pushing through, but not enough about what it looks like to care for ourselves while we’re in the middle of heartbreak, burnout, grief, recovery, or reinvention.

In this talk, I’ll be sharing thoughts on how writing can support us through those hard seasons, along with permission to rest, permission to write differently, and permission to let our creative life evolve as we do.

If you’ve been in a season where writing feels different, harder, or more tender than it used to, I hope you’ll join me.

You can register for free here, with paid upgrade options available. If you can’t make it at the time, you can always watch the replay:

https://createsummit2026.heysummit.com/?ac=3CLd3BcA

I’d love to have you there.

Warmly,
Danica

There are seasons of life when everything changes at once. Though sometimes it starts so subtly, you don’t realize it’s happening until you’re in the middle of it.

The life you thought you were building shifts. The roles you’ve carried no longer fit the same way. The things that once came easily suddenly feel heavy, uncertain, or far away. And if you’re a writer, one of the hardest parts can be what happens to your relationship with writing in the middle of it all.

We don’t talk enough about that.

We talk a lot about productivity. We talk about discipline, consistency, mindset, and creativity. We talk about finishing the book, building the platform, staying visible, keeping momentum. But we talk much less about what it means to be a writer when life has knocked the wind out of you.

What do you do when you’re in a season of grief, heartbreak, burnout, upheaval, recovery, or reinvention?

What do you do when the words don’t come the way they used to?

What do you do when the story you were writing no longer feels like the story you’re living?

These are the questions I’ve been sitting with for a long time, not just as a writer, but as a woman learning how to live through change without abandoning herself in the process.

One of the things I’ve come to believe is that writing can still be a companion in those seasons, but it may not look the same as it did before. It may become quieter. More private. Less polished. Less productive in the traditional sense. It may ask you to tell the truth before it asks you to be clever. It may ask you to listen before it asks you to perform.

It may also ask you to rest.

It may ask you to stop forcing the work that no longer fits.

It may ask you to let your voice change because you have changed.

And I think that matters.

I think there is deep value in giving ourselves permission to be writers in a different way when life is tender. Permission to write badly. Permission to journal instead of drafting. Permission to write fragments instead of chapters. Permission to step back from one project and move toward another that feels more honest. Permission to care for ourselves as whole human beings, not just as content-producing machines.

That is what I’ll be speaking about tomorrow in my talk, Writing and Healing Through Big Transitions and Recovery.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever wondered if they were still a writer because life made writing harder. It’s for anyone who has ever felt lost in the middle of change. It’s for anyone who has needed permission to do things differently and to trust that differently does not mean wrongly.

If that sounds like something your heart needs, I’d love to have you there.

It’s a free event, though there are upgrades that I highly recommend you take advantage of! (Full disclosure, I paid for the big package even before I was invited to speak, that’s how much I believe in this event!) Here’s the link (aff link) to sign up:

https://createsummit2026.heysummit.com/?ac=3CLd3BcA

And even if you can’t attend, I hope this serves as a reminder:

You are allowed to rest.

You are allowed to change.

You are allowed to write differently than you used to.

You are allowed to become someone new and bring your writing with you.

I used to think that being a writer meant writing through everything. Good days, bad days, heartbreak, stress, exhaustion, deadlines, doubt. If you were a “real” writer, you found a way to get the words on the page. You pushed through. You stayed disciplined. You kept going because that’s what writers do.

But one of the hardest things about going through a major life transition is realizing that the old rules don’t always work anymore.

When your life falls apart, your writing can fall apart too. Not because you’re lazy. Not because you lack discipline. Not because you suddenly stopped being a writer. But because the person who knew how to write inside your old life might not know how to write inside this new one yet.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I prepare for my talk at Monica Leonelle’s upcoming Create • Expand • Prosper summit. I’ll be speaking on Writing and Healing Through Big Transitions and Recovery, and this is the piece of it I keep coming back to: what do you do when you want to write, but you just can’t?

Not “can’t” in the cute procrastination way. Not “can’t” because you need a better planner, a new word count tracker, or another productivity hack. I mean the kind of can’t where you sit down and your brain goes blank. Or your body tightens. Or the story you used to love suddenly feels like it belongs to someone else. Or the idea of creating anything feels impossible because all your energy is going toward surviving, healing, working, parenting, caregiving, grieving, rebuilding, or just trying to make it through the day.

I don’t think we talk about that enough.

In writing spaces, we talk a lot about consistency. We talk about habits, discipline, deadlines, and momentum. And all of those things matter. I believe in showing up for the work. I believe in honoring the gift. I believe in taking our writing seriously.

But I also believe there are seasons when the most loving thing you can do for your writing is to stop treating it like one more thing you’re failing at.

Sometimes you can’t write because your nervous system is overloaded. Sometimes you can’t write because the story you were telling no longer fits the person you are becoming. Sometimes you can’t write because your creativity has been carrying too much for too long, and it needs care before it can give you anything new.

That doesn’t mean you’re done.

It means something in you is asking to be tended.

I know how scary that is. When writing has been part of your identity for years, the silence can feel like a betrayal. You wonder if you’ve lost it. You wonder if the words are gone for good. You wonder who you are if you are not producing, publishing, creating, finishing, or proving that you still have something to offer.

But what if the question isn’t, “How do I force myself to write again?”

What if the better question is, “What kind of writing can meet me where I am?”

That shift matters.

Because writing during recovery may not look like writing during a productive season. It may not look like a finished chapter, a polished essay, or a thousand words before breakfast. It may look like a few lines in a journal. It may look like voice notes in the car. It may look like making a list of what you’re angry about, what you’re grieving, or what you wish someone understood. It may look like writing one honest sentence and then taking a nap.

That still counts.

Not because every private thought has to become content. Not because your pain has to become a book. But because writing can be a way of staying connected to yourself when everything else feels uncertain.

For me, writing has always been more than a career. It has been how I make meaning. It has been how I understand myself. It has been how I find my way through things that don’t make sense yet. But I’ve also had to learn that writing cannot only be a place where I perform being healed, wise, capable, or inspiring.

Sometimes writing has to be the place where I admit I’m tired.

Sometimes it has to be the place where I say, “I don’t know what happens next.”

Sometimes it has to be the place where I let the old version of me speak, and then let the new version answer.

That is the healing part.

Not that writing magically fixes everything. It doesn’t. But it can help us listen. It can help us notice what we’re carrying. It can help us name the losses we haven’t had time to grieve and the desires we haven’t been brave enough to claim. It can help us understand which dreams still belong to us and which ones we’re allowed to release.

And sometimes, before we can write the next book, we have to write our way back into relationship with ourselves.

That may be the part I care about most.

Because when writers go through big transitions, whether it’s heartbreak, divorce, burnout, grief, illness, career change, identity shifts, or simply realizing that the life they built no longer fits, there can be so much shame around creative disruption. We think we should be able to keep going the way we always have. We think our capacity should stay the same. We think if we were stronger or more disciplined, we’d still be able to produce at the same level.

But healing changes capacity.

Recovery changes capacity.

Transformation changes capacity.

And maybe instead of asking ourselves to return to the writer we used to be, we can begin asking who we are becoming as writers now.

That may mean giving yourself permission to rest without calling it failure. It may mean changing what you write. It may mean writing slower. It may mean stepping away from a project that used to feel right but now feels like an old skin. It may mean exploring a new voice, a new genre, a new form, or a new reason for writing altogether.

It may also mean trusting that the dry season is not the end of the story.

I think that’s the hope I want to offer in this talk. Not a formula. Not a productivity plan that pretends healing is linear. Not a shiny promise that if you journal for ten minutes a day, everything will magically resolve.

Just the reminder that your writing is allowed to change because you are changing.

Your creativity is not a machine. It is a living part of you. And living things need seasons. They need care. They need nourishment. They need time underground before they bloom again.

So if you are in a season where you’re asking, “What if I just can’t write anymore?” I hope you’ll be tender with that question. Don’t use it as a weapon against yourself. Let it become an opening.

Maybe you can’t write the way you used to.

Maybe you can’t write the thing you thought you were supposed to write.

Maybe you can’t write from the old pressure, the old identity, the old version of success, or the old survival patterns.

But maybe there is another kind of writing waiting for you.

A truer one.

A quieter one.

A freer one.

One that does not demand you abandon yourself in order to create.

That’s what I’ll be exploring in my session, Writing and Healing Through Big Transitions and Recovery, at Monica Leonelle’s Create • Expand • Prosper summit. It’s a digital summit for creators who are thinking about how to keep creating, growing, and building sustainable creative lives in a changing world.

You can attend the live sessions for free, and there are replay options if you want to watch on your own schedule.

You can register here:

https://createsummit2026.heysummit.com/?sc=EqLde0AT&ac=3CLd3BcA
[Affiliate Link]

And if writing feels hard right now, I want you to know this: you are not less of a writer because your capacity has changed. You are not behind because your healing needed your attention. You are not broken because the words are coming differently.

You may simply be learning how to write as the person you are becoming.