Very rich of her to ask when there was never really a properly defined destination. There was no roadmap, no coordinates, no clear picture of where we were supposed to end up. My definition of there was, and perhaps still is, largely based on delusion and vibes. It could be a place, a person, a group of people, a feeling, or even the possession of certain material things. So, if she were to ask me whether we had arrived, answering confidently would be quite difficult.

My twenty-year-old self was almost obsessed with the idea of a future self and laying the right foundation for her. It brings tears to my eyes sometimes when I think of that version of me. She was just a girl doing her best with what she had at the time, making decisions with the information available to her and trusting, perhaps a little blindly, that they would lead somewhere worthwhile.

I don’t always give her enough grace.

I tend to look back through the lens of a critic, picking apart the things I did and didn’t do and tracing the consequences all the way to my current self. Missed opportunities. Places I could have gone. People I could have connected with or perhaps avoided. Things I should have known better than to do.

It’s easy to tell yourself you should have known better when you’re looking backward with information you didn’t have at the time. Clarity, I think, is sometimes most visible when it has been fed with time.

And so, if you asked me now whether we’re there yet, I think my answer would be complicated.

Some days, getting out of bed to face the day is difficult. On those days, I stay in bed for so long that the small sparks of motivation I have to do anything meaningful wither before they can turn into action. Yesterday was one of those days, and I’m learning to give myself grace for them.

I still don’t have a definite picture of there. It’s still pretty much based on vibes.

But I do remember some of the questions you used to ask yourself every now and then, almost as a way of anchoring yourself and recharting your course.

• How much are you laughing?

• How connected are you to the people you love? Do you still show up for them, especially when it’s inconvenient?

• How is your relationship with God? (Or should I just move on to the next question?)

• What is your relationship with yourself? Do you treat yourself like someone you’re in love with?

• Do you honour yourself by keeping your word to yourself?

• Do you show up to work and give each day your best, whatever that looks like?

• Do you still hold your values dear?

Don’t ask me about my answers to these questions right now because I’m not entirely sure how you’d feel about them.

Would you be disappointed by how far we’ve drifted?

Or would you be proud that I’m doing my best in spite of everything?

I don’t have an answer.

Some days, it’s easier not to think about you at all because remembering the zest and enthusiasm you had for life can make me feel like I’ve misplaced something along the way. You seemed to believe, with a certainty I don’t think I possess anymore, that things would eventually be blissful and beautiful.

I don’t know when exactly that certainty softened. Maybe life did what life does.

I hope you would be gracious with me, though. I hope you would appreciate that I’m trying because, if I’m being honest, I don’t think we’re there. I don’t even know how close we are.

And perhaps, in that sense, we aren’t so different.

You didn’t really know what you were doing either, but you showed up anyway. The only difference is that you did it with zest, and I do it now with the semblance of a tired adult.

But I’m thinking of you today.

Of the girl who spent so much time trying to build a life for me, even though she had no idea who I would become. And I hope that, even in the slightest way, the person I am today is reflective of you.

We may not be where you thought we’d be.

But perhaps we’re still becoming.

And for now, allow me to borrow from you a little courage, zest, and whimsy to show up as you would.

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I came across this line on my feed a few weeks ago, and for some reason, it got under my skin.

“Joy has a habit of returning.”

Does it?

Maybe the better question is: why does it leave in the first place? Why does it feel so much more absent than present?

Lately, it has felt like playing hide-and-seek with joy, except it seems to enjoy hiding a lot more than being found. It feels almost irresponsible, in a world that constantly reminds us of everything that is broken, to insist on joy. Everywhere you look, there is another reason to despair, another reminder that things are uncertain, another tragedy unfolding in real time. It becomes difficult not to feel like hopelessness is the more sensible response.

I understand, of course, that joy isn’t meant to exist without contrast. We wouldn’t appreciate light if we had never known darkness. Painful seasons make joyful ones feel fuller somehow. I know all that jazz. But what good is that knowledge when you start getting used to joy’s absence? It’s a bit like an absent parent who shows up every few years, expecting applause for making an appearance. That seems like an unfair comparison, but that’s honestly what it has felt like in my head lately.

A while ago, I intentionally practiced Alex Elle’s Joy Spotting. I wanted to make room for joy rather than wait passively for it to arrive. I wanted to position myself to notice and to cultivate it. Lately, though, it has felt harder. The return on investment hasn’t seemed worth it. You do the work of building a little bubble for yourself, trying to protect some softness in a world that often feels sharp around the edges, and then life finds a way to burst it anyway. It almost feels like the world asks, “How dare you try to be happy when everything is going to shit?”

There are days when I feel like I’ve run out of breath chasing joy. And yet, the thought of settling for a gloomy life feels just as unbearable.

Yesterday, I did something incredibly ordinary. I’ve lived in my neighbourhood for about eight months now, but if I’m being honest, I don’t think I’ve really seen much of it. I know the bus routes by heart. I know which supermarket is closest, and I know all 12 stops from mine to my friend’s. And that’s somehow enough to convince me I know the place.

Yesterday, I left the familiar route and went on a spontaneous twenty-minute walk. It took a little while to get out of my head, but once I did, I found myself paying attention to things I had somehow never noticed before. People’s gardens. The plants growing on balconies. The small objects resting on window sills quietly telling stories about the people who lived behind them. I caught myself wondering who they were, what they loved, what their days looked like. It felt good to wonder about something that wasn’t myself.

By the time I got home, something inside me felt different. I hadn’t necessarily been needing more joy. I had been needing more wonder.

I’m beginning to think wonder and joy are inseparable sisters, at least in my world. Wonder invites me to slow down long enough to notice. To pay attention. To approach the world with the kind of curiosity children seem to carry so effortlessly. And maybe that’s where joy quietly waits — not in extraordinary moments, but in ordinary ones that I would have otherwise walked past.

I came back to my journal feeling strangely excited. Earlier that day, I had been in the throes of despair, convinced that life had become too heavy to carry. Twenty minutes hadn’t changed the state of the world or solved anything. But somehow, it had changed the way I was looking at it.

I’m still wondering how to maintain that curiosity in a world that often feels reluctant to be known, because so much of what you uncover can be painful. The more closely we look, the more reasons we seem to find to despair.

But perhaps the opposite is true, too. Perhaps the more closely we look, the more opportunities we have to stumble upon beauty that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Maybe joy really does have a habit of returning. Or maybe wonder simply has a way of leading me back to it.

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That’s been my recentering phrase over the past few weeks.

I’ve been thinking lately that I may have become a little too fixated on the nooks and crannies of my own life and my own being. On the surface, that doesn’t sound like much of a problem because, well, it’s my life. What else would I focus on if not that?

Journaling, as many people who know me know, is something I hold incredibly dear. It has always been where I go to sort through the tangled mess that my thoughts sometimes become. It’s where I carefully unspool them, naming feelings that would otherwise exist as one indistinguishable blob taking up space in my mind. I’ve always considered that a gift. Learning myself has felt like a worthwhile pursuit, and I don’t think I’ll ever regret the years I’ve spent trying to understand who I am beneath all the noise. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering whether the gift of journaling has a shadow.

In my early twenties, I poured so much of myself into my journal. I wanted grounding. I wanted to understand myself. I wanted to know why I did the things I did, why certain things hurt more than others, and why I responded to the world the way I did. I answered countless journaling prompts because I genuinely believed that the more I knew myself, the freer I would become. To some extent, I still believe that.

What I didn’t expect was that there might come a point where looking inward stopped feeling like self-awareness and started looking a little more like self-absorption. I don’t mean that in the self-centered sense. I mean it in the sense that I slowly became the center of almost every observation.

Every uncomfortable interaction became something to analyze. Every awkward conversation became something to replay. Every version of myself needed to be understood before I could move on from it. Somewhere along the way, I became so interested in understanding myself that I forgot there was a whole world existing outside of me, carrying on without waiting for my interpretation.

“Look outside of yourself.”

I’ve had to repeat that phrase to myself more times than I can count.

Leaving home and moving to another man’s land has a way of messing with your mind. It has been a constant reminder that I am different, although I know my mind has a funny way of exaggerating those differences. It fixates on things that probably matter a lot less than I imagine they do.

For a long time, I found myself editing and re-editing the things I wanted to say. I edited how I showed up. I watered down parts of my personality because I was worried I would be too much. At some point, I even convinced myself that the fullest version of me belonged only to the people I’m lucky to love me, and everyone else got a carefully edited version.

As someone who holds authenticity as one of her deepest values, what was the point of becoming smaller just to feel ‘acceptable’? The funny thing is, the problem was never really about how people perceived me. The problem was how I imagined they perceived me. My mind has been working overtime, y’all.

Another thing I’ve been confronting is how easy it is to mistake familiarity for universality. When you’ve spent most of your life around people who share similar values, it’s surprisingly easy to assume those values are simply how the world works. Of course, I’ve always known people are different. I haven’t been under the illusion that everyone thought exactly like me. But knowing something intellectually and living it are two completely different things.

Sometimes I ask myself, “Why are my non-negotiables not as important to another person?” And then I remember that someone else is probably asking the exact same question about me. That realization has been oddly freeing.

Not because I’ve stopped caring about the things I value, but because I’m beginning to accept that my perspective is just that: mine. It’s shaped by the family that raised me, the place I come from, the people who have loved me, the books I’ve read, the painful experiences I’ve survived, and all the little moments that have quietly pieced me together. Someone else’s perspective has been shaped by an entirely different life.

Neither of us gets to claim the view as the view. Only a view.

I think that’s what “look outside of yourself” has really been trying to teach me. Not to stop knowing myself. Not to stop reflecting. Not to stop journaling. But perhaps there comes a point where becoming more yourself also requires becoming a little less consumed by yourself. Where knowing yourself deeply must coexist with genuine curiosity about other people’s inner worlds. Where you put the microscope down every once in a while, lift your head, and remember that everyone else is also trying to make sense of life with the tools they’ve been given.

Oddly enough, that thought has made me lighter. Less anxious about being perceived. Less convinced that every interaction is secretly about me. More willing to let people surprise me and to accept that my perspective isn’t wrong, only wonderfully and inevitably incomplete.

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I’ve been turning this question in many different directions in my head for the past few weeks, and I don’t think I’ve arrived at any specific answer. If anything, I’ve realized that I cannot quite define, by example or by feeling, what happiness means to me as it stands right now. According to Merriam-Webster, happiness means:

(1) a state of well-being and contentment: joy;
(2) a pleasurable or satisfying experience.

But when I think of happiness, I think of something more complete — a state of bliss, unblemished joy, where pain and suffering take a back seat, and I’m not constantly brushing up against existential dread. I’m not even sure that’s realistic, but that’s where my mind goes.

I’d never have expected not to have an answer to the question, “What makes you happy?” It’s the kind of question I wouldn’t have thought twice about before. I would have given the same nicely rehearsed lines that I’ve always known to be true. Happiness, for me, has always meant seeing my people happy, especially when I’m the reason or have a hand in it. It’s being able to have a good laugh with the people I love and care about. It’s being in community. These things still ring true, but I can’t confidently say that they define happiness for me in my current state. And that unsettles me a lot.

I haven’t been sure how to feel about it, because these things have been, more or less, the foundation of my being. They’ve shaped how I understand myself, what I value, and how I show up in the world. But now, my values are changing. The things I hold dear are changing. My ideas and perspective on the world are changing because of how I’m existing and showing up in it now. And to some extent, it feels like I am losing parts of myself, or at the very least, becoming unfamiliar to myself in ways I don’t quite recognize.

I find that I cannot reconcile my old thoughts with the new ones.

Growth is supposed to mean new territories, new horizons, charting new courses —fun and exciting things to try. But it also means disappointing yourself sometimes, surprising yourself in ways you didn’t expect, not being familiar with your new self, and being in quiet conflict with yourself. I don’t think that part is talked about enough.

I’m not sure how to hold all these moving parts together, and so I find myself sitting with more questions than answers. In what ways am I changing? Are these shifts tectonic, or are they smaller, quieter shifts that I’m magnifying because I’m paying closer attention? What does that mean for me? Who am I, then, in the middle of all this?

Two entries ago, I wrote about being tired and the weight of life and living in an all-too-demanding world. I’m beginning to see how connected that is to what I’m feeling now. I’m acknowledging that I see things differently because I’m growing, and because I’m growing, things hold a different value now. The thought of things not meaning the same to me is daunting. I know it’s supposed to also mean a chance to redefine things, to explore, to yield, to find new ways of doing and being. Tell that to this tired adult who is just trying to make sense of life.

I think what unsettles me the most is not just that things are changing, but that I don’t yet know what is replacing them. If the things that once defined happiness for me no longer feel sufficient, then what does? What am I moving towards? Or am I just in a space in between, where things are loosening before taking new shape?

I don’t have a neat answer to the question I started with. If anything, I’m sitting with the discomfort of not knowing, and with the quiet awareness that things are shifting, whether I fully understand it or not. Maybe, for now, that is enough.

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Last week, while walking through the streets of Prague, a statue caught my attention. I should say that I’m not someone who feels particularly skilled at interpreting visual art - statues, paintings, and the like. But this one tugged at me in a way I couldn’t quite explain.

It was a statue of a woman sitting, embracing her knees, with a soft smile on her face. There was something about the ordinariness of it. A woman smiling, almost like she was at peace with herself, with her life, maybe.

Was she in love?
Had she just received good news?
Was she simply content?

I’ve been sitting with this image, and the question it left me with: what was so special about this? And maybe more importantly, what does my being drawn to it say about me? Why am I so drawn to deeply human things?

I was first introduced to memoirs when I picked up reading again in 2021. Elaine Welteroth’s More Than Enough was my first. It opened me up to people being vulnerable—sharing their stories, their beginnings, the unpleasant parts, the highs, and the lows. Just baring it all out. I connected deeply with how human it all felt.

Since then, I’ve read quite a number of memoirs, and what continues to strike me is how universal the human experience is. Of course, there are differences: culture, social background, and race. Of course, those nuances matter, but what they signal for me is that, at the core, we are more alike than we are different.

We wake up to days stretched out before us. Each day comes with its own challenges. And still, we live. We try. We make something of it (or we don’t), but we are living all the same.

I don’t know if I’m expressing this exactly how I want to, but it’s something like this: each of us is living out our own small life moments. Doing things that seem mundane, almost insignificant, but somehow those very things are what make life what it is.

I love getting to know people, especially from a distance, through writing or quiet observation.

What makes your eyes light up a little more during a conversation?
What’s that one topic you could talk about endlessly, even if you’re afraid of crowds?
What’s that one movie that made you cry yourself senseless?
Have you ever had an out-of-body moment? One where everything felt suspended?

Maybe this is all very standard, just part of getting to know people. But it fascinates me all the same; how different we are, and how the small, ordinary details of our lives are what make us uniquely ourselves.

There’s a poem by Wendy Cope I’ve been mulling over for some time now. It feels close to what I’m trying to say.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

There’s something about how she captures the quiet joy of ordinary things. The quiet kind of happiness that comes from being fully present.

I feel it when I lose myself in simple moments.
The wind hitting my face at the beach.
Sharing silly laughs with friends while cooking.
Taking a walk with my partner, hand in hand, and talking about everything and nothing.
Discussing books and fictional characters, with friends, as if our lives depend on it.
Hearing my parents and siblings laugh, especially when I know I caused it.

As a reflective person, I’ve been practising noticing. Catching myself in these moments. Pausing, even briefly, to recognize how precious they are. Part gratitude. Part wonder. Part quiet awe that life, in its own way, is kind enough to offer these moments. Because a lot of life is lived in the ordinary. Or maybe, life is the ordinary.

And so, I want to hold on to this. This childlike wonder, this attentiveness to small things. Maybe this is how I hold life. Not as something grand or distant, but as something tender. Something made up of moments like these. Something worth noticing.

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Lately, I’ve been trying to understand why this feeling feels so dominant. Why “tired” keeps making an appearance. I don’t think it’s physical. It feels mental. Foundational, almost.

A question I wrote to myself recently:
How do I quench mental fatigue when I’m only familiar with tending to the physical?

In Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson, there’s a line that reads “tired to the depths of my being.” That line has been echoing in my mind because it captures the feeling exactly. Not surface-level tired. Not “I need a nap” tired. But tired in a way that feels bone-deep.

This is not an isolated feeling. From the sheer amount of information we process in a day, to the uncertainty that seems to shape the future, to watching tragedy unfold in real time — existing right now requires stamina. To be human in the present day is exhausting in itself.

To make sense of it all, I’ve been making lists of everything that exhausts me.

I’m tired of having to show up as my “best self” every day. For a long time, I’ve tried to soften that pressure by telling myself that my best doesn’t always mean 100%. Sometimes, best looks like 5%, or 20%, or 85%. But lately, even that feels like a performance. Because I’m tired of showing up.

Can I sit back and not participate in existing for a little while? Not in a dramatic way. Not maliciously. I sometimes wish there were an option to opt out of human-ing. Maybe make me a tree for a few weeks. Let me stand still. I’ll come back when I’m ready.

I’m tired of scarcity and hopelessness being sold to us as ambition. As “drive.” As “hustle culture.” As constant self-optimization. I’m tired of being told to dream bigger while the ground beneath those dreams feels increasingly unstable. As a young person without the cushion of generational wealth, it’s exhausting to navigate career building, maintaining relationships, staying healthy, and trying to be a decent human being all at once. This isn’t to say good things aren’t possible. I believe they are. I believe I’ll achieve what’s meant for me. But sometimes, it’s harder when the thing you’re reaching for feels like a shell of the thing itself, when opportunity feels narrower, and stability feels like a luxury.

I’m also tired of every day having to mean something. This one is on me.

I built the habit of setting daily intentions, making small to-do lists, and ensuring each day contributes to a larger future. It sounds healthy. It can be healthy. But I’ve noticed how easily it turns into pressure. Pressure to optimize. Pressure to move forward. Pressure to justify my existence with productivity.

Even God rested on the seventh day.

Meanwhile, I’m here trying to make sure every day pushes me closer to a life goal that isn’t even fixed.

I say I want fluidity. I say what matters most is to love and be loved and be a good human.

Yet I structure my days like I’m chasing a finish line.

I’m realizing how much energy I spend taking care of my future self, while denying my present self the pleasure of nothingness. Of unstructured time. Of wandering thought.

One thing I want to practice is scheduling real rest. Not recovery disguised as productivity. Days that don’t move anything forward. Days that don’t justify themselves. Just rest.

I’m tired of being apart from the people I love because life makes the most sense in community. In shared laughter. In cooking and eating together. In staying up too late and taking turns playing songs, we think the other person needs to hear immediately.

I’m tired of mourning a world where I miss so much of life, trying to make something of life. Growth and stretching, they call it.

Lately, I’ve been mulling over a line I read from Suleika Jaouad’s memoir: “Until death, it’s all life.” If that’s true, then I don’t want to spend my life perpetually tired, always reaching for some future version of living. Rest needs to be part of the life I’m building, not something I earn at the end of it.

I know fatigue is inevitable, and it’s yet another proof of my existence.

I don’t know that I’ll always be tired. But I do know that I don’t want exhaustion to be the dominant record of my days.

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Still, there’s something comforting about new beginnings. I like knowing that regardless of what is and what has been, I can always start again with renewed and focused intention. I’m cringing a little as I write this because I sound like one of those “aspire to perspire” folks. But honestly, this practice works for me. So I let myself have it.

For the past few years, I’ve picked a word for each new year. Think of it as a theme. There isn’t a strict method to how I choose these words. In the final days of the year, I usually reflect on how it’s been—what I did or didn’t do, whether I kept my word to myself, what changed, what didn’t. I sit with the behaviours and mindsets I carried and think about what might carry me forward instead.

It sounds serious when I explain it, but it really isn’t. This kind of inventory-taking just helps me recenter. With the way my mind works, it sets the tone.

My word for 2025 was Whole. In every aspect of my life, I wanted to show up as my authentic self. It was also a reminder that I am not fundamentally incomplete. The world has a way of picking and poking at you, making you overly aware of your flaws, convincing you that you’re always one step away from being “better.” Like there’s always something else to fix.

Whole was my way of pushing back against that. A reminder that I am complete as I am, in any given moment. That I don’t always need to be trapped in the loop of self-improvement. To some extent, that word nudged me toward being fully present—toward allowing myself to exist without constantly trying to improve the experience of existing.

For this big year of 2026, choosing a word felt harder.

The word kept appearing in my journal in different ways, long before I accepted it. I resisted it for a while, mostly because choosing it meant confronting some uncomfortable truths about myself. Eventually, I stopped fighting it.

The word is Yielding.

Yielding as in being open.
Yielding as in being flexible and malleable.
Yielding as in allowing the process to show me the way.
Yielding as in loosening my grip on control every now and then.
Yielding as in not being in my own way.
Yielding as in allowing myself to suck at things before getting good at them—or not getting good at them at all.

This was a difficult word to choose because it requires softness, where I usually default to rigidity. It asks me to sit with fear instead of trying to outplan it. I found myself asking one question over and over again: uncomfortable expansion or comfortable diminishing?

Growth is scary, yes—but the feeling of being stuck scares me more. So I yielded. Or at least, I’m trying to.

I think part of why this process felt so confronting is that self-awareness, when unchecked, can become limiting. I like to think I know myself pretty well. I know what I like, what I don’t. I know what excites me and what drains me. And while that knowledge is valuable, I’m realizing how easily it can harden into certainty.

Sometimes I don’t open myself up to new experiences because I “know myself,” and history suggests they’re not for me. But I’m learning that this confidence can be an illusion. A subtle way of staying safe. Staying familiar.

So when I say Yielding, I mean remaining open—to being surprised, to being wrong, to discovering new versions of myself. Not abandoning self-awareness, but holding it a little more loosely. Allowing the universe to meet me in ways I didn’t plan for. Beautiful ones. Messy ones. All of it.

If you’ve read this far and are also in the habit of choosing a word for the year, and you’re comfortable sharing, I’d love to know what word you’ve chosen for 2026.

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Since childhood, I’ve always needed an outlet. I grew up keeping so much of myself to myself, but writing has always been my way through. I’ve kept a diary since 11 or 12, and have only ever truly known myself in the pages of my journal.

It’s where I am my most unfiltered self—where I leave nothing uncovered. It is where I understand who I am, what I feel, and how I think about things—which, to me, is one of the most valuable things in life.

I don’t know exactly where I am in my writing journey, but I do know this: I’m ready to share my thoughts. I admire anyone who can reflect deeply and put their feelings and thoughts into words. In many ways, writing is community care. The words of strangers have saved me more times than I can count.

I’ve always been fascinated by memoirs. At what point do people decide they’re ready to write about their lives? Is it after overcoming their biggest hurdles, making it a celebration of survival? Or do they write while still in the thick of it, as a reminder to keep going?

These are questions I grapple with every time I reflect on sharing my own experiences. How much of myself do I want to reveal? Do I need to have gone through something extraordinary—or even traumatic—to be “qualified”? Everyone’s story is worth telling, but I’ve often wondered who my writing would resonate with the most.

At approximately 11:45 p.m. on the 2nd of February, I felt an undeniable urge to write the first draft of this post. And as soon as I finished, I just knew—I was finally ready to share my thoughts publicly beyond the usual book chatter. I’m so looking forward to this journey!

This will be a monthly-ish newsletter—a documentation of showing up, speaking out, in figuring things out as I go. I’m excited and terrified in equal measure, but I refuse to hold myself back.

Things That Have Kept Me Alive Lately

Woman, Eat Me Whole by Ama Asantewa Diaka

I’m reading this poetry collection for the third time now - and every reread feels like a warm hug. It’s like running to a friend in hard times and not having to say anything because they know and understand it all. I’ve replayed “Reminder” a poem from this collection in my mind for the longest time;

“A love recipe hangs down my mother’s neck

She loves without a manual

Muscle memory syncs her heart with her mind

And makes her a metaphor for softness

When pain blurs love

I look at her and remember to breathe” - pg. 18

A Review on Instagram

Alex Elle’s How We Heal

I first read this book in 2023 and as life would have it, I have reason to go back to reading this. While I’m not exactly enthused about what led me here, I’m very grateful for Alex’s voice and a chance to make peace with the past and move forward.

Poetry Unbound Episode on Diannely Antigua’s Another Poem about God, but Really it’s about Me

It feels like the world is crumbling more and more each day, and holding on to our sense of self and sanity can feel harder than ever. In times like these, the little things that keep us anchored matter even more.

So, I’d love to hear from you—what’s been keeping you steady, bringing you comfort, or making life a little more bearable lately?

Journal prompt: What are the things keeping you alive lately?