This past weekend was extremely busy. I had just finished setting up my new podcast studio, performed stand-up, and had two out-of-town guests staying with me. Three activities that, combined, should legally require a nap. By Sunday, when everything finally slowed down, I looked at my friend mid breakfast sandwich bite, who was still sitting across from me and randomly asked:

“Are you happy?”

Not “did you sleep ok?” or “do you want a coffee.” Happy. Like I was conducting an audit.

I’m not entirely sure why I asked her that.

I’ve spent the better part of the last six years, since my divorce, thinking about what makes a good life. If you had asked me back then what my life would look like by now, I probably would have told you I’d be remarried. Or at least partnered. Living some version of a more traditional life. The kind where we go to Costco together and eat all the samples so we aren’t hungry when we get home.

I am not.

And somewhere along the way, instead of making me less interested in happiness, this has made me almost obsessively curious about it. Like, what is it actually? Because if you know me at all, you know everything I do comes with a research phase.

I look at the people around me, the married ones, the single ones, the ones with the beautiful houses and the impressive careers and the family Christmas cards where everyone is wearing some version of the same outfit, and I wonder: How does it actually feel to be you?

Because I know we spend an extraordinary amount of energy making our lives look happy. But are we? Or have we just gotten really good at performing it?

Later that day, I started wondering if maybe I’d asked my friend the wrong question.

What even is happy? I know it’s a feeling. But so is sadness, anger, and boredom but we don’t really like to talk about those. When all of these other feelings are so easily brushed off, we so obsessed with this one in particular. I get that it feels good, but there has to be more to it than that. And maybe, happiness shouldn't even be the goal.

Could part of our unnecessary suffering be that because as a society we’ve deemed this one the ideal emotion now we think we need to be happy all the time? Like it’s some sort of subscription service and we’re behind on payments.

I know I feel happiness sometimes. When I see the look on my son’s face after he wins a chess game. When I can tell my daughter genuinely finds something funny. The first two bites of a really good chocolate cake. (After that, it’s kind of diminishing returns, you know.) Apparently this has actually been studied. We enjoy the first few bites the most.

But we keep eating, don’t we?

We are looking for something. Happiness, we’ve decided, must lie a the bottom of that damn cake. Although anyone who’s finished the whole cake knows that’s not true. Sometimes the search for happiness gives us a stomach ache.

So maybe the better question is: are you content?

Not floating around in a state of ecstatic bliss. Just content. Personally, I’ll take inner contentment over “happy” any day. Happiness just hasn’t been all that trustworthy.

A friend recently said to me about someone, “He looks like one of those sad people.”

“Yeah,” I said immediately. No follow-up questions.

We all know those people. The sad people. The ones who always seem to be down. The Charlie Brown people.

I have no doubt those people have a legitimate reason to be sad. Maybe awful things have happened to them. Awful things do happen. Some people objectively have it harder than others.

I’ve come to believe that the people who seem most content are not necessarily the people to whom nothing bad has happened. They’re the people who refuse to let everything that has happened to them become who they are. I’m not interested in pretending suffering isn’t real. We all have ours. And some people have more than their fair share.

You know those people you can tell want the suffering trophy? Whenever you’ve had a hard day, they have had it harder? I’ve come up with a new move. I just give them the award right away. I call it the Suffering Trophy.

Oh God. That sounds awful. I don’t know how you go on living.

You win.

But I’ve also started to consider that the people who make life “look easy” are the same ones we assume haven’t experienced trauma or loss or heartbreak. But they might not have had easier lives at all. They just might be better at not narrating theirs out loud. Maybe they’ve just stopped organizing their lives around what happened to them. Maybe they aren’t obsessed with happiness. They are just tired of fighting with reality.

I don’t really know who I would be without the challenges I’ve encountered, and I don’t think I care to know. From my perspective, plenty of people have had it easier than I have. And, plenty of people have had it much harder.

Maybe none of that actually matters.

Because here we are, each of us, in the life we have, dealing with whatever is directly in front of us. And yet we spend so much time looking sideways.

I know I have. As children, we want the toy, we get the toy, we want the next toy. Then it’s the relationship, the career, the body.

We keep changing the object, but the sentence stays the same:

If I could just have _, then I would be happy.

Except we also know that happiness doesn’t work like that. Happiness doesn’t like when we rely on it too much, apparently. It’s a bit like a cat.

What I’ve found stays , or at least what has stayed for me more reliably, is the increasing realization of who I actually am. The witness of all things part of me. The me without the labels. And I think so much of our suffering comes from the distance between the life we have and the life we think we should have.

I know a lot about this.

At some point, we have to surrender the life we thought we wanted to let the life that’s waiting to live through us emerge.

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Which sounds very beautiful and spiritual until you’re actually asked to do it. Surrender means giving up the picture before you know what is going to replace it. It means giving up control. Or the illusion of it, which frankly, was doing a lot of heavy lifting for me emotionally.

I’m beginning to understand that there is a particular flavor of suffering that comes from insisting that life conform to our ideas about it. Kind of like showing up to a restaurant with your own menu.

Maybe contentment begins when we stop arguing with what is.

When we organize our lives around outer things, we hand over our happiness over to circumstances. To relationships. To accomplishments. To the chocolate cake. We are outsourcing the one job we are supposed to keep.

We live focused on gaining things instead of slowly discovering who we are already underneath all the gaining.

I’ve often wondered why we seem to require an epic failure to get there. Why not come in to the world just knowing?

Story. We are obsessed with a story. And who doesn’t love a good story? Triumph and Setback. On repeat forever. It’s our own little reality show where we are the leads.

You reach a plateau. You fall from grace. You climb again, except this time you reach somewhere you couldn’t have reached without the fall. That’s the evolution. We all know this on some level. Yet we act surprised everytime. I think the surprise is part of the act. If we knew, the realization wouldn’t be as sweet.

My meditation teacher often says, “Take your happiness on an excursion.”

He means be the happiness. Don’t go looking for it.

I know this. I have a daily practice that puts me in touch with that place twice a day. And yet I open my eyes and life rushes in and I still tend to forget.

I still occasionally fall for the idea that the right person or opportunity is going to fix something in me that actually isn’t broken. It’s just human. Perhaps the sweetness of life isn’t that we arrive here already knowing our nature and remain perfectly satisfied with everything around us. The sweetness is in the remembering. We look outside ourselves. We come back.

We need the contrast, apparently. Because if we were only love, how would we ever know that we are if we don’t know the opposite? We know ourselves through the other and it’s through the contrast that we can truly know our true nature.

I think this whole strange human experience is the divine experiencing itself through a million different faces, forgetting what it is just long enough to have the exquisite experience of remembering. And the strangest thing is, I don’t know that I would trade this life for the one I thought I was supposed to have.

I certainly wouldn’t trade the person I’ve become living it.

That is being content to me.

So I don’t think I want to ask people if they’re happy anymore. Happiness comes and goes like WiFi. What I really wanted to know when I looked at my friend that Sunday was something I think I’ve been asking myself for the last six years:

Can you love the life that’s here, even when it doesn’t look like the one you ordered?

Can you eat up that idea like you do the chocolate cake? I have a feeling happiness is more likely found at the bottom of that wonderful dish.

The other day I was getting a Thai Massage. I was folded up like a Murphy bed, someone standing on my back, and somewhere in there, I finally landed the punchline to a joke I’d been working on for weeks. The punchline was for my upcoming comedy set, where I discuss God, meditation and my weird childhood hobbies.

I find myself having these “shower thoughts” a lot lately. It’s like as soon as I give my brain permission to not need to figure it out, something takes over.

This is, apparently, just how I’m built.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering who I am. It’s been a question that has been at the center of my searching since I was a little girl. I’ve always been a meaning maker, which has been a blessing and a curse.

Am I spiritual or irreverent? Deep or funny? Someone who meditates twice a day or someone who loves 90’s hip hop?

The answer for me seems to always be yes.

I have never wanted to pick a lane. I don’t think I even could if I tried. So I’m certainly not going to do that on Substack. I also don’t think a great life happens in lanes either.

I like to write about why I can’t stop analyzing people who don’t deserve the analysis, the version of motherhood nobody puts on a greeting card, and whatever ridiculous thing happened that week.

This may sound a lil bit scattered, but I don’t think it is.

After years of personal growth and what I like to call A LOT of research, I’ve come to believe one thing:

How we relate to this issue, is the issue.

The circumstances themselves are always changing. One year it’s my relationship. Another, a friendship. Then it’s a child. Next it’s my body, money, or some person I just met who has suddenly hijacked the entire nervous system. Etc. Forever.

The circumstances are always masquerading as the “thing” but I’ve come to learn the circumstances are actually just the vehicle. It’s just the thing life happens to be using at that moment to show us where we need to focus the healing.

The boyfriend is the vehicle. The difficult child is the vehicle. The friendship ending is the vehicle. Whatever you can’t stop thinking about at 2 am is the vehicle.

What really fascinates me is what happens inside of us once the vehicle arrives.

And that bus is never late.

Do we numb ourselves from our own lives or do we choose to engage in whatever messy, uncomfortable way is available to us now?

Or my personal favorite; Do we know something and then spend six weeks constructing an airtight case for why we don’t actually know it or do we have the courage to act on what we know?

I have done all of the above with remarkable enthusiasm.

I used to think the goal of all of this personal growth and healing was eventually reaching some magical point where I would stop having issues. I’ll let you know as soon as that happens. ;)

I have a theory that we are basically in some version of Earth School. Maybe we get one lifetime to work it out. Maybe we get twenty thousand. I genuinely don’t know, and increasingly “ I don’t know” is one of my favorite answers for all spiritual questions.

I’m beginning to think the only thing that really matters is:

Am I actually here for the life that I'm in now?

There are a few core things I keep coming back to. The gap between what we know and what we choose to do. The multiple and ever increasing creative ways we abandon ourselves. The way relationships of any kind reveal us. Peace, attention and what happens when life refuses to cooperate.

And mostly the fact that it’s all pretty damn hilarious.

I’m still getting walked on, both literally and figuratively. Still landing punchlines mid-Murphy bed position. I have come to accept that I am both spiritual and irreverent and completely unwilling to pick a lane.

I am so happy to be writing here, but I am mostly SO glad you’re here! Along for the ride, in whatever vehicle you have chosen today. Honk Honk!

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And let me start by saying I'm not particularly religious, though I do find the idea of an omnipresent authority figure kind of soothing. I promise I’ll make it short and sweet and that at the end I won’t try to sell you a nervous system regulation course.

I was walking in an ancient town and I saw a church up the hill. It was almost as if it was floating on the horizon. As I got closer I knew with strange certainty that you only have in dreams, that I had to go in. It was empty, and I thought maybe I’d just sit in the pews for a bit and soak up the sacredness.

As I got closer to the front of the church, I noticed a man sitting on one of the benches. I sat beside him and as soon as my buns hit the seat I felt this extreme peace wash over my body.

Woooosh.

I dropped in, and I thought to myself. THIS is what I want. THIS is the feeling I want in a relationship.

The man turned to me like I spoke out loud and I realized it was Christ. (Yes, the Jesus one.)

He said, “ This is you, I’m not doing this.” and then turned back to face the front of the church.

Yes, Jesus really looked at me and said, “Ma’am this is on you.”

And then I woke up and probably brushed my teeth and took my kids to school.

I have often thought about this experience at random times in my day.

Because I think for most of my life I misunderstood peace.

I have lived a life of extremes. I once broke a 30 day raw cleanse fast with a martini and a plate of fried shrimp. I have danced on tables and I have spent weeks meditating in India. I would have profound spiritual experiences and walked right back in to terrible relationships.

So I began to assume peace was what happened when nothing was wrong. Those tiny moments between crisis or the roughly 40 minutes a day or so I would meditate.

If you asked me years ago, I’d say something like peace is the absence of chaos.

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After years of meditation, and recovering from an almost addiction to chaos and chaotic people as a way to bolt from my own life, I’m realizing peace is what remains when something just is.

People tell us to protect your peace. And I think there’s some truth to that. If we can make decisions about who and what we spend our time doing our life will naturally unfold in away that feels more peaceful overall.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a type of peace so fragile that another person’s behavior can take it from me in an instant.

I don’t mean tolerating mistreatment. You can leave. You can say no. You can be furious. But true peace shouldn’t require you to arrange the entire world so nothing activates you.

I used to think peace was a life without chaos. Now, I think peace is knowing I don’t have to leave myself when shit gets real.

Alot of our suffering is created by our insistence that reality should be different than it is. I say to my kids all the time “ When you argue with reality you lose”

(they love that)

But we love to argue, distract, and fight with it, don’t we? It gives us something to do other than sit in whatever reality is asking us to sit in. When we are fighting that we get to exit what is really going on for us. The uncomfortable feelings of being alive.

It shouldn’t be this way, It’s not fair, I should have been treated better!

Maybe.

Probably.

But now what?

You’re still there, with those same circumstances. And your body isn’t asking for no conflict ever, it’s asking you to stay. It’s asking that you don’t leave yourself. That you love yourself enough to let yourself be with whatever it is in that moment.

And then I go back to the dream…to where I think the most Universal version of Christ exists…

When I sat down. He didn’t ask how I was doing… Or what was going on ..or if I’d just had a fight with ex-husband before peace was extended.

What I felt in the dream wasn’t happiness. Nothing had been solved. Nobody promised me that nothing painful would happen. He didn't look at me and say, “ well figure it out, make your life peaceful already” There was a meaning much softer in his words, “This is you.”

This IS you. This is your birthright.

A sense that underneath all of it, the chaos, the pain, all the sense of injustice in the word, whatever came, whatever left there was something I couldn’t lose.

We have a saying as meditators, take it as it comes, and then we go a bit further.

As it comes take it.

We don’t need a perfectly regulated nervous system. We don’t need everyone to behave the way we want them to. We don’t need to try and control every last detail of our lives to feel safe and to feel peace.

We just need the ever increasing knowledge that whatever happens, we have what it takes to not leave ourselves.

I used to protect my peace. Now i’m realizing i’m becoming it.

A cow looked at me with what I can only describe as spiritual concern.

Not about my children.

About my boyfriend.

I wasn’t checking to see if he was okay. I was checking to see whether I needed to get ahead of his feelings. Send reassurance, smooth things over. You know, make myself a little smaller, a little more available, a little less happy to be on a trip he never wanted me to take in the first place.

I had spent the afternoon meditating on peace.

And yet, somehow I was still very much on call for someone else’s chaos.

Something changed for me this year, and I’ve been holding back telling y’all about it. Which is unlike me, because I’ve kind of made a career out of oversharing. It’s a little awkward and slightly embarrassing, which means I’m obviously going to tell you everything.

The good news- for all of us- is that I didn’t change because I had to learn something new.

It’s because I finally ran out of ways to ignore what I already knew.

For most of my adult life I was the one people came to for advice. I’ve been the solid one, the stable one, the peaceful one. I’ve stepped away from dancing on tables at bachelorette parties to complete my afternoon meditation.

I can explain the difference between intuition and fear.

If I’m being completely honest, I have just enough charisma to accidentally start a cult.

The problem was almost never that I didn’t know what to do. The problem was I wasn’t doing it.

My inner world was full of wisdom.

My outer life - was another story. A limited series, you could say.

I knew what peace felt like. I just wasn’t choosing it consistently. I preferred small visits.

Over and over, I’d override the quiet voice inside me in exchange for intensity, chemistry or potential, or the hope that this time it would be different.

It showed up in both my romantic relationships and also my friendships. It showed up in getting involved in other people’s chaos, dysregulation, and hours of scrolling through lives that weren’t mine. I was choosing all this all as a way to helicopter out of my own life. No destination. Just an extremely expensive refusal to land.

I wasn’t choosing love or belonging, I was chasing distraction. Literally anything that kept me from having to fully be inhabiting my own life.

I wasn’t outsourcing my worth.

I was outsourcing my knowing.

Then one night, I asked for something different. And the old saying, be careful what you wish for rang true, apparently, because sometimes the answer arrives as demolition.

Very on-brand for the universe. Questionable bedside manner.

I asked for a relationship that supported my work. I asked for relationships that matched the life I said I wanted. The level of honesty and peace that I worked so hard to create.

And everything that was not that fell away.

Almost over night, everything I’d been trying not to see became impossible to ignore.

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What followed wasn’t peaceful or particularly enlightened. Relationships that I was trying to preserve became impossible to keep explaining away. People I love disappointed me. Mostly I disappointed myself. I had to finally admit that some of what I’d been calling love and potential was actually me abandoning myself with excellent PR.

One man in particular gave me a masterclass in inconsistency, which was generous of him.

There were so many moments when part of me wanted to return to the version of the story I was ignoring. I’m not sure it hurt less, I was just better at being uncomfortable there.

Unfortunately, awareness has a terrible return policy.

For a long time I thought I just needed to read more books, have more therapy, more wisdom, more teachers. If I could just optimize my healing and HEAL MORE, I could solve it.

I finally realized insight doesn’t end a pattern. Suffering does.

Knowledge does not change our patterns, action does.

Knowledge is for action.

I didn’t need another answer. I needed the courage to act on the ones I already had.

These days I’m less interested in collecting wisdom and more interested in living like I already have enough. Less interested in optimizing myself and more interested in trusting myself. I no longer try to bypassing pain and I try to listen sooner. This is mildly inconvenient, because I was very good at buying books. Listening to myself does not guarantee a pain free life.

I no longer have to add the pain of betraying myself to whatever life is already asking me to walk through.

That’s the gap I’m trying to close.

I’m writing because I spent years overriding myself. I started this Substack because if I can shorten that journey for even one person, that’s enough.

Here’s to true peace.

The inner and the outer kind.

And ideally both at the same time.

I intentionally made zero plans. This was incredibly hard as someone who likes to curate her kid-free weekends like I’m on parole.

I’ve been divorced for six years and every other week, my kids go to their dad's. Monday to Monday. Seven whole days to fill my time, ya’ll.

Turns out, I'm incredibly talented at not being alone with myself. Not because I'm afraid at being alone. I’m actually really good at being alone. I’m just even better at finding things to do. I was booked and busy. I was FINE!!!!!!

So I did what any emotional stable person would do, I deleted all of the distractions. I started noticing something weird. At some point I realized I had become completely incapable of just existing. I realized I had turned my entire life into a self-improvement side quest. The algorithm was basically my project manager.

I didn’t think ahead too much when I made the decision to stop at all at once. In hindsight, maybe I should have slowly withdrawn from my dopamine. So now, every other week, I have seven days with genuinely nothing between me and the silence. I honestly sometimes find myself saying out loud “Whatever will we do with the time?” in a formal British accent.

It was Sunday, the day of the Lord. The day of all days were you meant to relax and enjoy. I had one part of that equation. I woke up with a full day of nothing ahead of me, and I'll admit, to a lot of married people with kids this probably sounds like a dream. But divorced parents know: when you don't have someone coming home eventually, it's a different animal.

Part of what makes alone time enjoyable is that it ends. Honestly, that might be what makes most things enjoyable. Think about how good a massage feels. Now think about it not ending.

I know. Brutal.

So there I was, in my condo with shit to do.

Here you are in your stupid life, which to be fair is the only one you’ve got, but here you are eating your stupid little sandwich at your stupid table, and you're alone. What do you want to do with the rest of your stupid little day?

The feelings started in my stomach and then started welling up behind my eyes almost immediately. That thick, embarrassing intimacy, just from the thought of eating a sandwich alone without narrating it to anyone. Nothing to read. No one across the table. Nothing to post and caption "best sandwich ever." No one to witness me. Just me and some deli meat. My own body and thoughts, showing up for a meal.

What am I, an animal?

So naturally, I started to cry. You know the kind. The kind of cry that's about nothing and everything, no specific grief attached, just a feeling desperately looking for an exit. The only way out was through my eyes and onto my now-soggy bread. Salty ass bread, too. But here's the part that actually surprised me, I didn't reach for anything. In fairness, there was nothing to reach for because I deleted everything like a maniac. If I'd had one of those apps in my pocket, I would have helicoptered right out of that feeling so fast and right into a different kind of despair. Hinge.

I’ve always had an irrational fear that if really let myself feel something, I’d never come back from it. I’m different than every other human. I know, dramatic. It would fill the room, then the house, and eventually my neighbors would call down from 5 to complain about the water damage.

Spoiler alert. I didn’t reach Season 2 of my meltdown.

Instead I just sat there. Crying. And for the first time in a long time.. I didn’t leave.

Somewhere in the middle of crying I had this weird thought. Maybe intimacy isn’t something another person gives to us. Maybe we give it to ourselves by not bolting. And in that moment, I realized I've spent years borrowing other people's lives so I wouldn't have to sit in the quiet of my own.

We all do it. We borrow someone else's vacation off of a screen, someone’s wedding. Hell, we even borrow someone’s nervous breakdown. Complete with good lighting and a tripod.

Somewhere along the way I started believing that if I just found the right work out…or planner.. or morning routine. I’d finally get it, Get what? I’m not sure. The internet has slowly sold us this idea that if we just obtain one more thing, we will be blissfully happy. And distraction is the ultimate outsourcing. You hand your attention to someone else's story but you leave your own sitting right there, unread.

Somewhere between crying in my apartment and wondering if I’d become emotionally dependent on strangers’ vacations, I started thinking about the phrase paying attention.

This week, my attention having nowhere else to go, went to the only place left.

My own wildly complicated but beautiful life.

Through the ridiculous tears of a solo distraction free lunch I realized something in the silence. When you love someone, you notice them.

When you love yourself, you stay at the stupid little table and finish your stupid little sandwich.

I deleted Instagram about five weeks ago because I was starting to feel like it was eating me alive. Like many of us, I found myself endlessly scrolling not just in my downtime. I was scrolling at stop lights, on walks, before bed, within seconds of opening my eyes, when someone I loved was talking. And yes, sometimes on the toilet.

I was turning into my teenage daughter, the sound of a popular reel song playing behind me on a loop as I walked through my house.

How many times have I watched this? Yes.

I’ve heard the definition of addiction is a narrowing of the things that make us feel pleasure. This was starting to happen to me — meanwhile an entire shelf of books sat there, spines out, silently judging me every time I walked by with my phone in my hand instead.

A few days ago I thought about downloading it again just to see — I don’t actually know what to see — what the latest skincare craze was? A supplement I missed and definitely needed? Some celebrity’s wedding who entirely consisted of other celebrities?

And I felt it in my body. Like a text from a toxic ex. My body was like no, bitch.

So naturally, I downloaded it. But just for a second. Enough time for me to go in and go, “ok, there’s actually nothing I’m actually missing.”

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See, the internet doesn’t just sell us products it sells us identities. I used to make a living as an influencer. I was early into the Instagram game, back when it felt fun and not everyone was a personal brand. I was fancy free, changing outfits in parking lots and writing funny captions. These were the glory days, back before everyone had a linktree, a podcast, and a philosophy that was going to most definitely change your life.

And still. There are very real things that I miss. I miss sending my long distance friend Hayley a wordless video of a capybara, no context, just an unspoken agreement that it means something. I miss sending Heather a ridiculous reel and her knowing without saying anything that I mean go to the comments immediately.

That’s the thing about addiction, some of the parts of it are exhilarating! My friend has saved no less than 150 reels and posts about houses in Mexico City. She does not plan to move to Mexico City anytime soon. Imagining an entire life in a new country is fun — until it starts interrupting the actual life you’re already living in this one.

Some are harmful. I think we can all relate to the feeling of being dropped off on the dark side of the algorithm, wondering how the hell we got there.

Well. That’s enough internet for today.

We don’t just buy things online. We try on avatars. We perform. It’s like one of those filters that sits on your face, smoothing every imperfection until you move too fast and it can’t keep up. You catch a glimpse of the real thing underneath. That’s what deleting the app did. It let it slip for good.

For the last few weeks I’ve been doing something I haven’t done in a really long time, inhabiting my actual life. I’m present with myself and my kids, my friends, the people around me — which I have to say is sometimes really hard. Other real people don’t have those filters either. A lot of it’s uncomfortable if I’m honest. Feelings I’d pushed down for years are surfacing now that I’m not drowning in something dumb like the “jorts” trend. (Long baggy jean shorts for those of you who want to know.) But, if I’m honest, even the discomfort feels like progress, because I’m sitting with it. And it’s sitting with me. And neither of us are looking at our phones.

There is a trust that builds with yourself when you allow yourself to be where you are.

It’s almost as if you’re saying to yourself, “I love you, I’m listening.”

We can’t evolve while we’re distracted. Our lives get too loud and we miss the subtle signals. Nature is trying to talk to us every second of every day and we’ve all got a Jet2holiday sound looping in the background instead of an ear to listen with. When Nature gets fed up with us not listening, it then begins to send stronger and louder signals. We don’t have to wait for the louder signals!

Last weekend my kids wanted me to drive them 45 minutes to a soda stand they had seen online. The kind of drive that would have annoyed the old me endlessly. But I had the time, so I went. It was a silly thing. We listened to music, we laughed, there was some sibling fighting. A parking lot and a novelty soda and a two hour round trip for a sugary drink reinvented by TikTok. Which actually meant everything to me. And I think that’s where we all really long to be anyway. In the small details, present to the moment that is actually in front of us. Skincare routines are great, but I’d rather my kids remember me as the mom that made a ridiculously long drive to a soda shop.

I don't usually remember my dreams. The other night I remembered one so specific it felt less like a dream and more like the minutes from a meeting my soul had without me.

I had a dream that I got into the elevator in my building and pressed 7. I live on the 7th floor, so this was not an ambitious request. There was also a weird neighbor, and a man yelling compliments at me that I did not ask for and would probably still think about a week later. But, let's focus on the main plot. I pushed 7.

Except the elevator didn't take me home. It took me to a bus. A bus! In my own dream, I couldn't even spring for an Uber. That bus took me across town, made questionable stops, picked up a guy who would not stop talking about his fantasy football league. Point is I was trying to go home, and somehow I ended up in a Greyhound situation.

This is, unfortunately, the most accurate metaphor my subconscious has ever produced. This one blew my recurring childhood tornado dream out of the water.

Tornado = Chaos

So obvious.

And I mean it. The director of this new dream deserves an Emmy.

I have recently started referring to such thoughts as Clown Cars. You know the thought. It pulls up. The door opens.

Honk honk. Cue the little circus horn song, you know the one, the one that plays anytime a clown car shows up anywhere.

Basically the theme is this — something or someone taking me away from myself.

The reason it's a vehicle is because it can come in many forms.

A person, a social media platform, an addiction, a habit. Sometimes it's the thought that if I could just alter my body into some finally-acceptable shape, the rest of it — the parenting, the aging parents, the whole unbearable lightness situation — would somehow get easier. As if the problem was ever the shape I'm in, and not the sitting.

Basically anything that takes us further away from the business of living in our own lives.

I'll decide it's over. Clean, decisive, done.

And then some old thought pulls up. Honk honk.

Not because there's new information. There's never new information. It's the same case I already tried, already convicted, already sentenced. But something in me wants to reopen it. Deliberate it again. Understand it even more, as if understanding it more will change the verdict.

It won't. I already know the verdict.

For a long time I thought my problem was that I liked the wrong men and I realized my problem was that I found it incredibly difficult to sit inside my own life. And for someone who has this pattern it makes sense to date complicated or difficult people because the easy ones are.. you guessed it.. rooted in their own lives.

BOOOOOORING.

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The irony is that by sitting in one's own life, you're actually dealing with the problem of being alive. Kundera named it “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.”

But, why do we avoid it so damn much?

Sitting in your own life means sitting with the uncomfortable. And by uncomfortable I don't mean "my WiFi is slow." I mean the actual questions.

My kids are getting older. I am getting older. My parents are getting older. Have I lived this life to the specs of whatever I thought it was supposed to be? Will I ever find a partner, or is that a bit I'm doing for an audience that stopped watching years ago?

You know. The easy stuff.

This is why the Clown Car is so appealing. It's a rerun. I already know all the lines. There's no new information, no risk, no aging parent in it. Just a familiar plot I can drive around in for three hours instead of parking the car and walking into my actual house.

Here's the beautiful thing nobody tells you about staying in your actual life. It's not nearly as bad as you think it's going to be. The discomfort has a shelf life. It passes, usually faster than the drive would've taken.

And what you get, if you stay, is not nothing. You get to actually be invested in your own life. has called it the “Soup of your life.”

You get the whole rainbow of what it means to be a person — not just the palatable, curated colors — instead of sitting in some rerun, watching a simulation of a life that isn't happening. You also get self-trust. And you get that feeling you’ve been looking for your entire life because it’s coming from the person whom you want it from the most. YOU.

I don't say this like someone who's mastered it. I say this like someone who just, for once, wants to be home when I get home. Not halfway out the door of my own life, one foot already in some clown car.

So here's my new goal, if I even believe in those.

Next time the car pulls up.

Next time it honks.

I'm going to let it drive off without me.

This time, I’ll take the stairs.

.

But my memory is terrible, unfortunately. So bad my childhood best friend Katheryn frequently has to remind me of very memorable things. Like how we both lost the race of “most humorous” to someone else in High School. (I honestly can’t remember her name…I need to ask Katheryn.)

I guess I write all this to say, humor has always been my drug of choice. I grew up during the Nancy Reagan “Just Say No” drug campaign, and boy did that ever work on me. Because besides one run-in with coke at a gay club in Oklahoma City in college, and the occasional pot, I was terrified of all drugs. In fact, the first time I did pot, I smoked so much I couldn’t move my legs and convinced myself I’d invented speakers. “What if there were these things that amplified sound?”

I also grew up spiritually adjacent. Meaning, I wasn’t born into a family of meditators or monks. I had to go find the knowledge. I was sixteen, to be exact. I think the suffering I had then was probably like a lot of suffering at sixteen, except my mind was specifically designed to ask questions and feel out of place. I don’t know if that’s my birth chart, the fact that I lived directly under my Neptune line, or just the way God made me. As soon as I could drive I started doing yoga in a town outside of Dallas, Texas, which was pretty unheard of in the 90s. I think they called it “Jesus stretches,” and that still makes me laugh. The instructor, who was obviously an old hippy, referred me to The Artist’s Way. But meanwhile, I was very much in character development with my main compensatory strategy … humor.

Years later, after the birth of my two kids at 27 and 30 (hello, teen mom), that ancient, familiar ache came back. Only this time there was nothing to point to. I had the kids. I had the husband. The husband was successful, so I didn’t even need a job, but I had the degree if I wanted to work. I had the house. And yet I had this deep feeling of something missing, not unlike my childhood, and I couldn’t figure out why, because now I had all the things people told me I needed to have to be happy.

It’s going to sound weird, but you know those brightly colored popsicles kids love, the ones where you suck the flavor out of the top and the color just gets a little duller? That’s what it felt like. Still red. Just less.

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This was before Instagram and the all mighty algorithm to tell me all the reasons I was unhappy. I was in therapy, but it didn’t seem to be working. That’s when I found a woman named Christine Hassler, a life coach way before life coaching was life coaching, way before your neighbor was a life coach and every other person on Instagram.

Christine had gone to a school called the University of Santa Monica. Traditional therapy had felt like recycling the same old things over and over again with different faces on them. Whatever Christine was doing felt like an actual release, a washing clean. And I could see how positive she was, how much she actually enjoyed her life — which was not a category of person I had spent a lot of time around. I immediately knew I wanted to go to her school. Small problem: I was in Chicago and the school was in Santa Monica. It was an executive program, though, so after much convincing of myself and my husband at the time, we agreed I’d do it and leave the kids with him one weekend a month.

In the program, we had to pick something for our second year that we’d always deeply wanted , they called it a sacred yes, or a heartfelt project, I can’t remember which. It was just a bunch of adults going back to something they’d abandoned when they were younger. A dream, an inkling, or something. It mostly looked like an adult talent show at the end.

We went through a process where we discovered what we actually wanted to do. I said something weird of course, something like: I just want to laugh. I just want a tail!

Thinking about it now, a tail is an outward manifestation of something you’re not supposed to have. If a human had one — an actual long, hanging tail — that would be weird. Maybe inside I felt weird, and I wanted people to see it, in a way where they could laugh instead of look away. I don’t know.

From that one sentence, my incredibly intuitive partner Darnell ( I remember his name) was able to ascertain that what I actually wanted was to be a comedian. “Do you want to do stand up?” I started crying immediately. Not relief crying. Terrified crying. Because comedian meant stage, and stage meant everyone would actually see the tail.

The first time I did an open mic, I was 30 with two kids at home. Before the show, a bunch of guys were sitting around watching TV at the bar. On the screen was a live cam of a giraffe giving birth at a zoo. The men were screaming and laughing and making bets. I don’t know why, but in that moment I felt so exposed.

I was the giraffe.

My first few times on stage were an absolute flop after that. The words existed in my head, but the road from my brain to my mouth had completely disappeared — kind of like my memory. As I got used to it, it got more fun. I gained confidence. I started saying things like: I never played the lottery until I got married. After one show, someone came up to me and said, I really relate to what you’re saying. You should keep going. That’s when I realized I wasn’t just talking about comedy. I was talking about life. Taking the spiritual concepts I’d learned at school. Making them bite-size. Something people could actually use.

Not a man in his 20s talking about his erection.

I eventually finished the program, but really the program finished me. It laid the groundwork for who I am now, and planted the seeds for who I am becoming. Just like everything I went through before it had. The non-spiritual family, Texas, the Jesus-stretching.

I think we’re all the giraffe, in some way. There’s always something each of us wants to hide, is ashamed of, exposed by. A lot of times, that thing ends up being the gift. Most people don’t play it out on an actual stage, under actual lights. But I think we can all take something from that image anyway.

I’d really like to know, what’s your tail? And could you consider that the thing you’d never willingly show anyone, might actually be the whole point?

I’m confused, sad, lonely, and living in a house with my soon-to-be ex-husband. I’m also wiping down groceries with disinfectant wipes while my kids attend school on Zoom. Some days I’m worried the world isn’t going to make it. Other days I’m halfway hoping I don’t have to.

Things were… not great.

My ex-husband and I had separated during COVID, but we kept it a secret from the kids. It felt cruel to ask them to believe the world was ending and their family at the same time. The divorce was mostly my decision, so I decided I should be the one to move out eventually. At the time, I guess I felt like I’d already done enough.

As 2021 approached, I started the exhausting process of finding a new home for me and my children. What I didn’t realize was that finding the house would have much less to do with real estate… and much more to do with imagination.

Before you start cutting pictures out of magazines just know I have nothing against vision boards. I actually think they’re fun. There’s something about scissors and paper, the sound of it, the finality of the cut, that does feel genuinely good. They help you clarify what you want. The problem is they often stop there. A vision board gives your eyes something to look at. It doesn’t give your nervous system somewhere new to live.

The exercise that changed everything for me looked completely different.

It’s called a Living Vision.

I took out a blank piece of paper and wrote one sentence across the top: This or something greater, for the highest good of all concerned — because maybe I don’t know, maybe there’s something better, maybe I’m open to being surprised. That sentence feels like nature’s insurance policy. Then I didn’t write what I wanted. I wrote what I imagined it would feel like.

Not: East-facing windows.

But: Every morning I wake up with warm sunlight on my face. Looking out over the treetops makes my nervous system exhale. I feel safe, inspired and at home here.

The key is to write it like you’re living it now. Not in the past, not in the future. NOW. One is a real estate listing. The other is a life I could actually feel my way into.

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The more specific I became about the feeling, the more real it became to me. Not because I believed I was magically ordering from the universe like it was Amazon Prime. Because I was practicing inhabiting the version of myself who already felt at home. That’s a very different exercise.

Read it a few times a day. Feel it. Yes, out loud. Yes, alone in your kitchen. Yes, even though you feel insane. Read it like you’re doing a table read with God at the head of the table. This is your moment. The universe may or may not need convincing. You definitely do.

Which is the thing about leaving room for something greater.

Maybe that’s why I don’t spend much time making vision boards anymore. I got what I was looking for. I just didn’t know I was looking for it until I stopped describing it and started feeling it.

The woman who stood in that kitchen in 2020 wiping down groceries with Lysol wipes, halfway hoping she didn’t make it. She made it. She got the terrace. She got the park. She got something better than she knew to ask for.

Which, it turns out, was always the point.

If you try this exercise, please tell me what happens. Not because I need to be right about it. Because I want to know what your terrace looks like.

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Seven-year-old me was basically running a Netflix writers' room with one increasingly exhausted actress. Barbie never interrupted to say, "Actually…I don't think horse veterinarian is my calling." She never asked for a table read. She never questioned the plot.

Looking back, Barbie had absolutely no agency in this relationship. I assigned her careers, marriages, emotional breakthroughs, and probably a brief spiritual awakening somewhere around third grade. Twins on Friday, enlightenment by Sunday. She was thriving, allegedly. It never occurred to me to ask Barbie what she wanted.

And that's the thing about dolls. They're wonderful because they never surprise you. People do.

I think the beginning of almost every relationship contains a little bit of Barbie. We meet someone and, before we really know them, our imagination quietly starts filling in the blanks like it's got a deadline. They're funny, so they must be emotionally available. They're attractive, so they must be kind. They're interested in us, so they must be our future. Seven-year-old me would be proud. Same casting instincts. Slightly higher stakes.

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The problem is that eventually every Barbie becomes a person. She gets tired. She disappoints you. She has opinions you didn't expect—and not the cute kind, like a favorite ice cream flavor. The inconvenient kind, like a boundary. She needs space. She makes a decision you wouldn't have made. She stops fitting the script.

Maybe that's the difference between infatuation and love. Infatuation says, "I know exactly who you are." Love says, "Help me understand who you are becoming."

I think we all project in the beginning. That's almost unavoidable. Our brains are little meaning-making machines. We fill in blanks before there are enough facts to fill them with. The question isn't whether we'll project. The question is what we do when reality politely interrupts the fantasy. Do we become more certain? Or more curious? Because that's where every relationship quietly changes.

Can you survive the first version of someone you don't like? Not abuse. Not cruelty. Just humanity. The first misunderstanding. The first disappointment. The first time they make a choice you wouldn't have made. The first moment they stop behaving like the character you cast and start behaving like their imperfect selves. Can you stay curious long enough to remember who they've consistently been? Or does one moment rewrite the entire story?

I think the greatest gift we can give another person is to watch them unfold the way we watch a sunset. Carl Rodgers said:

We just pay attention. Maybe after we've seen the whole sky, we realize we aren't the right fit for each other. That's okay. But at least we loved a person. Not a projection.

Because the cost of being put on a pedestal isn’t just the fall. It’s that you become responsible for protecting someone else’s first impression of you. Every mistake starts to feel catastrophic. Every need feels inconvenient. Every disagreement feels like a threat to the role you’ve been cast in.

Nobody asks the doll how her day was.

I'm no longer interested in being someone's Barbie. I don't want to spend my life trying to stay balanced on a pedestal where one wrong move turns me into someone unrecognizable.

I want to be known. Known people get context. Known people get bad days. Known people get to apologize. Known people get to exist. Known people get to become more of themselves.

One thing I’m learning is that I don't want a director. I want someone curious enough to keep watching after the opening scene.

I’m curious if this resonates beyond romantic relationships. Have you ever noticed yourself shrinking, performing or trying to live up to someone else’s idea of you? Let me know in the comments!

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That is not the version that happened.

The version that happened was more like this: my body shut down because it knew the truth before I did. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. My heart was beating fast, and I had the kind of anxiety that made even your toenails feel foreign to your body. I knew if I didn’t communicate this really uncomfortable truth to someone I loved, I was probably going to die, or at least lose my mind. So, like any reasonable person with these symptoms would naturally do, I waited another month.

My point in telling this story is, I don’t think I’ve met one person who actually likes change. And my relationship to change has been a lot like what you just read: more “tied to the back of a truck and dragged down a gravel road” than “hey, you know what, let me just get behind the driver’s seat.”

A good friend of mine, , has a song about change. The joke, more or less, is that change makes us miserable, but we also have to change to become happy. It’s funny because it’s true.

I’ve been thinking about that lyric a lot lately. Because if I’m honest, I don’t like change. I stayed in my marriage years longer than I should have, not because I thought it was healthy, not because I believed it was where I was meant to be, but because I knew it. There’s a strange comfort in the familiar, even when the familiar hurts. Looking back, I don’t think I was choosing my marriage. I was choosing certainty. And I’m not sure those are the same thing.

I’ve noticed the same thing in almost every area of life. People stay in jobs they’ve outgrown. Cities that no longer fit. Relationships they quietly know are over. Hell, we even keep clothes in our closets we don’t wear and that don’t fit. Versions of themselves they’ve already outlived. Not because they’re happy. Because they’re familiar.

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I’ve spent years meditating. Studying spirituality. Reading every book that tells me change is the only constant, that evolution is literally all that’s ever happening. The seasons change. Our bodies change. Our children change. Our cells change. Nothing in nature clings to one form forever. Except us. We’re the only species that seems genuinely offended by the idea.

And maybe that’s because change asks something terrifying of us. It asks us to let go of a version of ourselves before we’ve met the next one.

These days, when I feel that old familiar tightening (the toenail feeling, the can’t eat feeling), I try to ask myself one question before I do anything else: is this fear of the wrong thing, or fear of the unknown thing? Those aren’t the same fear, even though they feel identical in the body. One is information. The other is just resistance dressed up as instinct.

I still don’t love change. I don’t think I ever will. But I’ve gotten better at telling the two apart, and that’s been enough to get me out of the back of the truck.

Lately I’ve been wondering if the goal isn’t learning to love change. I’m not sure most of us ever will. Maybe the goal is recognizing when life is already asking us to change, and deciding to participate. To become the author instead of waiting to be edited. Because one way or another, life keeps moving. Nature doesn’t tolerate stagnation for long. The question isn’t whether change will come. It’s whether we’ll choose it before it chooses us.

So I’ll leave you with this: where in your life are you holding on simply because it’s familiar? And what might become possible if you trusted yourself enough to write the next chapter before life writes it for you?

I’ve had a man puzzle for as long as I can remember. A crush. A boyfriend. A heartbreak. A possibility. A text message. A future. Always something to solve. For years, I thought this meant I was looking for love. Now I’m understanding that maybe I was looking for a puzzle.

I was walking through Rome, surrounded by ancient ruins, and somehow my brain was trying to solve a man. Again. Not even a new man. A familiar one. The details don’t really matter, because I’ve realized something a little embarrassing: the puzzle changes. The hobby stays the same. Different face, same mental activity — wondering, analyzing, decoding, gathering evidence like I’m preparing for trial in a court that doesn’t exist.

At various points in my life, I have confused hypervigilance with intuition and chemistry with an unsolved mystery. I’ve spent enough hours analyzing text messages that I could probably qualify for continuing education credits in forensic linguistics — trying to understand another person’s behavior before fully acknowledging my own experience.

Then another thought hit me. This might not actually be about men at all.

It’s about a nervous system that grew up trying to solve. When I think back, I can find a man puzzle attached to almost every chapter of my life — family vacations, girls trips, college, marriage, divorce. There was almost always a man somewhere in the background, occupying a small but persistent corner of my attention. A crush, a hope, a possibility, a problem. Something unresolved. Something that quietly pulled me out of my own life and into someone else’s. Something that kept me occupied in the eternal questions — does he like me, what does this mean — instead of the far more useful one: do I even like it here?

Apparently enlightenment was fine. But only if it texted back. I’ve even managed to bring this energy into meditation retreats, where I was supposedly transcending the ego while secretly wondering if someone had viewed my Instagram story. The commitment to the bit is honestly impressive.

Which raises a deeply uncomfortable question: who am I when there isn’t a puzzle?

I don’t know yet. I’m learning. And I suspect this may be my life’s work for the second half of life. But standing among structures that have survived two thousand years, I had a suspicion: some things are ancient because they’re history. Some things are ancient because they’re habits. And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Not ideal.

Particularly because Thai massage isn’t the kind where you’re peacefully tucked under a blanket listening to whale sounds. It’s the kind where a stranger periodically folds you into the shape of a carry-on suitcase.

I was in the middle of a devastating breakup. The kind that rearranges the furniture of your life. I was mortified. The poor massage therapist had signed up for tight hips and stress relief. Instead, he got sixty uninterrupted minutes of active, volcanic grieving.

At one point I apologized. As women do. We’re always apologizing for something. For crying. For needing. For feeling. For taking up space.

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

And he said something I’ll never forget.

“It’s okay. Just be where you are.”

And I cried even harder. Not only because I didn’t know how, but also because I knew he was right. A lot of my life I been avoiding that uncomfortable feeling. And now, somehow it was impossible to hold back the tears. Perhaps because I was being twisted into a human pretzel.

I knew how to improve where I was. I knew how to fix where I was. I knew how to analyze where I was. I knew how to create a five-step plan to get somewhere else. But simply be where I was? Impossibly heartbroken. Confused. Human. That felt impossible.

Years later, after another difficult ending, someone told me he would always love me.

And something about the way he said it broke me open. Not because of him. I knew that relationship had sailed. But because after the relentless tears I realized, somewhere underneath the words, that’s what I’d been waiting to say to myself.

That’s what I’d been looking for all along. And they always say it don’t they?

The relationship you’ve been looking for is the one with yourself.

The unconditional acceptance. The unwavering loyalty. The willingness to stay. The ability to sit beside yourself exactly as you are. Not after you’ve healed. Not after you’ve figured it out. Not after you’ve become someone better. Now.

And once again, I cried. I got to experience that feeling. Not just know it in theory.

Sure, it’s wonderful to be met by someone else’s love. To be chosen. To be adored. To have someone look at you with tenderness and say, “I see you.” That’s beautiful. Maybe it’s even part of the point.

And yet. Isn’t it interesting how another person’s love is never quite enough?

There’s no amount of outside reassurance that will do it. Not really. Not permanently. You get the validation and it feels good for a moment and then like a child who wanted the toy, got the toy, and is already looking toward the next thing — the hunger comes back. A little different. A little deeper.

There’s the high school love. The college one. Maybe you find someone to love you forever. And that’s real. That counts. But I have a sneaking suspicion that underneath all of it, underneath every relationship we’ve ever wanted or chased or clung to , what we’re actually craving is something no person can give us.

We’re craving the love that was always ours. The one that doesn’t require earning.

The one that was never going to leave.

And I think that’s what God is. Or the universe, if that’s the word that fits better for you. Not a love that judges or withholds or makes you earn it. Just, here. Constant. The way the sun doesn’t decide who deserves light today. It just shines. On the mess. On the grief. On the woman crying in the massage room. On all of it, equally, without judgment.

The real work, I think, is learning to love yourself the same way.

To look at yourself with the same softness. The same patience. The same willingness to stay. To stop treating yourself like a project that’s always under renovation. To stop withholding love until the next version of yourself arrives — the version that’s thinner, more healed, more evolved, less anxious, more certain, more worthy.

I’ve spent a surprising amount of my life preparing to become someone I could fully love. Preparing to be ready or preparing to finally exhale. I’ve also spent a lot of time looking for someone to give that to me. Looking for that perfect person who would fill that void.

I realized at some point I had it all backwards.

Maybe the work isn’t becoming someone else, or finding someone else. Maybe the work is learning how to be where you are. To sit in the massage room and cry. To experience the sweetness of your own love. Even through the difficult endings. Mostly through the difficult endings. To love the person in front of you when that person is you.

Not improved. Not transformed. Not finished.

Just here. As is.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the goslings and baby ducks. Every morning I look for them. I know where they tend to gather. I worry about them crossing paths with dogs. I have become, somewhat unexpectedly, invested.

There are also apparently several rare birds living near the lake, because every morning I see people standing perfectly still in camouflage with professional cameras pointed toward the trees. Some of these people have traveled miles to catch a glimpse of a particular crane. Meanwhile, a few hundred feet away, thousands of people have descended upon the park for Pokémon Go Fest. They’re staring at their phones searching for creatures that do not exist while walking past creatures that do.

And then there’s me. Not dedicated enough to identify a rare crane by sight. Not dedicated enough to chase an imaginary creature through a public park. Just wandering around wondering why everyone is paying attention to what they’re paying attention to.

It got me thinking about attention itself. The currency of our world is called paying attention, after all. We are paying for it. The crane is special to the man with the camera. The Pokémon is special to the person playing the game. Neither one is inherently more meaningful than the other. Meaning seems to emerge from attention. The more attention we give something, the more alive it becomes. The more alive it becomes, the more we care. And the more we care, the more attention we give it.

But the thing that struck me wasn’t the crane or the Pokémon. It was the certainty. The man in camouflage knows exactly who he is. The person wandering around searching for a digital creature knows exactly who they are. Neither one seems particularly concerned with whether the other approves. They’ve found a thing they care about and they’ve committed.

I guess I’m somewhere in the middle, and part of me envies them. Not because I want to photograph cranes or hunt Pokémon, but because they seem so unapologetically themselves. I’ve spent a surprising amount of my life trying to figure out who I’m supposed to be.

In my twenties, I paid attention to what everyone thought of me. In my thirties, I paid attention to my children, but also to beauty standards, productivity, relationships, social expectations, and a thousand invisible metrics that seemed important at the time.

As I move through my forties, I find myself releasing some of that. The seventeen-step skincare routines. The pressure to look younger while pretending you’re not trying to. The quiet obligation to be interested in things simply because you’re supposed to be. And in the space that’s clearing, I find myself paying attention to different things — trees, birds, long walks, the lake, conversations that matter, the feeling of peace. Not because those things suddenly appeared. They were always there. I just wasn’t looking at them.

I’ve often joked that I’m entering my bird-watching era. I think that’s just a polite way of saying I’m getting older. But maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s not about birds at all. Maybe it’s about finally becoming interested in the things I’m actually interested in — not the things I think I should care about, but the things I do.

Maybe that’s what the forties are for. Not figuring out who you’re supposed to be but finally meeting who you already are.

I can’t fully explain this psychologically, which probably means it’s psychologically important. Whenever I felt anxious, lonely, restless, bored, overwhelmed — I would put on Goodfellas. Other girls had comforting romantic comedies. I had organized crime, gunshots, infidelity, and men screaming in kitchens while sauce simmered on the stove.

Relaxation.

And like me, if you grew up thinking Goodfellas was a rom-com, dating later in life may become slightly complicated.

Looking back, I think I was romanticizing chaos very early. Not consciously. I wasn’t sitting there at fourteen thinking, one day I hope my nervous system associates emotional volatility with passion. But I was drawn to intensity in a way I couldn’t name yet.

Suburban life felt emotionally beige. Everything fluorescent and contained and predictable. Meanwhile Goodfellas felt alive. Fur coats. Loyalty. Drama. Cigarettes. Women with long nails and emotional problems walking through dimly lit restaurants while men in wool coats made terrible decisions with enormous confidence.

There were no men at Newman Smith High School dramatically unraveling women over red wine and existential longing. Just boys named Chris asking if I finished the geometry homework or if I wanted to play Tennis on the weekend. Or worse, politely asking me to Prom. YAWN.

So I started sneaking out of my suburban house with my friends and driving toward Dallas, half-imagining someone vaguely connected to organized crime might find me fascinating.

Which in hindsight feels psychologically relevant.

This was probably my earliest form of romanticizing chaos. And I would keep doing it for years — not necessarily mafia chaos, just emotional intensity in different costumes.

Unavailable men, cinematic relationships and the strange belief that longing itself was evidence of love.

I don’t think I actually wanted dysfunction, though. I think I wanted expansion. I wanted to feel something larger than chain restaurants and parking lots and emotionally restrained people pretending not to want more from life.

Goodfellas felt like hunger. It felt alive.

I remember studying abroad in Spain, terrified and lonely in a hostel one night. I could hear the people in the alley, a language echoing that I couldn’t fully understand. Every single night I put on Goodfellas to fall asleep.

And there I was, drifting off peacefully to the sound of gunshots, screaming, and someone being beaten in a kitchen.

Again: relaxation.

Years later, after spending an alarming portion of my adolescence emotionally attached to Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, I actually met Ray Liotta in New York City.

I saw him and immediately lost all composure.

“Oh my God, Ray. You’re my favorite actor. As far back as I can remember…”

Which is honestly the most psychotic possible thing you could say to that man specifically.

Later he slipped a note under my hotel room door, and we ended up going on what I guess technically qualifies as a date.

We drank red wine. He put ice in it — which spiritually devastated me a little. He told me he’d met the real Henry Hill once, at a bowling alley.

And the whole thing felt strangely, unexpectedly human.

This mythological figure I had projected so much onto was suddenly just a much older guy drinking cold red wine and telling stories. Not dangerous. Not cinematic. Not larger than life.

Just a person.

I remember feeling oddly disappointed. Not because he did anything wrong, but because fantasy almost always collapses a little under direct lighting. The ice in the wine. The bowling alley. The way he was just there, across a table, being ordinary.

I’ve thought about it a lot since.

I think that’s part of growing up. Realizing that the people and stories we romanticized were often carrying something for us emotionally long before we understood why.

Goodfellas made me feel alive when my world felt small. It made me feel connected to something dangerous and passionate and bigger than suburban Texas. And maybe that sounds ridiculous — objectively it’s a movie about violence and instability and abusive men making terrible decisions in tracksuits.

But when you’re young and restless and lonely, the things that soothe you don’t always make logical sense. Sometimes they just make you feel less trapped inside your own life.

I still catch myself doing it, honestly. Reaching for intensity when stillness feels like settling, or more accurately, unsettling. Mistaking emotional turbulence for depth. It’s a slower habit to unlearn than I expected.

But I’m more aware of it now. And I think that counts for something.

Ray Liotta died in 2022. I think about that note sometimes.

Every year the internet splits into two factions:
“My mom is my best friend.”
“My mom ruined my nervous system.”

And somehow, all of these people are talking about the exact same thing.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why mothers — and motherhood in general — can feel so emotionally charged. Not just personally. Existentially. And I have a theory. What if part of being human is that we’re all, on some level, slightly furious we got brought here in the first place?

Stay with me.

Before birth — or at least in the spiritual fantasy version of before birth — there’s no separation. No anxiety. No taxes. No Hinge. No trying to decipher whether “heyyyy” means someone likes you or is just unemployed. Just oneness. Pure consciousness. Cosmic weighted blanket energy.

Then suddenly:
WELCOME TO EARTH.

Here’s your body. It’s going to bloat. One day your knee will start making sounds for no reason. You’ll spend six years recovering from a man who says things like, “I just don’t know if I’m ready for anything serious right now.” Also everyone dies. Good luck.

Honestly, I think part of us never fully recovers from the shock of incarnation. So who do we blame? The woman who physically escorted us into the human experience.

Poor mothers.

Imagine being held responsible not only for your child’s emotional development, but for consciousness itself. “Actually Mom, my issue isn’t just that you yelled during math homework in 1998. I fundamentally resent embodiment.”

And the thing is, I don’t even think this dynamic only exists in people with objectively bad mothers. I think motherhood activates something ancient in all of us. Because mothers become symbolic containers for impossible human feelings.

Why am I here?
Why does love feel fragile?
Why do I need validation from people who use phrases like “circling back”?
Why does my teenager act like brunch is a human rights violation?

No mother can successfully carry all of that.

She was probably 34 years old eating shredded cheese over the sink trying not to have a nervous breakdown while someone screamed “Mom!” through a locked bathroom door.

The older I get, the more I realize adulthood is partially the horrifying process of discovering your parents were never all-powerful emotional wizards.

They were just…
people.

People who also got launched into existence.
People who inherited coping mechanisms.
People who probably wanted love, freedom, rest, transcendence, and a clean kitchen simultaneously.

Which honestly feels impossible. And I think this is why Mother’s Day hits people so strangely. The holiday itself is asking one person to hold an impossible amount of symbolic weight.

Your mother is somehow supposed to represent:
home,
sacrifice,
safety,
nurturing,
memory,
gratitude,
forgiveness,
childhood,
womanhood,
creation,
and unconditional love.

Meanwhile she’s googling:
“How long can potato salad sit out before it becomes dangerous?” Of course the holiday feels emotionally unstable. It’s carrying too much.

But underneath all of this — underneath the memes and resentment and guilt and flower deliveries and family group chat tension — I actually think something deeply tender is happening. At some point adulthood asks us to stop demanding that another human being make existence feel painless.

Not because our pain isn’t real.
Not because our childhood didn’t matter.
But because no human being can return us to the original feeling of perfect union we unconsciously long for.

That ache is older than our mothers.

And if you’ve ever found yourself disproportionately triggered by your mom, motherhood, or even the idea of being deeply needed by other people, you may already know what I’m talking about.

Sometimes the feeling underneath anger is grief.
Sometimes the feeling underneath criticism is longing.
And sometimes the feeling underneath all our hyper-independent “I’m fine” energy is: I miss being held by life.

I think that’s what so many of us are actually searching for in relationships too. Not just romance. Relief. Someone to make being human feel less lonely.
Someone to make embodiment feel safer.
Someone to sit beside us in the absurdity of all this and go:
“Yeah. This is weird. I know.”

But maybe part of healing is realizing no one can fully give us that feeling permanently.

Not our mothers.
Not our partners.
Not even our children.

Eventually we have to learn how to hold ourselves here.

How to become steadier inside uncertainty.
How to stop treating life like a customer service issue we’d like escalated.
How to find moments of belonging inside the ordinary human experience itself.

Which sounds profound until you realize sometimes “belonging to life” is just:
drinking coffee in your kitchen, hearing your kid laugh in another room,
watching sunlight hit the floor, or eating Taco Bell in silence in your car after therapy.

Tiny moments where existence briefly stops feeling like a cosmic kidnapping. Maybe that’s the whole journey.

We leave the oneness.
We spend years confused about it.
Projecting onto our mothers.
Projecting onto lovers.
Trying to get another person to remove the ache of being human.

And then slowly, awkwardly, beautifully…we learn how to belong here anyway.

Love well. Be honest. Do the thing.

But whatever you do, do not build your entire emotional life around the outcome.

Easy to say, very difficult to practice. I still like results. I still want things.

I have not yet moved to a cave to meditate 23 hours a day while raising two children, though I suspect there are moments they’d support the idea.

What has helped me most is not just shifting attention away from the outcome, but questioning something deeper:

The belief that I am the sole author of every desire.

That it is little Andrea from Texas white-knuckling her way through life, personally manufacturing every ambition, every longing, every creative impulse.

What if that’s not the case. Maybe desire moves through us.

Maybe something larger taps us on the shoulder and says:

Make this.
Try this.
Love here.
Begin again.

And we simply raise our hand and say, Use me. Pick me.
When I can accept that, everything feels lighter.

If I am not carrying the whole universe on my back, trying to make every detail fit and control every little outcome, I can relax.

I can participate. I can enjoy the process.

Show up? Yes. Love well? Yes. Be honest? Of course.

Obsess over outcomes like a tiny CEO of the cosmos?

Less and less.

Finally, I’m starting to get what they’ve been trying to tell us for thousands of years. I guess i’m a slow learner.

I’ll never forget this one man I dated after my divorce.

I’m not qualified to diagnose anyone, but I was very qualified to feel deeply unsettled.

Whatever was going on with him, one thing was abundantly clear: something was off.

We can discuss my own codependency in another article.

Because enough about him.Let’s talk about me. Specifically, the part of me that stayed.Between my friends and my Notes app, no one thought this relationship was a good idea except me.

The pros and cons list looked something like this:

Pros:
Tall.

Cons:
Disrespect
Devaluation
Objectification
Name dropping
Angry
Chaotic
Miserable
No boundaries

I’ll stop there because this is getting humiliating.

Now, that’s an extreme example. But I’ve had other experiences since then that confirmed something important:

There is always a part of us that knows long before we are ready to know.

A text you keep rereading.
A feeling in your stomach.
How your body tightens when they’re near.
The way you explain them to your friends more than you enjoy them in private.

The mind is wired for evidence, but the body is wired for truth.

The wisest people I know recognize patterns.

An evolved person also knows when they are trying too hard to override what’s obvious.

I think it’s great to always stay open and kind.But when your Notes app starts gathering evidence, listen.

There’s a third type of knowing that’s rarely talked about.

The ability to loosen your grip on what you know.

Because if you identify every defense mechanism, every wound, every future problem in real time, nothing gets to breathe.

Evolution is halted.

No relationship survives forensic analysis.

Life cannot be fully lived from the control tower.

Sometimes we have to know less on purpose.

Not to abandon ourselves but to fully join the human experience.

The art is finding the balance. When the suffering gets too much we must dial up the knowing.

Wisdom is recognizing patterns but growth is not making every man pay for the last five.

I laughed when I heard it. Not only because it’s relatable, but mostly because it’s true. The best comedy always is.

But it got me thinking about my own mother, and my own experience of being one. Motherhood is strange because you are everything to someone, and also, there’s a part of you that’s completely unknown to them.

There is an entire life before them, where you existed as a full person without kids. As soon as I had my daughter sixteen years ago, my life completely changed. No one warned me. There wasn’t the kind of public discourse that exists now. No one was talking openly about how hard it was.

We were all just… managing.

Quietly.

In many ways, I’m grateful that women are finally speaking honestly about motherhood. And maybe we didn’t have the right tools. And maybe our mothers didn’t either. So it’s not really their fault.

But we still want someone to blame, don’t we? There can be something so deeply annoying and grating about motherhood.

And who better to blame than our mothers? They’re there from the beginning. It feels like a reasonable leap to assume that if something has gone wrong in our lives, they must have had something to do with it. And if something is wrong, shouldn’t they be fixing it?

And maybe they did have a hand in our suffering.

But lately, I’ve been thinking about what it would look like to release that grip a little. For me, the answer has been forgiveness. Of my mother. And of myself.

When the grip of judgment loosens, something else has room to come in.

Love.

I know some things feel unforgivable. I know some of us deserved more than we got. I know there have been moments where my own children deserved more than I gave. But if I zoom out, even just slightly, I can see something else.

My mother was once a woman without children. She was once a child herself and before that baby, completely dependent on her mother. Who was also living inside her own imperfect experience.

A long line of imperfect women, living in their own imperfectness.

She gave me a body. She took care of me. Gave me shelter. Kept me alive. She showed up to my games and practices. She showed up. Imperfectly sometimes? Yes. Yet a chance to be here, at this time, on this planet. Maybe that doesn’t make everything right. But it’s something.

Lately, when I feel like I’m falling short as a mother, I stop. I put my hand on my heart. And I try to soften whatever judgment I’m holding against myself. It makes things easier. It makes things feel not as burdensome or important.

The funny thing is it can feel temporary and yes, I still sometimes roll my eyes when my mom calls.