In that moment, I became aware. At first, my friends and I thought it would be an act of protest to walk around with our middle fingers up, yelling “Saddam Hussein sucks,” but we were asked to stop.

That’s my earliest memory of being political. I wasn’t even American, I was a Canadian immigrant in America, for the first time, though not the last.

Moving to Canada, I became more political. There were strikes. A lot of teacher strikes. I missed most of eighth grade thanks to Ontario’s government treating teachers unreasonably, but not much has changed. There were more strikes in high school. I excelled in civics class, where I’d debate the “conservative Canadians” who ended their arguments with a “Ya bro, eh?”

There were more strikes in university. I missed my entire last year to a whopper of a TA strike at York University. It reshaped my life, I couldn’t get a job because I didn’t know when I’d be able to go back to school, so I slinked off to the local animal shelter, which essentially launched a twenty-year career of helping dogs.

I attended council meetings. I presented bylaw ideas to ban permanent tethering of dogs and introduce spay and neuter laws. I was laughed at and patted on the head. I was 21 years old.

From there, I told the local news station that they should do a show on dogs, and they said, “we think you should.” I put together a Craigslist call. The cable station gave me a crew, and we shot two seasons of “The Wagging Tail with Nicole Simone,” which went on to air in Ontario for YEARS.

I got paid nothing. I didn’t care.

I continued being political. It’s a part of my nature to get involved — I just like to be a part of what’s going on. I tried corporate marketing jobs and social media gigs, but it felt like eating papier-mâché.

I felt lost for a long, long time. I made art. A lot of art — art I was lied to about, told wasn’t good enough. Told I was too old. I made peace with that. I still make art.

But the most political thing I’ve done is open a federal charity, because the moment you do, you’re beholden to all of it: all the policies you didn’t know existed, boards reporting to boards reporting to more boards.

When they closed the border to the U.S. during the 2020 pandemic, my charity was cooked. The dogs waiting in shelters would all be euthanized. I made a call, and another call, and one more call, and then I convinced the federal government to let our volunteers cross the border while maintaining COVID protocol. This went into effect for all animal rescuers, every rescuer who needed to bring a dog or cat across could. And they did. And oh boy, did I get hate messages about that.

I returned to being a Canadian immigrant, this time in California. I wasn’t in first grade anymore, but a woman in the Hollywood Hills, navigating a complex city with a social issue on every corner.

Then 2024 happened, and I decided to talk publicly about my opinions on Threads. But talking politics isn’t about what’s bad, it’s about what’s good, who’s moving, who’s shaking, and what can be done. Politics is about community, about working together. And as backward and tragic as things feel right now, I have no desire to become less political. I have no desire to dumb myself down, to blend into a beige dress cleaning a pool, to become the center of nothingness.

I haven’t achieved a ton in my life, but it’s not been nothing. It’s not been the cost of nothing.

So I stay political. I stay tuned in. I show up where it matters. I speak out to whom it matters. I write the damn letter and put it in the mail. I send encouragement, and I send criticism. In another life, I’d run for some sort of Office but as a woman I know what a long daunting road that would be. But hey, anything can happen.

So please, in these times of gestures vaguely stay political.

But I knew the secret behind my bravery: most of the time, it was just absolute desperation to resolve an issue.

Bravery and survival are not the same thing, although from across the room they can look remarkably similar.

When I picked up my life in Toronto and moved to LA several years ago, people told me I was brave. The truth was I was desperate. Desperate to get away from an abusive ex I had a restraining order against, and desperate to get away from a collection of stalkers I had somehow accumulated through the dog rescue world, which is not a sentence you imagine having to say when you decide to help dogs.

It didn’t feel brave. It felt mostly scary and disorienting.

I think it was the right move.

My time in LA has been cinematic, to say the least, but it wasn’t part of some grand vision. There was no vision board with palm trees on it. I wasn’t manifesting anything. I was trying to solve a problem, and Los Angeles was very far away from the problem.

Sometimes distance is a strategy.

Years later, after years of misdiagnoses, I was finally diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening illness. Again, people told me I was brave. Brave for going from doctor to doctor, for refusing to accept the answers I was given, for eventually finding my own “Dr. House,” someone willing to map out my chart and figure out what everyone else had missed.

He did.

But I didn’t feel brave then either.

I knew I was dying if I couldn’t get an answer. I also knew there was no mysterious adult coming to take over. No one else was knocking on hospital doors or calling random doctors. Apparently I was the adult, which felt like an administrative error.

I was desperate because I didn’t want to die.

And so I did the things.

And I didn’t.

Maybe that’s what bothers me about the word brave. It makes survival sound much more dignified than it usually is. From the outside, you see someone making enormous decisions and think: courage. From the inside, sometimes it’s just a woman frantically pressing every button because one of them has to open the door.

I wonder sometimes what I would do if I weren’t desperate.

What would bravery look like if nothing were chasing me? If nobody were hurting me, if my body weren’t failing me, if there were two perfectly acceptable doors and I simply chose the one that frightened me more because I wanted whatever was behind it?

Maybe that’s bravery.

Or maybe bravery was never about having a choice.

Sometimes you have to pull the goalie on your own life. Perhaps that’s a very Canadian philosophy.

Maybe bravery is just what desperation looks like from the outside, once you’re the kind of person who turns it into motion instead of collapse.

So the next time someone tells me I’m brave, I’ll still say thank you, but I won’t correct them anymore. I did what I had to do because the other options weren’t humane. Maybe that’s where real bravery comes from. Not fearlessness, but desperation put to good use.

The kind you build a real authentic life out of.


If you're also just pressing every button hoping one of them's a door too, subscribe.

Living between two countries.

Which means I live in duplicate, with zero good answers to “so where do you actually live?” It means my heart works like one of those novelty pens with several inks (I own three of these) — depending on which country I’m in, a different color comes out, and I don’t get to pick which. It means I’ve stood in an airport at midnight, crying a little, not because I was sad exactly, but because I hadn’t decided yet whether I was allowed to be. I had gotten a version of what I wanted, it’s just that it looked entirely different in 3D.

I keep waiting for the moment I choose. I picture it like in the movies: a suitcase gets packed with purpose, a door closes with a satisfying click, a woman walks toward something instead of away from everything. Instead I have a suitcase that lives half-packed, permanently, like it’s rehearsing for a decision I haven’t made yet. It knows before I do. It’s been ready for months.

Maybe the cure to indecision isn’t to decide, but rather to just let things unfold a little more, collect a little more data before we book the next flight, the next move, the “OMG I can’t believe you’re doing that, Nicole!”

But here’s the thing about indecision: you already kind of know. And sometimes you wait so long that someone else, or something else, makes the decision for you. There have been times I would have paid good money for someone to make decisions for me. And that would have been a big fat mistake. Most of the time.

Decisions move the buck forward, and so long as there is a path forward, there is a way to keep existing.

So if you’re stuck, ask yourself this question: What are you actually afraid the decision will confirm about you, once it’s made and there’s no more room for “maybe”?

The indecision was never about fear of choosing wrong. It's about already knowing which decision is right and right was never going to mean painless. It just means yours to live with.

Happy deciding!

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All of my planets related to love and commitment, marriage et cetera are retrograde in my chart. Somehow, I didn’t know this until this year. It wasn’t pointed out emphatically in blinking lights when I was born. There was no post-natal astrologer in the ’80s going room to room, foreshadowing to new mothers about their children’s future love lives. Would have been a heck of a business then, if not now.

But I feel, at the age of 41, that I have met my destiny a couple of times, and it was, in fact, false.

A false positive. A positive false.

As a little girl, I wanted to keep up with the boys more than I wanted to be in love with one. I was a late bloomer in every sense. My hair didn’t even turn red and curly until I was well into my teens. One day I looked in the mirror and realized I was a ginger. The freckles I’d been promised would fade had instead intensified. I was turning into someone else than that I was promised.

I don’t know why I was so surprised. I come from a long line of Sicilian redheads. But as a child I was tanned and blonde, with thin hair. Then one day I woke up and became someone else entirely. I wasn’t prepared.

Perhaps that was my first experience with false destiny.

My childhood was in sunny California. Had I stayed there, would I have remained tanned and blonde instead of turning into the ginger vampire I am today? We’ll never know. People look at childhood photos of me and don’t believe it’s me. I barely believe it’s me, but it is in fact me.

I am very good at patterns and connecting the dots. No, I don’t have autism or ADHD or anything like that, as much as people want to impose that on me. I’ve been tested, and the results are always not even close to putting me on the spectrum. Just another club I can’t join.

But when you’re so good at connecting the dots, how do you know if you’ve found a constellation or if you’ve just drawn one yourself?

You don’t, really.

Destiny is something that stays. A direction that takes you on a singular course. There should be a word for false destiny for the people and places and moments that arrive with all the architecture of fate, only to eventually reveal themselves as coincidence.

A fate that expires.

Counterfeit fate.

Everything in life isn’t a lesson. It’s an experience. Sometimes we learn things from experiences, but mostly experiences shape us, our direction and our course.

Maybe that’s what makes false destiny so convincing. It changes the course, too.

But if something changes the course of your fate permanently, but doesn’t stay, is it really false destiny?

Yes. Because impact isn’t destiny.

A car accident can change the course of your life. So can getting on the wrong train, meeting someone at a party, losing a dog, getting sick, moving to another country. We don’t call everything that alters us fate simply because we are different afterward.

Maybe counterfeit fate is something more specific: the thing that doesn’t just change your life, but convinces you, for a while, that you know where your life is going.

And then it doesn’t go there. That’s when we feel as though we’ve been duped, left out in the cold of our own path, holding a map that was apparently wrong despite every landmark telling us otherwise. Maybe the hardest part of false destiny isn’t losing the person, the place, or the future we thought was waiting for us. It’s having to accept that something can look exactly like fate and still not be it. There may be no lesson tucked neatly inside, no cosmic explanation waiting to make the whole thing worthwhile. It happened. It changed us. It mattered. And then it ended. We have to keep walking without knowing whether the constellation was ever really there or whether we drew it ourselves.

Maybe eventually another collection of stars appears overhead and, against all better judgment, we connect the dots again. Because what else are we supposed to do, but keep looking up?

Our tiny pocket computers have isolated us from the rest of society, and I think we’re only beginning to catch up to what that’s done to us. With so much of the world burning, we’re all looking for a friend at the end of the world—and that friend should be someone you can be bored with.

Not the friend who needs reservations at the most annoying new restaurant in West Hollywood. Not the friend who can’t go out without the promise of alcohol. Not the friend who cancels at the last minute and sends you a meme about how cancelling plans is actually self-care.

No. We’ve moved on from the hell of 2020 isolation. We’ve gotten therapy. A good skincare routine. We’ve read books. Seven of them.

I mean the friend you can go to the grocery store with on a Tuesday night and compare protein powder ingredients. The friend who will get slushies with you and swing on a playground after dark, laughing at the frivolity of it all.

For the last eight years, the person I was best at being bored with was my dog, Indie.

When she died, I realized I suddenly had no one to do nothing with.

If I wanted to see someone, there had to be a plan. A reservation. An activity. An end result. There was no one lying on the living-room floor with me screaming the lyrics to an old Elton John song. No one wandering from room to room while I got ready. No one simply existing alongside me.

There is a good kind of bored and a bad kind of bored, and somewhere along the way we decided they were the same thing.

They aren’t.

Boredom is the root of creativity. It’s also where intimacy lives.

And when there’s no one to be bored in the world with, you remember the importance of something as stupid as running errands.

Don’t order the envelopes. Go buy the envelopes.

Kurt Vonnegut once explained why he’d rather walk out and buy an envelope than order one. The errand was the point. As he put it, “We’re here on Earth to fart around.”

Somewhere along the way, we started treating all the farting around as inefficiency. We eliminated the errand, the boredom, the stranger at the bookstore, the friend who comes along for absolutely no reason.

And then we wondered why we were lonely.

I have so many unusual encounters with people simply because I leave my house. Like the night I went to the bookstore instead of ordering from the ugly online conglomerate, and the cashier, after repeatedly failing to sell me a membership card, became so flustered she finally yelled, “WELL, YOU’RE REALLY BEAUTIFUL.”

That would never have happened if I’d stayed home and clicked a button.

Staying home and clicking buttons is, in fact, part of the problem.

We’ve built an incredibly convenient world and somehow made it harder to bump into one another.

So maybe the test of a friendship—or a relationship—isn’t whether you can have an incredible night together.

Maybe it’s whether you can have absolutely nothing to do together and still want to be there.

Because I don’t think most of us are missing entertainment.

We’re missing intimacy. Familiarity. Someone to run errands with.

Someone who stays not for the plot, but because there isn’t one.

And I think that manages to simultaneously be a little boring and a little interesting.

Nothing in my life is static. My location, my relationships, my work, my creativity. Everything is in flux, and it’s been that way, mostly intentionally, for a long time.

I still tell everyone and anyone who will listen that my dog died while somehow making it sound like she abandoned me. Like she had control over the tiny brain tumour that grew and grew until it rendered her incapacitated. Like we didn’t have to sit in an emergency room and say goodbye while the wind rattled the door to our exam room as though people were trying to get to her and take her away.

And then they did.

One moment I find myself at a real race track, with the sound of cars roaring just feet away, being ushered in and out of trailers, learning everything I can. The next I’m in a field with so many wild rabbits, being photographed, the sun setting while I fight off mosquitoes. The next I’m downtown in an emergency room, petting a dog who has just passed away and comforting the guardian who watched the dog slip out the front door and into traffic.

But I’m supposed to be waking up in London right now and boarding a plane to Barcelona, and I am not.

Instead, I’m in Canada.

My therapist would probably tell me the plane is the metaphor.

This is why she has a job and I have so many unused airline points.

I live with a life-threatening illness that’s a lot less manageable than I’d like to admit, and a lot less manageable than people like to recognize, because I seem fine. On the days I’m not fine, I isolate. I cancel flights. I disappear until I can convincingly be myself again.

“When are you back in LA?”

I don’t know.

I am untethered.

I say this as though I am a boat. I am not a boat. Boats at least have designated places to return to.

There is allegedly earthquake weather, and suspicious fires seem to pop up every day in ways that make me want to put on a tinfoil hat. I wake up to smoke from faraway forest fires that darkens the day in a way I wish never to experience again. I wake up again to sinkholes from broken water mains flooding my neighbourhood in Los Angeles.

Apparently you cannot out-travel climate change.

I have tried.

Hyper-independent. Evolving. I don’t have everything figured out. No one is asking me to, which is perhaps the strangest part. People often ask me to figure things out for them, and I usually can. But when it comes to my own life, I can’t see the forest for the trees. The painting from the frame.

So I just do what I know and learn what I’m inspired to.

Everything is changing.

I am changing.

And somehow, which feels almost suspicious, that I still feel my life is a little stupid and boring but it’s mine.

In my hands is a white helmet and, next to it or inside it, I haven’t decided, a pair of gloves. Empty, because gloves are always empty until the exact moment they aren’t.

There is a couple beside me. Younger than me, probably, though the man is missing a lot of his teeth, which makes it hard to guess anything about him with confidence, and his wife is holding their baby with pride. He hugs her. He puts on his helmet. He leaves. She smiles at me, and I understand the smile, or I think I do, which might be its own kind of arrogance.

People stare. It’s the hair; it has to be the hair, it is my unintentional beacon to the world, the thing that gives me away before I’ve done anything to be given away for. They stare because there is a woman alone at a go-kart track on a Thursday night, and a woman alone anywhere on a Thursday night is apparently a puzzle that needs solving. They wonder where my boyfriend is. They wonder who I am waiting for. I am waiting for myself to figure out what it is I’m doing here, which is a different kind of waiting, the kind that doesn’t have an arrival time.

I think of Paul Newman. If you know me… and I mean really know me, you know that for the last several years I have thought about Paul Newman an unreasonable amount. I think of the photograph of him middle aged, alone on a kart track somewhere in the 1960s, not yet the man who would almost win Le Mans, not yet the man who would hold world records, not yet, in other words, the outlier he was about to become. I wonder if he knew. I wonder what it is like to be photographed at the exact hinge point of a life and not know it’s a hinge.

I love a dark horse. An outlier. The unusual. I have built a whole personality, possibly a whole life, out of loving those things, and here I am, apparently, trying to become one.

I get into the kart and I go. I work on my racing lines. My lap times. Small, correctable, quantifiable things, which is a relief, because so little else is.

When I am driving, my head goes clear. My chin tilts down and everything else, all of it, the whole apparatus of being a person who has a phone and a job and cities she keeps swinging between… just falls away, and I get to be present, briefly, unglamorously, in the world and in my own body, which is not something I get to do very often living the way I live, mostly online, mostly elsewhere.

Sometimes I run a great race. Other times I tell myself there’s always next time, which is either wisdom or the thing people say instead of having wisdom. I race teenagers. I race guys in their twenties. I race couples on dates who did not expect to be racing me. Occasionally I crash a birthday party, uninvited, in the friendliest possible sense of crash. The staff all know me by now. They are, every one of them, exceedingly kind. They give me pointers. They review my races with me afterward like coaches, like this is a thing that matters, which, increasingly, it does.

I do private lessons. The first time I show up, I am alone on the track, and I am terrified, because a small cluster of dads is taking turns stepping outside for cigarettes and watching me between drags. One of them points out that my boots are too heavy, that they’re slowing me down. My lap times are terrible. Genuinely, embarrassingly terrible.

I leave feeling a little bit lighter. Because I like being terrible at things. It means I am growing, or at least it means I have found something new to be inadequate at, which at a certain point in life is its own kind of gift. Outside, I turn, and I see the guy who just interviewed Toto Wolff on his podcast, holding his daughter’s hand, and I freeze, completely, a deer in headlights, some part of me reaching for hello and another part of me remembering he is a stranger, just a stranger, and yet it felt like a sign anyway, the way things do when you are already primed to be looking for one.

There are many more nights like that cold January night. Tucking my terminally ill dog into bed before heading back out for a late drive, which is a sentence I did not expect my life to contain. Realizing, with real and lasting amusement, that Formula 1 is, at its root, just glorified karting, dressed up in nine-figure sponsorships.

There are no women on the track. The monthly Grand Prix is all men, who look at me sideways, who seem, some of them, genuinely unhappy that I am there, though sometimes there are fun exchanges, real ones, and real improvement shown, mine and theirs. But it bothers me. The absence bothers me. So I build my own league.

Thirty women show up. I show every one of them the ropes. After two small events, I start getting emails — from F1 drivers, from engineers, from executives — all carrying some version of the same message: keep going, we need this.

So I am. I’ve put together an association now, with events in multiple cities, built for women, because someone had to build it. And it turned out that on a cold January night, alone in a corner, holding a helmet I didn’t know what to do with yet, that someone was me. My own hinge moment.

Months later, I sat at a racetrack in Canada watching IMSA, thinking about how Paul Newman had once raced on that very track. I remembered the photograph of him at middle aged, alone with a kart, not yet knowing what he was about to become.

I am middle aged now, too.

I don’t know what I’m about to become.

But I think I’ve already started.

Well, let me start with the reasons that get projected onto me so fast my head spins.

Some of you will say my standards are “too high.” You’ll tell me the Paul Newmans of the world don’t exist anymore, and I’ll sigh, knowing it was really a Paul Walker type I was hoping for. But I can only have so many emotional support dead men haunting me.

Second, I’ll be told it’s my age. I’ve aged out of dating and should accept a life of spinsterhood. Except I’m older than what would traditionally be called a spinster. I’m not sure what comes after that. I think, in the patriarchy, we’re referred to as dust.

Third, there will be criticisms of my social media and my looks. I’m too sexy, I’m trying too hard, I’m not trying hard enough, I’m scary-looking, intimidating even. I sigh and collapse into a pile of pillows.

Finally, I’ll be told it’s where I live. Los Angeles is a hard city to date in, a hard city to exist in, a hard city to be intelligent and vibrant and all the things that make being here hard. But then the real reasons start to reveal themselves.

Life has been very different since 2019. Very. Instability. Social shifts. An economy that makes going out feel like a financial decision rather than a casual one. Men are afraid of the expectations placed on them. Women are afraid to find out the man they’ve agreed to meet thinks some tech billionaire is secretly “a really good guy.”

And through the crevasse of it all, there’s been a pattern: a lot of men wanting to ask me out, me agreeing, and then zero follow-through. In it for the win, but not the kill.

I consider myself fairly open-minded, though my friends tease me that most of the men I’ve dated look like they’re from a 90s catalogue. I don’t disagree, but it’s never been intentional. We just seem to gravitate toward each other.

At the beginning of the year, I made a concerted effort to expand my social circle. I joined a private members club and a go-karting track.

I’ve met nearly no one at the club. It seems to be more about being seen than actually knowing people. You’re encouraged to socialize, but not to approach anyone. The conundrum of that.

Go-karting, on the other hand, has been a group of polite men in their 20s, mildly confused about why I’m there, what I’m doing, and occasionally—quietly—impressed with my lap times. I wouldn’t say I’ve made friends, but it’s certainly friendlier than the club. And the wardrobe is entirely different.

I wake up to messages every day from men overseas via a special app, as if there’s some kind of war going on. And I suppose there is many of them.

“When will you be in Poland next?” (Never been)
“Are you ever in Spain?” (Nope)
“Do you make your way to London often?” (Rarely)

The truth is, if I travelled more, I’d probably meet more aligned men. Or at least have a better chance of it.

Because at the end of the day, I’m not the rarest bird, but I’m also not Sarah in marketing or Josie in accounting. I’m the girl with giant red hair who rescues thousands of dogs, writes music about her feelings, writes books about stories that don’t seem to end, and laps 21-year-olds in race karts for fun. I can debate politics with ease, bake an excellent banana bread, and take you to the finest Italian restaurant.

And maybe that’s just it.

Maybe I’m overqualified for first dates at this point. Maybe I am too old to believe in love or tradition. The idea of getting married makes me think of a gazelle being hunted in slow motion by a lion. I don’t like it, even if my mane resembles that of a lion.

Besides, I’ve had enough dating experience to write a tell-all of strangers you wish you knew and people you’ve definitely heard of. It’s not a flex. It’s a reality. And it all feels a bit hollow at the end of the day.

So here I am. Overqualified for first dates, under-considered for second ones, and apparently most appealing to men who are either an ocean away or no longer living.

If you need me, I’ll be in my race suit, lapping someone’s younger brother, wondering if Paul Newman ever had this problem.

It felt less like a question and more like being told something about myself I hadn’t agreed to.

“I’ll figure it out,” I said. “Life is just figuring things out over and over again until we die anyway.”

I don’t know if I believed that. I think I just liked how it sounded when I said it out loud.

That’s how Circles started.

In early 2025 I decided I was going to make an eight-song LP and press it to vinyl. I didn’t know what it would be yet, but I knew I wanted to be the kind of person who had done that.

Yesterday, the record came out. A few days before that, the vinyl showed up at my front door. And a few days before that, I lost Indie.

She had been sitting behind me in the kitchen when I wrote “Circles.” I didn’t think that meant anything at the time. Now it feels like it meant everything, but only in a way that doesn’t help me.

After that I was on a plane again, somewhere over the desert, sleeping too much, trying to reorganize my life into something that looked intentional.

The album had a theme. Astrocartography. The idea that certain places are supposed to open you up in certain ways. Barcelona, London, Paris. My Venus line. I liked the idea that there were places where I might become more myself, or more loved, or more something.

“Circles” came first. Then the rest, in pieces. Sometimes the night before a session. Sometimes from fragments I had saved without remembering why. It felt less like writing and more like noticing something that had already been there, waiting for me to admit it.

By mid-summer I was short two and a half songs. I had other songs, but they didn’t belong. Or maybe I didn’t want them to belong. There were things I was resisting to write, which made them louder. I hadn’t launched the Kickstarter campaign but my community backed me all the way once I did, forever grateful for that.

I went back to Canada for a break and finished the songs there. “Decades.” “Barcelona.” The rest of “Overthinking.” I didn’t feel particularly inspired. I just stopped arguing with myself long enough for the songs to happen.

Then the vinyl came, which was its own kind of personality. Multicolour, random, slightly out of my control. Each one different, which felt either meaningful or inconvenient depending on the moment.

I’ve spent two days in London. That’s enough time to get lost once and decide it was intentional.

I've never been to Barcelona. I've spent two days in London. And yet there are full songs about the energy and cadence of those cities. A braver woman would have gotten on a plane. Instead I am here, somewhere over the desert again, sorting out life.

Instead I am here, again, somewhere in the desert, trying to feel like my life is happening in the right order.

But it's not really about being brave. It's about letting life figure itself out, even when you don't want it to. I sometimes think that worrying makes me feel more important than I am. More necessary. It makes me feel valuable in the moment, even when it's doing nothing at all.

A friend told me I should start the next record. Keep the momentum.

I have no idea what to write about and I think that's great.

Which felt wrong at first. Then it felt like a kind of relief.

Like maybe this time, I don’t have to know anything in advance.

Like maybe the next thing will happen whether I understand it or not.

And I will just be there, slightly behind it, trying to catch up.

—

You can listen to the full album on any streaming service here: https://soulspazm.ffm.to/circlesalbum

A big thank you to all involved making this record: Billy Lefler at Death Star studios, Alvarado for mixing it, Hans Dekline for mastering it, the label at Soul Spazm, and all my Kickstarter backers.

It had been a slow decline since the beginning of the year. Her walk changed. Then her bladder. Then the focal seizures began. Neurologists, medications, more medications. Sleepless nights where nothing seemed to touch what she was experiencing.

And then in the morning, she would yell for breakfast like nothing had happened.

I kept asking if we could do more. Bloodwork. A scan. Something. But there was nothing more.

How do you know when it’s time?

They say it’s better too soon than too late, but that’s not very helpful advice. Too soon feels cruel. Too late feels callous.

The truth is simpler and harder than that. If you’re asking the question, you already know.

I’ve been here before. I’ve euthanized dogs through my work in rescue. I’ve had a dog with grandmal seizures. Violent, dramatic seizures that looked like he was being electrocuted from the inside out.

But this was different.

This wasn’t a steady decline. It was uneven. Peaks and valleys. Moments where she seemed completely normal, moments where she was inconsolable, and moments where she simply wasn’t there.

On Monday, I wasn’t bartering for her life. I was asking someone else to give me permission to let her go.

That night, we didn’t sleep. She woke every hour crying. We walked through the night. 2am, 3am, 4am. She didn’t want to stay still, but she was too tired to keep going.

By morning, she seemed okay again.

By the afternoon, we both knew.

If you’re already considering it as an option because they are suffering with little to no relief, then the decision has already been made. You are past that finish line.

This is not my first dog with seizures. Charlie, a Jack Russell Shih Tzu, suffered from grand mal seizures for years. I have euthanized several dogs in my life through my charity work. I am not new to having to make this decision.

But with Indie, it was different.

And I repeat, it wasn’t a slow descent. It was uneven, unpredictable. Moments she was herself, moments she was unreachable, and moments where she was simply not there.

That Monday, I realized I wasn’t asking how to save her. I was asking for permission to let her go. A neighbour had taken notice of the situation unfolding and kept leaving fruit and bagels and whatever she could think of without intruding on our situation. It meant a lot to both Indie and I because we were in some limbo and time felt invisible.

By 9am the next day, Indie was completely out of it. Her neck stretching forward again and again in a motion that looked like pain. Neil Young’s “Tell Me Why” came on and I hadn’t heard it in years. That song played on repeat all day. Around 4pm I crouched in front of Indie, nose to nose. Through the cracking of tears in my voice I said “We’re about there aren’t we?” She licked my nose and bopped me with her paw.

At 9pm it became unbearable. Tears came immediately. I called a friend, midnight her time, and she gave me permission. I needed someone else to say it was okay, that I wasn’t giving up or quitting. That I was doing the “right” thing.

Indie could no longer walk now. I placed her in a trolley with her bed and her favourite blanket and took her to the car.

She threw up on her bed. The first time in years.

I drove her to McDonald’s and told her if she didn’t want to eat, I understood. She ate a whole cheeseburger and ice cream anyway.

At the clinic, I was crying as I wheeled her in and someone said, “your dog is so cute.”

They put us in a room. A nurse opened a cupboard. I thought it would be medication.

Instead, she unwrapped a Hershey’s Kiss and placed it in Indie’s mouth.

Indie held it there for a moment, as if she knew chocolate wasn’t for dogs. Then she ate it. And another. And another. She seemed completely enamoured.

They took her to place the IV and brought her back with a bandage wrapped in a small cut-out heart.

The lights were dimmed. I was given a buzzer. When I was ready to say goodbye I would press the buzzer and the vet would come, it would all be over.

We spent time together. Had a conversation too personal to repeat. Listened to music. Her head was soaked with my tears. And then I pressed the button.

The rest is too private to share. A moment between a woman and her dying dog is not for public consumption.

After the worst of it, I sat with her again. Spoke to her again. When I pressed the buzzer, two nurses came in, lifted her body off me gently, and told me what a pretty dog she was.

She loved being told she was pretty.

Even then, she got that.

The decision had already been made. She left exactly when she needed to.

I loaded my wagon in my cart and went home alone, arriving just before midnight. I tucked her leash and collar into her bed and slid it under a table where I haven’t looked at it since.

I dreamt that night I arrived at the airport and a man I had once been involved with who was 6000 kms away, who knew Indie well this past year, was waiting for me to board the plane together. He was holding Indie’s empty leash. He took my hand and we boarded the plane. I’m not sure where to but seeing her empty leash in the dream stayed with me the entire next day.

She was loved every step of the way.

The following days, I slept. Not from depression, but from exhaustion. From the weight of it. I had arranged my life around her, around that unconditional love and her needs. Once I felt stronger I went to the karting track, and cleaned up the car from the chaos of the week, bought a new dress and then slept some more.

Waking up to an empty home is its own kind of silence.

And I continue on, because I know how many worthy dogs are still out there. And I know I will love another one again one day.

But this is what I understand now.

It’s not a matter of too soon or too late.

It’s a matter of grace.

The quiet moment where love lets go without fear.

If you have to ask yourself if it’s time, then you already know.

And I knew.

And she knew.

And we found grace between us.

It’s her dinner time. She usually lets me know. Lately, her sense of time and appetite have fallen to the wayside. She is a rescue dog always happy for food and attention, but something else has taken over.

It started a couple months ago when I noticed her slowing down on walks. Then there were some accidents in the house. Then the seizures started. In fact in 2020 I was told she only had a year or two to live, diagnosed with rare Masciotry Myositis (that’s why her head is so small), lupus and the big one, chronic hepatitis of the liver. I found specialists, she was on a medication protocol that at times felt overwhelming, but she was always worth it, sorting her pill boxes.

And there were improvements. Sure she had a body like a coffee table and her head looked like someone had shrunk it, but she was a pleasure to be around. A real girl’s girl. She was leery of men, but she loved women and was quick to make friends with any woman who spoke kindly to her.

In the last year she has listened to an almost (impossibly) intolerable amount of Crowded House, crossed the Arizona to California desert too many times and has seen me through some incredible lows. She didn’t waver. She was happy to be included.

The other night we stayed up all night together, as her body threw her back to back seizures. Despite the neurologist appointments and medication, the verdict was still the same - the tumour in her brain was growing and disrupting how her brain communicates to her body. I’ve tried pushing her in scooters, but she seems to prefer to walk, stubbornly, slowly. She wants to feel the grass on her feet, she wants to watch the birds and the butterflies on our street.

And I think, “maybe this is just the new normal for her”. I can adjust. We’ve adjusted before, we can adjust again, but this time feels different. This time, the end feels near. I did one of those DNA tests that shows you with some relative accuracy when her birthday is. It came back not only has 4 years older than I had placed her (that’s an additional 32 years in dog years) but that she was a Capricorn (it would explain so much) born December 27, 2013.

So at nearly 13 she’s been running on whimsy for quite some time. And I’m in entire denial about it. I’m at the point if I let her go tomorrow, no one would say it was too soon. But it always feels too soon, when it’s someone you love. She’s been my only constant in a chaotic and tumultuous stretch of 8 years.

I know the time is soon, and I don’t know quite how to time it. It feels in the past week like someone has moved a large metaphorical clock into our living room that ticks louder and louder every day.

And I just don’t know how to be the one to stop it.

Who am I supposed to come home to now? And who does she go home to?

At first you feel crazy. It has been years. Why am I thinking about them. Why do they show up in my dreams like something unfinished. Surely this can’t mean anything.

And for a long time, it doesn’t.

Years pass. You stop giving it weight. It becomes a phase. A fling that lasted too long. Something you tuck into a version of yourself you don’t visit often. You describe it casually. Like going from a rusty Honda Civic to an Aston Martin. You say it as a joke, but it did change something. It shifted your sense of what was possible.

And then it happens.

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Since I was a kid I would have these episodes. I couldn’t focus. I was told I was a daydreamer and vaguely attempts were made to diagnose me with something. There were times I was in sensory overload and had a hard time functioning in school. I was put in a special class, but without much reason other than I just did better when variables were isolated and I could do my own thing.

As I got older the episodes became more dramatic, the issue more apparent but I was told I was anxious, underweight, and just needed a nap and a sandwich.

By the time I was in my 30s I was weeks away from dying. There were discussions of feeding tubes and hospitalizations, but no real answers. It wasn’t until I hired a private doctor to assess my case that things started to move. He got me tested during overnight hospital stays following my low cortisol crash-outs, then a blood sugar test that involved orange juice and blood draws over several hours. I threw up and never drank orange juice again.

But there it was.

Hormones are a very important part of our lives. The focus is always on women and their hormones, or perimenopause, but it’s so much more complex than those groupings.

I have lymphocytic hypophysitis causing central adrenal insufficiency. I’m sorry that’s not more sexy or catchy. But it’s rare, and it’s real and it is a life-threatening condition if it’s not properly managed. I suspect it’s only “rare” because doctors don’t always know to look for it. If they’re looking for a horse and you’re a zebra, things get complicated.

Basically, the gland in my brain called the pituitary gland stopped communicating properly with the rest of my body because it is attacked by an autoimmune disease. It’s supposed to tell everything else what to do: make cortisol, regulate blood sugar, produce DHEA, make testosterone, keep your stress response functioning.

When it doesn’t, your body doesn’t just get tired. It gets confused and it starts to die.

For me this shows up in episodes called adrenal crises. Adrenal crises kill people. Full stop. They are life threatening events, just like if someone who had diabetes wasn’t able to get their insulin on time, we’ve all seen how Steel Magnolia’s ends, and it’s very much that. It will start very casually, I’ll get very fatigued, then very anxious, followed by what feels like an intense hour or two of stomach “flu”, more anxiety, and back pain. I won’t be able to stop shaking or sweating. Then I can’t think straight at all. At this point, I have to take a giant syringe of liquid steroids and stop shaking long enough to jab it into my leg and hope it works before I black out or hope I call 911 in time (I have). If it ends reasonably well, it ends in this strange wired-but-tired state where resting makes you feel worse, but doing anything also makes you feel worse. The next day there’s often a huge drop. Dopamine feels like it disappears. I get really low, sometimes out of nowhere.

And this is where it gets interesting.

Cortisol, dopamine, and blood sugar regulation are all connected to how your brain functions. When cortisol is too low or dysregulated, your body is essentially stuck in a confused stress response and your brain is trying to compensate. That can look like difficulty focusing, emotional dysregulation, anxiety spikes, fatigue that feels neurological, sensory overwhelm. In other words, it can mimic things like ADHD or even aspects of being on the spectrum.

Not because you are those things. But because the systems that regulate attention, mood, and stress are being disrupted at a biological level.

Your brain doesn’t exist separately from your body. It responds to it.

I still struggle with it. I’ve gone to specialists from Sunnybrook Hospital to UCLA and they understand it enough but it’s rare, and the medicine around it is still catching up. What I’m left with is the daily work of managing something that most people have never heard of. Balancing a plane with no autopilot. Running all my hormones manually.

So when people say I seem anxious, or scattered, or speculate about what might be different about me, I understand where that’s coming from. But I’ve been running on (cortisol) empty my whole life, with barely even a manual. They understand the core issue but they don’t understand the scope of how this fully impacts someone’s behaviour.

But what’s actually happening is my endocrine system is misfiring in a way that can be dangerous, and my brain is doing its absolute best to keep up.

It mimics being on the spectrum. It mimics ADHD. It mimics anxiety, laziness, flakiness, fragility.

It’s something else entirely. And it took most of my life to find out what.

A note, because I am not a doctor and I want to be careful here but I do want to say this:

If something feels off, keep pursuing it. If you’ve been told you’re anxious, or scattered, or sensitive, or that you just need to rest more and eat more and stress less and that answer has never quite fit, it might be worth looking deeper. Get your hormones checked. Not just the standard panel. Ask about cortisol. Ask about your pituitary. Ask about your adrenal and pituitary function. Endocrinology is still an understudied and under-utilized field.

I want to add that you can’t stress out your adrenal glands into not working. I don’t believe the pseudo-science behind that. Stress is bad. I get that. But if you make too much cortisol that’s technically called Cushing’s Disease which is a different disease. There is no such thing as adrenal fatigue. Stop using that term, I swear to God doctors get confused when some MAHA girl brings that up and people with actual life threatening cortisol issues gets dismissed because of it. Just stop.

The medical system is built around patterns. When you don’t fit the pattern, you become difficult to diagnose, not because you’re broken, but because the map being used wasn’t drawn with you in mind. If the diagnosis has never quite landed, maybe it’s because the right question hasn’t been asked yet.

You are allowed to keep asking.

I’m in pituitary failure, it’ll worsen as I get older. It might kill me. I’ve been warned many times. I’ve made peace with ‘best efforts’ though I truly wish I had more real life support. But all this to say, sometimes the answer isn’t what you think it is and you have to press on, but there’s probably an answer and half of it will be up to you.

There’s also the irritating fact that amongst all this, things like proper sleep, no caffeine or alcohol and living a relatively health style are terribly, annoyingly important. There is a lot of accountability regardless of an illness I didn’t ask for.

My biggest struggle isn’t the episodes themselves. It’s the aftermath. The come-down is heavy, a fatigue that sits on you like wet concrete, and alongside it, this quiet voice that asks whether I managed it wrong. Whether I took my medication at the right time. Whether I flew the plane badly.

I have to take medication throughout the day just to keep my body doing what most people’s bodies do automatically. There is no autopilot. There is no co-pilot. It’s just me, recalibrating constantly, alone in the cockpit.

I try not to think about what my life would have looked like without this. When people tell me “you should have been more successful, more famous” I know exactly where my shortcomings in that are. That path leads nowhere useful. What I know is that it has made me resilient in a way that is both genuinely useful and genuinely annoying, because resilience sounds like a gift until you realize it was forged by something you never asked for.

But here I am. Still flying.

I am not a doctor. Nothing in this piece constitutes medical advice. If you are concerned about your physical health or mental health, please consult a qualified medical professional who will actually listen to you.

I usually apologize before the story even begins, like a pilot announcing turbulence before the plane has left the ground. Women are trained early to soften the edges of themselves, to make sure the room knows we aren’t too proud of the story we’re about to tell.

I can’t quite remember when this started, but more often than not I find myself telling a story to a group of friends over dinner and apologizing for the context first. I say something like, “This is going to sound weird,” or “I know this sounds made up.” Sometimes I laugh in advance, like a warning label.

My life has been anything but ordinary. The confusing thing about it is that it doesn’t feel busy while it’s happening. There’s no constant chatter, no tight orbit of friends, no large family dinners. Most days are quiet. I make tea. I answer emails. I look at the sky like anyone else.

But every so often I become an island that gets hit by wild storms… events so strange and intense that they rearrange the furniture of my life. When the storm passes I’m left cleaning up the wreckage and the washed-up treasures for months afterward.

Often the storms return.

Sometimes they disappear so completely that later I wonder if they were ever real at all.

But they are storms all the same.

Last April I spent three weeks intensely writing a book. Several people have read it and understand that it is loosely autobiographical. I am a make-it-happen woman. There is no time like the present.

But this book makes me vulnerable, because it is half true and half not and I’m not telling which. Sometimes I worry that this makes the book bad. Not bad exactly, but suspicious. Like a person who smiles too much. Perhaps it isn’t fully accurate. Perhaps it isn’t even realistic.

Many times I have thought about sitting down and writing a series of short essays about the things that have happened to me, around me. But then I imagine the reaction.

Who does she think she is?

A woman with a life worth documenting?

A woman who thinks she’s the main character?

The truth… which I suspect is less glamorous… is that I like the long shot. I like the long way home. I aim for the unlikely and most of the time I lose, but I end up with a story of my own.

Shoot for the moon, get the stars they say. I aim for stability and end up with a great story to tell over dinner.

Life is just that, a lot of stories woven together. Woven through fractured feelings, tumultuous weather, strange coincidences.

So I’m sorry that my stories make me seen.

I have a habit of connecting dots in ways that feel almost synchronistic. I love patterns. I follow them like threads. If someone gave me enough time I would probably trace them all the way across the world and back again.

I think I’m circling something very specific, like a dog walking around the same spot in the grass before lying down. The apology isn’t really about the story. It’s about the person telling it. It’s about a woman briefly believing she deserves the room’s attention… and then becoming suspicious of herself for believing that.

That’s the nerve I keep brushing up against.
The one that asks if I’m allowed to be here, telling it.
And at the end of the story I will probably apologize.

Just to be safe.

Later, you realize how misleading that belief was. Of all the misinformation floating around the internet, the talking heads, the advice, the certainty spoken from wounded places, very few people talk about love from a place of actual happiness. Or calm. Or having stayed.

People say they want chemistry, but what they usually mean is excitement. Intellectual chemistry is something else. It’s when someone doesn’t just think the way you do, or even complement the way you do, but wonders in the same direction. When they pause at the same questions. When they stay curious about the same things.

Curiosity is underrated. It keeps you young. It keeps you playful. When you think together and wonder together, when you’re still interested in what the other person is noticing, the relationship doesn’t age the way other things do. It stays slightly unfinished. Which is another way of saying: alive.

It has only happened twice in my life. Both times were geographically impossible. The last time, his eyes were far too blue. He felt so untethered I don’t think he fully belonged to time.

I think about those situations more than I should. The way my head tilted, slowly, when I realized we were often thinking the same thing. Not finishing each other’s sentences exactly, but hovering near the same thought. Like we’d arrived at it from different directions and were surprised to find each other already there. It felt intrusive at first, like there was teleprompter floating above my head. As if my private thoughts had accidentally been made public and no one had told me.

Once, he was standing in my kitchen and suddenly straightened up, startled in a way that felt almost childlike. He said, laughing, that he thought we were thinking the exact same thing again. He admitted he had noticed it before. More than once. He hadn’t said anything because it felt too strange to point out. Or maybe too fragile. He said he thought it was happening because we weren’t trying. Because we were just being ourselves. As if that alone was enough to synchronize something invisible.

On our first date, we had spent a significant portion of time studying maps, asking questions and the same level of curiosity about the world. That curiosity is what keeps things youthful, from stalling out.

But not all good things stay and not all good things that do stay, stay good.

So how will you know when you’ve found intellectual chemistry with someone, on top of all the other types of chemistry?

You’ll know it’s happening when you stop performing. When the questions you ask aren’t designed to impress but to understand and engage. When you’re genuinely curious about their answer, not just waiting for your turn to be interesting.

It won’t feel like chemistry at first. It’ll feel like relief. “Thank God, we speak the same intellectual language”. This isn’t about IQ or being smart, its about being on the same wave.

The people who have this type of relationship don’t usually post about it. They’re too busy being in it. Which is why so few people write about love from a place of having stayed, they’re not looking for validation online, they don’t need it. They’re looking at maps in someone’s kitchen, startled to find themselves thinking the same thought at the same time.

If you’ve had it even once, you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t yet, you’ll recognize it the moment it happens. Not because it’s loud, but because suddenly everything else will feel like noise.

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I was stumped for a minute. And I gave her my advice, sipped my ginger ale and drove home. But I kept thinking about it.

1. Wear The Damn Sunscreen - If the UV is over 3, you’re going to damage your skin bit by bit. Even in Canada. Even in the winter. UV over 3, SPF over 30 (I wear 60 because it lasts longer) and yes you’re more likely to get skin cancer from not wearing sunscreen than you are from all the online baloney that SPF gives you cancer. Full stop.

2. Always have enough money in the bank to leave whatever situation you’re in. You cannot count on someone to provide for you. This isn’t 1880 Russia. You are not incapable of signing a credit card. This whole provider culture is a means to suppress women and trap them. Should your partner contribute to the wellbeing of your life? Absolutely. Should you be dependent on them to pay your bills? Absolutely not. If they want to, great. But if they can’t or refuse, be able to pay your own bills. Financial abuse is real, it’s the number one reason why women stay in bad abusive relationships.

3. Sleep really does matter. As humans we need a lot of it. Prioritize it. Your body and face will thank you.

4. Empathy is not a skillset but it is something you need to recognize in yourself. I’ve done a lot of different volunteer work in my life and it’s grown me tremendously as a person, more than any 9-5 job could have. Don’t just give money but invest your time and presence in the causes you believe in. I can’t tell you what those causes are because I’m not you but part of the fun is exploring that. Your presence is more impactful than you think.

5. Don’t accept no as an answer. If you’re ill and a doctor dismisses you, see another doctor. Get another opinion. I have seen women nearly lose their lives over a doctor who would rather give the wrong answer than admit they simply do not know. Women’s bodies are complicated and nuanced and not all medical professionals are on the side of women. This is something that exists. A lot of medical studies don’t even include women.

6. If you’re having a baby, that’s your business. I have seen terrible bullying of women’s birth choices online. No one should be allowed to comment on whether you have a c-section or vaginal birth. If you’re having a baby for yourself or if you’re a surrogate. No one should be allowed to comment if you breast or bottle feed. Literally, no one. They are not you, they are not in your body, they are not making the choices you make. I think that having a baby is a personal decision and whatever decision you’re making for the baby, so long as you’re not endangering the child or yourself, is your business not theirs.

7. Learn to tolerate being misunderstood. Being liked is easy when you’re agreeable. Being respected often isn’t. You will outgrow people. Let them misinterpret you. Clarity comes from living, not explaining yourself into exhaustion.

8. Don’t confuse anxiety with intuition. Your nervous system will often speak before your brain catches up to you. Intuition is quiet and persistent. Anxiety is noisy and immediate.

9. Do it alone. There will be a lot of things in life you want to do or places you want to go and there will be no one to go with you. You need to do it alone and not martyr yourself over it, but enjoy the entirely unique experience that will revolve around you. You will miss out on a lot in life if you always expect to have a friend or partner to do it with you. In fact, they can ruin it for you entirely.

10. Cynicism isn’t a life skill. Curiosity is magic. It keeps you alive. The people who age best aren’t the most preserved, they are the most interesting. And interesting over sterile beauty is a win every day (not saying you can’t be both). Curiosity is your compass. When you get curious or excited over something, listen to that. You’re being guided.

11. Don’t monetize everything you love. Some things are meant to be enjoyed. Some things you are meant to be terrible at. Be terrible at them so you can enjoy them. Take the pressure off of being perfect enough to monetize. Capitalism isn’t everything.

12. The love of your life isn’t always waiting for you. This is not a failure. This does not mean you aren’t pretty enough, smart enough or interesting enough. It just means your luck has not come in yet. And healthy romantic partnerships can’t be cultivated, it’s a lot of the right person and the right time. As someone who believes in working on themselves, this truth that it’s out of our control annoys me to no end but I know it’s not a reflection of my worth. It’s just timing.

13. You’re allowed to change your mind. We don’t always get it right. We aren’t always the same people we were 5 years ago, 8 months ago or 2 days ago.

14. Consistency is everything. I’m sorry but it’s true. It’s the key to success. I’ve been around long enough to see the consistent people aren’t always the most talented ones. Often the most talented ones fail because they can’t be consistent. Even skin care comes down to small steps done consistently over time. Showing up is more than half the battle to anything you want to conquer in life.

And finally: Wash your face. Not because beauty matters most, but because the small act of taking care of yourself, every single night, even when you’re exhausted, is practice for everything else. It’s the promise you keep to yourself when no one’s watching.

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Meanwhile, a significant portion of men appear to be… buffering.

This isn’t a moral failing. It’s more of an infrastructure problem. Women are drowning in advice. Glow-up guides, wellness plans, emotional literacy, skincare routines with flowcharts. Men, on the other hand, have largely been left with “be yourself” and a suspicious amount of confidence in cargo shorts.

There are a million articles on how women can improve themselves, and almost none that gently explain to men that improvement is also available to them, should they wish to participate.

So consider this a small public service announcement. Not a manifesto. Not an attack. Just a quiet suggestion that heterosexual women, having done an extraordinary amount of work, deserve partners who look like they’ve noticed the world has changed.

Truly.

• Fix your posture. How you carry yourself communicates everything before you open your mouth. This is the first thing I notice about a man, is how he carries himself, how he walks, how he moves. It’s so telling of who you are.

• Learn to shower. It’s amazing how many men don’t shower properly. We’ve failed as a society. Liquid soap, a loofa or wash cloth. Go to town. Wash all the places.

• No underwear or socks with holes. Throw them out. Replace them. This is not sentimental. If you can afford it, buy the new garments.

• Pick two colognes: one for daytime, one for night. Learn restraint. You are not crop-dusting a room. Learn how to apply, subtly is everything.

• Basic moisturizer. Yes, you have to wash your face first. Drugstore brands are fine. You don’t need to go extreme with it.

• Make sure your clothes fit. Find a good tailor. Yes, even for jeans. No floods. No baggy pants. No belly tops (yes, they have

• Get one good haircut and maintain it. “Low effort” still requires effort.

• Clean shoes matter more than expensive shoes. Own a good pair of boots, a casual option, and something business-appropriate.

• SPF. Sunscreen matters. 90% of skin damage comes from the sun. If you’re not going to wear 30 SPF daily, fine, but wear it when it makes sense.

• Manscape. Your ears, your nose, trim your eyebrows. Not sculpted. Just… acknowledged.

• One decent jacket that fits will outperform five mediocre ones. Fit matters more than branding.

• One perfect pair of sunglasses. Something modern yet classic. Invest in this one.

• Keep your nails clean. Moisturize your hands and feet. People notice. See the doctor about that yellow toenail.

• Have one solid travel duffle bag. Retire the backpack from 2011.

• Drink water. Not alcohol or soda. It shows.

• Work out. Not for vanity, but for vitality. Strength is compound interest for your body. If you hate working out, do it with friends or get a trainer. As you age, your bones require weight training. This is maintenance, not a personality trait.

• Oral hygiene. Brush properly. Floss. Mouthwash. See a dentist. Bad breath negates literally everything else on this list.

• Sleep. No one looks good exhausted and resentful. Eight hours is not a personality flaw.

• Basics > novelty. Neutral t-shirts, proper socks, a belt that matches your shoes. The foundation matters more than the statement piece or band t-shirts.

• Phone hygiene. Clean screen. No cracked case. No phone that looks like it’s been through three wars and a divorce. If you can’t, at least wipe it down.

• Buy the nice sheets. Don’t get navy blue. Something soft, that feels good to sleep in. You’ll feel better. Wash them once a week. This is hygiene.

• Social awareness. Read the room. You’re smart. Show it.

• Learn when to stop talking. Confidence is not volume. Learn to listen.

• Have one grown-up hobby. Not gaming until 3am. Something embodied, skill-based, or social. It shows you can commit.

Before you accuse me of being superficial, think about the women you’re attracted to and the work they put in. Nothing in life is effortless. The male loneliness epidemic has been curated by men themselves.

Men love to call women superficial for having standards, while simultaneously shaming them for doing too much or too little to meet those standards. You can’t demand effort and then resent the existence of it.

Effort is not a crime. It’s just more obvious when you’re not making any.

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This has nothing to do with being “friend-zoned,” passive, deferential, or secretly auditioning for sainthood. It has to do with the small administrative detail that the rules have changed while many people were still arguing about whether they had.

Women no longer need men to open bank accounts, co-sign credit cards, or grant them access to the working world like a VIP wristband. They have acquired the economic and educational equity they should have always had, and as a result, partnership has shifted from survival strategy to elective experience. Like choosing a very good restaurant. Or not.

This has left a number of men standing in the emotional kitchen, staring at the table, wondering what exactly they were supposed to bring.

The answer is not status alone. It is not provision alone. It is not a watch, a job title, or a complicated explanation of cryptocurrency. It is character. It is whether you are pleasant to be around. Whether your presence lowers the temperature in the room rather than raising it. Whether you listen, show up, and behave well when there is absolutely no audience.

And yes, protection still matters. Not ownership. Not control. Protection in the sense of safety. Emotional safety. Social safety. Physical safety. The rare and deeply attractive quality of making someone’s nervous system unclench slightly in your presence.

This can look very unremarkable on paper. Opening a car door. Pulling out a chair and waiting. Making sure someone gets home safe. Checking in, and then actually doing the thing you said you would do. It reads as small. It is not.

Sure, washboard abs and a nice car help. No one is pretending they don’t. But if there’s one thing I know about my fellow women, it’s that we routinely overlook a great deal when the things that actually matter are present. And yes, there are still women who cling to an outdated, transactional view of relationships. Mostly, they are not representative of most women.

So there it is. The advice you scrolled for, possibly the best dating advice you will get all year, and irritatingly simple enough to dismiss: be a good friend.

Romance no longer begins with performance. It begins with trust. And trust begins, somewhat inconveniently, with being a genuinely good friend. That means character, integrity, and sincerity. It means consistency. It means doing what you say you will do, especially when there is nothing to gain.

One important caveat, which should not require a user manual but apparently does. Do not pretend to be “just friends” when you are quietly harboring romantic intentions like contraband. A date should be identified as a date. Your interest should be visible to the naked eye.

After that, relax. The most valuable thing you have to offer is not strategy, mystery, or a slow reveal. It is friendship. The kind that does not arrive with fine print, emotional traps, or a dramatic reveal in Act Three.

Make your interest clear. Then be a good friend anyway, because that’s what all good relationships come down to. When you’re both old and your face is hanging on by a thread, it’s the friendship that’s going to matter.

And if she does not appreciate any of that, I bring reassuring news! She is not someone you were going to want to spend the rest of your life with anyway. So stop fixating on the worst examples, and remember this: it has never been easier to decide to be a good person.

There is no braking.
There is only the wall.

I hit it at full speed.

I start crying laughing. The kind where your body decides before your brain does. A marshal runs over yelling, “Are you okay? Are you injured? Are you okay?” And the truth is I am injured and okay. Both things are true. I will have an orange-sized bruise on my back for the next month. I feel weirdly satisfied about it.

“Valla, Nicole! Valla!”

I am back in Spanish class. I have never spoken Spanish in my life. French, yes. Italian, yes. Spanish feels like I showed up to the wrong party in the wrong shoes and decided to stay anyway. Sometimes I read the words like they’re French. Other times my Spanish sounds like an Italian doing a bad impression of a Spaniard. It is unintentionally offensive. I am having the best time.

He asks what language I’ll learn next. I say Català.

He pauses. “But no one outside of Catalunya will understand you?”

I tell him it’s niche. A callback to a failed summer fling. It fits with my current interest in failing at new things. That time, it just wasn’t a language. It was a person.

Everything right now wants us to be perfect. Optimized. Maximized. Strategically excellent. I have decided I want the opposite. I want to be uncomfortable. I want to want things badly and not be good at them yet. I want to embarrass myself in public and survive.

It’s raining when I go to check out the adult karting league. Inside, it’s mostly men. All men, actually. They stare at me. I am the girl in the pink Ferrari jacket, red hair, boots, gloves, helmet. I look like I know what I’m doing. I do not.

I ask about lessons. What would it mean to get good at this? Could I have my own kart? One of the really fast ones? Could I race?

They ask if I want to race that night. I pause longer than I should. I’m alone. It’s Sunday. I say yes.

I sit by the track waiting. There are kids. Teenagers. A man with no teeth whose girlfriend is hyping him up like he’s about to go to war. And then there’s me. Still in the pink jacket.

Then I’m on the track. I’m racing. First. Second. Fourth. I finish third after the brake slips again. I am not tall. This may be my villain origin story. When it’s over, my arms hurt from holding the wheel too tightly, like it might run away from me.

I walk off the track pretending not to limp.

The next night in French class, I talk about Formula One. About racing. Every fifth word I ask, “What’s the word again in French?” I am at maybe 40% fluency now. I started at 30%. This feels like progress. I will take it.

It feels so good to learn without an outcome. To do things not because I’m good at them, but because I want to be. To choose discomfort on purpose. To be bad first.

This is my terrible era.
Please let me be terrible for a while before I dare to get good at anything.

See you on the track, speaking in tongues and hoping the brakes hold.

The story had been sitting in my head for months. I was watching someone else’s personal drama unfold from a polite distance, telling myself I wasn’t involved. I kept circling it emotionally… close enough to understand the shape of it, far enough to feel removed. Until, briefly, I wasn’t. Nothing explosive happened. Just a small shift that made the pattern visible.

I wrote Circles just before I left Los Angeles for a month, as the fires did what they were always going to do. There’s a particular feeling that comes with watching something advance without regard for your plans. At the time, the timing felt coincidental. In retrospect, it wasn’t.

That song quietly set the tone for the entire record, which comes out in April.

Circles is out today.

I didn’t have race cars in mind when I wrote it, which feels ironic now that I find myself on karting tracks, literally moving in loops again and again. I’ve come to accept that I’m a woman of patterns… emotional, geographic, creative. I tend to return to things to see if they’ve changed, and to check whether I have.

I didn’t begin this album with a concept. I wasn’t trying to capture a moment or make a statement. Each track became a segment of that year simply by existing inside it. Looking back, Circles had to come first. Not as an introduction, but as a map.

Some things don’t announce themselves loudly. They just repeat until you notice.

I hope you take a listen to the new single here.

P.s. It’s on all streaming services.