Lunch comes around, and it’s slow, chef-curated and chef-made, with vegetables plucked from the farm earlier this week. It sits with me better, and I eat slow too, appreciating the labor of love that went into this plate in front of me.

The hours tick on by, and I find my way into the kitchen once more. This time, I reach for the brown shaded powder - hojicha - made from the older leaves, stems, or even twigs that matcha doesn’t find value in. I find hojicha to taste earthy, and in a way, it grounds me too.

The day softens into evening. I tuck my laptop away, and find that I have a few more hours of sunlight to get some movement in. I put on my shoes, a podcast that tethers me to what’s happening in the industry or in my homeland, and walk into the forest that is now my backyard. The forest is not an understatement; it’s truly just the forest. I walk underneath a canopy of endless trees on a paved road that I’m not entirely sure how exists, but I’m grateful. A creek slows through it, bugs hum, a leech or two successfully finds its way into my sock crease, and still, nothing here feels frightening. Only the noise of the woods, and the quiet of my own mind, finally loud enough to let the thoughts surface.

Today marks exactly one week since I’ve been here in Wazuka. But time moves differently in this town. I perceive it differently. I think it’s because today is treated simply as today, self-contained to starting the moment I wake up and wrapping up when I doze off to my bedtime read. Every day is a full day, and not one whose value is wrapped in the success of what needs to be done tomorrow or what was built upon from yesterday. Today, you are present, and today, today is the thing that matters.

This sits strange, doesn’t it, when you spend your days in business school constantly thinking about how to build a career to supposedly define the dominant pieces of your future trajectory now, about how to build now regardless of whether you actually feel passionate towards it, about how to out-think the machines, about survival of the fittest and the constant stare-and-compare-and-emulate syndrome that often plagues ambitious, coastal cities, and then you come here and you just watch people simply live and you’re asked to simply live.

Where every day is a full day. Where today just asks for your intentional presence, whether it’s making yourself a matcha made with love, or pulling vegetables from the garden for the table, or caring for a whole farm to send the joy of tea and values carried from centuries of Japanese history into the world. You find purpose in the present, instead of overthinking the past or living in the promise of the future.

Just about a year ago now, I was also in the woods for 10 days, meditating in silence, and I remember exactly what it felt like to find myself again. This time, it’s the same feeling and I’m still wrapped amongst all this green and brown of the forest and the farm at once - only now, I'm surrounded by people, yet letting the noise of the everyday and the noise of the woods reach me the same way, back to that same depth of reflection.

A week in Wazuka, and I already know that I will do what it takes, with practice, ritual, and intentionality, to bring this gift of the present back home with me.

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Learn more about d:matcha and the family farm here!

And I genuinely could not make that up if I tried.

One second I’m just casually eating a vegetable, the next second there’s a tiny jagged edge where a smooth one used to be, and my tongue hasn’t stopped checking on it since. It’s so unexpected that it’s basically all I can think about now - not the five pounds I’ve been low-key trying to lose, not a bad hair day, not the pimple on my chin that felt like the end of the world yesterday, not my digestive issues that always plague me post long travel.

And it’s so funny how fast the hierarchy of what’s “wrong” with you can reshuffle itself in an instant. It’s all so subjective, this whole experience of being in a body & how the idea of what counts as a crisis is computed in the present.

It reminds me of this quote by John Green, “That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.” The idea that we focus our attention and let occupy our mental real estate what’s shouting the loudest right now, not necessarily the most critical thing or the most important thing.

Whether a chipped tooth or something at work or a little argument at home, maybe it’s worth thinking about through this lens of relativism.

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In the rhythm of the bend, find the weed, pluck the root, check, move, bend, find the weed, pluck the root, and repeat, I lost myself in meditation. And two things kept circling back to me.

(1) The weeds always come back. And this is just what farmers do every day, all season. The weeds come back, you pluck them, you let the plants breathe, you move down the rows. And a week later, they come back again. But you return, and return, over and over, with patience and with expectation, without overthinking it or losing your mind over what’s unavoidable. Weeds grow where your flowers grow, and that’s just a fact. So, you pluck them out and move forward down the row - again, and again. And the simple discipline and patience of showing up like that manifests into the harvest at the end that speaks for itself. And I think there’s wisdom in that that carries deeply.

Perhaps, we might just tend to the things that cloud our vision with patience and grace, instead of expecting ourselves to defeat them once and for all.

(2) I thought about how quickly I’ve always had my matcha - whisked and gone faster than it took to make it. But all this time, I really had no sense of the hundreds of aching hours underneath that bowl. And this isn’t just about the harvesting labor; it’s about the time that goes into weeding, shading, fertilizing, and the jobs that go hidden behind the already hidden jobs.

There were 7 of us today, spread across two small farms, hunched over one row at a time - and this was just one day, of one season, on one farm among so many. Multiply that by every harvest, every farm, every hand that’s ever bent the way mine did today, and the scale of it becomes almost impossible to hold in your head.

We consume so much of the world without ever touching what it cost to make.

And so, for the rest of the day, everything felt almost magnanimous - like the volume had been turned down on the noise and up on the noticing.

I sat in the car afterward, chugging my two-liter water bottle, and found myself just staring at it. The bottle, the cap, the packaging, the label - and thinking about how some manufactured every part of this, shipped it, stocked it, and sold it, so that I could drink water in a car without a single thought.

I stood in the kitchen for a second before a homemade lunch made by someone’s actual hands behind it and continued to think about the invisible diligence stitched into everything I get to enjoy without a second thought.

From the chef who made today’s lunch to my mom, growing up, who set the table at the exact same time every single day like it was simply what the day required, to my dad when he makes my favorite egg dosas standing over the pan after a long day without needing my explicit gratitude.

Labor via love, disguised as normal - and made even more invisible when things like matcha powder is manufactured in a way that is so removed to our every day.

But perhaps, if we just slowed down long enough to actually watch the water get poured instead of just drinking it, or let a meal sit in front of you for a second before you eat it, or let ourselves just breathe.

Because when we begin to notice, really, really notice, the hands and hours behind the ordinary things we move through on autopilot, I doubt we’ll be able to unsee it.

The invisible work stops being invisible and it just starts looking like what it always was: care given by someone, so that we could have an easier day than if they hadn’t given.

I feel grateful, I feel palpable growth, and I also have felt like things are happening to me faster than I can realize.

And just when I was craving a slowing down of a pace, the universe granted me with one of my biggest surprises and wishes yet. An opportunity to spend a month in rural Japan, working on a matcha farm.

I’m currently in the tiny town of Wazuka working at d:Matcha, an intimate, mission-driven matcha farm, for the next month-ish or so. It’s so quiet in this town, I can almost always hear my own breath. Slowing down is coming easy, and stopping to smell the roses feels like the only thing I can really do.

This is the kind of stuff Sow’s dreams were made of.

I’m spending the next few weeks learning some farming basics, being out in the fields with my hands in the dirt, learning how to whisk an actually perfect bowl of matcha straight from matcha farmers themselves, and helping the farm think through business expansion opportunities.

And I get to do it all tucked away in a village so quiet and isolated that there’s genuinely nothing to do here but live slowly. Just endless tea (seriously, I get access to unlimited hojicha and matcha hehe), trees, and time.

And this is when my writing flows the easiest, when I get to sit in the gap, and when my brain feels rested and calm.

So now I’m back, notebook in hand, hoping to post some thoughts and feelings every day I get to be at this farm.

Today, we’re going to talk about the thing I started talking about in this article: time.

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I was recently talking to a friend about the subjectivity of time - that as we get older, we perceive it differently, and in a way that only accelerates. There’s something I read recently that said, adjusted for this subjectivity, our life is already half over by age 23 or 24. School blends into work blends into the normalcy of everyday, and our routines build and patterns repeat day in and day out, until our brain just blurs all the moments together and starts processing time even faster.

Today was day 1 of my summer at a matcha farm (!!!) in Wazuka, a town about an hour from Kyoto. I took the train from Kyoto this morning, and watched the trees whoosh past the window at a speed faster than I could even process. When our perception is so warped, those years start to feel like that train window. A blur we never meant to let becomes the whole view.

But then, I arrived to:

Green stacked on green stacked on green. So many trees. Terraced into the mountainside like the land itself is patient in a way I’ve lost sense of being.

Even as I write this, I face nothing but green. And all day today, I’ve felt my cortisol just drop in real time, little by little, with every new tree that I process. Shoulders I didn’t know were at my ears, coming down.

This farm’s owner and manager, and now my manager for the next month or so, Daiki-san, sat with me this morning as he talked about his story and why he wants to hold this little farm of 10 acres close even when bracing for growth. His idea is not to chase scale for scale’s sake, but rather making sure people know the origin and story behind matcha. How do we hold the source story of matcha closely. A matcha with the farmer’s name who harvested it still on it, the twenty days of shade still legible in the packaging, with nothing flattened into an anonymous green tin. He said he doesn’t want to make his matcha a commodity, he wants to maintain it as a story that keeps touch every step of the way, where quality can be felt because it’s purposed and remembered.

And maybe that’s the same answer to the thing I was talking to my friend about. If time speeds up because our days blur into sameness, then slowing down isn’t necessarily about doing less or needing to plan adventure after adventure. It’s about fostering depth. Depth as attention we chose not to rush. Naming the shade, the harvest day, the farmer, the people that make us us, the homes we live in, the places we see, the people we strive to be.

A month to come spent amidst this green stacked on green stacked on green.

The sound of my pulse slowing down to meet their sway, is all I hope to receive this month.

It’s late afternoon and I’m back home in San Diego, after some of the most hectic last few weeks with finals and then back-to-back trips to Japan and Jamaica. My hair is still damp from a shower, my skin warm under familiar sheets and the smells of home. My body feels like it is finally exhaling after weeks or rather a quarter - or in the spirit of the last day of the year - a full year of movement.

This year was a year of self-discovery in its fullest of definitions.

There were so many shifts and pulls of the tides in every facet of life. And through the wins and the rocky parts, it was an unprecedented year of unwiring old neural connections, familiar patterns, and versions of myself that always stayed in what felt safe even if no longer true.

It was filled with milestones and letting-go’s - stepping straight into a long-held dream, expanding my world through new people and adventures, learning impermanence through days-long meditation, and leaving and forgiving vs. staying and resenting.

the big lessons and reminders of 2025:

1. What feels like ceilings are often really just self-imposed thresholds.

This lesson is a huge work-in-progress lesson that needs to be injected into my bloodstream. I remember early this January when I had convinced myself that I couldn’t get into any grad school in my list, only to now be going to the school of my dreams. Finishing what once felt impossible, and watching long-held hopes materialize remind me that so many ceilings have been self-imposed. The lesson wasn’t just that I could - it’s how often I convince myself that I couldn’t.

2. Letting go with forgiveness and kindness creates more peace than staying with resentment ever could.

There were moments this year where staying could have felt easier or I could have chosen to stay in something that no longer served anyone best after learning new pieces of information. And in those moments, choosing to accept the reality at hand, mourn what once was, but let go with grace, created a kind of relief I didn’t know I was capable of. It was one that allowed my consciousness to eventually sleep easy at night, rather than whirl around in the what-could-have-beens.

3. Every single answer we are searching for lies within us.

My proudest and most significant of experiences is the 10 day Vipassana, or silent meditation retreat, I completed in August. Ten days of silence in the woods removed every familiar distraction and left me alone with my own mind. Sitting somewhere always in the spectrum of boredom to heightened emotion, I had to remain still through it all. Over time, the idea of anicca or the law of impermanence, of every single thought stopped being theoretical - every thought and sensation rising and falling on its own if I didn’t interfere. The physical clarity was steady, and deeply rewired my understanding of every single point of suffering or desire I inflicted upon myself. It didn’t last forever, but it permanently reset my understanding of peace and how to humanly get there - if we just try.

4. Traveling always delivers special kind of lessons packaged in poetry.

This year, I made it to the 30 under 30 list. That is, traveling to Jamaica this last week officially rang in my 30th country I’ve been to before 30. In fact, I went to 6 new countries this year, including Costa Rica, Portugal, Hungary, Germany, and Croatia, and re-visited some personal Sow favorite places like Prague, London, and Japan. I’m beyond blessed that this gets to be my reality. Traveling this year, across new cities and familiar places revisited, continued to remind me how many stories are walking around at once, all just as full and complicated as my own. As the world continues to expand for me, I feel my ego growing smaller in the best way. I’m reminded that I’m just a little droplet in a world full of moving beings, and a seedlet of positive nihilism (think: everything everywhere all at once or buddhism) is planted.

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5. Health is not something you can pause and return to unchanged.

For nearly a decade, discipline and routine had kept my body steady, almost invisibly so. But ever since the start of grad school, with a packed schedule to the T filled with constant movement, that rhythm broke. I stopped cooking, my workout schedule became fluid, I lost control. My body responded quickly and loudly, forcing me to recalibrate this winter break. It was sobering to realize that our corporeal bodies are not invincible and how vital foundational care really is. But, in my belief that everything happens for a reason, and I’d like to think all these lessons are best learnt sooner than later.

6. We haven’t yet met everyone who will matter to us yet.

It’s incredible to think that I only started grad school this September, for I feel grateful to have an unexpected abundance of new friendships. It feels wild that I feel so close to people I haven’t even known a full 120 days. It’s a beautiful reminder that connections with people are ongoing. That new people can arrive and matter so deeply, quickly, serendipitously. I felt full with the community I had at the start of this year and even fuller now. It feels surreal to think that my community will only continue to expand with newer faces and relationships ahead that lie ahead in my chapters.

7. Love craves to be revisited.

And on the flip side, these last few months reminded me that community isn’t self sustaining. As life expands and gets busier and busier, old friendships and family bonds won’t simply just hold. I’ve been caught by the winds of the MBA, but also have increasingly missed my old friends and family these last few weeks. One of my 3 resolutions for the next year is to be more intentional with the people I have called mine prior to school. I want to treat connection and community as something living, one that you return to and check in on, even when you have valid reasons to be away. For life is too short to not tend to those who are ours.

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8. The present moment carries much more happiness than the milestone ever could.

Over and over again, life has proven that the version of happiness I imagined waiting on the other side of an achievement never quite materializes the way I expect it to. The moment you “win” and land the dream you were always dreaming of, the mind quickly adjusts, goal posts shift, and a new set of desires (and problems) begin to take shape. Stanford made this especially clear. Getting in felt like validation to my younger self. But it was only time that it too came with an arrival of life’s pre-stamped package of new goalposts, pressures, doubts, and expectations. It’s not that ambition isn’t wrong. It’s that peace cannot be postponed. It’s a reminder that happiness needs to be practiced in the middle of things, and not reserved for some imagined future.

9. Sometimes, familiarity isn’t always freedom.

Letting go of ways of thinking and situations I had grown used to sitting in for years felt deeply uncomfortable at first, and at times painfully disorienting. But that deliberate unlearning created so much space to welcome new experiences and deep connections. The unwiring also continues to dismantle an image of myself I had clung to for a long time, occasionally triggering existential panic, but more often sending me into a series of new adventures and zoomies.

10. Every single person or thing comes and goes; nothing is permanent.

Once again, I return to the idea of anicca, and that everything comes and everything goes. The idea that meaning is something we attach, and not something fixed. This year carried some of the highest highs and some of the lowest lows, often entangled next to each other or sometimes, happening at the same time. It’s a reminder that the best of news lasts just a while, and the worst of news lasts just a while. Perhaps, loosening grip on outcomes and focusing on existing in the moment just makes life feel that much lighter.

what’s guiding me into 2026?

A lot of these lessons amongst many others will continue to lead me into 2026. But, the biggest thing my mind keeps wandering to is a reminder of how I want to keep moving through the world.

And this reminder arrived for me at a fruit stand at a farmers market a month or so ago.

a love letter to: persimmon man

About a month or so ago, I was on my way to Mademoiselle Colette in Menlo Park, a coffee shop that had recently become a new local spot to go do some life admin at. It was a Sunday morning, and I happened by a farmers market I hadn’t been to before.

I was naturally drawn to a stand that showed off my holy grail of fruits I like buying: plums, pomegranates, and… persimmons. I sampled more persimmon slices than I should’ve - because, yum.

I carefully picked a few persimmons and plums and went up to the seller. He was behind the counter, along with his 14-15 something year old daughter, together chopping fruit to put up for samples.

He weighed the bag and said it would be $12. I reached for Apple Pay, and he said cash only.

I let out a quiet but emotion-filled welp. “Oh nooooo!”

Without missing a beat, he told me to not worry about it, to take them, enjoy the fruit that he harvested for people like me, and that he would just get it from me next time.

His daughter kept chopping fruit next to him, as if this was normal, and as if generosity without spectacle was just how things were done.

I walked away with a larger heart and a bag full of persimmons, feeling like I had been handed something much larger than persimmons.

And that is exactly the spirit I want to carry forward, into 2026 and beyond, for myself and into rooms I walk into. The humanhood that exists in little moments where the littlest acts can compound into so much more.

Because when I keep thinking about this past year, through the wins and through the chaos, I keep returning back to this moment with the persimmon man.

There’s a reminder here that life is much more than the extraordinary moments, and mostly made up of these small, ordinary moments that pass quickly if we’re not paying attention. Perhaps, choosing to be present, showing up at our best in the moment, accepting circumstances as they are, and offering people our best without keeping score, shape how we perceive the world and are perceived by the world more so than any grandeur act could ever.

So thank you persimmon man, for your kindness and for the reminder that life can be nothing but a string of sweet nothings.

my wishes for my dearest readers

And as we step into a new year, I wish a few things for you too.

I hope you find moments that slow you down in the best way - small, ordinary ones that remind you you’re here. I hope you meet people who arrive unexpectedly and matter deeply, and that you tend to the ones who have known you across seasons. I hope you’re kind to yourself in the middle of becoming, and that you trust the work happening beneath the surface, even when nothing feels certain yet. I hope everything works out for you - in the sense that everything works out exactly as it should - and that you let yourself be present for the journey. And as things rise and fall, as they always do, I hope you remember that none of it is permanent, not me and not you, and that you return back to the present moment with intention and kindness to yourself and others.

I hope this new year fills you with a truck load of sweet nothings.

with love and energy as sweet as handpicked persimmons from my beloved persimmon man,

sow 🍊

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I turned around to come face-to-face, eye-to-eye with a wolf - a big, gray wolf.

We stared at each other for about ten seconds, frozen in the same patch of silence.

My brain was waiting for me to panic, but my pulse stayed steady.

I stayed still, the wolf stayed still, until we both decided to turn and walk away from each other at the same time.

A week earlier, I would’ve run.

But today, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t.

I had been spending the last ten days in North Fork, a small town tucked away in the Sierra Nevada forest, effectively living the life of a monk or a nun. I signed up for a retreat where for ten days, I gave up my phone, my books, my voice, any distractions, and anything familiar. I sat in silence, meditating around ~8 hours a day, learning Vipassana - the same meditation technique that Gautama Buddha used to reach enlightenment and teach others.

The idea is simple, brutal, and powerful: strip everything away, sit with your body and mind, and watch yourself without reacting.

What ended up coming out of these 10 days is a realization that the answers we search for lie within the framework of our own bodies.

The path forward begins by looking inward.

Day 1: Anapana and Letting Go of Control

During the first couple of days, we are taught the technique of Anapana which is basically just observing your breath as is. Don’t change it. Don’t deepen it. Don’t label it anything - you are constantly asked to not use any verbalization, don’t term it an inhale or an exhale.

Personally, my natural inhales and exhales are extremely shallow and hard to feel. But then once I found it, I found this constant pull to want to interfere or to control it - to make them deeper, to make them stronger, to make them more dominant.

That impulse itself became the lesson: that we too often want things to be as we think they should be, rather than observing them as is. This urge runs so deeply to the point where I wanted to control the most subconscious thing we do that keeps us alive: breathing.

As a Type-A-constant-goal-seeking-perfectionist, I thought about how important controlling the outcome has been for me without me realizing it - for years. So of course, when things lead astray and move off the roads of Plan A, Plan B, or Plan G, into uncharted territory, I often lose my sights and find myself in a puddle of anxiety.

Rarely have I accepted things to be as they are.

Letting the breath simply be as it is was the first step in a ten-day journey of learning equanimity - accepting reality without trying to bend it in any direction.

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Days 2-3: Sensations Upon Sensations Upon Sensations

For the next few days, we graduated from just simply watching the breath to watching the sensations it produced in the smallest of areas, like the rims of the nostrils or the upper lip.

At first, my shallow breath barely stirred anything, and I sat there wondering if I was destined to spend ten days failing at even feeling my own face.

But eventually, with enough stillness and concentration, I began to feel faint warmth, a bead of sweat, and even my heartbeat pulsing against my gums.

Nothing dramatic, but real. And the more I stayed with it, the more I realized how the body is always feeling something. We’re just rarely still enough or focused enough, to notice.

It injected the muse for a thought that kept returning to me through the retreat: how many moments am I missing out on simply because I’m too busy or ignorant to register them?

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Day 4: Vipassana and Learning the Law of Impermanence

On the fourth day, I moved into Vipassana proper, a meditative technique that involves scanning the body repeatedly, top to bottom, bottom to top, and noticing whatever sensations were present or absent - with absolute objectivity.

With enough time and focus, I felt sensation everywhere - the good, the bad, the ugly. Tingles, buzzing, chills, intense pain in the lower back, itching, numbness, vibrations.

But the most important instruction was repeated a countless number of times: treat every sensation equally. Don’t label the sensations as good and bad. Don’t chase the pleasant ones. Don’t wish for the painful ones to go away.

Treat them with a full understanding of anicca - or impermanence.

Every sensation, whether pleasant or unpleasant, rises, lingers, and passes. Nothing stays the same.

The body is constantly shifting, a living landscape of transient experiences, and our habitual responses - craving for pleasure and aversion to discomfort - are optional.

Observing sensation objectively and acclimating myself to not react to them during vipassana rewired something in me that I realized you can only unlock with direct experience. There were these moments that made the central Buddhist philosophy of detachment actually be experientially felt in my own body.

Buddha said that 100% of our misery is our own doing due to either craving for the good and aversion for the bad. Experientially feeling that in my own body by allowing the good and bad to be met with equanimity and anicca, I felt the truth flow within me.

Craving and aversion are simply mental constructions that we feed and multiply with our own obsession to the good and intolerance for the bad.

Instead, when a pleasurable vibration arises in the body, I learnt to feel it fully, but not cling to it. And when pain shoots through my back, I feel it fully, but I don’t resist it or try to escape it. And over time, you actually feel anicca at work - the pain subsides, and the vibrations disappear. It’s all impermanent.

My mind began to loosen its grip and attachment through the days. Each moment of noticing without reaction felt like undoing a knot in my mental wiring. I realized how much everything that gives us misery is either fueled by craving or aversion. We spend our entire lives straddling the two, chasing or resisting.

But what happens when you don’t do either? If you just observe and do not react?

All the mental noise just… stops.

The idea here is not to just be passive and let life happen to you. Rather, it’s to change how we respond to circumstances, situations, and people.

The teacher lays out an example in one of the discourses, and uses a metaphor of the weather - if it’s hot, you don’t try to change the weather, you take an umbrella out.

It’s a humbling and hitting realization that we are entirely responsible for our own misery. At times, it feels unfair. It’s easy to want to blame someone else, or an unfair hand that was given to you, or God if you’re a believer.

But it’s powerful to reclaim even this responsibility. That by choosing to not accept and observe, and by instead reacting, clinging, and resisting - we are the ones that lead us to our own doom.

The liberation comes when we stop.

Days 5-9: Discipline, Determination, and Undoing Sankharas

The fifth day onwards, we began to incorporate aditthana - the idea of strong determination - into our practice. For 3 hours everyday, we were told to not open our eyes or move our posture when meditating.

And in case you’re wondering at all what the big deal is here, let me tell you - this is a brutal experience.

Meditation is often misconstrued to just be a peaceful experience, and maybe that’s the case when you’ve done it for a while - but when you’re starting out, it’s a mental and physical sport of finding stillness in spite of debilitating pain.

For many hours, it felt like I was in actual hell. My lower back was heating up and pulsing with pain, my upper back wanted to mutilate itself, and my legs went numb.

But then, you're constantly reminded of anicca, anicca, anicca. Everything arises, everything passes. You’re told to not attach a feeling to the sensation, and you’re asked to not react by shifting your posture.

It’s impossible at first, but then there’s moments in which I became aware of the mechanics of suffering. I allow the sensations to arise, and patiently meet them with equanimity as they shift and vanish.

The habitual reactions to clench, resist, and escape loosen.

Sankharas, the patterns our minds and bodies have learned over time, are broken down.

And it is through this concept I realized how practicing this Vipassana directly influences how I navigate my actual life.

We may contain plural selves, but our corporeal, physical body holds the weight of our past trauma and the memories of our lived experiences. Fear, stress, sadness, and anxiety that we feel throughout our lives embeds itself in our bodies and is tied to old, conditional responses.

But by simply watching pain (or pleasure) with equanimity - even for a handful of moments, I stop generating new sankharas and old patterns begin to dissolve.

So subtle, almost invisible, but deeply profound when the realization hits that enlightenment is reached when you completely eliminate all your old sankharas and find stillness to the point of being able to observe every single sensation on your body with balance.

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Day 10: Metta and Practicing Unconditional Goodwill

On the tenth morning, we were taught how to end each of our meditations with a few moments of metta.

Metta is the practice of silently wishing for the safety, happiness, and freedom from suffering to everybody. This includes every single person, even those you might’ve once had resentment or anger towards.

Because in Vipassana, you learn actively to treat everything with neutrality. Everything you do with sensation - observing, forgetting, forgiving, letting go - you do with people and their actions even when they hurt.

And for the first time in all of retreat, I got to turn my mind outward, flowing from the center of equanimity to embrace the vastness of connection.

It let me feel what exists at the center of Buddhism - that liberation is not just about quieting the mind for yourself, but to allow your own inner freedom to become a seed for kindness in the world.

Equanimity without compassion is hollow; awareness without goodwill is incomplete.

Day 11: Tasting a Tiny Sip of That Elusive Brew Called Enlightenment

We woke up at 4 AM on the last day to close out our retreat with a final meditation.

We ended with metta, with the guru-ji on the tape closing out with two lines: effectively giving forgiveness to those who may have hurt you in the past, and asking for forgiveness from those you may have hurt in the past.

And in those minutes, there were flashes of faces and moments from my entire life - and then, they dissipated into the air. And I was left with tears streaming down my face, and an open, clean heart.

In that moment, my body felt still. My mind felt still. My heart felt free. I held not an ounce of hate, and only love and compassion. I couldn’t think of anything or anyone that hurt me or gave me ecstasy. I felt reborn with a zest for life I don’t think I’ve ever felt before.

Two days later today, the essence of it still remains. I feel balance, I feel peace.

I still carry my flaws and inexperience in this path of dhamma with long ways to go - but dang, does this mindset shift already feel so good.

To not just react to a wolf in the wild, but also to the packs upon packs of wolfs that lie within us.

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This was a long piece - and yet there’s still so much more I want to distill and say. I promise more will keep coming.

But for now, thank you for walking with me through these ten days on the page.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And even, offer a gentle invitation to try a Vipassana retreat for yourself. It’s not glamorous or easy - it’s long hours of sitting, aching, watching the mind, unwinding trauma trapped in your body and heart - but somewhere along the way, you find a kind of clarity that is rare to come by.

And if curiosity lingers about anything at all, I’m always happy to chat.

<3

With gratitude and metta,

Sow

But this also feels like a reductionist approach to thinking about the lived, human experience. We do move forward in time, but not linearly as one.

Rather, there is a constant weaving of our past and present selves, a process through which who we are now is always informed by the selves we once were, and in which growth means moving through, alongside, and beyond all of them as we birth future selves too.

The plurality of the self is a concept I’ve kept returning back to this summer. When I think about it just long enough, it makes me giddy even. It’s this idea our self right now is not rooted in permanence; it’s one of the many layers to ourselves, just like our past informs our future selves, and how our current self is not recognizable to our past versions.

Who we could be tomorrow could be unrecognizable in so many ways, but also rooted in everything we have been and are today. The fantastical notion of the multiverse feels real in its own right.

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I’ve always thought of myself as being very introspective and reflective of my own life experiences, and hyper-aware of my strengths, flaws, and ways of being. In fact, it was a source of my inner pride for long. But it wasn’t until I started therapy a few months ago that I realized there were still things to unearth about myself and learn about. A shocker!

It was humbling in the beginning, but now it’s exciting to be making connections, drawing patterns, and creating little origin stories for some of my traits, by just intimately thinking through my journey out loud. There’s pieces of my childhood I never thought about too deeply that connect to why I have an ambitious personality. There’s choices I continuously make in my friendships and relationships with people that I always viewed as just who I was because it’s who I am, but spoiler alert, it goes deeper than that; it almost always connects back to fragments of our past selves navigating life and informing our current selves.

There are so many versions of ourselves floating the astral ether, each still existing beyond the moment they physically experienced life and each a little bigger than the last.

As life moves on, we try on and wear different personas that go on their own adventures, build their own experiences, and make their own connections. And something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how each version of the self is doing the best they can. They’re optimizing for and making the best decision for themselves at a given point in time. They’re doing what they can with what they know.

And it’s why it’s an incredible disservice to ourselves to judge our many past selves for doing something or not doing something. It’s easy to say that our current self wouldn’t have made the same choices, but that’s almost obvious because we’re not who our past self was. We’re evolving, we’re growing, we’re morphing.

We cherish some selves. We wish to abandon some selves. We long for some selves. We try to forget some selves. We return to some selves. We outgrow some selves. We find some selves knocking on our doors when we least expect it. We subliminally hold on these selves within us, with fragments of different selves informing how we see the world and the choices we make in navigating our lives.

Sometimes, we feel guilty, foolish, or angry for making the choices we did once upon a time. Beating ourselves up for present day us wouldn’t never ever make the same choices as our past selves. But that’s almost obvious for we’re not who we once were, or what we once know, and we were once not who we are today. To try to judge our past selves with our current lived perspectives is unjust and impossible, like a mathematical inequality with no resolve.

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Ruminating on the idea of plural selves emboldens me to keep looking forward, using only a mirror to reflect back in time, and not a time machine that sucks me into mental spaces I can feel lost in.

There’s so much we can learn about ourselves, our tendencies, and the roots to our deepest dreams by just looking back and connecting the dots. There are also several dots waiting to be connected that are going to draw themselves onto the several blank canvases also waiting to be filled.

I find solace in the idea that we’re always doing our best.

I find resolve in the idea that we go through everything we do - the good, the bad, the ugly - to learn what ultimately comes to serve us the best.

And I find so much romance in the idea of becoming new versions of ourselves, each and every single day.

And so, even though I set out to do a quarterly reflection today, I find myself slipping into a daydream sort of haze and thinking back to where I was exactly a year ago. And how so much has changed and shifted. The change isn’t just in individual aspects, but in entirely, as if you’ve taken me and fully placed me in a different plane of existence where nothing from my past or even my old self belongs. There’s so much to say here about the plurality of the self, but that’s for another article (coming into your inboxes so very soon!)

But one thing feels emergent as true: that we are never really meant to be fully prepared. Things change - sometimes by choice, sometimes by unexpected circumstances. Life reroutes us - sometimes gently, sometimes all at once. And yet, we always find our way. It’s this realization that where we are right now, whether on top of a mountain, or at the bottom of the barrow, is just a stop and not a state of permanence. The ground keeps moving, and we keep becoming.

Hopefully this serves as a little something to think about as we approach the second half of this year. To believe in yourself and in your dreams with all your might, because you have no idea how much life can change if you believe that you deserve it. To dust off anything that knocked you down in the first half of the year, and use it as feeder to jumpstart anything you wish to do or be this second half of the year. To not let people or shifts distract you for too long. To allow yourself to become and become again.

And in the spirit of becoming, I wanted to take a beat and reflect on some things my mind and body did become through the season of Q2.

The Happenings (ft. the Moral of the Stories)

Boxing: Sweat, Ego, and Choosing the Right Room

I’ve been regularly boxing for the past 2.5 years, typically in an upscale boxing gym with group classes or with a personal trainer in 1-1 sessions. Through March and April, I would go to Rumble, since it was the closest to my parent’s house and it was a solid sweat - even though I deeply disliked how it wasn’t a place to get actual feedback on your boxing form since the gym catered itself to the casual boxer who goes for cardio, compared to a boxer who is training to be a fighter.

I found myself constantly booking front row, catching compliments from fellow gym-goers and the coaches after sessions. Coaches would come up to me to ask me my name and ask if I fought or trained for a while since I looked like it. And it made me feel good - shot my ego really.

But I knew this wasn’t the place for me if I wanted to keep training to spar and fight. I decided to try out a different boxing gym in May - one that looked like it was straight out of the Rocky movies. It looked rugged but real in every way. It smelled like pure sweat, and not like eucalyptus oil. There was no life inspirational pep talk given during or after class outside of a “you know you can do it else I’ll have to reset the timer!” when holding a V-up or running laps with a 15 lb medicine ball above your head.

I went to the first class, a part of me expecting to be at least the third or fourth “best” in class - only to have my butt absolutely whooped. I felt slow, I felt weak, I felt… lame. The conditioning workout was like none other, and my heart was beating out of my chest half way through the class.

On the drive home, I just thought about signing up with Rumble again - it was a good workout and didn’t botch my ego. But I didn’t. I forced myself to show up the next day and signed up with the Rocky gym. Somewhere deep down, I knew I would rather be uncomfortable in this new gym that I knew could make me a better athlete - rather than be comfortable in spaces I knew I already thrived in.

Moral of the Story: It’s been a bit over a month and driving to class still makes me a bit nervous - but I get better everyday, mentally and physically. Comfort doesn’t make you better; discomfort does. Staying humbled and grounded and growing over being praised and staying still.

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What I Took With Me When I Left My Job

After six years in corporate, I quit my job in May to take a break before school. I expected to feel excited, and maybe even relieved. But what I didn’t expect was how emotional it would be - not just because I was stepping away from the rhythm and routine, but because I was also leaving my people. These were people I grew with, built products with, laughed in Slack threads with, saw me at my best and my worst, and always championed me.

Since people knew I was leaving for a while, I got waves of emotional messages for a few weeks. Notes of appreciation, memories, and little things I wasn’t even expecting like a virtual farewell.

I miss my team and my work a ton. And I feel the weight of everything that I journeyed through my 4+ years at my company - not just as a worker, but as a person in a community.

Moral of the Story: Sometimes impact isn’t just measured in outcomes and accolades, but also the quiet, meaningful relationships and community you build along the way.

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Adulthood = Greater Appreciation for Strangers Turned Friends

Over the past couple months, I’ve slowly started meeting future classmates from grad school that I’ll be starting in the fall. I met some people on campus during admit weekend, others during happy hours or random dinners, and each time, I’ve left feeling a bit more lit up. These are sharp, curious, interesting, and super friendly people who I’ve had such a range of conversations with. With some, our walls immediately broke and we burst into silly humor; and with others, we shared the exact same professional dreams and they inspired me to dream bigger - in such a short period of time of knowing each other.

It can be rare, as an adult, to feel like you're about to enter a new chapter filled with new minds and new energy. And it’s exciting to feel like I’m right here on the cusp of it.

I also realize that I’ve been lucky to have found new friends in adulthood time and time again. And even within this last quarter, I was reminded of that at a very palpable level.

I traveled to Mexico City with my best friend Jules, who I met during my first job at the ripe age of 21.

I went to Rosarito on an extremely impromptu trip with my family and two other families - one of whom I only met when I was 22. And now, their Gen-Z kids gang up with my other family friend kids as they tease me for being too old. I let it pass assuming it’s their language of love (my coping mechanism).

I had several days of coffee runs and drinks and laughs with coworkers turned friends, from the job I started when I was 23 and held on till a few months ago at 27.

I spent this last weekend at a retreat in Oceanside with my team-turned-family at Rickshaw Film Foundation, a non-profit I’ve volunteered with since last year, but who’s been in my life since I was 23.

I went to New Orleans for a bachelorette trip for a fiancé of a friend I made during a Writer’s Room at the age of 24, who I also became close to during the last few years.

I had a couple of heart-to-hearts with my ex-roommate in LA, who I met through a friend of a friend when I was also 24, as we devoured down the best toro sushi in LA.

My lovely friend, Seeret, who I met during a film set at the age of 26, instantly handed me her apartment keys and insisted I spend the night at her place in LA when she heard my plans had fallen through. (an actual angel)

Moral of the Story: It’s overwhelming in the best of ways to think about how we haven’t yet met everyone who’s going to matter to us yet. And there’s something really beautiful about that.

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A Hitting Realization: Your Problems Are Strictly Only Yours.

I spent a large chunk of this past quarter just journaling, going on long walks, and caught in between that space between daydreaming and ruminating. And after some therapy sessions, conversations with friends, and late night kitchen table talks with my dad, I’ve come to realize a simple truth with a clarity that I’ve never felt before: no one’s ever going to get your sh!t - not fully. So what really matters is learning how to hold yourself through it, and finding that strength from yourself. I write more about that here.

Moral of the Story: We’re all a little alone. But that doesn’t mean we’re lost. It means we learn how to listen inward, and how to lead ourselves forward. And when we’ve mastered that, we’re unstoppable.

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The Outtakes

Another special moment that makes me proud is Rickshaw getting to screen Nice Indian Boy, and having Roshan Sethi and Karan Soni with us during the Q&A. It’s a testament to how big and impactful Rickshaw has gotten as an organization, while staying grounded. And on a personal level, getting to know them as people beyond just the filmmakers they present themselves as, during the screening and a team dinner after, felt inspiring and energizing. And surreal, even; the younger version of me who moved to LA at 23 having no understanding of the movie world beyond just her dreams to be creative would be pinching herself.

I would also be amiss if I didn’t give a very well deserved shoutout before I wrap this section up: all the new coffee shops and matcha I discovered these last few months. As a freshly minted (f)unemployed person, I spent countless hours at these new spots, which served both as my sources of muse and makeshift office desks. No place like a coffee shop to get my mind flowing.

What I’m Looking Forward to the Most this Q3:

• Traveling across Europe with different groups of people - college friends, to-be grad school friends, my cousin - and a little stint by myself. Traveling always brings out the best of me, and I’m so excited!

• A 10-day Vipassana right before school starts. I hear it’s one of the most difficult things you can do for yourself - and I’m sheepishly so excited.

• Absorbing more slow-form content like books or movies, compared to short-form videos that compete for our attention. Hoping to lean into this more through a modified, sustainable morning/night time routine.

• Giving more thanks to my family, as I recognize that this may be the last time in a long, long, long time my family unit of 4 gets to live under the same roof. Also an incoming Substack series is love letters to my brother, mom, and dad. Truly my everything and more.

• Discovering more coffee shops (with stellar matcha) through my travels and while I have some time here in SD to keep my stomach happy and my creative juices flowing

• Continuing to develop my pitch plan as my dreams to help independent filmmakers continue to grow and grow. I hope to lean into the exact energy that I explicitly wrote down earlier in this blog post: To believe in yourself and in your dreams with all your might, because you have no idea how much life can change if you believe that you deserve it.

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Thanks for reading, my dearest friends on the interwebs.

As always, I deeply appreciate your support. And as ALWAYS, I would so love to hear from you not just with what may have resonated / what thoughts you have, but also what you’re most excited for these next few months coming up. Whether that’s just continuing to dream, continuing to experience the world, continuing to build your relationships, continuing to work towards your ambitions.

And for whatever that means to you, I’m sending you the best of energy from my space to yours, to hold what’s close to you, trust that the dots will connect and that your dreams deserve love, and to welcome change and gifts when they do knock on your door.

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yours truly,

sow 🐝

I hope this article finds you well. I sat in my airplane seat, intending to write a shorter morning coffee crumbs piece by the time the plane landed, but instead caught myself in a flow state, writing endlessly about one of the most simple yet profound realizations I’ve had lately.

It’s going to be a longer article than usual, only because my brain was in a state of exhilaration and excitement - and I hope that translates in the writing, that you enjoy, and that it leaves you with something to think about.

I was listening to this podcast a few days ago when I heard a line that really stuck with me:

I can create and destroy meaning as I see fit.

I began to really meditate over this idea that nothing truly, really, actually matters in this world, in the larger, grander perspective of the universe. And while it may feel abstract or even uncomfortable, this idea includes us and our existences as well.

My experiences, joys, and problems are strictly mine, with sometimes a substantial spillover impact upon some people in my circle, a smaller extension of conversation for others in my circle, but with no real relevance to the rest of the world.

Think about the last time you interacted with a woman who recently gave birth. Her pregnancy, her labor, her joy delivering the child, her ups and downs in her physical and emotional journey is all something only she will ever feel - no matter how much is shared. And even when she experiences one of the most incredible, magical moments of the human experience - giving birth to another conscious being - that moment is truly just hers. For her closest family and friends, a considerable chunk of her joy and pain through the experience is felt. For slightly more distant people who care, a ‘congratulations!’ message, flowers are sent, and hearts are left feeling fuzzy and warm for a few minutes, hours, or days - but then, you move along with your life.

To put it simply, the experience is felt to every degree by the one having it, and dissipates in importance for those further in connection from them. Whether this is a birthday, a death, a breakup, a special joy of meeting your forever partner or your childhood idol, a diagnosis, or doing something that feels larger than their wildest dreams for that individual like getting signed to a music label or landing the job of their dreams, nobody but the individual feels the full extent of this experience. And as you move further and further away from this person’s circle, that thing creating the joy or suffering for that person, truly does not matter.

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In the grandest scheme of things, nothing in the universe shifts if you experience happiness or sadness. And when you let that idea extend out, you realize that nothing in the universe also shifts when you’re born into this world and when you leave. Life goes on.

It’s easy to read all this and assume that this is purely a nihilist perspective.

That nothing matters in this world. But it matters to you. The duality is important.

Because once we understand that nothing really matters in this world, but it matters to you in the way that you ascribe meaning to it, there is so much power we reclaim in our experiences.

Knowing that you have the power to remove or add meaning to something or someone allows you to feel more in control, rather than letting this thing destroy you or feed your ego.

It’s really just a thing. A thing the universe does not actually depend on or care about.

It’s just a thing. But it’s a thing that you attached some meaning to.

So if you could attach some meaning to it in a previous moment in your life, you can also always re-attach a new meaning to it considering new information or circumstances. Only if you allow yourself to feel the experience, instead of letting the thing itself consume you.

Maybe you didn’t land your dream job. Instead of letting this thing dictate your identity, you allow yourself to understand why you’re feeling this thing so hard. You dig deeper, you re-strategize, you keep going.

It’s actually not about deflecting or reducing your feelings.

It’s more so about feeling all the feelings, but remembering that we’re the only ones marking this thing with these feelings - whether it’s positive or negative. And when you allow yourself to feel all the feelings while also remembering that it’s only us tacking importance to those things, you can separate meaning from reality.

And when you separate meaning from reality, you see reality for what it is.

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Knowing that we have the power to create or destroy special meaning towards the reality we are experiencing allows us to be in control no matter what the wind hits you with. It’s the ultimate realization that you can prescribe new meaning to things if that’s what you’d want for yourself - given time to feel the feelings and understand why your heart prescribed meaning in the first place.

But really what it’s done for me in the last few days of digesting this philosophy is being able to practice more empathy, kindness, and forgiveness.

It’s made me really think about this offshoot philosophy - at the risk of sounding dramatic - that we’re all really alone in this world. And contrary to making me feel cynical about life, it’s been a facet of reality that has allowed me to understand emotions and people more, and even feel comfort in this understanding.

Think about it like this: if there is a thing that I prescribed meaning to, I cannot expect anyone else but myself to prescribe the same exact meaning to the same exact thing to know what I am feeling.

If I’m experiencing the loss or death of a friend, my family or friends may be able to empathize more strongly and with more fragility in the first few days of the aftermath. But as weeks go on by, it’s easy for even your closest ones to slowly forget that this thing has continued to affect you and your demeanor. Maybe you snap at them or are more reclusive, but they no longer brush off your actions for they neither no longer prescribe the same meaning towards the thing that happened that you do nor are they able to empathize with your reactions any longer for they also are living their own lives with their own sets of experiences, joys, and pains.

Instead of continuing to ask for grace from them, or feel misunderstood or alone that your loved ones no longer check in on you or seem to excuse you, maybe you remember again the idea that we’re all just alone.

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It’s not a question of why can’t you understand me? don’t you see I’m sad? don’t you see I’m stressed? It’s now an affirmation that people around you actually care about you so much to have given you the grace and understand they did. And maybe now, it’s time to find that strength from within to keep moving on.

Because the reality is: the thing. does. not. matter. to. anyone. but. yourself.

So no matter how much you want someone else to get it, they won’t. Not because they don’t care, but because this isn’t a thing they attached the kind of meaning you did towards it. No one felt every fragment of your feelings, expect yourself.

And the reality is, no matter how selfless or considerate you think you are, you do the same thing to others. Your partner, your parents, your siblings, your kids, your closest friends all have things they attach special meaning to that you won’t ever feel the exact same towards. So you too will maybe not celebrate someone to the extent they want to be celebrated, or you too will not remember that someone is still grieving something or someone months later.

And that is just the experience of being human. To be living our very own, distinctly individual, independent lives.

Sometimes I think about how I’m the only one existing in my reality. It’s just me in my room with my own thoughts and feelings and anxieties. When my mom enters my room or when my friend texts me, they briefly enter my realm of reality, and then they disappear again. They only exist as ideas and imaginations in my thoughts, but nothing outside of that. So, when this is the case, how do I expect anyone to know the extent to which I place meaning towards the things I attribute as my struggles, my wins, my dreams, my truths, and everything else in between?

The world does not revolve around you, as the popular quote goes.

But your world revolves around you.

And everyone’s world revolves around themselves.

But no one else’s world - and the world itself - revolves around you.

Hold that so close to your heart, and you begin to find more gratitude in the moments when people do give you love or grace, for they’re choosing to hold you closer in their own worlds and experiences.

It’s when our worlds collide that we have our most intricate, intimate, beautiful, and sometimes random and fleeting moments of human connection.

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A romantic myself, I lean into that notion deeply to strengthen my relationships with family, friends, loved ones, and strangers alike. But in that, sometimes I lose myself in expecting everyone to feel the same way I feel about the things I attach meaning to, or even in expecting people to give me the same type of empathy I give them.

But that’s how and why this newly indoctrinated philosophy of thought has been incredibly powerful and revolutionary for me.

To remember that we’re all living our own lives, giving meaning to things that inherently have no meaning.

And in moments where things have shifted, or meaning to things that have happened needs to be shifted, remembering two fundamental truths has helped me find more grounding and empathy:

1. You hold the ultimate power to remove or add meaning to things that happen to you. Allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling to really arrive at the ability to separate meaning from reality, to then prescribe new meaning to it.

2. You attach meaning to things in an uniquely coded way that no one else attaches the same exact meaning to. This means that when things shift, instead of expecting others to view the impact of the thing itself in the same way, in a conversely intuitive manner, try finding more moments of grace and compassion for the love that you do receive at all. For people are choosing to collide their world with you to some degree by nothing but their deliberate and intentional choice to do so.

While this is just the surface of something I’ve only just begin to feel and be able to conceptualize in the form of words, I can already see how it can empower me to see things for what they are, to find more grounding in what is and what is not in moments of joy and disappointment, remember that not just life but feelings too are fleeting, and to radically find more gratitude towards my loved ones.

I imagine I will be distilling this idea further or in other newly emerged thoughts in future blog posts, but I hope this one left you with something to think about.

And if you made it this far, thank you for sticking with me, and for choosing to let my exposition of thoughts occupy your world for a few minutes. I would love to hear any thoughts you may have, or if there was anything that resonated more intimately or not with you.

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With love and a freshly baked realization that we’re all capable of creating and destroying meaning to things that exist in our own individual worlds,

sow <3

I’ve been trying to find the words for weeks now. What do you say to a city that let you dream out loud? That held you in your loneliest moments and your loudest joys? That watched you fall in love with your life - in fragments, in rituals, in motion?

I first moved here in 2021, with nothing but big dreams and no roots or people I could call mine. I didn’t know the roads, the rhythm, or where I’d find myself after the dust settled. I just knew I had to be here.

And before I realized, you felt like home. Not all at once, but slowly - in the way sunlight dripped through palm trees on morning drives, in the unexpected laughter of new friends who became family, in the quiet days spent writing in coffee shops where no one knew my name, but I felt known anyways.

You’ve always had a devilishly strange pull on me. No matter how messy or sprawling or overwhelming you can be, I never want to be too far away. There’s a soul to this city - a raw, pulsing, electric current that says: try again, keep going, make the thing, say the thing, do the thing, trust yourself, follow the dream.

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In you, I learned how to be okay alone.

Going to sushi bars alone with my Kindle in my hand.

Sitting by myself with my arms hugging my knees in a movie theatre and thinking about nothing but the cinema.

Writing for hours at a coffee shop while listening to conversations of strangers and watching the sun move across the room.

Making Baldwin Hills feel like my extended backyard I could take mid-day walks in, and feel like the mountain was mine.

You taught me that when I’m full of my own light, the right people find me. And you sent them - brilliant, wild, curious people who challenged me, supported me, surprised me. People who invited me to fringe shows in black box theaters, accompanied me on annual universal horror nights, invited me on nights out I didn’t know I needed, and let me into their homes and hearts and worlds.

When I first moved to LA in 2021, it was a year of taking leaps and trust falls, and following my heart into the unknown, trusting that it would all be okay. I would leave after a year, and kept making frequent visits back, before moving back in 2024.

And this last chapter was supposed to be all about building - planting roots, calling this familiar place now home with intention, and learning what it means to feel steady in motion.

I really thought this time, the move would be permanent. That I would stay here for good, build my whole life here. I began to go to open houses to even see if there was a starter home I could move into later this year and plant myself into the city even deeper, as I daydreamed about my own personal future with a family, community, and a white picket fence.

But, within a few months of moving to LA, the city did what it always magically did for me - asked me to look at the bigger picture, to ask myself what I really want, to trust in myself, to dream bigger, and to keep dreaming on.

And mid-last year, I started to do just that. I trusted my intuition, my desires, and my deepest dreams. I landed on really wanting to go to the right grad school in pursuit of my larger ambitions, even if it meant leaving the city. I just had to listen to my inner voice.

Fast forward to now, I’ve moved away once more - but with the spirit of the city stitched into me. While I may not live in LA right now, I know part of me never really left.

I still carry the scent and sounds of the quainter side of washington blvd, a street I could never seem to leave despite my moves in and out of the city.

I still keep my AMC pass.

I still look at the pink and purple sunsets when memory flashes of the LA skyline appear amidst it.

I still (and forever will) hold so closely the love for independent art and cinema that LA cherishes.

I still walk into cute, local coffee shops in town and take silent notes, eagerly waiting the day I build one myself in LA.

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LA, thank you for being the place where I grew into my own skin. Thank you for letting me find out what it means to choose myself, even when it hurts or can be deeply uncomfortable. Thank you for giving me the sweet confidence that new places and people can feel like home if you let it. Thank you for being a city where people dare to dream, where everyone’s working on something, building something, chasing something - and it doesn’t matter if its messy: it just matters that it’s yours.

I’ll always come back to you, I never can stay away for long.

To my sweet, sweet LA friends - please know that you are always mine and to always reach out; you’re part of the home I found here. But also: soak up the sunshine, take the long way home when the light hits just right (and traffic is in your favor), explore every coffee shop the city has to offer, root for your local playhouse and go to their shows, catch the sunset when you can, and let it remind you that this city holds a kind of magic that quietly tells you - you can do everything you dream of.

And one last time, to LA - thank you for giving me so much to love, so much to miss, and so much to return to.

With all my love and a heart forever tethered to this city,

sow :)

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I say sheepishly to you as I break my silence on this corner of the internet. For the past many months, there were just too many thoughts, too many happenings, too many feelings to make sense of to put myself out here again. But one word at a time, I’m craving to find my way back to this outlet, to my voice, to this safe little home i’ve carved out for my reflections, and to you. so, hi!

Q1 started like most chapters of change do: with a fog I couldn’t yet navigate. I had just finished applying to grad schools, and now was waiting for interview decisions to trickle in. Convinced the universe was going to hand me a hard no, I prepped myself for disappointment and told myself I’d be fine regardless.

It was a season of limbo, of waiting and wondering. And then, everything I thought wouldn’t happen… did.

One by one, the doors opened and opportunities I didn’t let myself fully imagine began to fly in.

In September, I’ll be heading to my dream school.

Even now, writing that feels surreal - like I’m watching it unfold from the outside. But currently, the joy is waiting to be felt, as I’m still stuck in this feeling of disbelief, even numbness. I wait for it to sink in slowly and soften into real gratitude.

But in the same breath, it’s also at times surreal to think about everything that dramatically shifted in the other direction this past quarter. What I held with certainty ceased to exist. What I had held closest to my heart no longer was in my reach.

It’s a strange thing, to find intense clarity in one part of your life while losing it in another.

The contrast is dizzying. The tides shifting. The ground underneath rearranging.

For a girl who loves her plans and knowing what her future could look like, whether it is plan A or plan Z, suddenly needs to cope with new context and circumstances life gave her.

Everything I was yearning for last year now granted, but at the simultaneous dissolving of a different idea of my future into imagination and stardust.

And right now, I’m trying to sit still in it all, and learning - slowly, but surely - to trust the unfolding.

I was lying down in shavasana in a yoga class this morning, when the yoga teacher said: observe your thoughts like you would clouds, letting them float in, shapeshift, and pass. no cloud more important than the other, treat them with equanimity. without clinging, without labeling, they’re all part of the sky.

And I realize this is the precise idea I’ve been returning back to this past month: to just let all the thoughts, the internal dialogue, the constructs, the memories, the plans just rush through me - to eventually find stillness.

I keep coming back to this idea too: that if memory didn’t exist, we could be new people every moment. And maybe, even with memory, we still can be. Every moment is an unlived one, untouched and irretrievable. And there’s power in choosing again. And again. And again.

Through the rush of what may feel overwhelming - the goodest of the good, and the worst of the worst - and the concurrent moments of desired stillness, I know what I want and need for myself.

For once in my conscious adult life, I want to delicately hold the big love I give to people and re-direct it back to myself. I want to actively choose myself, and work to be my own best friend first. A writer who journals everyday, I thought I knew myself well… enough. But, with the number of little discoveries I’ve had in the past month, I realize I need to rotate the chair back in my direction, and ask myself to dig deeper into my story and my journey.

This next chapter feels like a soft demolition, pulling apart old scaffolding and rebuilding from the roots up - really learning what that means beyond self-care and solo date nights. I want to sit with the hard questions, take long walks without needing to mentally arrive anywhere, spend time in silence without needing to narrate my stream of consciousness. I want to deconstruct stories I’ve been telling myself for years about who I am and what I deserve. And when old patterns resurface - as I’m certain they will - I hope I meet them with curiosity and patience, instead of shame.

And while so much of this work is internal, I’ve been holding close the people who feel like home, the ones who remind me who I am when I’m weak enough to forget. my community, my tribe, the people that give me life every single day.

A few weeks ago, a few people of this community I hold so close, my family and my family friends, took a trip to costa rica. It was a pre-planned vacation that came timely right at the moment of my overwhelming good and bad.

In the midst of that trip, I found a special moment I’ll come to treasure for a long time: sitting directly underneath the Nauyaca waterfall where I entered a deeply meditative state for the first time ever.

To enter a state like that, especially in a time when I was struggling to find a break from my thoughts and feelings, was nothing short of magic.

The roar of the water drowned out every spiraling thought, and for the first time in literally my entire conscious lifetime, I couldn’t hear myself think.

The silence felt sacred, like it was the most grounding sound in the world.

There was no space for anything but just presence and breath underneath that waterfall.

And it reminded me, that there is a world outside of my inner voice. A vast one that is still full of beauty, surprise, love, and wonder. That there are infinite experiences, feelings, adventures, and connections waiting to be unlocked.

It was one of those moments that quietly rearranges something inside you - not with force, but with clarity. It’s not like this feeling was permanent, but it did have a residual impact in unlocking something in me.

And maybe that’s what healing and growing is. Not permanent shifts, not a destination, but a series of moments that don’t bring you back to who you were, but rather make space for who you’re becoming.

So what’s next for me these next few months?

This is the season of me becoming my own anchor, my own guide. A season of me resting. A season of me taking a pause, letting myself serve my needs, my wants, my reflections first, before school and a new move to a new city takes over later this year.

And a season of letting softness rewire me. Of solo dates, family dinners, passport stamps, reading books, losing myself in sci-fi worlds, boxing classes, new friends and skills in a summer badminton camp, trying pottery or maybe learning how to make the perfect flat white.

I’ll be traveling a whole bunch - from Mexico City to Slovenia to next door in Idaho.

I’ll be spending the last few months of working my big girl full-time job before I’m a student again for two years. And in between, I need to re-learn my microeconomics and world history so I actually sound like I finished my K-12, let alone undergrad.

And I’ll be taking a vipassana course - a 10 day meditation camp where you make a vow of silence. No journaling, no reading, no making eye contact with anyone but myself. Just me and my mind - a terrifying but thrilling idea. But something about it feels right for where I am - leaning and learning to trust myself in stillness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how easy it is to define ourselves by the people and roles we orbit. We become reflections of our surroundings, shaped by conversations, routines, and quiet expectations.

But what happens when all of that shifts?

Who am I, really? What makes me feel alive, what makes me shrink? What do I want for myself, when there’s no one to give to, no one to reflect?

The answer isn’t clear yet, and maybe it won’t be for a while. But I’m learning to be okay with that, as I lean into that at-once cosmic and personal question this new quarter.

What I am about to say comes from someone who is a chronic planner, so know that I don’t say it lightly: I am finding that uncertainty can be a quiet kind of grace - an invitation to be present, to listen, to soften into trust.

So as I go from one destination to the next, here’s to the in-between.

To soft steps forward, to the golden hours yet to come, to new versions of me already becoming every moment, to everything beautiful unfolding as we open our eyes to it, and to walking toward the light, even when the path is still forming.

With softness, stillness, and big skies above,

I’ll meet whatever’s next with an open heart.

Until next time,

Sow :)

After a 3 month hiatus and hiding away from the interwebs, I’m willing myself out of an unintended hibernation that I scared myself into taking.

At least for now, I exhale out all the remnants of stress, self-doubt, anxiety, numbness, and hesitation that had overcome upon me in these last few months. And I inhale in all the bits of love, joy, wonder, and careful confidence.

The air feels so crisp up here, I forget what it was like to always be the person I had been proud of growing to be.

Up here, I’m seeing the forest for what it is, instead of getting caught up amongst the trees and feeling lost within its canopy of darkness.

Up here, I’m reminded to not take myself too seriously - in the most liberating and cathartic of ways.

To be up here is to be the person who had meticulously built a sturdy ladder to withstand anxiety hurricanes that overcame her too often.

For the past 3 years, I’ve been doing the work to find more gratitude and slowness, and to cultivate a feeling of caring, but not caring too much about dreams and ambitions to the point where they ruin me. The change had felt palatable, real, and like something that was to stick.

So a few months ago, when I had waves of major anxiety knock me back onto the ground again, I was not ready to be swept away by the storms.

I felt the familiar pressure of a self-seeded gauntlet of dreams, expectations, goals I haven’t yet reached, tightening its grip yet again. It was a weight I thought I’d learned to carry differently. But, no matter how much I tried to tear the dead weight away from myself, it showed up in the small moments and crept back into my headspace. I beat myself over the fact that I couldn’t defeat these fears and these old patterns instantly. If I really did do the work and grow in these past few years, why wasn’t the work shining through?

But just like the sunlight that cracks through the trees, the growth was omnipresent, even if it wasn’t obvious. raðljóst, they say in icelandic.

The work did not go to the graveyard.

The ladder carefully built through the years stands right in front of me. It’s not made of feathers; it’s rooted into the ground, unshakeable.

On good days, like today, I can scale the ladder easily and let the inspiration of the magical forest of possibilities, opportunities, and no-real-bad-outcomes guide me. On bad days, I can’t seem to climb back up the ladder, no matter how hard I try. Some really bad days, I can’t even seem to find the ladder, covered by thick fog.

But it still exists.

And somehow, I always seem to find my way back to it.

In contrast to 4 years ago or 8 years ago or 12 years ago, that’s an incredible shift. I can shake off the dust faster, and look up at the hope of the ladder, even if I can’t climb it up immediately.

And this time, instead of fully breaking down in a state of panic, I partially break down - and can also smell the flowers.

What I have come to learn this past quarter is that old reflexes and deeply ingrained patterns return - and that’s okay. That is what makes us human: to carry pieces of our past and our rooted selves with us - the good but also the bad, the ugly, and the really, really, really ugly.

To live is to grow, but not to be perfect.

There’s been a lot that has shifted in these last 3 months - dramatic shifts in 1-year, 2-year, and 5-year plans in terms of some goals and dreams. Many parts of these plans have arrived with elements needing more urgency and heeding more importance, which is what knocked me into a whirlwind of newly found madness against ticking time. It’s also come at the mental cost of needing to re-wire my entire routine, spending less time with things I love like writing or the boxing, and with people I love, and with adventures and travels that keep me thriving.

And when you’re me, all of that is enough to make you feel like you’re lost in an abyss, losing control over your life and having all the joy and positivity within you be tried, tested, and drained.

But also, there’s three big reminders that me on good days tells me on bad days:

1. This phase is temporary. Like all storms, this one too shall pass. And know that this storm is not a reflection of what your life actually is and what it is capable of being.

2. Nothing has really changed. The present is the present, and the future continues to be unknown - as it always had been. The only new thing is that you’re seeing the future differently, but the nature of it is still the same. I never had it figured out, and I still won’t have it randomly figured out now. To want otherwise is impossible - and not fun.

3. And on that note - have fun. How exciting is it to have new things to care about and to work toward? Like we see in all chapters in our life, every success opens a path, and every perceived failure opens two paths. There is no bad outcome.

This quarter has been one of those seasons where I’ve had to confront old habits, to sit with the tension of wanting so much while also feeling stretched thin by it all. But I’m also trying to trust that there’s value in this phase, too—that even when things feel stagnant or difficult, I’m still building something worthwhile.

And maybe, I’ll come to realize that the real prize isn’t in pushing through to the front, but in allowing myself to just take in the new lessons and realizations, as I look back at all the flowers blooming on the path I’ve been walking all along.

The ladder will always exist for me to look forward, but maybe I’ll learn to love, simply just, standing on the ground, sitting still, and still being able to take in deep breathes.

I might even think to myself,

The air down here is thick with the scent of pine and soil; I feel alive, with my feet planted into the ground, rooted deep in warmth, grit, and determination.

Thank you for supporting Sweet Nothings. I know I’ve been away, and I probably will still be away from posting at my regular cadence until the weather calms down in my headspace. But, this was one of the most therapeutic things I’ve done for myself in a while, so who knows - maybe you’ll see me here sooner than later.

As always, I would love to hear if there was anything that resonated with you, or if there’s any thoughts that come to the surface.

Until next time ♥

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But sitting down to write this piece was… hard. I could have found time to sneak into my little writing corner and get this quarterly update out at any point. But each time I sat down in my chair to write, my crippling fear won and forced me to roll away from my desk.

After six instances of publicly posting neatly packaged collections of quarterly reflections and revelations, I was afraid that I just let 3 months pass without doing anything to warrant such a think piece.

The worst reality for any writer felt like it emerged at the surface: I feared that I had nothing to say.

I sat with that prickly feeling for a long while. I almost didn’t push this piece out. I imagined that it would be the death of my writing “career” of sorts.

I know I was being dramatic in retrospect - but aren’t we almost always when we’re thinking about who we are or who we could be? Sometimes the drama of it all turns into ambition, and sometimes it leads you to spiraling into a rut.

To climb out of this very specific rut, I went back and read through every single one of my journal entries from this quarter.

What I’ve realized is that for the past 3 months, I just literally lived life like I probably will live life for the majority of the rest of my life instead of how I usually live life.

For a change, I lived every day as it came.

I’ve fallen into the habit for years now of planning things months in advance, stacking them with travel and people, packing them with big life plans, shifts, and goals. As much as I tried to sit in the present on a daily basis, I lived in the future of it all.

When there are so many new things happening, it’s easy to find and scribble down new reflections, learnings and pieces of wisdom for the self. And for the first time in a damn long time, I’ve allowed myself to settle into the busy of the everyday, without constantly trying to live out a life in the tomorrow. I conflated the wonder in living this new sort of life for a misguided placement of failure on my behalf.

I still had and have dreams and ambitions, had and have travel plans, had and have adventures both planned and spontaneous - but by virtue of committing to building a home and community in LA instead of living out of my suitcase, I also was naturally more able to live more intentionally in the everyday.

In my last quarterly post, I set aside some goals for myself:

I read this list this morning and literally cracked a goofy little smile at my screen. Huh, why isn’t that so silly? I fully did exactly what I hoped to do, yet allowed myself to feel like that wasn’t enough? There is no harsher critic than the self.

My prediction ended up right: these last few months were really busier than ever. I couldn’t even tell you with what unless I look at my calendar and my journal.

And that’s what the magic of actually living in the present is. Amongst the already planned things, I was busy showing up for things that were popping up in real time, for my old friends, for my new friends, for the arts, for my family, and for myself.

Some Quarterly Highlights:

So much good, a little bad, so much adventure, a few unremarkable days. But no matter the day, I treated each day within the parameters of its own day, and tried to wake up each new morning with a reset to take on just another day. I’ll take that as a win.

I wrote a lot more consistently on Substack and in my personal archives.

On the flip side, I’ve also been consuming so much more content that’s been immensely inspiring - film, theatre, live screenings, books, music - which has also motivated me to start my served by sow series. Front row seat to the rap beef online, screening with people like Vijay Sethupathi sitting a row in front of me, friends performing incredible solo shows… the diversity of experiences - chef’s freaking kiss.

I’ve restarted boxing again with an incredible trainer.

I bought a creami and a kindle. Who said material goods couldn’t bring you infinite joy?

Through the packed routines of life, I was able to make quality time with my parents and my brother. In so many ways, they’re the people that have always made it easy for me to live in the present, even when I found it hard to.

I’ve had the best times with my friends and family over the little and big adventures both here in LA and in different cities, and it goes without saying that they make the everyday just feeling that much more special.

Looking Ahead

As I reflect about it all and think about what I want for myself in Q3, I do think I could slow down a bit.

Slowing down does feel like going against the grain of who I am. However, I’m starting to feel my own lifestyle drain my body and mind out.

Maybe it’s restarting the habit of waking up at sunrise again to make time for myself and energize my introvert battery, or saying no to things, or carving out intentional blocks of time to do absolutely nothing. Solo date days have been wonderful, but maybe rot days could be powerful.

It feels silly and a little bit obvious to treat the future like the future, and to treat the present like the present. Live in the present, they say, but have dreams and ambitions for the future, they also say. And for people like me, that can get a bit confusing. You start living in the plans of the future, while wanting all the progress towards your dreams and ambitions happening in the present.

I do feel a sense of pride and joy to think that I was able to slowly reconfigure this for myself these last few months. There’s still work I need to do, I’m sure, but baby steps always.

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I’m fascinated by having single words to describe complex feelings, yes. But what makes this book even more interesting is being reminded of the shared human experience, for any one of us is able to relate to most of these made-up words that depend on our relatability to such intimate feelings.

Incredible how we all live such unique lives, yet feel the weight and nostalgia of emotions we can all find common ground in.

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The other day, I felt trapped within a writer’s rut. I decided to flip to a random page of this dictionary, and see if I could find some muse in a new word.

future-tense:

adj. sensing the judgment of your future self looking over your shoulder - chuckling at your well-laid plans or clutching their pearls at the risky move you’re about to make - which leaves you faintly wary of their opinion, even though you know they’d take your place in a heart-beat.

After a few moments of sitting with this word that defines something I feel far too often in my reflections, I was able to let the feather pen flow and write some imaginative prose.

And I hope you enjoy.

I close my eyes and imagine: 

somewhere in the middle of a random, vast strawberry field. It’s warm, but there’s also a slight breeze - just the way I’ve liked it my whole life. 

I see little girls, teenage girls, women, mothers, grandmothers.

some of them look similar, like they are siblings. they bicker but they laugh at the same things and dress similarly - like they share a mind.

some of them look like they could be separated by two generations.

some are standing alone, pacing by themselves, caught up in their own boxed world they seem to have made for themselves - even though we are all here together, in the middle of a strawberry field, so vast, so full of promise.

some are together, holding hands, falling asleep in each others arms, just looking at the sky.

some seem lost, maybe perhaps because we’re all out here in the middle of a strawberry field, so vast, so far away from any perceivable exit. 

but from the corner of my eye, 

I catch three of them, 

standing far, far away from everybody else. 

the youngest one has her eyes wide open, looking at everyone simply just be in the strawberry field. plump skin, tender eyes, a small smile that reflects nostalgia, she gazes around.

standing back to back with the youthful one is:

the oldest woman whose face I can’t see whose beautifully gray hair dances in the wind, as she re-wraps her scarf around her head, stares at the open field in the other direction. not a person in sight. just the wind and the bees. 

holding their hands, 

there is a woman looking right at me.

she carries the hurt and the history 

and the lessons and the love 

that the youthful one embodied under her skin and bones. 

she carries fragments of all the imagination and the intimacy,

the wisdom and wistfulness 

that the gray-haired woman contains in all her aura. 

she holds my gaze.

I smile at her;

she smiles back at me.

I know her. 

she is me. 

🐌

the draws have sometimes been expected; 

I know what’s coming, 

I know what to play next. 

but sometimes I’m dealt something I never would have had the foresight to know was coming

and I am forced to play my next card,

and witness turns I never accounted for.

sometimes, I serendipitously find my way back to a known game set-up:

I know what to play next.

so now - 

after seeing how each inexplicable draw leads me to living an even more so previously inexplicable life that could have only belonged to my dreams - 

when the uncertainty of the draw hits, 

I find myself naturally with a gasp and an incessantly tapping foot

from part anxiety, part wonder

at the sheer indefinability of all the unlocked pathways

to come.  

I find that posting my imaginative thought scribbles or ‘poetic prose’ on Substack can feel scarier than one would imagine. If I had to take a guess, I wonder if it is because it leaves me feeling more exposed as a writer, like I’m to be judged for how cryptic, original, or well-educated my imagination wills itself to be.

Because this specific piece brought me out of the mini writer’s block spell that was cast on me, I decided to wiggle myself out of my fear of judgment and post this directly from my creative writing journal.

I would love to hear if you all enjoyed reading this piece, if it resonated with you, and if you would like to see more of this type of content. This space is mine, as much as it is yours - and I hope to build it with everything we wish to see - even if it means kicking my fears right in the butt and breaking myself free.

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There are so many lists of lists I wanted to include in this compilation post, but snipped it down to the categories that seemed to speak to me the most.

Enjoy!

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things I underlined from things I read:

When it comes to how I’ve consumed my books, I’ve been a purist for as long as I’ve known. But the arrival of my Kindle last month has been a game-changer. While I still do commit to buying books from my local bookstore at least twice a month, I now read 4x more now that I can read on the stairmaster or under my covers after I switched the lights off.

But by virtue of having instant access to an infinite library of sorts, I’ve ended up starting books on impulse and reading a bunch of books I didn’t love (or hated). I am currently reading what feels like sweet honey of some writing, The Song of Achilles, which has been a beautiful experience. But apart from which, everything else has averaged 1 or 2 stars out of 5.

Yet everything I read had a line or two that was worth underlining.

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things I watched:

film:

• Robot Dreams (dir. Pablo Berger) - I walked into the theater half-heartedly and not knowing what this silly looking animated movie was going to be about. Little did I realize two hours later, I would walk out, with a stained face from all the dried tears, a stomach that felt like I swallowed a nest of butterflies, and a heart that was overwhelmed by all sorts of feelings. An easy 10/10, I recommend everyone reading this to book your ticket NOW to see this limited theater release, and walk in without reading anything about it. An incredibly human film told through a dog and robot, this artistic masterpiece will leave a permanent mark in your heart and mind.

• Laapataa Ladies (dir. Kiran Rao) - A gentle, powerful film that celebrates women and explores womanhood in a realistic backdrop of rural India. A movie that is sprinkled with equal parts humor, adventure, and inspiration, this is the sort of perception-changing art I hope more and more South Asian populations see in cinemas.

• Late Night With The Devil (dir. Colin and Cameron Caines) - A horror film fanatic, I find it a rarity to find a film in the genre that piques my interest. This film is original, brilliant, and compelling. While I wasn’t hiding my face in my sweatshirt from fear, I was deeply enamored every step of the way.

• Inside Out 2 (dir. Kelsey Mann) - I have never felt more seen and represented until this film unlocked Anxiety as a new emotion/character. Every time Anxiety did something or said something, I was pinching myself and internally whispering, “that’s me! that’s me!!!” It is incredible how the Inside Out franchise is able to take something as complex as the study and interaction of emotions and package it into a medium that is accessible to children and adults alike.

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stage shows:

• Final Girl by Callie Ott, a musical one-woman show inspired by true experiences about a girl confronting her inner monologue and real danger as she calls the cops on her abusive boyfriend. My friend Callie is an absolute powerhouse of a woman with a voice, talent, and a reflective spirit that translates and touches every person who has the privilege to witness her story told. I laughed, I cried, I gasped. All her upcoming shows are sold out, for good reason! The joy that comes from watching unique stories is incredible and inspiring.

• Sunken by ugly tuna ensemble, a play that followed two parallel stories of parents who lost their children to murder and murdered children stuck in purgatory, was an example of pure indie theater magic that LA has to offer. The play explores several heavy topics surrounding the grieving process through what felt like intense method acting, leaving you to feel every kernel of the playwright’s investigation of grief and reality.

I might write a whole article about this, but I find myself so incredibly inspired by artists like Callie and the kids in Sunken who performed with their whole heart.

Big budget Hollywood movies and multi-million-dollar Broadway productions are so fun to watch, and it would be such a dream for any artist to be a part of such a production, or even create one of their own some day.

But impact at every size of an audience matters. It really, really matters.

When an artist can make someone feel, that is their art doing their work. That is success. And while I want them to be able to reach bigger stages and wider screens to let more people feel, I want them to know that their work already matters. They’re already spreading their magic in deeper ways than they may realize.

things I talked about with people:

Something I’ve been doing all of 2024 is write very detailed journal entries before I sleep every night, with the idea of testing and seeing if I could flip back to any day and visually remember something about it.

A consequence of this is that I often write down details of conversations I’ve had with people - especially the interesting ones.

Here’s just a few of the many that left me thinking:

• Why are women always bakers, art gallery assistants, or of similar like in rom-coms? Men are almost always in a position of power in rom-coms, from being popstars to finance bros to the bosses of the love interests. There’s an interesting narrative being forced to us here by people in power who may find the idea of powerful women to be unsettling? They just subtly hide this idea behind aspirational-looking women, pastries, and pretty Prada bags. - may 7, at work, during lunch with colleagues

• Can anything ever neatly belong in a single category? We had an ever-splitting debate about whether sandwiches and hotdogs or soup and cereal are in the same category or not. Or whether breakfast is based on timing or your first meal of the day (even if its 5 PM). The conversation lasted an hour and there was no agreed upon conclusion. To me, it was a commentary on how categories just kinda suck as a singular concept. Nothing is ever that clear, is it? - may 9, at work, also during lunch with my silly colleagues

• Some people lean towards strength training, and some people lean towards cardio. Strength training feels like a sort of meditation, when you’re hyper focused on maximizing the reps, or the weight, or the pump. Cardio feels like journaling, when you’re running miles and are left in just the company of your thoughts. Perhaps everyone just gravitates towards the activity that you need or crave? - may 13, over iMessage with a friend, when I asked her to consider taking up boxing for the 23429th time and she stressed that running and biking just find their way to her heart more

• Why do we continue to hold eurocentric standards of beauty as the sole desire even when the odds are ancestrally stacked against us? It is crazy how our bodies are genetically wired to exist in a certain way, whether it is the shape of our noses, the way fat is distributed in our bodies, or the width of our torsos, because of survival patterns that have existed for millennia. Instead of appreciating our differences, we berate ourselves. Allen’s Rule & Bergmann’s Rule are factual rules, yet we listen to propaganda instead. - may 15, on Discord Chat with friends

• Why do we use .5s when we have a scale of 1-5, but also .5s when we have a scale of 1-10? - may 29, with a friend on a walk

• Hyper-fixations are often correlated to having past trauma. Knowing this helps you empathize more with people who we may find it more difficult to fully get, whether this is a hyper-fixation about cleaning things or consuming (or lack of consuming) things. - june 2, during a 2 AM deep talk at a bachelorette

• Do not allow your dreams to be dormant. You’re doing yourself a disservice by not committing to them with all your might. Allow yourself to fall where you may. Allow yourself the grace to find fulfillment to whatever magnitude your dreams shape themselves out to be. But always, always, always - dream big, work hard, and let the river flow in whichever direction it wills itself to. - june 13, during a tough love / motivational conversation over dinner

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things I listened to:

album drops that served as my soundtracks for the day:

• Atavista by Childish Gambino, with top favorites being Human Sacrifice, To Be Hunted, and Sweet Thang ft. Summer Walker

• ROOM UNDER THE STAIRS by Zayn, with top favorites being Fuchsia Sea, Stardust, What I Am, and Lied To

• TIMELESS by Kaytranada, with top favorites being Witchy ft. Childish Gambino and Do 2 Me ft. Anderson .Paak & SiR

songs that were or have been on my on repeat

• September by Earth, Wind & Fire - I swear this song has occupied free real estate in my brain and remains there 24/7 ever since I watched Robot Dreams

• TAKA by Ahadadream, Priya Ragu, & Skrillex

• GO by Atif Aslam & Abdullah Siddiqui

• places 2 be by Fred Again…, Anderson .Paak, & CHIKA

• Igual Que Un Ángel by Kali Uchis ft. Peso Pluma

things I consumed:

• Salt & Straw’s Pistachio with Saffron & Rose Water that tasted just like the kulfi you get back home in India. Petition to make pistachio as default of an ice-cream-flavor option as vanilla is!!!

• Blueberry Earl Gray Fōnut from fōnuts - I got one, ate it on my way to the car, and went back to get another one, to eat it on my way to the car, again.

• Lavender Matcha Latte at Coffee and Plants, an aesthetic coffee shop with some of the best nutty matcha flavors for any LA readers who are curious!

• The BEST handrolls at Yunomi (that I cannot shut up about since I’m a regular customer who goes 3x a week and writes about it on Substack at least every other article), with their secret yuzu ponzu sauce

• Lobster Salad at Duryeas in Montauk that somehow felt worth its embarrassingly high price-tag. I felt both the taste of the ocean and the fields with every bite - in the best way possible.

• Homemade Tofu-Spinach Protein Pasta - Also discovered nutritional yeast when making this recipe for the first time - where has it been my whole life?

• Homemade Ice Cream Experiments in my new Ninja Creami (!!!). It’s definitely an investment, but one that I can guarantee pays itself off for all my fellow sweet tooth holders.

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things I journaled:

the binding topic that all of these excerpts are wrapped within is: littlest joys that I love to have witnessed. the sweet nothings!

things I am ending this long week with

• A hit of creative energy after spending a large chunk of my Friday writing in a newly found coffee bar and feeling in my element

• An excitement to begin my paint & sip night, as I slip into my cozy pajamas, pour some Olipop into wine glasses, and we paint each other’s faces

• A mind whose toughest decision this weekend is to pick between either watching Bridgerton Part 2 or The Boys Season 4. A return of Barbenheimer for this summer!

• A package that just arrived at my doorstep, and I think it’s the Robot Dreams visual novel and I am so, so, so excited.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing this, and have something to take away with you - whether it’s a conversation kernel or a movie recommendation to get cozy to.

Have an amazing weekend, everybody!

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For months, I was looking forward to June 2 - a day that I promised myself would be the start of a breather period of sorts.

I hoped to sit still for a bit.

I hoped to not make any major travel plans or make large commitments that would require me to show up with more energy than I could muster.

I hoped to prioritize a routine and rhythm that could be sprinkled with spontaneity so if I wished - a life I desperately craved. 

4 more weeks. 

2 more weeks. 

10 more days. 

5 more days. 

3 more days?

1 more day?!?!

It’s June 2.

I woke up the morning of june second, ready to ride along that summer rhythm I had been endlessly daydreaming about. Yet, I fell asleep that night to the beat of a racing mind that somehow fully missed the memo and decided to run a marathon of its own. 

I woke up the morning of june third in sweat, brain fog, and numbness. I fell asleep that night, without really addressing it and brushed it all away as a mere consequence of just feeling physically tired from all the travel, social energy, and sleep deprivation, as of late. 

I woke up the morning of june fourth in a mental state of an absolute mess.

I wasn’t sure what triggered it then, but something snapped - and I broke down. It was like every little worry to the biggest anxiety that had been conveniently brushed away for months all washed up at the surface. I was worrying about some real things, but mostly unchangeable things, the unnecessary things, the overly exaggerated things, and the things that only became things because my anxiety was making them out to be something they never were. 

I did fall asleep that night, feeling resolved and at peace - an absolute 180 from how I started that morning, thanks to long conversations with my dad and my best friend, and all the grace and support they gave me. 

It is the night of june tenth, as I write this, and I feel more stable and calm than I have felt in weeks. Even if a good place to be, it is an odd feeling to be here right now - considering how impossible this state conceptually felt only six days ago. 

And similarly, I find myself reflecting back to the three-day long tumultuous journey my mind forced me to advent on. That too was an odd place to be, to be shoved into a pitfall of doom and dread after finally scaling to the peak of the mountain. 

Just when I finally found some quiet and space to breathe, my anxiety chose to occupy that space. And I couldn’t figure out why - until I did. 

In the moments before we fall asleep or in the moments when we shut our eyes to begin meditating, it is our deepest desires or stressors that often bubble up at the surface.

We plot plans.

We simmer over possibilities.

We waltz with our imagination - or sometimes, twist it and strangle it.

We let the whispers of our heart infiltrate our mind.

We let the walls come down.

Disregarding the nature of the thought being good or bad, we just allow ourselves to be. 

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I have prided myself on taking very deliberate moments in my day and even, full days in a week, to just fully sit with myself by myself, and with my thoughts. I figured that those moments were serving as good enough pauses to allow my mind to take over and to really listen to my thoughts.

But these activities that kept me busy made me feel good, they made me feel energized, they made me prioritize myself; they did not give me the space to fully allow my mind to speak its truth. 

After months of travel and busy schedules all topped with the busiest six weeks I had in a while with multiple road trips down to San Diego, a trip to New York and the Hamptons, a bachelorette weekend in the Palm Springs, all while balancing work, routine, my life in LA, June 2 marked the start of a sudden crash in dopamine - in the best of ways, but also in a confronting way.

It was like hearing silence after months of listening to loud music on the stereo. It was needed, it was craved for, but it also opened doors to thoughts I did not expect. 

What I had come to realize was that all the anxieties I had felt through the three days following June 2 were not new; they were always there in the foundation behind the colorful wallpaper that was slapped on top of it. I just hadn’t let myself truly feel for a while. 

Only because I am doing okay now, I’m glad that everything came rushing that day - and that I had the right people that helped me muster the strength to sort through the anxiety in the quickest of ways. I feel lighter, and still have so much of my breather period left to just feel the summer rhythm. 

But it wasn’t easy to deal with it all at once. It was a hellish, hopeless sort of feeling that sucks life out of you. While nothing is for certain, I really do believe that this was an inevitable state of being for me to land in, after spending months just running against time and performing for myself. 

In retrospect, I needed a break between all the commitments.

An introvert, I need time in between to recharge and reset, instead of letting my body run into overdrive. I want to be mindful of wedging in periods of detox time, even during the busiest periods of my life. Even if I may feel perfectly charged at a point in time, maybe this just means intentionally scheduling in nothing for a whole weekend, because I know I need to stay in energy saver mode before weeks of travel.

What is interesting is that I think I always knew I needed a break from the everyday - but I was going about it in ways that I thought were enough, when it may not have been.

I did find journaling, walking, exercising, cleaning, and cooking to all be “breaks” that help me find serenity, joy, and peace in the everyday. These activities are often thought to be dopamine detoxes, since they’re rather healthy habits that are not tied to addictive patterns or behaviors. 

Yet, I realize that for me, a serial routine-chaser and to-do-list-crosser-offer, these activities did trigger dopamine releases in me. While I genuinely looked forward to do these activities that I found meditative, they also made me feel happy as I was doing them. Plus, I would not be telling you the full story if I said I didn’t feel accomplished to strike them off in my planner. 

The term dopamine detox has its fans and its critics on the internet, but as I interpret it, I do find virtue in its concept.

A detox suggests that we abstain away from anything we find instantly perceptible joys in and do a relatively neutral activity. As a romantic, I will say that I find myself finding depth and happiness in everything. Following this definition to the absolute T may be an impossibility, yet I do wonder if there is perhaps just something more to the definition of neutral. Neutral may mean something that isn’t instantly giving me gratification, or something I’d rather not be doing if I was optimizing for my happiness points.

To me, meditation is the perfect example of a neutral activity - perhaps ironically because we have to sit with our thoughts and do nothing about it except accept. It is innately a practice that encourages a neutral mind. 

As I continue along the beat of my summer rhythm, I hope to empower myself little by little and remind myself to:

let our thoughts run loose and free, never in the shackles of our own repression.

A Quick Activity, if you’re willing (highly encourage!!!)

I invite you to do a 2-5 minute meditation session. Put everything aside, and sit criss-crossed with your eyes closed.

Try focusing on your breath - the inhales and the exhales.

Pay attention to where your mind drifts and wanders.

• What are the things that come to your mind?

• Did anything surprise you?

• Were you able to gently move your thoughts to the side and return back to your breath or move on to a different thought strand?

• Did you find it difficult to sit still?

If you have a moment, write down the things that came to your mind to perhaps gently confront them.

• Why do you think these specific thoughts came to mind?

  • If negative thoughts: what are ways in which you can address them to relieve your headspace?

• What are ways in which you can find moments of neutrality, whether it is committing to meditation practices as such, to find more stillness in the everyday?

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Dearest Readers…

As always, I would love to hear what your thoughts were and if you resonated with any part of this piece in the comments below.

I took a hiatus for a couple of weeks while navigating the pinnacle rush of my pre-june-second life and the anxiety spell that followed - but I’m back! And if there is ever anything you would like to invite me to think about or write about, please, please, please message me! There is no better sort of mail I love receiving.

And if you like what you read, please consider dropping a little like and subscribing 💛

Maybe it’s my algorithm.

Or maybe it’s the way the algorithm forces itself on to all of us because it knows that there is statistically a 83% higher chance of us watching this video to the end, and a subsequent 58% chance we search up similar videos, collectively increasing the time we spend on the app three-fold.

Just at the small expense of our mental health and sanity.

For today’s piece, I briefly examine the way media technologies have been constructed to set us up for hyper fixating upon our bodies in a way that guarantees cyclic failure, and give ourselves some words to maybe relieve ourselves of this chokehold these capitalist entities have on us. Because who are we to be defined and molded by these algorithms? We should be owning every bit of us that they fallaciously label as flaws.

We are more than skin that is pigmented and fat that needs to be trimmed and bodies that they want us to mold so that we can all be clones of an unattainable standard.

We are more than skin, fat, and bones; we carry generational stories and ancestral remnants in every fabric of our being. To question that is a denial of our truth. To recognize the beauty in that is power no one can take away from you.

Amidst pop culture and politics discourse on TikTok, I mindlessly scroll through a stream of sinisterly cleverly distributed videos that promote supplements, diet hacks, someone monologuing at you in a way that is disguised as gym advice when it’s really just a critique on what you’re already doing, and endless new things for us to obsess over fixing really nothing that needed fixing in the first place.

Every few days, I’m introduced to a new concept that conventionally attractive people on TikTok claim changed their entire physique and holistic health with an intensity like their life depends on it.

Do these:

Tart cherry juice, ashwagandha, magnesium pills, prebiotics, probiotics, replacing strength training with pilates, replacing cardio with strength training, replacing strength training with the stairmaster, replacing ALL working out with just low intensity cardio because otherwise our cortisol shoots up, the 12/3/30, the 15/5/15, glutamine, chlorophyll, 16/8, water fasts, bowel cleanses, sea moss, lymphatic drainage, colostrum, etc on etc on etc

to fix these:

gut health! hyperpigmentation! dark circles! hair loss! lack of glow! moon face! stubborn fat! sleep quality! cortisol! stress! the body that you have vs. the body the skinny white rich girl has! leaky gut! pcos! terminal illness! the reality of us being vincible!!!!!!!

And sadly, we all eat it up.

We look at ourselves more critically in the mirror, analyzing every flaw that only ever defined itself as a “flaw” because the media and society told us so, buying the supplements, or at least contemplating them, changing the way we go about our days and our habits, just to make something happen.

The algorithm feeds into these cycles because it serves every money-making entity in this process - the creators, the companies and partners that make money off of the platform, the platform itself. They don’t care that they’re skinning us into becoming a victim of our own hate. Hate breeds capitalistic practices and funnels more time spent scrolling through this content in this attention economy, all backed by a desire to change ourselves in acute ways promoted by these mediums.

The cycle never stops. You’re never going to be enough for them. There’s always going to be something you could be critical about, not because you should be, but because they know they can make you be.

But maybe, this morning, consider for a second this radical idea that I dare present to you at expense of dismantling every stupid construct that we’re forced to exist within:

You are enough.

You are more than enough.

You are more than just skin and bones,

and the tummy rolls and the stretch marks,

and the crooked nose that actually should be cherished for it is a tribute and tale of generations within your culture,

and the stubborn belly fat that your genetics make it difficult to lose for survival and evolutionary reasons that extend beyond our lifetimes,

and the dark circles that come after a string of late nights with you laughing with your best friends, or studying till you fall asleep at your desk for you’re about to finish your degree and be the first in your family to do so, or taking care of your kids while doing 90 other things in a day because motherhood is taken for granted when it should be cherished every day,

and the breakouts that come after you indulge in a bit of extra sugar from the most amazing warm apple pie with ice cream that you impulsively got while out,

and the hundreds upon hundreds of other things that society, media, and people who profit off of your pain tell you that you should be care about.

You are what you tell yourself you are, and not what others tell you you are. - especially others who claim to know you when they don’t know you at all and talk at you and tell you how to live your life despite not knowing anything about who you are and the life that you live.

You deserve to live a lifestyle that you want for yourself - a lifestyle that is sustainable, that keeps you healthy, thriving, and energized. Whatever that means for you.

You deserve to not let the algorithm have sorcery over you; you are an individual of free will and not a puppet these entities oh-so-wish to make of you. You will not give them that sort of power.

You deserve to look at your mirror, and smile each time at the reflection that smiles back at you. Analogous to the way self-hate breeds everything the algorithm wants it to, the practice of everyday self-love breeds self-worth powered from within, and not the type we need validated by anyone but ourselves.

You are the stories of your ancestors.

You are the story you tell yourself.

You are made of star stuff.

And do not let anyone take that away from you.

A Quick Reflection

Writing this felt therapeutic and powerful, in a way that makes me feel like I’ve reclaimed a part of me that was stuck in hostage. I feel loved by someone I’ve always had my battle feeling the love from: myself.

I’ve had (and continue to have) my own journey with body image and dysmorphia. Sometimes, it gets difficult. Sometimes, it’s easy to remind myself of the beauty in just being. I’m currently in one of the thumbs up phases, but I know how easy it is to slip into the rocky zone when there are just the right number of triggers hit.

I fully intend to keep writing myself these love letters to the self, reminding myself that I am enough. Even if it’s just a sentence everyday, maybe that’s all the love we need in this space of hate everywhere.

I invite you to consider doing the same everyday, or maybe just once in a while. You deserve it.

Some Journaling Prompts:

1. How has society and social media impacted how you see yourself?

2. How do you want to see yourself? Do not think of specific “changes” to your physical self. Think feelings and emotions you want to feel about yourself.

3. What is one thing you can commit to doing this week to make you feel that way? Is there something you can do to reduce the power social media may have on you? Some ideas are practicing gratitude, reducing time on social media, tricking the algorithm into immediately scrolling past anything that tells you how to be)

4. Write a sentence or two or four or ten, that serve as a reminder that you are more than enough in the body that you belong in.

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Ok you beautiful, beautiful, beautiful beings…

This journey to self love is not a switch that turns on overnight, even for me who wrote this entire love letter to how we are the star dust of our universe and the evidence of our ancestors.

But I trust that with practice, commitment, and promise to adoring and nurturing the self, the good days will outnumber the rough ones.

Now go look at yourself in the mirror, and smile at everything that smiles back at you.

You’re perfect, and I hope you have a perfect rest of your week.

A Monday Column flying into inboxes on a Tuesday? No one probably would have noticed, but it’s something I was beating myself up through several of my internal monologues for the last 48 hours.

I only recently made this commitment to writing a little something at the start of every week, and so, it bothered me that I failed to stay consistent. But a little bit of journaling and reflecting made me realize that I need to practice exactly what I wrote about in my previous article.

This past weekend, and the 3 days leading up to it, were stacked with several commitments and plans. I barely had time to do much for myself - and when I did have a few moments, I stole them to just rest my brain and my body.

In hindsight? I’m glad I decided to put this out today, instead of yesterday. I hate the idea of writing feeling like a chore. I feel energized and not drained, as I write this.

This morning, I invite you to reflect upon the idea of prioritizing ourselves, unequivocally and before anything else. Just like most things that sound intuitive and obvious, I find that it’s still something that takes practice and intention.

Prioritizing ourselves means that we do things that align with our needs and wants, in ways that fuel our energy and mood, and not expend it.

Yet, often, we go about our everyday because of other people or for other people, because we’re caught up in an attention economy and glue ourselves to our screens instead of doing the things we may really want to be doing, because we act in accordance to what society may want from us, or because we forget to actually listen to ourselves in the same way we listen to those we love.

If you count every minute of our lifetimes, we would have spent a majority of it with ourselves.

When such is the reality, shouldn’t we strive to be the best version of ourselves, for ourselves?

Shouldn’t we find comfort in prioritizing ourselves by ourselves and not depending on other people to do that for us?

Shouldn’t we strive to be so deeply in love with ourselves so that we thrive by just existing and experiencing things?

Swiping Right on Myself

Truthfully, years ago in my young adulthood, I don’t think I can say that I ever loved myself enough to prioritize myself. I did things because I thought it would make other people happy, or because I thought society, including my friends and family, would value me more.

I even hated the idea of doing life by myself. Having no plans on even a weekday would immediately make me feel so alone. I placed so much value into my identity as a friend or companion, that I needed things to validate that identity on a daily basis.

But my identity as just a human-self? I barely paid attention to it.

This would eventually translate itself into feelings of insecurity, self-doubt, worthlessness, all leading to feeling directionless in life with no purpose, which would then throw me into cycles of anxiety.

It took years of work to re-wire these tendencies. Conversations with my dad, journaling, podcasting, stumbling upon things that would bring me a lot of innate joy (boxing, strength training, creating), and just growing up and facing the realities of adulthood head-on, all led to growing into someone who prioritizes herself first.

Still a work-in-progress, but I’m there now.

I swiped right on myself.

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Taking Myself Out On Dates

My newest hyperfixation has been the practice of taking myself out on a date at least once a week.

Friday is my date day. And I look forward to this date all week.

I dress up and feel my best, just like I would if I was getting ready to go on a date. I go sit at the bar of my most favorite hand roll spot in Los Angeles, with my Kindle, or just my human wallflower self as I just eat and listen to peoples’ conversations. I grab some ice cream and read. And then, I do an activity - go to the beach, watch a movie by myself, go the farmer’s market, drive to a different neighborhood and go on a walk; the options are endless.

There is something that makes me feel so incredibly powerful when I’m doing all of this alone. It’s because I am affirming to myself that I had a choice to be here, and I chose myself.

By virtue of making myself a priority, I’m telling myself that I’m important. That I’m worthy enough of my own space, money, and time on my packed calendar. I remind myself that there is so much joy in just being on my own, and experiencing this life.

At the end of every self-date, I feel giddy, energized, and I’m looking forward to the next one - just like I may feel on the perfect first date.

Arguably, this feeling you cultivate for yourself may even be more special.

Nurturing this Forever Relationship

I cannot tell you how life changing this practice has been for me.

When you prioritize yourself enough to look your best and show up your best for yourself, and are not afraid to spend time with yourself for yourself, there is an undefined power that is unlocked.

You leave your comfort zone more. You’re more open to changing the course of your life, in little ways or in big ways, on your own accord. You stop caring about what the preppy girl in the corner with all her friends might think of you sitting alone; you actually start to feel like the cool girl being able to rock up and take on the day by yourself. You start lifting your head up more to look at more things and to listen to more things.

You might even start finding yourself make the mundane things feel a little different each time.

I’ve been subconsciously finding myself treat even grocery shopping, going to the gym, or working from home, with a little more intention, rather than just passively. I try to put on an outfit that I feel good in, whether that means baggy sweatpants or a nice dress. When I can, I try giving myself “surprise moments of adventure” so that the “chore” feels just a little bit more interesting. Like getting two new, never-tried-before snacks when I go grocery shopping. Or listening to a complete new album end-to-end during my strength workout.

It keeps every day feeling interesting.

It keeps every day feeling just a little different.

And it keeps spending time in your own company feel more invigorating, encouraging you to look forward to the next time you can carve out more time with yourself.

Put this on your to-do list for this week:

Take yourself out on a date this week.

It can be a small thing, like grabbing coffee or going to the bookstore. Or a bigger thing, like eating lunch by yourself or going to the movies by yourself. Or a full itinerary of curated plans, things that fit your boat and mood.

Regardless of what it is, promise me that it will be an intentional date. That you’ll show up in whatever way you feel best with the same energy that you show up with for a friend or someone you care about.

Maybe take a journal with you, or a book, or better yet - just put your phone away, and look around at the people or things around you. Take it all in, a meditation of sorts.

I’m not a scientist or a psychic, but I can guarantee that you’ll end up feeling better than you did before you took yourself on the date. I would love to hear all about it, after!

Some Journaling Prompts:

1. When was the last time you did something for yourself? Think of an activity or a hobby, and not necessarily a chore or everyday habit.

2. Do you spend your free time acting in accordance to your wants and needs?

   1. If not, why? This could be because of a lack of time, lack of making it a priority, lack of knowing how to, or something else.

3. What would your everyday life look like if you were able to 100% commit to your wants and needs in the free time that you have?

4. What is one thing you can commit to this week to show up for yourself better? This could mean anything from dressing up in something that are not couch clothes when working from home, to dedicating more time towards a hobby you’ve been intending to do, to just spending less time on your screen.

5. Make your plan for your self-date this week. Think about the activity you hope to plan out, when you’re intending to do it, and what you hope to take away from it. Make a mental note to commit to it.

Please let me know your thoughts and feelings in the comments below! I would love to hear them.

Hoping the rest of your week is filled with little moments of self-inflicted joy and wonder ✨

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“I'm dedicating this chapter of my life to no longer defining myself by my output.”

There is so much here that I resonate with - or rather, continually work to resonate with. For many of us, we do find ourselves defining our self-worth to what we tangibly do and accomplish, either because of the importance society gives it or because of the weight we put on ourselves. As we start our work week this Monday, I thought this would be a perfect sentiment for us to reflect about.

My life has always been reduced to to-do lists, schedules, planners, trackers.

I start my mornings with a to-do list, track my progress through the day on little cells on an Excel spreadsheet, plan my next day in my planner - and do this practice twice everyday. Physically in my Composition Notebook, digitally on my laptop.

Every time I tear myself away from these hyper-fixating practices, I run back to them like an addict.

This screenshot captures a mere, small selection of my several, several trackers from the last couple of years. Each one tracks every aspect of my life, from my sleep, mood, workouts, habits - some even tracking my activity by the hour to judge my productivity to see how I’m spending my time.

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This might be a hot take, but I have to say that: I don’t actually think my need to extensively plan my life is a bad habit.

We all are built differently and require different practices to maintain focus, prioritize different things, or even, find fulfillment.

I personally find so much joy in building a routine and making to-do lists on a day-to-day increment. It is joy that comes from ticking things off, and feeling accomplished, like I’ve done what I set myself out to do.

But, what happens when I don’t tick off everything on my list? What happens when I stray away? Maybe I didn’t actually set out on that 3 mile walk and sat in my sofa after work watching an episode of The Great British Bake-Off while eating take-out instead, even though I planned to cook dinner that night.

I give myself grace 10% of the times. The rest of the times? I kick myself in the foot, hard. I write-off the rest of the day, I scramble to fit in the things I failed to do, I forget that one day will not hurt the bigger picture and make a whole, different tracker to reset progress, I crumble. One strike, you’re dead, reset the game and start over; I treat myself like I’m a soldier in Halo.

Routines and to-do lists are great. But so is living life at your will, even when they beat at a different pulse than that of your rigid structures and planners.

Can both co-exist?

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I say, yes.

Two changes I’ve made in the last few weeks that feel like steps in the right direction:

1. I stopped tracking my progress on those Excel sheets. I effectively stopped scoring myself on a report card. No one likes receiving F’s. Especially not my self-esteem.

2. I stopped giving myself rigid goals on my to-do lists. Instead of writing down walk 5000 steps, I just write down “get at least 30 minutes of sunshine.” Giving myself preemptive flexibility and grace allows me to design my day by will real-time.

Only a few weeks in, but I feel so much better. I can allow myself to slip up without judgment (of myself). I can be less productive than I intended to be because I planned for that case too. I can live a life both adjacent and separate from my to-do lists.

Not all of us are married to this idea of schedules and routines to the degree that I am. But all of us do attach goals to some degree or another in our life, and by extension, often, to our self-worth.

But honestly - fuck that.

Treat each day like a carefully wrapped blessing, and nurture it right. Work towards your goals, dream intensely about your dreams. But also, treat your mind and body like a carefully wrapped blessing, listening to what they need from you and from the day. Allow yourself to do what they ask of you, even if that means straying away from The Path for a bit and catching yourself a breath.

Some reflections to accompany you for your Monday morning cup of tea:

1. What is your relationship between your goals/output and your self-worth/mood?

2. How much value do you place in how productive you are in a given day?

3. What does a good day mean to you? Is this definition of a good day tethered to your goals or daily achievements?

   1. If yes, where does that pressure to perform come from? What can you do to disconnect the two?

   2. If no, yay! This mindset is something I personally think we should all strive to have. But also, how do make sure you stay consistent with making sure you are still tracking in the direction of your goals?

4. What is ONE thing you can commit to this week to focus on your goals, but also give yourself more grace and freedom to just… be?

All of us are so wired so differently; I just know our answers to these would all be so different. Please let me know what your thoughts are in the comments!

Have a wonderful Monday, y’all.

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I am finally doing the thing I have been meaning to do for weeks now - compiling a list of little lists. As someone whose old resume had Making Lists under my Interests section, I would be lying to you if this wasn’t the most fun thing to put together.

In a world of so much content that we maneuver in a life filled with so many emotions and happenings, this idea of making a “highlight reel” in the form of words spoke to me.

I hope these lists leave you with at least one new thing to read, watch, do, or think about, as you head into your weekend.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think in the comments below!

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things I read:

Articles:

1. Woman in Retrograde by Isabel Cristo - This article thoughtfully explores how “girlhood” has been carefully wrapped as a concept, packaged, and served back to women, as a form of escapism from the realities of womanhood. Ever since I read this piece, I’ve been thinking about the question that is posed directly within it: What is it, exactly, that’s so uninviting about being an adult woman?

2. In Real Life, Not All Interruptions Are Rude by Deborah Tannen - This article introduced to me a concept that was striking: cooperative overlapping, a conversation mechanic practiced in some cultures, in which [talking while another is talking can be a way of showing engagement with what the speaker is saying]. Some perceive little pauses to be uncomfortable silences, and avoid them by virtually making them non-existent, often those from South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European cultures. How does this nuance translate over to perceptions of immigrants from these cultures in the West?

3. i think it’s brave: to not choose a personal brand by Meighan Grady - This article explores the pressure that Gen Z-ers find to box themselves into a category or into an “aesthetic”, often exasperated by the needs and asks of college essays or TikTok trends. I found it interesting to think about how this effect persists not just within Gen Z, but really on anyone who exists on social media. When we label a mid-day walk as a “hot girl walk”, do we find ourselves needing to do other “hot girl” things to belong? Drinking night time cherry tart mocktails in curated ceramic sets, taking $30 fitness classes, overanalyzing our hyper-pigmentation and finding ayurvedic fixes commodified into expensive brands you can buy at Sephora? I live for my daily hot girl walks, but I also question whether labeling everything we do or scrolling through videos of several walking mood-boards is just setting ourselves up for doom of either never feeling like we belong, or feeling like we need to constantly be chasing to belong.

4. Why people are tired of Taylor Swift by Tess GC - I am someone who grew up listening to Taylor’s music, has a portrait of Taylor framed in her room, went to the Eras Tour and cried, and defends her lyricism for how it speaks to the feminine experience. I am also someone who finds a lot of her actions (or lack thereof) to be problematic. Critiquing Taylor without being branded as a hater feels almost impossible. But, why can’t both things be true at once? This article does a perfect job explaining the nuance that exists between the good and the bad, and how we should pull ourselves away from the attention circus that celebrities and the media force us to spectate, to focus on what is. This doesn’t go for just Taylor, I think there’s a much deeper conversation to be had about celebrities and the commodification of the celebrity.

Books:

• Savor by Fatima Ali - A memoir told in her last few weeks of life, the book hits you where it hurts - and where you feel. It is the story of a woman at the start of a promising career that was cut short at 29, yet inspiring and whole, rich in adventures, growth, discoveries, and wisdom.

• A Strangely Wrapped Gift by Emily Brynes - A poetry collection that is easy to read and fall asleep to at night. I’m not typically a fan of this sort of poetry, but the beautiful way in which she uses metaphors and word play has made this deeply enjoyable.

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things I watched:

• Challengers, written by Justin Kuritzkes, directed by Luca Guadagnino - Hands down the sexiest movie of the decade. I was surprised but also not surprised to learn that the writer is married to Celine Song, the writer of Past Lives. It’s kind of incredible to see how the two stories write about similar themes of revisiting old flames, but explore it degrees differently. A toxic rollercoaster that has you melting into your chair from stress, this movie was refreshing, silly, and fun.

• Baby Reindeer, written by and directed by Richard Gadd - No amount of praise can be given to this show, but I try to do my best in this article I wrote here a few weeks ago!

• Monkey Man, written by and directed by Dev Patel - It’s not everyday that we see a South Asian action star in a Hollywood movie that is celebrating rich, Hindu culture, while making an important, political critique. While I have some qualms on the simplicity of the plot and characters, I thoroughly enjoyed the ride, and thought the cinema could not have been made more beautifully.

• The Boys, a satirical television series based off of the comics, developed by Eric Kripke - Yes, I know I’m 5 years late. Incredibly fun, but also incredibly preposterous how they got away with so much outlandish, nightmarish, and absolutely out-of-pocket content on streaming.

• how glowing up ruined my life, a video essay by Alivia D'Andrea - This video brought me to tears, and I could not recommend it enough. It would not be far-fetched to say that every woman has had to deal with the pressures of “glowing up” to match what society deems as beautiful and enough. Between navigating her own journey battling this war and defining concepts like self-worth vs. self-confidence, Alivia left me with so much to think about, re-calibrate, and even love.

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things I listened to (and still listening to tbh):

• jazz is for ordinary people by berlioz - my favorite song to play on repeat when I am cooking dinner

• SATURDAY SLIDE by RMS - an up-and-coming Indian-American rapper from New Jersey!

• A quick 101 overview here for those not familiar, but literally all the diss tracks on repeat - with special shoutouts to Kendrick’s Euphoria and Kanye’s Like That Remix. I am very grateful to finally be aware of the history and the intricacy that surround this alternate universe of rap feuds and beef because it has made for some very exciting nights digging into rabbit holes and watching analysis videos - 10/10, highly recommend.

• Please Don’t Fall in Love With Me by Khalid

• II Hands II Heaven by Beyoncé, but also all of Cowboy Carter

• Training by Zakir Hussain - Dev Patel really did unlock something here - I’ve been doing heavy bag drills to Zakir’s music, and it really does unleash a force within.

• DOSE OF DOPENESS by Kid Cudi - He cancelled his tour (that I had tickets for) because he broke his leg, and I’m still sad and mad.

things I consumed:

• Truffle Salmon Sushi - I cannot recommend enough the power of the fusion of these two intense flavor profiles

• Chocolate Mint Smoothie made with my latest and greatest find of the best protein powder I’ve ever come across

• Salt & Straw’s Day-Old Bread Pudding & Chocolate Ganache - It is criminal that such 10/10 seasonal flavors are only available… seasonally.

• Petit Sirah v Petit Verdoh - A slender Trader Joe’s find, this bottle accompanied me on a girl’s night where we all did a wine show-and-tell. Each of us brought a bottle that best represented ourselves. With notes of raspberry jam and black pepper and a silly, goofy label that says “Like any good wine, too much and you’re in for a K.O.” this wine spoke to my soul.

• Microwaved Poached Eggs - LITERALLY GAME-CHANGER, how did I NOT know it was this easy to make for this long?!

• Nana’s Shrimp Kheema layered in between my Mom’s Crispy Dosas

things I journaled:

things I am ending this long week with

• A sigh of relief that I finally got this article out the door! Please let me know if you do happen to read/watch/listen to any of the reccs, or have thoughts already. I would love to hear what you think in the comments.

• A readiness to sink into my bed - this week has been LONG

• But also, a giddy excitement because I am about to host a Brown Girl Book Club for Savor actually. I’m excited to see my girls, but also excited to devour all the food from our potluck.

Have the best weekend, everybody!

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