Read more

But today, I’m back at the page/keyboard — currently writing from a wine bar in South Park, already one spritz deep. The same week we found the house, I had four interviews (yes, four interviews in one week) for a job that had seemed like I’d dreamt it up myself. A role working in education and advocacy for a pediatric rare disease, offering a base pay range that put my last job’s to shame. Each discussion ended with the interviewer saying something along the lines of “you seem like the perfect fit” and “you won’t start in the role until Mid-August” — all sentences that helped to ease the rising anxiety of signing up for a mortgage payment in America’s Finest (and most expensive) City. But despite all the reassurance I’d received, I got hit with a fairly generic rejection to my inbox coming out of the yoga class I taught this morning. And here I am now, drinking blood orange vermouth — and writing again.

I can’t help but feel like this job was a test from the universe. A carrot dangled to see if I would abandon the writing I had finally returned to, after all these years. A return that took quitting my last job and years of inner child work and grieving the loss of a friend and in many ways, an ego death of my own. Like the universe was toying with me, asking: would I still show up to the page if I had the dream house, the dream job? (At the mere possibility of having both this last week — I did not).

For me, it seems there is no writing without yearning. Without desire. I believe that desire is the very root of eroticism — so I guess, in many ways, I never want 100% of my desires to be fully satiated. Not to say that I want to be in want — there’s that conflicting (but very human) need to feel safe and supported and capable of survival, at a bare minimum. But I never want to be sitting on my expensive couch in my expensive home with my high profile career and paid bills and wonder… Is this it? Is this all this life has to offer? Friction creates experience, creates sensation. And damn, do I love sensation.

I love heat — the heat of the sun above me, creating sweat on my brow as I write in this window in mid-July. Sweat that drips from every crevice of me during my morning yoga practice, despite the studio air conditioning and ceiling fans fighting for their own lives. I love the feeling of stretching my muscles, of working my body to exhaustion — the shortness of breath from hiking at altitude. I love dancing in a room packed full of bodies, the bass from live music resonating with the beating of my own heart and vasculature. There’s the part of me that hates uncertainty, but also — the part that loves it. That knows, deep down, that uncertainty = possibility. That uncertainty = freedom. I may cower from fear and uncertainty, but I cower from boredom and complacency more. In a game of Fuck Marry Kill with yearning, complacency, and uncertainty: I’m marrying yearning, fucking uncertainty, and killing complacency. (If you can’t tell, I’ve moved on from my blood orange spritz to a vodka, lemon, and cardamaro concoction. It is refreshing and light, and tastes a little like spicy sunshine on ice).

So: I’m pissed that I was love-bombed by this interview process. And I can allow myself to sit in that pissed off-ness. It sucks that I’m living off my savings, and watching the number in my bank account dwindle by the day despite working fairly hard these last six months, and that my car is in the shop with some unknown engine malfunction, and and and... And, alternatively: I feel very grateful to be able to feel that friction, that discomfort, while still having my basic needs met. While being surrounded by the people I love, and continuing to dream, and plan a life in a new home. I don’t know how exactly I’m going to be okay, how I’m going to make the ends meet — but I’m not bored. I’m striving still. And I’m writing. At the end of the day — the blank page will always be here.

After teaching prenatal this past Sunday morning, I took the vinyasa class & sound bath that shortly followed. During the sound bath, physically spent and soaked in sweat after hours in the humid studio, I had a visual arise. I was at the end of my life, at the very edge of death, and I was begging for more time. I was crying, no, no, no; I didn’t want this lifetime in this body to end just yet. I wanted one more day. I wanted one more kiss. I wanted to hold my cat to my chest one more time, feel the purr of his belly against my own. I wanted the anxieties and the frustrations and the low back pain and all the imperfections and unknowns and wrong turns. I wanted the friction. I wanted one more taste. I wanted to get stuck in traffic one more time, if only to listen to one more song. I wanted another moment of being in this body — even if that moment meant feeling pain, or rejection, or loss, or grief. The yearning was palpable, was visceral.

I will hold my cat to my chest tonight, despite the heat and humidity that refuses to dissipate in my apartment. His constantly shedding fur will stick to my sweaty arms, and I will shake my head, but I will cherish it. I will put the sewn pouch of lavender & flax seed in the microwave, and allow this heat to soothe the back cramps that have made it difficult to even walk this week. I will wince from the pain as I lower myself into bed tonight, but I will also feel the softness of the cool linen sheets against my skin, and relish in this possibility of feeling anything at all. I will let myself wallow in this small rejection, while still daydreaming up what could possibly be next for me. And tomorrow morning, I will return to the page.

If you’re also in a period of transition or uncertainty right now, I’m sending you my love. It can be really hard to feel grounded and centered and confident as the earth shifts beneath you moment-to-moment. Let’s take a moment this evening to let ourselves feel the freedom, right alongside the fear. To feel anything at all, while we still can.

In love and trust of the greater process,

Jamie

Read more

There were a lot of good intentions in the home I grew up in — a new brick build in a brand new subdivision, furnished almost entirely by Pottery Barn; my mom worked retail throughout her pregnancy carrying my younger brother for the store discount. Two green Adirondack chairs on the front porch, flanked by potted mums in the fall. The house with the green chairs is how most of my friends identified the house. It was filled with framed photos; photos that have stayed in those same frames to this day, faded from the sunlight of the last twenty-six years. It still has the same white carpet that displays perfect rows of vacuum lines.

The kitchen looks different now — stainless steel and quartz replacing the 2000s era white appliances and laminate countertops. There’s still the same kitchen island, two barstool seats where my brother and I would eat breakfast and do our homework. For the short stint we had water frogs, they sat in a big bowl atop the island where we’d watch them swim while eating eggo waffles in the mornings. Hoppy was my brother’s frog, and Happy was mine. One morning, we came downstairs to find Hoppy had eaten Happy’s head — one bloated frog and one decapitated frog floated at the top of the bowl’s water; both were dead. We went back to beta fish after that.

That kitchen island is where my mom used to force me to drink a glass of orange juice every morning before I could go to school, even though I’d sit there and beg for any other source of vitamin C. I hated the taste of orange juice. Hated it. My younger brother had a peanut allergy, so his strong dislikes and taste preferences were assumed to be related to another allergy of some kind. He had a diet that mainly consisted of white rice and frozen chicken tenders, but he liked orange juice just fine. It might sound silly, but at eight years old, I began to feel like his opinions were respected and taken to heart, and mine were dismissed, received with rolled eyes. His body’s intelligence was to be trusted, and mine was not. His pickiness became life or death, and mine was all dramatics. I slowly learned to swallow my opinions, grit my teeth, and power through.

One morning, I was too tired to put up a fight. I poured a glass of orange juice and begrudgingly drank it, my mom still asleep upstairs. When I came home from school on the bus that day, a fresh glass of orange juice was waiting for me. I threw a fit. In the end, she couldn’t believe that I’d willingly drank the juice without her cajoling. I cried fat tears as I gulped down the second glass.

The next morning, I set up the family camcorder on the kitchen counter. The tape I recorded was close to five minutes of plugging my nose and gagging as I drank, and it’s still talked about when my cousins get together to this day — but I finished the glass. It’s undoubtedly hilarious, and yes, more than a little dramatic. But I had just wanted to be believed. My mom only wanted us to be healthy. She had the best of intentions.

The house was filled with good intentions; Pottery Barn furniture sets and pristine white carpet. Two kids that met their vitamin C daily requirement every day. But it lacked boundaries, or any sense of privacy.

By the seventh grade, everyone at my middle school had texting. I had a knock-off Motorola Razr made by LG that made it so I could call my friends without being overheard on the landline — but no one was calling these days. I had AIM, but we only had the one family desktop computer, and instant messaging really works best when you have instant access to those messages (and your mom doesn’t have your password). I had begged for texting all year. The answer, again and again, was no. The term iPad kid had yet to be coined, but my mom wasn’t going to allow me to become even more drawn to my cellphone than I already was. As I get older, I begin to understand each no of hers more and more. But at the age of twelve, I was far from having this perspective. I felt cut off from a whole world of communication and connection with my peers.

I was asked to speak at the sixth grade honors breakfast at the end of that school year — my best friend had died of cancer the year before, and I was still an honors student that got all A’s and had a stellar attendance record (read: I had a phenomenal GPA, and very little popularity). The school administration asked if I’d share my story with the grade below. My obvious and immediate answer, being a pre-teen who was severely terrified of public speaking — the last and only time speaking to a crowd of this size, having given a eulogy for my ten-year-old best friend — was no.

My mom, however, had other ideas. She presented me with an enticing, and somewhat threatening, opportunity: the only way I was getting texting was if I agreed to give this speech. I was equally horrified as I was salivating at the offer at hand. It seemed to me, I had no choice. I would give the speech.

As my brain has done with much of my childhood, I have entirely blacked out the memory of speaking at the honors breakfast (if the memory was even recorded by my brain at the time — I’m sure I was operating from a state of fight-or-flight as I spoke). But I do remember coming home that day and demanding we go to the AT&T store on Randall Road. It was time for me to collect my reward.

I ended that day by typing on my flip phone’s keyboard something along the lines of “WAR IS OVR” and sending the SMS to all of my friends. I had much to rejoice over, until I found my younger brother of over four years, who had not spoken to hundreds of students and their parents that morning, shooting off messages from his cellphone. When I confronted my mom, fat tears rolling down my cheeks and heavy sobs rolling through my body at how unfair this all was, she seemed exasperated and unable to understand why I wouldn’t just be happy that I’d finally gotten what I’d wanted. My brother had his allergies, and asthma — it made sense from a safety standpoint that he’d have texting. Plus, it was easier to just add it on for both of our lines while we were already at the store (my mom avoided communication with AT&T like the plague — each time we left the store or hung up the phone, the monthly bill had somehow grown, and she’d lost hours from her day). I felt tricked. I had done all the work, but had to share the prize? The plight of the eldest daughter played out once more.

All this to say — getting texting was freeing in many ways, being able to communicate with friends on-the-go, and giving me something to do during church on Sundays, hiding the phone in between the thin pages of a thick bible (to my father’s absolute dismay). But it did not afford me the privacy I had hoped for. I knew my mom read through my AIM each time I logged out of the family computer, but I’d expected things to be different with a cellphone all my own. My parents hadn’t cared where my phone was at night when I didn’t have texting (and quite frankly, neither had I). But now that its capabilities had grown (and thus, my parents’ responsibility), the cellphone was to be charged overnight in the kitchen, while I slept upstairs. It wasn’t until the day after a fight I’d had with my mom, texting a friend some undoubtedly hateful words in my anger, that I realized my mom was reading through my texts after I went to bed each night. I threatened to erase all my messages at the end of every day, but she owned the account, and wanted to read the texts more than she desired to avoid interaction with AT&T.

She had her reasons; this, I know. Safety was one, I’m sure, amongst wanting to feel closer to a daughter that was growing up quickly and aching for independence, keeping more and more details of her life to herself. But the damage was done in my mind. I wanted privacy, and she wanted closeness, even at the expense of my trust, it seemed. Whether I was a spoiled brat with unreasonable expectations, or simply an adolescent trying to grow an independent sense of self and state a boundary, the result was the same. I only pulled farther away.

This is around the same time I began throwing out my journals and notebooks full of diary entries and short stories. My innermost thoughts and feelings didn’t feel safe on paper, or on my phone, in that house. I ache to know the girl I was in this time — the creative plots I conjured up, the happenings of my day-to-day long-since-forgotten. How I viewed and processed the grief of losing my best friend. What I thought about God. What I dreamed about. The evidence lay scattered, in various torn-up and decomposed speckled composition books across landfills in rural Illinois. It’s funny, now that I think about it. All I want now is to know this girl. And all this girl wanted was to be unknown. Invisible. Unseen. In many ways, she has gotten her way in the end — even as I try now to excavate the truth.

The oldest journal I have in my possession now is from 2019, the year I moved out of that house with the Pottery Barn furniture and white carpet for good. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I have begun doing something I have never done before, and reading through these twenty-five journals I do have. 2019 is only seven years ago, and yet, I almost do not recognize the girl who scribbled in these bound notebooks. The words are hard to read — many of them prayers, anxious thoughts given to God in an attempt for some relief. But I am grateful for them all the same. I am grateful to have this record of the girl I was at the start of my twenties, whether or not I feel particularly connected to this girl (and, whether or not I’d like her if I met her today).

And I can hold multiple things to be true at once. I can be grateful for a mom who only wanted to know me deeply. Who only wanted to keep me safe. Who wanted to push me to do hard things (like public speaking, and drinking orange juice). Who had the best of intentions, always. And: I can be grateful for a sense of safety in my home now to keep these journals I continue to fill. For a partner who I trust to live with these journals in our home, and never once touch them. To have shed some of the shame I carried for so long — knowing that I can choose to share my thoughts and feelings with the world, and that I can, and will, survive being seen.

Read more

I’m tired of being sold to. It’s impossible to escape on my phone: mesmerizing ads fill my social media platforms, my Pinterest feed, even my Substack — coaches looking to help people just like me grow their paid reader communities and make a living from their writing. The freeway I drove this morning littered with billboards for casinos and supplements and dispensaries and psychiatry clinics (if you live in San Diego, maybe you can guess which freeway).

It’s exhausting living in a society that sees you first as a potential buyer. But I guess that’s what happens when living within a system built for only a few to succeed, the rest of us doing what we can to just stay afloat. We begin to fight over the scraps.

In an effort to escape the matrix for an hour or two, I took my journal and pen to a coffee shop after teaching yoga today. I wanted to sit and write — to be sold nothing but an overpriced, albeit necessary, coffee. I opened my journal to a blank page, and was able to write the date and time before a woman sat down next to me and struck up a conversation. Before I knew it, I was 25 minutes into politely nodding along to an MLM pitch. It happened slowly, us connecting over having backgrounds in clinical patient care roles. She’d gained my trust before I even realized what was happening. She was good. It made me angry.

This is why I left my job in sales: even if you’re in it for the “right reasons” (side note: this phrase will always remind me of ABC’s The Bachelor), you’re oftentimes surrounded by people who are only in it for the money. The people who say your name in conversation too often because they read about it in a book on business leadership. The people who try way too hard to force inauthentic eye contact, and ask too personal of questions too early in relationships, in an attempt to find your pain points. The people who can’t turn it off. Eventually, we become who we spend our time with — and I needed to get out before that could happen anymore than it already had. It felt impossible to continue on my personal journey of becoming more and more like myself, while professionally trying to convince people they needed something that only I had. Being in sales began to feel too much like growing up in my hometown’s mega church. There were pyrotechnics on the main stage at the last national sales meeting I attended, and they reminded me of the extravagant Christmas services the church would host when I was younger. In both moments, I found myself asking: how did we get here? The plot had been lost, entirely.

My energy has been leaky recently — things that usually wouldn’t shake me, knock me completely off balance. So even after I was able to place my AirPods back in my ears and pick up my pen once more to journal, I couldn’t let go of the uncomfortable feeling that lingered after that conversation in the coffee shop. It felt like a violation, her coming into my precious container of time where I try my best to be open and sensitive and vulnerable. The compliments, the probing questions. The soft closes. It reminded me of a time, years ago, that a friend-of-a-friend persistently asked me to go out with him until I gave in and agreed to meet up for coffee. Halfway through our date I realized he was Christian, and was trying to convince me to go to his church. I hadn’t wanted to date him, but I especially did not want to go back to church. He called my very effortful and painful religious deconstruction a phase, a crisis of faith. I left early. We never spoke again.

In both instances — capitalism and, oftentimes, Christianity — there is exploitation of pain.

Are you lonely? Jesus loves you. Are you broke? Tithe 10% of what you do have, and Jesus will reward you with eternal life more valuable than any earthly jewels or gold. Are you lost and looking for answers? We are not meant to understand the mysteries of God, so stop asking, and rest in this peace. Give it to God.

Are you lonely? Pay for HingeX. Subscribe to this dating coach’s exclusive channel. Make an appointment with this plastic surgeon. Are you broke? Pay for this course on how to manifest abundance. Buy a lottery ticket. Take out loans to go back to school. Are you lost and looking for answers? Go on this retreat. Sign up for this training. Buy this course.

I’m not saying there’s not a lot of good that can be gained from either — everyone can benefit from community, and community can be found at church. There are retreats and trainings and coaches I’ve paid for that really have changed my life and helped me regain direction. But I am tired of people trying to convince me that I am not enough as I am, just so they can sell me the solution. And this is the main sentiment I’ve deeply engrained from a lifetime with both of these influences.

For example: the rhetoric that Jesus loves me and made me in his image, but I’m inherently broken, and always will be, without capital-H Him. Also: the idea that I will feel worthy of love and confident in my own skin if I just start using this skincare product, or learn how to dress for my body type, or replace my closet with a capsule wardrobe. It’s a constant striving, an ever-changing finish line. And I’m so tired of feeling like I’m one eye cream or answered prayer away from being enough.

After our conversation, I looked up the program that this woman had been raving would allow her to leave her 9-5 by next year. The program’s founder she’d spoken so highly of, also turned out to be a pastor. It made sense why it felt like I was being preached to. In that coffee shop, I felt more like the young girl who spent most of her time at the church across the corn fields, than I did the thirty-year-old woman who now lives across the country.

It was one of the first times I’ve been ashamed about all the space I’ve created in my life recently — when she asked me what I did for a living, I didn’t have a clear cut answer, outside of the honest one: I’m trying to figure that out right now. In retrospect, her eyes seemed to light up at the opportunity I’d presented her. She began to subtly cut down my plan, or what she knew of it from the vague details I’d given. She seemed to have all the answers, and almost looked at me with pity that I hadn’t yet figured out what she had. What she didn’t realize, is that I’m done searching for answers outside of myself. I don’t want what she’s selling.

So if you ever find me shilling açaí berries or leadership programs, or heaven forbid, trying to evangelize you, please call for help. I think you’re beautiful and precious and whole exactly as you are, and you don’t need anything outside of you to prove your worth. I hope you spend the rest of today deleting items from cart and maybe getting some dirt under your fingernails in your garden.

With lots of love,

Jamie

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

As an exercise in self-compassion (and, sometimes, torture), I’ve decided to start reading through my old journals. I’ve always felt called to write memoir and dreamed of publishing in some distant “someday” future — although the idea of portraying such vulnerability physically causes me to shudder with resistance. I can sit here and talk about all the self-love I’ve developed throughout my yoga and meditation practice, and still automatically chastise myself internally when I allow myself to believe, even for a moment, that my story is worthy of telling. Who am I to write memoir? To take up that kind of space? Reading past journals has always felt like a great exercise in preparing to write the memoir I’ve always wanted to: getting clear on the details of my life and my perspective on them at that time. Reminding myself that I do have stories worth telling, that other people may be able to connect to and resonate with. But the journals all live at the bottom of a back closet, and there’s quite a bit of unpacking (physically and emotionally) between me and ever opening them.

But I’ve been really hard on myself this last month or so — I was sick for so much of May, canceling my birthday celebration and sleeping throughout the day, lacking the energy to even read fiction to distract myself. When my body is suffering, my mind has a way of making it intensely worse. My mind already has this predisposition to feelings of doom and hypervigilance: there is a delicate balance of movement, sunshine, medication, hydration, time alone and time in community, that allows me to be able to face the world in a way where I can be present and grounded in my body. When you take away the energy to do any of these practices, and add in swollen tonsils, I am positively miserable to be around. My inner monologue was downright rude last month: you’re thirty now, and what do you have to show for it? No job, no income. Paying student loans for a degree you don’t use anymore. No kids, no husband, no house (helloooooo internalized conservative midwestern beliefs). You quit your job to create space for all the things you didn’t have the time and energy to do before — and now you’ve spent this entire day watching Real Housewives. You don’t even like Real Housewives.

I was completely disregarding the fact that, before my body was actively fighting traveler’s diarrhea and bronchitis post-CDMX (and the fatigue that lingered long after), I was actively having the time of my goddamn life. I don’t remember a period of my life post-grad where I’ve learned so much, and tried so many new things. Spent so much time in the sun, and time with my friends. I’m doing things imperfectly, and allowing myself to show up imperfectly — and I’m growing from it. I take deeper breaths than I did just a few months prior (despite the bronchitis). But when my physical body started to feel bad, to innately slow down to focus simply on surviving, my mind took it as an opportunity to capitalize on my weakness and catastrophize. Old patterns of thinking quickly fell into place without any resistance. What did you accomplish today to prove that you are worthy?

So even though I couldn’t do the things I would usually do to break the spiral that naturally follows asking that question — go for a walk, go to a yoga class, jump in the ocean — I knew I couldn’t fall into believing the invading thoughts. I dug through the closet and pulled out the basket of journals I’ve kept since moving to California in 2019, and began to read (slowly, painstakingly). I was reading to build a case for myself against the thoughts: I may not have the tangible proof that modern society and more traditional value systems rely on to show progress throughout one’s lifetime. Read: no husband or babies or white picket fence or high-paying job. But that does not negate the growth that has taken place here — in my subtle body, in my mind, and how I show up in the world. The growth that has undoubtedly changed my priorities from the things I listed above anyways.

I was looking for proof of change, and boy did I find it. I gritted my teeth and clenched my jaw throughout 2019, 2020. What a shock that was to read. Who was she?

I decided to be a little gentler towards myself, and opened more recent journals. 2025, 2026. I quickly gained the perspective and proof I’d been looking for. That version of myself, the one that isn’t quite who I am now, but not too far away from her — she’s really dramatic. Still pretty cringeworthy. But I can relate to her a little easier, can still feel the pangs of emotion from what she was moving through. And it’s easy to see the differences, easy to see the proof of how I’m changing from month to month. I found the evidence I needed to soothe my hateful mind, if only for that moment: I am moving in the right direction. Even if I don’t see the progress at the end of each day. It is there; I am shifting. I’m learning to trust myself, to trust the natural order of the world. This change might be happening in a spiral (i.e. not in a linear fashion), but it’s happening.

Somewhere in this self-soothing process, I began to realize that what I was trying to call “self-love” was just shifting the disgust I had for current me, onto past versions of me. Self-disgust dressed up as self-compassion, but not compassion at all. I realized (again) this tendency I have to put so much weight into feelings of pride for how far I’ve come. Which can, undoubtedly, be positive to reflect on. It definitely worked in the moment to soothe the illness-provoked torrential storm moving through my psyche, and I really have grown so much — especially in these last seven years that I started allowing myself to keep the journals I fill. But underneath, there’s always this feeling of… inadequacy in this kind of reflection. Anger. Disgust. Like the version of myself I am now is worthy of love and grace and patience and rest and slowness, but not 2019 me. Not 2020 me, 2021 me. Not the girl who stayed longer than she should have, or ranted on Instagram about things probably better-suited for her therapist’s office. I loooove who I am now, but that girl? She was awful. I feel such strong disdain for her. She should be ashamed.

Five, six, seven years from now, I don’t want to be looking back on this version of myself with disgust and shame. I want to be able to hold her lovingly in my heart and know she was doing the best she could with what she had. She was being brave and courageous and yes, maybe dramatic and cringeworthy as well. She is going through the shit that is creating that version that will exist five years from now. And she is worth the space she takes up, simply because she is. No proof necessary.

In an effort to try to love these past versions of myself, I’d like to find the confidence to give them the voice I’d previously denied them. I’m reminded of the 18-year-old version of me who started a blog from a desktop computer at the Michigan State library, and the 19-year-old me that scrubbed its existence from the internet in a rush of shame. I’ll be periodically sharing journal entries, poems, notes in the margins of planners and pieces of scrap paper found in old books — thoughts and feelings of previous versions of the woman I am now. Doing my best to leave them unedited and in their most raw form, with the understanding that these girls, too, deserve space to be heard.

Here’s one now, from the week before I decided to take a leave of absence from my last job — the beginning of a cascade of events that led to the life I’m living now. There are pieces of this version of me that remain now, and pieces I’ve lovingly left in 2025. But all of the pieces deserve to live here and be heard and take up space regardless.

With love & cringe,

Jamie

October 25, 2025 1033a

There’s something about growing older, living these 29 years and some-odd months and days, gaining preferences and friends and hobbies and little rituals along the way, that makes life feel — busy. I want to say full, as in my days feel full of all these things I’d like to do and things I have to do, but full could also make it sound like I feel full right now, and honestly, I don’t. I feel busy and not the least bit full right now. Full of complexity, maybe. Full of purpose and meaning and feeling and fulfillment, not in the slightest. Full of seeking. Full of desire to have it all figured out. Full of questions. Full of shit. Full of sadness mixed with gratitude, a heap of comparison, guilt peppered throughout — anger bleeding in from the edges. No words to explain or containers to allow all that feeling to settle into. Full of all these things I want to do, devoid of any energy to do them. Full of empty promises made to myself.

Full of everything but the capacity to take a deep breath.

A handful of Zoloft and vitamins in the morning. A cup full of coffee to motivate me to get out of bed and arrive to the page, full of doubt and lack of direction or belief.

My to-do list for the day full of everything from “fold the laundry” to “learn Italian” to “submit my expense report” to “learn how to stop being so sad.” But then also “allow yourself to sit in the sadness, allow yourself to move through it.” Which is it? Maybe “be sad so you can stop being so sad” is more accurate.

A typical to-do list of mine is full of:

• Write my morning pages (also, record my dreams — see if there’s are any messages in my subconscious trying to claw their way to the surface)

• 7 minute Pilates arm workout (do it twice if feeling energized, or the alternative, feeling especially awful about my image in the mirror that day)

• 7 minute core workout (see above)

• Meditate on my shake plate (maybe the benefits of a shake plate are a total myth; I’ve decided I don’t give a shit. When I get so stressed and overwhelmed that I can’t contain it, my body takes over and shakes itself free. So I’ve determined the shake plate is a good way to release the pressure just a little bit each morning)

• Read my affirmations (try to stay focused long enough to read my manifestations and desires for myself and truly visualize them in my mind. Things like “I speak to myself with grace and loving kindness” and “abundance finds me wherever I go”)

After all this, feel guilty about not having a morning yoga self-practice as was pressed in my yoga teacher training. Continue on to:

• Eat a healthy, nourishing breakfast (usually skipping this one due to lack of time)

• Read a chapter of my current book. Right now, it’s “Shakti Woman: Feeling our Fire, Healing our World” (hence the emphasis on recording my dreams)

  • Introduce more guilt when reading about how harmful our capitalistic hustle culture is to women and our intuition, and what we really need to chase is silence and stillness

• Add 30 minutes of complete silence and stillness to morning routine

• Feel stressed by how overwhelming this morning routine has become, never do the stillness portion, and feel like shit all over again

• Respond to voice memos from friends, answer the 15 pending messages in my inbox

Welcome to my mind in the morning these last few months. Did I mention I have a full time job? And a business I decided to start? So then my to-do list continues on to:

• Expense report

• Order catering for lunch presentation

• Check e-mails

• Decide on a day I want to start teaching a yoga series

• Market my business on TikTok/Instagram

• Find time to go to the gym to swim laps

• Empty the dishwasher

• Go to a coffee shop to work on writing a book

• Worry that I’m not giving any time to my new hobbies — decide this afternoon I’ll either make a new piece of jewelry or paint or carve a new linocut

• Check my phone and add about 6 more miscellaneous tasks to the list, like ship items from my closet I’ve sold on Depop, or return swimming goggles I bought online that don’t fit my face right

By 2pm I’m exhausted, and despite accomplishing a ridiculous amount of this to-do list, I feel as if I’ve accomplished nothing at all. My friends have responded to the messages I’ve left them this morning, and now I feel overwhelmed that I have to respond all over again. I feel guilty that instead of having gratitude for so many people who love me and care to check in with me, I’m resentful that they’ve added more to my to-do list.

Feel like shit all over again. Full of shit. Full of guilt. Full of awareness that I’m on a hamster wheel that makes no fucking sense. Full of the irony of it all. Full of despair. How do I stop? How do I rest without slipping into a different kind of depression? Isn’t my productive burnout better than the sadness that prevents me from doing anything at all?

I’ve had therapists point out before that a common theme for me is guilt; feeling guilty no matter what I’m doing. But none of them have ever told me how to make it stop.

• Find a new therapist

• Read a book on reparenting your inner child and healing shame and guilt

I know I can’t do it all. But if that’s the case, how do I decide what to do, and where to start? Usually I start with work, because that’s what pays my bills and keeps me in my apartment and with health insurance that gives me access to therapy and Zoloft and diflucan when my body decides to throw a fit for taking a fucking bubble bath.

I’m 29, and I’m exhausted. And I’m reminded that I need to start deciding if I want to have kids. Full of fear, and anxiety of all that would add to my to-do list. Full of guilt that I’d consider not having children because of how busy and overwhelmed I already am. A full schedule and at the end of the day… emptiness. Full of disappointment that I didn’t paint today. That I didn’t work enough.

• Take a hydroxyzine to sleep — because while my body and mind and spirit are running on fumes, they refuse to quit. Rest is on my to-do list, and it’s the one I’m worst at.

In the morning, wake up and check my Oura ring’s sleep tracking data. Feel disappointed at the amount of deep sleep I got the night before, worry about my heart rate not dropping low enough overnight.

And begin again.

“The answer to the need of the young child for close parental contact is not the ghettoization of women in the home. It is recognition by society at large that there is no more important task in the world than the nurturing of the young in the earliest years. From the strict financial view alone, the benefits to society would be enormous if this were accepted. So much costly social dysfunction would be prevented, so many productive and creative forces allowed to unfold. There would be much less ADD, and much less of other disorders of development as well, if fathers, as well as mothers, were encouraged to consider the child’s interests paramount in the formative years and were not denied the required social and economic support.”

— Gabor Mate, MD in Scattered Minds, his book on the origins and healing of ADHD

It is no random coincidence that my attention recently has been so focused upon the way we parent in modern society, specifically the west and the US. On top of being a pediatric nurse at a children’s hospital in the midst of a pandemic that created a mental health crisis in parents and their children alike, I now teach prenatal yoga to women throughout their entire pregnancies. I listen to their intentions at the start of our seventy-five minutes on the mat together early on Sunday mornings: presence. Stillness. Slowing down. Work has been so crazy, and on top of taking care of my toddler, I’m sometimes moving so quickly that I forget I’m pregnant. 

Everything about this statement is inherently wrong — and not in any part due to the fault of the pregnant person herself. No, I think most people would consider a person (most often, identifying as a woman) who manages to work full time and keep a toddler alive and cared for, while five percent of the gray matter of her brain is siphoned off to create her baby’s nervous system, her blood volume increases by 50%, her body courses with even more cortisol than pre-pregnancy life — most people would not hesitate to call this woman a hero, and often, people probably do. But this label is a problem in and of itself. We saw this throughout the pandemic working in unequipped hospitals as nurses and healthcare workers battled COVID: we call you a hero if you’re achieving the unthinkable, despite an environment and society that’s left you wholly unsupported and without the adequate resources to do the job. And we stop there. We provide recognition — a gold star, a pat on the back, a mixed look of awe and pity — and we don’t ask the questions that need to be asked. How did we get here? How did we come to expect so much from our pregnant people, from the very people creating the future of our species and society? And then: How do we change it?

It is not a question of whether a woman is strong enough to do it. Women everywhere do it every day. Rather, the question we should be asking is: how do we support them so that portraying this strength is not the only option?

This is more than just government and economic support for mothers — although in the US, this would even make a significant difference. The village it takes to raise a child is all in the workplace now. And while women’s involvement in the workplace is undoubtedly a good thing (heavy emphasis on this not being a MAGA trad-wife rant in disguise), our lack of requiring paid maternal leave, the cost of existing and raising a family in today’s world, capitalism as a whole, has removed that option for most parents that might choose to stay home and recover from birth and raise their child past the twelve weeks protected by FMLA. Many women are forced back into work so early simply out of survival — they need to feed their child (but not breastfeed, because that requires the near-constant presence we’re simply not allowing).

I also teach baby & me yoga classes. Not “mommy & me,” being inclusive of all parents and caregivers (and how they identify), although I’ve only ever had women participate in class. We allow the babies to coo and cry and feed and diapers to be changed right there in the studio, on the mat. Moms don’t have to run outside with baby to console them when they cry, as they do most other places in the public sphere. They can pop a tit out without having to hide out in a restroom or cover baby’s face. Many students and their babies come to class, not because they love yoga or have a strong practice of their own, but simply because this class is one of the few places where they can exist with their baby outside of their home, without feeling like they are inconveniencing the people around them. It’s isolating being glued to a newborn baby for weeks and months on end, all while navigating a healing and ever changing body, identity, and life.

I asked a student of mine when she was returning to work (our classes are mid-morning on Tuesdays, and inevitably our moms & babies stop coming to class). She responded “four weeks from now, but I’m not allowing myself to even think about that yet.” This is a woman who is a wonderful, caring, present mother, and undoubtedly a really fucking cool person prior to gaining this new title of mother. She loves her job, and yet, it seems, even she might choose to extend this recovery and integration period, if it were only an option. We live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, pay the California state taxes that repel the Texans and Midwesterners that might otherwise move here — and yet still, the social structures do not exist to support mothers and families that wish to pause the hustle and just be present with their children.

I recently turned thirty (mixed feelings on this now that I’m here), and I continue to be undecided on whether I’ll choose to bring a child into the world. The more I learn about my body’s capabilities to create life, the more I’m curious to experience pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. I want to experience the awe and love on these mom’s faces that I only get a glimpse of in class, gushing over their babies as they suspend their bodies in Warrior III. And yet, I don’t want to be treated the way we treat pregnant women and mothers.

In addition to this, I feel I can hardly keep up with my life as it is — paying rent in San Diego, finding time to read and meditate and heal old wounds and create art and take care of my body and travel and do so many of the things I dream of doing. So much of my life is already consumed by self-help practices and exploration, I can’t imagine adding the responsibility of growing and raising a whole person. I recently finished Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her (10/10 recommend this read), whose words struck me right in the chest: “Do you know when you need self-help? When no one else is helping you.” Mind you, I am a white, heterosexual cis-woman in America with a community of loving friends and a supportive partner. I have privilege and support abound, and yet, the system we live within is still so oppressive, actively working against us. 

I sometimes wonder how easily I’d choose motherhood if the financial and societal conditions were perfect. Maybe I’d still choose not to, to spend my life pursuing other dreams. But the option would be nice. 

I do not want to have to manifest my way to abundance and expansiveness, to a level of wealth that would allow me to hire the village that would help me to raise babies and children the way that I’d desire in today’s world. I want to live in a society where it is not so fucking hard to be a human. Where it is not so fucking hard to be a woman (let alone a woman of color, or a queer woman, or a trans woman). Where it is not so fucking hard to be a mother. Even the idea of manifesting — while I practice it and use it to expand my ideas of what I think are possible for my life — is so fucked up in its individuality. Manifesting puts the onus, the responsibility, on the one person, not the system that’s oppressed them and made these intentions so difficult to “call in.” The things I’ve been manifesting recently: paying rent with ease. Having time to pursue creative passions. Time to lay in the sun in stillness. 

Read: I’m trying to manifest living the human experience outside of the influence of capitalism. I want shelter, time in nature, time to dawdle and play. How have we created a system that makes this feel so out of reach and unattainable? A luxury?

I do not have an answer to these problems, but I do know that the answer is not silence. I’m choosing to be loud about what I see, what I notice and observe in the world. I’m choosing to allow the anger to be there, to move through my body and alchemize it. Not only to manifest a better future for myself — but to change the systems we have to operate and live within so that each person, each woman, knows that we do not have to do this alone, separately & quietly in our homes. Change can only start with visibility, with assertion — with anger.

Share this with a person, a woman, a mother you love. Let her know you see her.

All the love,

Jamie

April 19th began Taurus season (a phrase I’d never imagine myself starting an essay with five years ago) — and while I spent much of my life laughing at and brushing off astrology girls and their Co-Star friend requests, I’m growing to understand some of my ignorance in disbelieving my relationship to the rest of the universe itself. The planets, the stars, the sun and moon felt so distant from me for so much of my life, a girl who found comfort in realism (and thought she was better than people who created their entire personalities off their birth days and times). But as I find more belonging in the flesh of my own body, settling into it like my favorite corner to read in my home, I find my body belonging more to the elements surrounding it. The way I allow a deep sigh to leave my lungs and I’m instantly more at ease with the singing of birds in the morning (an evolutionary sign of safety in the environment, in lack of threats and danger). How my body sways and undulates throughout the day, after spending only a few moments floating in the rise and fall of the ocean’s ebbs. The first day of my cycle falling in line with the New Moon; the difficulty sleeping I experience during the Full Moon. My face instinctually turns upward towards the sun, eyes closing, as I step through a threshold and into the light.

I also live on the southern coast of California now, and exist within communities of people who do yoga and surf regularly — so it makes more sense that I’m now surrounded by people who pay closer attention to the movements of the planets, the moon and the tides. At least more so than many people did in suburban Illinois and Michigan. People here will plan their days around watching the sun set over the ocean — it’s common to see crowds congregating at coastal parks, people pulling their cars over and pausing in the middle of walking their dog to try to catch the green flash. Yoga classes and community events are themed off of the cycles of the moon — not only observing what phase the moon is in at any given time, but finding meaning from it in our own human lives (both astronomy & astrology).

Maybe it’s the environmental influence, or this time of my life (my 29th year, my Saturn return), but I find myself gazing upward at the stars more. Looking for answers outside of myself, my own mind (and the internet), and broadening my awareness. I’m learning that this curiosity, this willingness to acknowledge how much I really don’t know, is not only humbling. It is expansive and liberating. When you can accept that you might not actually know everything, more becomes possible. There is freedom and space in uncertainty.

Essentially what I’m getting at, is that I found myself reading a Taurus Season guide this morning, written by Jill Wintersteen, that a friend generously shared with me. My 30th birthday is this Taurus season, so it feels like I’m stepping into a new phase of this human life on Earth, and I want to be intentional about it. I’m not having the same sentiments and resistance that many of my friends and peers have shared with leaving their twenties, outside of finally prioritizing SPF and moisturizer. My twenties were a time of exponential growth, and also, significant pain. Wisdom gleaned from difficult lessons I sometimes thought might kill me. Much of me is eager to step into a new decade, now that I’m this woman I’ve grown to really like and respect.

And whether you glean any meaning from astrology or not, this practice of reflecting on how far we’ve come, or how different life may be, since the previous birthday(s), is something we all do. It’s part of how we measure and mark the passing of time. In Sasha Sagan’s book, For Small Creatures Such as We, she writes “somehow we humans got the idea that the best moment to really meditate on an event — a birth, a marriage, a death, a battle, a coronation, an inauguration, anything good, terrible, auspicious, historic, or otherwise memorable — is when the Earth is back in the same position it was when the thing happened. This is astronomy at work. On anniversaries and birthdays, we are in the same place in relationship to the sun. However, the whole solar system is actually moving through the galaxy every 225 million years. So you’re kind of in the same place, but everything is also totally different.”

I’m given this prompt in the Taurus Season guide, after a lengthy description detailing Uranus leaving Taurus and entering Gemini after 8 years: “What do you know now about your value today that you did not know in 2018?”

Just reading the question felt like getting hit in the chest. 2018 was the year I graduated from college, moved back in with my parents and struggled to find a new graduate nursing job. The year my friends began starting their new careers and lives, building communities in new cities, and I couldn’t help but feel as if I was being left in the dust — stuck sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and then, having panic attacks as I prepared for night shifts working at the very same community hospital I was born in 22 years before. It felt like such a regression, during a time where I’d expected expansion and freedom. My boyfriend at the time was away on a nine month deployment, and he somehow managed to be even more of an invalidating source of confusion & self-hatred than usual, even halfway across the world and accessible only via WhatsApp. I don’t know that my mental health and self-worth have ever been lower than the latter half of that year.

What did I not know about my value in 2018? I did not know that I had any value at all. I would step into every room as if I were a living and breathing apology. I had convinced myself I was a burden to be borne by those around me. It’s honestly hard to step back into these memories — hard to understand how I’d dug myself so deeply into this hole of isolation and shame. The purpose of sharing this is not to create pity for this version of myself, nor do I need you, the reader, to be holding any space for me in this vulnerability. It’s hard to step back into these memories only because of how vastly different my inner world is now, eight very long years later.

It happened in small and slow ways, this shift. This healing was very much nonlinear, more of a spiral in its trajectory. Three steps forward, two steps back — again and again. I moved to California (three steps forward). I moved in with that boyfriend (two steps back). I broke up with that boyfriend, and had the opportunity to live on my own for the first time in my life (eight steps forward). I started dating someone marginally better, someone who was kinder, but was otherwise wrong for me in every way (four steps back). I started doing yoga more regularly, exploring what it felt like to spend time in my body (five steps forward). I moved closer to the ocean (three steps forward). I dated a lot of mediocre men (two steps forward for the confidence and courage, five steps back for the behaviors I put up with). I started journaling. I left my job as a bedside nurse. I began surrounding myself with a community that made me feel like I could be myself. Like the person I was at my core actually belonged somewhere. Like she didn’t need to prove that she belonged in the room, she just did.

I made mistakes, too. I dated more people who were quite wrong for me. I stayed in jobs and relationships I’d outgrown for longer than I’d like to admit. Gave my energy to people who probably didn’t deserve it. I still fawned in times of stress — and still do sometimes (although less and less with each passing year). But I started to talk about my feelings more. To share my shame when I felt myself dropping into the pits of it. To believe my friends when they told me I was deserving of love, and not the cruel or conditional kind. I began to gradually understand that I was the one who could give myself this kind of love, acceptance, and belonging.

It’s now April of 2026. Earlier this week, I stopped into a concierge psychiatry office that I used to frequent when I was a pharmaceutical sales rep. Some of my private yoga clients have been referred to me by their psychiatry providers for a safe space to practice dropping into the body (somewhat of a full-circle moment). So here I was, dropping off my yoga business cards as opposed to drug samples. I ran into another rep in the waiting room, and caught up with him and the front desk, filling them in on what I was doing in this season of life as an ex-priprazole rep (thank you to a psychiatrist friend of mine for this fun antipsychotic pun). The rep made a comment I also would have made if I was in his position: “Wow. What I would give to be tan and teach yoga classes for a living. That sounds like a dream.”

And to be fair, I also believe this (hence, why I finally made this decision). I didn’t take any form of offense from this comment, and fully understood where it was coming from. The woman behind the front desk, whom I’d known since my first day in my job as a rep, and who quickly became one of my favorite people I’d interact with in that role (as blunt and hardheaded as she could be) — said in response: “Well, don’t forget how hard Jamie worked to be where she is right now. This didn’t come easily.”

When I climbed back into my car, tears began to fall in rivers down my cheeks. To feel so seen in this small kindness — and she didn’t even know the half of it. The arc of these last eight years; how low the lows truly were.

As I journaled in response to the prompt, “what do you know now about your value today that you did not know in 2018?”, I eventually found myself writing: Thank god for the girl I was in 2018, the one that didn’t know her own value. Because she survived, I am here now. She endured and kept waking up each day, with the smallest amount of hope that it could get better. And now, I reap the benefits. I feel the sun on my skin and listen to the birds sing and I smile. I make things with my hands and I move my body and marvel at its strength. I even sing to myself sometimes — in the car, as I do the dishes. I can command a room full of people. I’m learning to be louder, to project my voice. To take up space.

I was out with a few friends over the weekend, drinking Miller High Life’s and paying to boost songs in the TouchTunes queue in a local dive bar. We were reminiscing on a few awful (and hilarious) stories about an ex-boyfriend of mine, when one friend pulled me aside in conversation, teary and emotional from the alcohol.

“You’ve had so much pain. You don’t deserve any more pain. Now is the time for joy.”

Now is the time for joy. I am lucky to have people in my life that make me feel seen in ways that 2018 Jamie didn’t even know was an option. I’m grateful to look back, and have less and less judgment for the version of myself that accepted much less forgiving and harsher forms of what I believed to be love at the time.

Sasha Sagan writes, “it’s this rejoicing at survival that’s at the heart of every birthday party. For most of history, survival was harder. Children perished. A first birthday was not a given. Each passing year, each step closer to adulthood, was a relief not to be taken for granted, something truly worthy of celebrating. That’s what a birthday really is: the realization that time is passing but we are still alive.” And so, that’s what I will celebrate this Taurus season.

I’ll end with a quote from the same astrology guide that inspired this essay: “Taurus teaches us that when we find our stillness, we discover both our creativity and our innate sense of worth… abundance in its most expansive form, a state of being that looks different for each person but always stems from a deep understanding of our inherent worth.” Believe in astrology or not — that’s some powerful shit. In my reflection of this passage, I wrote in my journal: I now have the abundance that is belonging in my body and feeling safe and whole and worth something here. And that is a kind of wealth I never even knew I was missing.

Life has been nothing but juxtaposition recently — balance I didn’t plan for, but that has seemingly just fallen into place in a beautifully synchronous manner regardless. The geopolitical (and physical) planet is crumbling around me, and yet my inner world has never felt so creative and expansive. I quit the job that provided me with the success and stability reminiscent of The American Dream — and despite this lack of steady income and resources, I’ve never felt more abundant in my energy, my time, my life force. I feel wealthy, but a different kind of wealthy. I’m reminded of a plaque that sat on the window ledge of my friends’ Kassi and Brad’s kitchen in Lincoln Park: Health is Wealth. I’m beginning to understand this on a deeper level.

In this time of what I like to call loose employment (working for hourly wages at a variety of yoga studios, leading infrequent workshops, teaching private clients) — not quite unemployed, and yet not quite on the same upward career path as many of my peers, as I once was myself — I’ve had the stillness and space in my mind to listen to my intuition in a new way. I cut out so much of the busyness and allowed there to be the quiet I was so afraid of (and yet craved) for so long. What happened in this silence — new hopes and dreams and possibilities rushed into the vacuum I created, in the absence of responsibilities I’d previously clung to.

This is not necessarily a manifesto intended to convince you to quit your job (but, like, do it… you know you want to). Nor is it intended to gloat about this newfound energy (some days I’d even call it bliss) I’ve discovered in this season. This essay is actually about death. About endings.

Cut to November of 2007. I’m eleven years old, with thick metal wire braces on both rows of teeth. I am more awkward than even now, and painfully in need of someone to tell me to stop wearing a different pastel polo shirt from Aeropostale each day of the week to school (there are just so many other options, Jamie). I remember very little from this time, or most of my childhood in Illinois for that matter. But I have flashes of different memories that will infrequently, and seemingly randomly (although probably not), come to mind throughout the day, and in my sleep.

One of these flashes is as follows: I’m looking up at an amalgamation of autumn leaves, bright yellow and deep red and burnt orange hues, rustling in the wind as they are shaken free from their branches. Rays of sunlight filter through the leaves in long lines of white light. It’s unseasonably warm, that span of time in the Midwest that we call Indian Summer (that we probably shouldn’t). There are no other details that I can see, but I know exactly where and when I am.

It’s the early afternoon of November 7th, and I’m in my mom’s dark gray Honda Odyssey minivan pulled to the side of the road at Silver Glen and Route 31. Despite the fact that it’s almost been two decades since this day, my body begins to tremble as I type, 2,000 miles and a lifetime away. My body has kept the score, no matter how many years of therapy, how many hours of meditation I’ve practiced to try to shake it free.

I’m in my mom’s dark gray Honda Odyssey, and I’m angry. I’m angry, because it feels safer than being sad, safer than allowing myself to break apart and weep. I have greater control over my anger; I don’t like showing the vulnerability in my sadness, and I’m actively learning to repress it deeper into the flesh and sinew of my body. So deep, I’m only beginning to tap into it all these years later. I’m angry, trying to swallow my sadness, because my mom has just told me that my dearest friend in the world has just died, peacefully, in her bed at home. The bed I’d slept in beside her most weekends throughout elementary school, after belting karaoke in the microphone attached to the machine that sat atop the dresser, playing Sims at the computer on the desk beside it. The bed that was littered with Webkinz stuffed animals (remember those?), and later, the needles, tubing, and saline flushes used to access her port. The port for the chemo to fight the cancer that ravaged her tiny body; the Reglan and Zofran to battle the effects of the chemo itself.

I don’t remember when or how Paige and I met, only that it was early in elementary school, and that she was someone that instantly made me feel as if I belonged in the world. We were the same kind of strange, writing short stories and creating secret languages under the playground during recess while the other kids played “Cops and Robbers.” She had beautiful blonde hair and soft features, she smiled with her eyes in a gentle way my gummy teeth-baring grin never could. We were just similar enough that I saw myself in her, but I also admired so many things she was that I was not — and in this way, I learned to love myself, bit by bit, the more I grew to love her.

We were only 10 years old, early in our fifth grade year, when the flu symptoms Paige had developed were actually diagnosed as Acute Myeloid Leukemia. While I’d like to say that I didn’t process the gravity of this diagnosis at the time, I think it’s more accurate to say that my body simply won’t allow me to remember the weight of my full understanding. Ten year olds are so much more wise than we give them credit for. Paige was pretty consistently hospitalized throughout the year she had cancer, and no amount of warm paint colors or hours in the play room with the child life specialist could dull the sterility of the children’s hospital on Fullerton. I understood in many ways that she was dying — treatments failed, her face and abdomen swelled from the high-dose steroids, her breath could be ragged at times. She’d lost her blonde hair, and deep chestnut curls began to sprout from her scalp after treatment was stopped. What I didn’t understand was how to prepare for the loss of my best friend, my sense of belonging, or how to grieve when it happened.

The day after she died was the sixth grade honors breakfast. Rigid in my ways and routines as I was, and desperately grasping for normalcy in the face of overwhelming loss, I insisted on attending school anyways. They announced Paige’s passing on the PA system with the morning announcements, along with a moment of silence. One of the kids in my class laughed, because sixth graders are terrible (they are too intelligent, and yet to develop any empathy). I ran crying to the bathroom in our mobile classrooms, my friend, Kassi, following me. She held me as I cried, not saying anything. Even at eleven, she was willing to sit in that discomfort with me and hold space for it — something many adults could not do for me at the time.

In hindsight, I probably should have been put into therapy of some kind, but this was 2007 in a conservative midwestern suburb, and that’s simply not what happened. Paige and I’s families both went to the same Christian church that could be seen across the cornfields from my backyard. This was where they held her celebration of life, and where my parents deemed would be the best form of support and comfort to me in this loss. I was told countless times to accept Jesus Christ into my heart and ask for his forgiveness, and I’d see my friend in Heaven again. I was baptized months later with that same hope — maybe this is only temporary? This heaviness caving in on my chest when I woke; this belief forming inside my very bones that maybe I was meant to be alone. I didn’t have to grieve and come to terms with this loss if death wasn’t as final as everyone had made it seem.

I’m wary to take a proverbial shit on the Christian church and their entire belief system regarding what happens at the end of life as we know it. In truth, none of us can say with certainty what happens after our physical bodies take their last breath, and I don’t believe I am above anyone else to tell them I know best. That being said, an eleven year old’s mind still works in very concrete ways — and I do believe that these promises the church made to comfort me, seriously hindered my ability to grieve Paige’s death, and its permanence, at all.

That being said, I didn’t believe that at the time. I’ve written about my experiences throughout Paige’s sickness and death a few times before; each time getting the words down has felt like a release, but it’s mostly been followed by shame and embarrassment of sharing my vulnerability. I spent most of the years following her death, until going to college and finally leaving my hometown, either pouring myself into academic and athletic accomplishments, or really unbelievably angry. Repressing any feelings of sadness, and trying to channel any of that emotion into productivity — I’d go to nursing school and work in pediatric oncology, and that way I could make sense of her death. I shared my story with Paige in a speech at a nursing awards banquet my senior year of college, ten years later. I believed I’d grieved Paige and our friendship. I believed myself to be somewhat of an expert on grief and loss compared to my peers at my young age.

Fast forward to the summer of 2025. So much has happened since I moved away from Illinois for college in 2014, for good in 2019. I have shed so many versions of myself, and luckily, braces and Aeropostale polo shirts as well. I have just come back from Bali for my yoga teacher training, and I feel aflame for my life again. During the daily philosophy lectures on the deck of the yoga shala in the middle of rice paddy fields, my teacher would share stories and talk about how little time we truly have on this earth — even those of us that get to live long, fulfilled lives. He’d talk about love and embracing the opportunity in each new day. He talked about how beautiful the present moment, the ordinary moments in this life are — they are so beautiful and precious, because inevitably, they end. Dust to dust, we each return to the earth. Whether we want to or not. Whether we’re ready or not.

It’s June, and I’m now back home in California. I am in my car in a Trader Joe’s parking lot in La Jolla, and tears stream down my cheeks as I read a long text from Kassi (yes, the same Kassi). Since that day in the sixth grade, Kassi has been an unwavering constant in my life. Anyone who has met Kassi knows that she is the human personification of her middle name, Rae — she is a ray of pure golden sunshine, and one of the funniest people I have ever met. Kassi and her husband, Brad, began dating early in high school, and quickly became the model of love and friendship for everyone in their orbit. It is hard to describe their love, so I won’t even attempt it. Just trust that it was, and is, something very rare.

Brad and Kassi’s story is not mine to tell, it is hers. But the gist of this long text message was this: Brad was dying from a brain tumor. I immediately think to the plaque in their kitchen, the kitchen that now had a wedge at the entryway step to accommodate for Brad’s wheelchair: Health is Wealth.

Brad died at the end of that summer. It did not feel fair that I was now the one holding Kassi, as she faced this unimaginable loss of her soulmate. We were only 29. It, in fact, was not fair — but that didn’t matter. Death has a way of reminding us that it plays by its own rules, the only certainty being: it will come for us all.

Grieving Brad’s death, preparing for it, meant first realizing that I didn’t actually know how. I struggled to cry, to sink my teeth into any of the sadness that sat at the tip of my tongue, that buzzed about the edges of my body. I got a new therapist, worked on finding my way back into my body itself (if you’ve never experienced dissociation, this probably will be hard to understand). I began to touch the edges of the gulf of sadness that sat deep in the pit of my being, teaching myself that I could take little bites and still come out myself on the other end. I didn’t have to force myself to feel it, only make the space to do so if it wanted to be felt that day. I knew that this sadness went much deeper than just this summer; my resistance to it was too familiar, as if this was a pattern as old as my body itself.

Paige and Brad were very different people, with different stories, and circles who grieve and remember them everyday. But to me, they were both dear friends that made me feel less alone in this world. Friends that taught me, through their lives and through their loss, how deeply a person can love. The difference one good friend can make. The priceless currency that is laughter. The opportunity and gift that is each new day. Their deaths were almost 2 decades apart, but I learned to grieve them both at once.

Now, back to balance. It is uncanny how beautiful life can get after you’ve been devastated so wholly. How just being around death and endings can shake you awake to how precious a gift life really is. The sun shines brighter; I’m more aware of the hummingbirds flitting around my balcony in the early mornings. This isn’t to say the “after” isn’t bleak or numbing or saturated with longing and regret (it can be all of these things, too). But with grief and loss also comes gratitude. It wouldn’t hurt so fucking bad, if the experience or person we’re missing so greatly wasn’t so fucking good. We learn to appreciate whatever it is we’ve lost on a deeper level. I recently started dancing again in the yoga studio before students arrive for class — my relevé doesn’t get quite as high in my turns as it once did, but my legs still carry so much strength and flexibility. Health is Wealth.

All this to say — I’m beginning to sit in the ambiguity and duality of this realization: because I know the devastation (and inevitability) of death, I am more connected to the beauty available to me in each moment right now. Just as I’ve learned to befriend pain, I am learning to befriend death. It will come for me (and you, sorry) — regardless of whether we prepare for it or not. I’d rather embrace this knowing than resist it. This isn’t to say that I welcome it, but I let the thought sit in my head when it arises. I don’t rush to push it out. I can breathe through it. I can cry. The release of tears is so sweet once you only allow them to fall. Memento Mori.

A few weeks after I quit my job (with no set plan, but about a thousand and one ideas of what I’d now do), the voice that I’ve come to know as my intuition spoke to me, clearly. In one morning, after dreaming of the death doula Kassi had worked with to plan Brad’s funeral, I received an email from my business coach that also mentioned death doulas — a quote from Marianne Williamson that read: We must be death doulas to the world that is dying, and birth doulas to the world that is begging to be born. The episode of The Pitt the week before had introduced a death doula to this season’s storyline. I was seeing it everywhere, and instead of brushing it off as coincidence, I decided to indulge the synchronicity and research what a death doula even does, how you’d become one. There was an End-of-Life Guide certification program at the University of Vermont specifically for child and infant loss that called to me (also not a coincidence) — and it was starting the following Monday. I signed up for the program and paid the tuition before I put my phone down. It all happened so fast, but it didn’t feel impulsive. It felt like everything was clicking into place.

I had a Reiki session with a friend I’d scheduled for later that week (call me woo-woo if you want, I don’t care). I filled her in a little bit on my life, without giving too much detail as to the specifics of the happenings of that week, or trauma-dumping my experiences with death and loss on her. After the energy work and channeling was complete, she shared with me a vision that came to mind when her hands hovered over the crown of my head.

I was in literal heaven — or the way you’d imagine heaven to be if that’s in your belief system. So airy and light and joyful. I saw you, just as you are now in your human form, but sitting amongst your angels. It wasn’t sad though — you were joking and laughing with them. There was no heaviness. It was like you ran back and forth between heaven and earth with ease, playfully, casually, no tearful goodbyes — almost bridging the two worlds like a guide.

Tears welled in my eyes as she asked, hesitantly, Does that resonate at all for you? (It did, Savannah, it really did). She shared with me some messages that came through that session, too: my guides & angels wanted me to know that none of what had happened had been a coincidence. And I was exactly where I needed to be. Maybe I wouldn’t have believed these messages so wholeheartedly, if I didn’t already feel that way in my bones, in every cell of my body. I didn’t know where this path would take me, only that this was the right path.

I finished the UVM doula program a few weeks ago, and I don’t necessarily know what the path looks like from here (although I have plenty of ideas). But I know how to listen to my intuition and act from my gut, and I trust that these answers will be revealed in time. And I know that if I’m even able to support one person throughout the loss of their child, or sibling, or friend — that will have been enough. Life is simply too short to not face the inevitability of death until we’re forced to. And what would all these painful lessons I’ve learned be for, if I didn’t share any of this wisdom I’ve gleaned with the people who might need it?

This version of me now, who is embracing the idea of death (but also allowing it to be… fun? Like the image of me laughing amongst my angels) — she is the person that the version of me at eleven would have died to know (pun intended). And that’s just so fucking cool.

-

If you’ve made it to the end of this essay, thank you. Writing this has not been easy, but it was necessary, and your participation as an audience is an important part of this journey of learning how to share my voice and take up artistic space in the world. Thank you to Brad Johnson, for teaching me the courage to bring the stories that live in my head down onto the page. Send this to someone you love — someone who makes you feel less alone in the world.

“When I was a young writer of 30, and just setting out…” is how Sue Monk Kidd starts her book, Writing Creativity and Soul, that I began listening to through my airpods as I folded the laundry this morning. I paused after only these first twelve words to write them down — words Sue herself probably didn’t think would change anyone’s life, but that struck me in the middle of my chest — a woman quickly approaching her thirtieth birthday, with dreams of being a capital W Writer.

I remember reading The Secret Life of Bees in school growing up, and later, The Book of Longings, when it was released in 2020. The fiction novel is not my typical genre of choice when it comes to reading preferences, but The Book of Longings resonated with me in a way few books (fiction or non-) had in my lifetime thus far. They were the exact words that I needed to hear in this year that my life and sense of reality actively crumbled around me (when I believed I too, would crumble along with it, body and soul). I venerated these words so deeply, that upon finishing the rented e-book on my kindle, I went to the store and bought a physical copy to immediately start reading again, annotating in the margins and vigorously underlining as I went (how I typically like to devour a book). There are only a few books I’ve ever loved enough to return to, time and time again — For Small Creatures Such as We, by Sasha Sagan, is another.

As a girl who spent her childhood highlighting the New Testament, and a woman now desperately looking for spiritual guidance in the wake of horrendous heartbreak and religious deconstruction, this novel became my bible. If you google this book, many descriptions of it as a Christian novel appear (my internet research of Sue’s life, and continuation of her newest book, tell me otherwise). It is essentially the story of Jesus, except told from the perspective of a woman, his wife — of her life and thoughts and dreams and fears and stories. It was meticulously researched for historical accuracy, and it was the exact antidote I needed to the stories and beliefs ingrained in me in my most formative years — the influences that first taught me to be quiet and respectful, to be a good little girl, to equate love and fear, to swallow so many of the words that rose in me. 

As I continued listening to Writing Creativity and Soul, each sentence gleaned more insight into Sue’s background, which seemed to eerily echo my own. At the age of six she decided she wanted to be a writer, yet ended up in nursing school, eventually working as an inpatient pediatric nurse. “There was a cross-stitched picture that hung on my bedroom wall when I was a girl that said If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. You have no idea of the sheer volume of words I swallowed.” I remembered the words I was forbidden to say in my own home growing up — stupid, suck, hate. So many of these words revolved around voicing my displeasure or distaste, as if the adults in my life wanted to prevent me from having any negative opinions at all. The punishment for their utterance still makes me grimace only to think of it — a mouth washed out with soap. The soap itself was Suave, re-filled in a Williams Sonoma hand soap bottle that sat in a sage green half-bathroom off the kitchen. It left a bitter aftertaste that lingered at the back of my throat for hours, no matter what I tried to rid it with. It was foul, which means it worked. I learned to swallow my opinions instead of the bitter soap.

“As I neared my thirtieth birthday, I grew increasingly homesick for myself.” I find myself nodding adamantly as I wipe down the kitchen counters. “There comes a time when feeling safe matters less than being a voice.” Yes, I whisper, to no one but the cat beside me. 

I feel as if I’m on the cusp of something big in this season of my life — the shift that many of my friends in their early-to-mid thirties have described to me as simply: giving less of a fuck. Caring less about other people’s opinions of their life. Maybe for the first time, paying more mind to how they are feeling in the life they’ve built, as opposed to the outside perception or some comparison to a checklist made up by modern society. I am finding myself practicing this shift in big and small ways. Sometimes, it looks like allowing my inner child the pleasure and joy and wonder and awe and play she desires (most often this manifests as a high-calorie sweet treat). A lot of times, it looks like rage. Allowing it to be present. Not quieting the emotion, but trusting its presence and purpose.

Good little girls are not taught about anger. How to process it, feel it, talk about it. We are not taught why we feel anger when we do, only that we should not feel it. That even if we do feel it, others should surely not see it.

“By the time they enter school, most children already think of disruptive behaviors and assertiveness — for example, using loud voices, interrupting, burping, joking, and cursing — as linguistic markers of masculinity, acceptable for boys but not for girls. Children fine-tune their response to adult expectations, and adults consistently demonstrate discomfort with the idea of a righteously angry girl making demands. Girls, admonished to use ‘nicer’ voices three times more often than boys are, learn to prioritize the needs and feelings of people around them; often this means ignoring their own discomfort, resentment, or anger.” 

The quote above comes directly from Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger that I began reading this week as well, after picking it up in a neighborhood shop in Barrio Logan — Libélula Books — recommended to me by a student in my yoga class. Libélula translates from Spanish to dragonfly, and stepping into this store felt like running around in the spray of the backyard hose as a child, blue dragonflies flitting about in the breeze around me. Like liberation, somehow. I’ve been practicing trusting and acting upon my intuition, and after reading the first line on the back cover, I knew it must come home with me. “How many women cry when angry because we’ve held it in for so long? How many discover that anger turned inward is depression?”

I don’t think I have ever once been able to get through a conversation in which I’m attempting to express my anger at some injustice, and have not wept. It’s humiliating, when all I want to do is express how on fire I feel. And me and my depression? We’re lifelong partners in this dance of life (as many times as I’ve tried to shake her loose).

I’ve come to realize that my conscious mind literally doesn’t know how to move anger through my body; it’s never been taught how. Sometimes the anger in me will rise to a threshold where my body will take over and shake of its own volition, my teeth chattering. When this happens, I’ve learned to surrender to it, to close my eyes and ride its wave. It’s always a little bit exhilarating to come out of it on the other end. To sense somewhat of a weight has been lifted.

All this to say — I’m turning 30 in a month, but in many ways, I’m still a baby. I’m still just learning how to live in this body, how to unlearn all of society’s programming (and the bitter taste of hand soap). And part of that means learning how to be angry. Learning how to talk about my anger as opposed to stuffing it down, clenching my jaw until my molars grind to dust. Learning how to voice the opinions and stories that maybe aren’t so nice. That might upset some people. It’s fucking scary. And yet, on the other end of it, I feel just a little bit lighter. And that feeling doesn’t suck.

A big thank you to Sue Monk Kidd and Soraya Chemaly for inspiring this week’s cathartic exercise in storytelling. If you’re still reading this (a big thank you to you) : tell me the ways you let your inner little girl get maddddd in the comments. As a woman (and a person), there are so many things to be really, really, justifiably angry about in the world today. I’d love to find some creative & productive new ways to throw a bitchin’ tempter tantrum.

Peace & love & angry tears,

Jamie

I’ve always been what you might call a “seeker.” I’ve been searching for my dharma for as long as I can remember (before I was ever introduced to the word dharma through my yoga practice), believing it to be a paid job and clear career path, of course, with the influence of American corporate culture. The word dharma has a Sanskrit root, and has become a foundational concept in Hinduism and Buddhism, among other religions & cultures. To oversimplify it, for me, dharma has become synonymous with my purpose for being. I approach each new hobby, interest, and job with earnest — like the baby bird asking anything and anyone, are you my mother? — “Are you my purpose?”

Despite my many attempts to convince myself, nursing was not my purpose. I was good at being a nurse, but being a nurse was not good to me (body, mind, or spirit). I took on the full weight of the emotional burdens of my patients, and to them, I oftentimes represented the broken healthcare system I grew to resent more and more with each shift. Hypervigilance and dissociation are two maladaptive coping mechanisms that were already deeply ingrained in my operating system prior to becoming a nurse. And when it comes to working in the hospital and being the main advocate for an acutely ill patient, you’re rewarded for this ability to anticipate the worst case scenario, to leave your body and simply respond logically and rapidly in the face of alarm. You learn to watch out for any sign of distress, become accustomed and numb to people’s pain. You do not, however, get to turn this off when you clock out at the end of your shift. I’d spend my days off attempting to find my way back into my body in yoga classes, or journaling at a coffee shop, before unraveling any mediocre progress I may have made when it came time to dress in my scrubs once more. I was beginning to find modalities to help me outside of work, but it became clear to me that I was filling a tank only to have it drained again by the end of a shift. I felt stuck, and exhausted. This time of my life reminds me of a line from one of Noah Kahan’s songs: if my engine works perfect on empty, I guess I’ll drive.

I eventually came to terms with the identity crisis I’d been battling in my attempts to help myself (if I’m not a nurse, what am I?). I got a new job; still working with other nurses, still in hospitals, but not with patients. This helped. Eventually, I felt the itch again. This is not it. I got a new job. This job was working with patients, but remote, in education. Another big but — I was working for an insurance company. The itch was more of an anaphylactic reaction in this job. Immediate, dire, and suffocating. This is not it. 

I managed to land a job in pharmaceutical sales from here — something I never expected I’d be doing, but by most definitions, the perfect job. It paid well, my schedule was my own, and I no longer worked weekends or holidays (this in itself did wonders for my mental health). I could go to the dentist in the middle of a workday if I needed, run errands while driving between doctors’ offices. I was educating in the mental health space, so for a while, I was actually really passionate about the work I was doing. Until the itch returned. This… isn’t it?

No, I really, really want this to be it. This job keeps me out of the hospital. It keeps my bills paid. It gives me stability, safety. It’s easy. I’m good at it. People in my own life have benefited from this drug. I’ve already been promoted. And yet… it wasn’t in alignment anymore. I began to dread waking up each morning to go to work. Because I knew in my gut I didn’t want to be doing it, every moment working felt like wasted time. Time was beginning to seem more and more precious — a close friend was terminally ill. Then, he died. Loss puts everything in perspective fairly quickly. Not to mention the genocides, wars, dying planet, and fascism abound. The world doesn’t need any more miserable people. I didn’t have any moments to waste.

I began to wonder: what if, all along, I was already living my dharma? Sitting in coffee shops, writing my thoughts and dreams and fears? Spending my time in yoga studios, making friends with strangers? I remember saying to my partner, Ian, a few months before giving my notice — “I think my dream job allows me to wear yoga clothes all the time.” I truly didn’t have the space in that moment to realize the job I was dreaming of was teaching yoga (not some creative director remote role that allowed me to take a class on my lunch break). It wasn’t until I had quit my sales role that I became aware of this possibility. I auditioned for a teaching position at a wellness studio, not 30 minutes after logging out of my work iPad for the last time on a Friday in February. 

I didn’t get that teaching job, but I hadn’t expected to. I was doing it for fun. I was doing it because the incredibly awkward and insecure little-girl-from-the-Midwest version of me would think it was badass that we grew up to be a hot and cool yoga teacher in San Diego (hot is not a reflection of image here, but more of an attitude, a mindset). I was doing it because I wanted to wear yoga clothes. I didn’t get the job, but I felt electric regardless. Because I showed up. I did it. And I realized — Oh. It just takes showing up. None of this can happen if I don’t show up and try. The possibility of being a hot cool yoga teacher seemed more accessible. I woke up to my own agency in making my dreams come true.

So I sent an email to six different studios a few Fridays later. I included my resume, an introduction, a little about myself and this season of my life. Two of these studios I now teach at regularly. It happened quickly, with seemingly little effort. It took showing up. I found where I was meant to land, and for the first time when it comes to my career, it felt… easy? Like settling into the first healthy relationship after years of struggle and “fighting for it” — Oh. It can feel like this? It can be this easy?

What this feels like in my body: my low belly is less contracted and constricted, my breath travels deeper without any conscious effort. I don’t wake with the same tight jaw from clenching my teeth overnight that I’m used to. My Oura ring says my resting heart rate has consistently lowered, that I recover faster overnight. My body is giving me all the feedback I need to know that I’m moving in the right direction. I’m where I need to be right now. 

And that’s the key really — the right now part. Because if I’ve learned anything in these almost-thirty years, it is that death is truly the only destination. The rest of it is allllll journey. I will probably not ever know my one true purpose, my dharma. If I knew the answer to that already, as I’ve strived to for so long, there wouldn’t be any point to continue on. The journey would be complete. I’m beginning to come to terms with the fact that I will never be able to rest in this perfect state of having it all figured out, feeling 110% in alignment. To quote Agnes de Mille, “Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what is next or how. The moment you know how you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” I do not know, and therefore, there is more work to do. More life to be lived. And I can learn to be grateful for this. I can learn to get real still and quiet and listen to the inner hum of my intuition, and build the confidence to trust and act upon it.

What I’ve learned in the last few weeks is less about turning passions into income sources, and more about following curiosity. Allowing myself to explore what I’m naturally inclined to learn about and experience. This is a practice. It’s a habit that takes time to build when you’re so used to shutting down your urges and desires to pursue what seems more reasonable or logical or profitable. In my life recently, it’s looked like this:

• Traveling to Portland for 24 hours to attend a poetry and erotic dance workshop with Joy Sullivan and Lauren Nagel (because have you ever heard of a more perfect evening for someone who only dreams of dancing and writing more poetry?).

• Enrolling in an Italian language course in my neighborhood (because the only thing I Knew how to say in Italian was telling someone to “f*ck off,” and I’d like to be able to order a meal exactly the way I want it the next time I’m in Puglia).

• Getting the urge to sign up for a Death Doula certification course specializing in child and infant loss, and then following through: Paying the tuition, reading the textbook. I had this urge arise on February 17 (year of the fire horse starting out strong), and I’ll have my certificate in hand in a few short weeks.

• I got a San Diego Zoo pass. I go to the zoo. A lot. I stare into the eyes of the snow leopard, a baby baboon, a silverback gorilla. Sometimes, I weep.

• Starting this Substack and sharing my writing.

• I get my hair wet in the ocean, or swimming in a pool. Simply because it feels good to be submerged, to care less about perception and more about how it feels.

• I go out of my way to see the moon at night (the sole reason being: because I want to).

• I started making things with my hands again — less focused on the outcome, and more on finding the joy in process itself (current modalities: block printing, beading, collages).

It seems simple, right? Desire arises, act on desire. But I can’t tell you how radical of a shift this has been for me in my life (shoutout to my last therapist, Kelly — you are a wizard). Caveat here, of course, because I try to be as aware of my privilege as I can be. Not everyone can get the urge to quit their job, and then, just quit their job, allowing for all this space. I know this, and yet I’m trying to not let this hold me back — to practice gratitude for this capability instead of forcing myself to be miserable until we all can not be miserable. Because that’s not how it works. I need to put my oxygen mask on before I begin to help others with theirs. It starts with me. 

If this resonates with you, or if you’re attempting to build a practice of following your curiosity, I encourage you to subscribe. Your energy and presence here matters, and I’m eternally grateful for it.

When I was in kindergarten (or what I remember to be kindergarten, as my memory of my childhood is hazy at best), I was enrolled in a beginner’s jazz dance class at the local dance academy in my hometown in Illinois. I only have two memories from this class, one more like a fleeting flash — the light filtering in the windows as the song “Kids in America” played over the studio’s speakers, falling in long prisms along the waxy orange wood of the floor. The second memory comes to me in dreams, infrequently, yet regularly, throughout my life since. Sitting in a circle of other kids the same age, mostly little girls with hair tied back in pony-tails or braids like mine. The teacher has asked us to introduce ourselves, encouraging us to share our names and what we hope to be when we grow up. When it was my turn to share, I stated easily, without hesitation or justification or reasoning:

My name is Jamie, and I am going to be a poet.

Today, my name is still Jamie (even after I begged my parents to allow me to change my name to Amy, believing it was “cooler” and that no one would ever mistake me as a boy again). My name is Jamie, and I have been many things in the almost-thirty years I have been alive. I have been a dancer, a swimmer, a student. Then, an inpatient nurse — first with adults at the end of their lives, then at a children’s hospital, which was a bit easier on my coming to terms with my own mortality (until the pandemic, when no part of it was easy). Then, an educator. Then, a case manager. Then, a pharmaceutical saleswoman (why does the title ‘saleswoman’ make me cringe as much as it does?). Now, an entrepreneur. Now, a yoga teacher. Now, a student again.

One thing I have never allowed myself to be since that day at Copeland Dance Academy, is a poet. Or, to generalize, any kind of writer at all. I have always loved to read, to take solace in the resonance of strangers’ words — people I have never met, and yet manage to have so many of the same deep feelings and experiences that I do. I have always dreamed of doing the same for other people, but never once allowed myself to believe this dream could be for me. Authorship has always been for other people — people with incredulous stories of bravery and accomplishment, people with the courage to share their innermost thoughts with the world. People with rich husbands, or wealthy parents, to fund their lifestyles as they sit at their desks overlooking lush gardens of lilac and lavender, writing with freedom and ease. People with the ample time to write. People that other people want to hear from. People that are not me.

If you were my therapist, you might ask, “whose voice is this in your mind, the voice that tells you that you can’t be what you truly desire?” And trust me, most of my therapists have asked this. There are many answers to this question, whether it be well-intentioned adults during my childhood, or less-well-intentioned exboyfriends. American Capitalism and Religious Trauma are the only two perpetrators I’ll name here. Years of programming eventually transformed the voice of my own mind into the enemy — a well-intentioned enemy that only wants to protect me from vulnerability and pain and abandonment and discomfort. But still, an enemy that won’t allow me to take myself seriously enough to sit down and write the goddamn poem I’ve been yearning to for the last 25 years.

Welcome, to my self-prescribed exposure therapy and official enrollment as a student in the School of Unlearning.

In truth, I’ve been writing every day for years (as Julia Cameron might say, this already makes me a writer — simply participating in the act of writing itself). I’ve had a consistent daily morning pages practice since 2022; journaling more infrequently in the years prior, but still, showing up to the page. Writing in this way feels like channeling to me — I have no idea where the words are coming from, but set up the right environment (a playlist of 528 Hz music playing in noise-cancelling headphones to quiet the mind, a glass of water and almond milk chai tea latte at my side, a pen that glides just so, an unlined worn-in lay-flat journal, and no sight of my to-do list or growing phone notifications), and the words fall out of me faster than I can legibly put them down. Some days I’ll read the words back and think, this is something that I would need to read. One day I should find a platform to share stuff like this. Then I’ll promptly close my journal, cross “morning pages” off of my habit tracker for the day, drain the rest of the latte, and never think about it again.

In my journey of entrepreneurship, in which I am very much a beginner (and seemingly always will be), I have often gotten this incredibly helpful advice when it comes to my reluctance of participating in any marketing strategy: Don’t think of it as advertising meant to trick the client into giving you their money. All you are doing is showing up and saying “Hi, I’m here to provide this service that you’re looking for and will gladly pay someone to support you in the journey you’re already on.” This makes sense to me, it resonates. There’s someone out there who needs to learn from the experiences I’ve gained in my life and career. How are they going to find me if I don’t allow them any channel to?

It’s only recently that I’ve begun to relate this advice to my own writing. I’m forever changed by the words of Mari Andrew, Ashley C. Ford, Sasha Sagan, Joy Sullivan, Wendy Cope, to name just a few. Their stories and their words comforted me in times where I had nowhere else to turn. The person I am becoming is in deep gratitude to the courage it took to publish their vulnerability for anyone to read. Because of this courage, I read their stories. Because of this courage, I am here now. Attempting to unlearn the belief that my dreams are not meant for me. Attempting to allow myself to do what I’ve wanted all along.

If these words resonated with you in any way, I encourage you to follow along and subscribe. Whether an audience develops or not, I plan to put my stories out into the world here. I plan to allow myself to be a writer, no matter how uncomfortable it may make me to say this. The world is uncertain and heavy right now, and it does not need any more miserable people (as Mari Andrew shared in her essay “How to find your passion in life” that landed in my inbox this morning). It needs people willing to share their vulnerability and their love — and I intend to be one of these people. Join me in this act of resistance.