and I just can’t enter one.

Maybe that's the whole point of your twenties. It's the decade you're supposed to get lost in: discover yourself, make the mistakes, be a little selfish, try the things that scare you. Open a few doors just to see what's behind them. Close some too.

Lately, though, I haven’t felt like an explorer. I’ve felt like someone standing frozen in a hallway, watching the doors, running out of time. For months now I’ve been carrying a version of the Sunday Scaries, except it’s not about Monday morning. It’s about turning twenty.

What if I never reach my full potential?

what are you actually afraid of?

It’s strange, watching your fears grow up with you. As a kid, I was afraid of spiders, deep water, the dark corners where ghosts might haunt you. Some of that never really left. But somewhere between childhood and now, a new fear moved in and took up more space than all the others combined: the fear of not living up to what I’m capable of.

The fear of becoming the person in the rocking chair, decades from now, running the tape backward. I should’ve done that. I could’ve done that. Why was I so scared? Why did I doubt myself?

That version of me terrifies me more than any spider ever did.

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comparison kills joy

Your 20s are watching everyone move at different speeds and pretending not to panic.

Nobody warns you about this part: your twenties are, in large part, watching everyone else move at a different speed while you try not to panic.

It starts early, university, most likely, where you’re working harder than you ever have and still feel like you’re falling behind. It took me a long time to understand something obvious in hindsight: everyone is on their own timeline. No one arrives at success on the same day, or by the same road.

Here’s the truth I had to sit with; my fear of falling short was never really about believing I couldn’t. It was about being seen falling short. I care, maybe too much, about what other people think of me — so much that if they can’t see my success, some part of me refuses to count it as real. And I know exactly where that road leads: a mental block that quietly keeps me from chasing anything ambitious enough to risk judgment. Fear, fed by other people’s opinions, is a small and shrinking way to live.

Comparison is the thief of joy. I’m done letting it rob me.

i’m going to walk through the door

I have two months until I turn twenty. Two months to practice living differently.

I want to live each of those days fully. I want to unlearn the habit of shrinking myself for an audience. I want to put myself out there, work hard, and stay locked onto my own dreams, not the version of them that’s palatable to everyone watching.

I’m starting here, on this blog, documenting my twenties in real time — and no, I won’t be afraid of who reads it. I’m going to be unapologetically, even obnoxiously, present: networking without cringing, exploring new hobbies, asking the questions I used to swallow. I’m tired of being afraid of being seen.

It’s time to let go. To be a little selfish. To chase what actually brings me joy — and walk through the door anyway.

Thanks for reading a piece of my heart <3

See you in the next issue,

Lindsay

Ester Greenwood watched her figs rot because she couldn’t choose. She sat frozen at the base of the tree while her futures shrivelled one by one.

The husband, the happy home, a famous poet, a brilliant professor, an amazing editor, global traveller, diverse lovers, and an Olympic athlete.

Dropped to the ground, black and wasted, and she starved in the shade of all she never became.

“My figs cannot rot, for I am the tree.”

Here is the thing nobody warns you about: every choice starts to look like the small death of another, and if you are a person who wants to be many things, the tree stops being a metaphor for possibility and starts to feel like a countdown.

Somewhere between childhood and now, having many different pursuits and dreams stopped feeling like abundance, but rather a diagnosis. Scattered. Unfocused. Jack of all trades, master of none. And with being in university for three years, it feels like everyone around me had already walked up to their tree, plucked exactly one fig, and was patiently ripening it in the sun.

Meanwhile I stood there with my hands full, reaching for another branch, and another, and I became terrified that this hunger for more would leave me with nothing at all. That I would be so busy wanting to be everything that I would quietly become no one. Accomplish nothing.

“But I will not let my figs go black and rot in the smell of my dreams.”

As I started my stem degree, I believed for a long time that that meant surrendering the parts of me that wanted to write, to make, to wonder without a hypothesis. I thought creativity and rigour lived on opposite ends of the same branch, and I would have to cut one off to reach the other. That was never true.

Why should I limit myself to the lab?

I want to grow an herb garden and learn what my hands know that my mind doesn’t. I want to paint badly and play music worse and not care. I want Sundays that belong entirely to a blank page. I want to study philosophy for no reason except that the questions won’t leave me alone. I want to start something of my own, to blog into the void, to learn four languages so I can be a slightly different person in each of them. I want to bake bread that doesn’t rise and try again. I want to stand somewhere in Vietnam with dust on my shoes. I want to learn what a florist knows about grief and celebration. I want to volunteer at a church some Sunday morning for reasons I can’t fully explain. I want to trek up a mountain just to see what thin air does to my thinking.

Why limit myself at all?

Some days, I still feel the old panic, the pull to just pick one, to make it easier for me. The expectations pile up quietly. From a society that rewards specialists. From a family that sacrificed so much for this one clear path. And from the harshest voice of all, the one inside my own head insisting I choose before I run out of time.

Yet, in those moments I forget the most important thing. I was never meant to be one fig sitting alone on a branch, waiting to be picked or left to rot. I am the whole tree.

And I refuse to starve to death standing beneath it, paralysed, cataloguing every future I might lose.

I refuse to spend my one life mourning the branches I didn’t climb.

Try everything, do everything. Let your hands be busy with more than one kind of work. You do not have to know, at nineteen or twenty nine or ever, which single thing you were put on this earth to become.

You are allowed to be a scientist and a poet and a business-woman and a gardener. The daughter who broke tradition and the girl who still bakes her grandmother’s recipes. The one who studies and the one who wanders.

Sorry Sylvia. I choose all the figs.

Maybe you caught that corner of the internet a few months back – the “Sister, you are so good at that!” and the “ultimate frisbee” trend from the Dominican Sisters Open Mic podcast. (just me?)

So…I fell into a rabbit hole and never quite climbed out, spending weeks listening to talks and podcasts by sisters and nuns, and one line has stayed lodged in me since last week. Sr. Mary Grace, of the Sisters of Life, said it almost in passing:

And then it hit me.

You don’t have to be religious, you don’t have to be Catholic. But it’s hard to argue with the shape of that idea: that to be human is to need rest, and that rest is where wonder lives, where imagination, kindness, compassion and motivation and creativity actually have room to happen˚˖𓍢ִ໋🦢˚

Instead, we’re stuck in a loop (or at least I feel like I am). Not enough, so hustle more. Work more. Perform for the world. Post more. Prove it, again, today, tomorrow.

And in that loop, rest gives birth to guilt. Like admitting you couldn’t keep up with the pace that’s expected of you.

But rest isn’t the thing keeping you from your life. Rest is what keeps you human enough to have one.

Technology keeps accelerating. Job markets keep tightening. Our attention spans have shrunk to something the size of a pebble, skipping across everything and landing nowhere. So we work twice as hard, three times as hard, just to be seen. And maybe that’s simply the cost of the era we’re in. But if you want to build a life — not just a resume or a feed, you have to know when you need to stop. The world will not remind you (it has no incentive to!). But that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t care.

rest as a form of discipline, not a reward.

That’s what I’ve been learning for the past couple of months, slowly and imperfectly: that a balanced ambition isn’t the absence of rest — but rather the presence of it, even when things are loud and busy and asking everything of you. Rest isn’t a luxury tacked onto a full life. It’s a physical necessity, whether that looks like actual sleep, a hobby, a book, or ceasing in labour.

I can tell you more honestly: I became more productive, more joyful, motivated and inspired, the moment I let myself have enough rest.

So when I’m not contemplating monastic life, there are other small, overlooked, and, unglamorous ways of resting (not rotting) that I do to protect myself in a world that keeps trying to harden me.

1. charge your phone, and recharge yourself

This means no screens in the evening. When I’m overstimulated, I step away from the world for a night. No glowing rectangle narrating my life back to me. Just a simple prayer, or a book, or something cooking on the stove.

2. complain on paper!

There’s a fine line between the rest you need and the neglect that wears its clothes. Rest is nourishment; rotting is escape.

• rest carries to external pressure, and rotting is avoidance dressed up as relaxation

• rest is a choice towards peace, and rotting is what happens when exhaustion starts making your choices for you,

Journaling is how I tell the difference. It gives my thoughts somewhere to go besides down, into the quiet place where they’d otherwise just curdle. It regulates what would otherwise spiral. And after I write, I read it back, not to check my grammar, but to see my own thoughts and struggles laid flat on the page, no longer swirling in my chest, but sitting still — small enough to look at. Doesn’t seem so scary now, hey? That kind of rest doesn’t just soothe the mind. It rewires it.

3. rise with the sun

Make yourself a cup of tea — skip the coffee, just this once , and watch the light come up. Slow early mornings ar

e one of the best ways to recharge and to carpe diem.

My favorite podcast <3

4. fifteen-minute hobbies

On the hardest days, fifteen minutes is sometimes all there is. So let those fifteen minutes be enough. Just for you.

I started with fifteen minutes a day writing for Substack (or other hobbies), that’s all it way, some days barely that — and now I block off a full hour, just for me to follow a thought wherever it wants to go. Small starts do have a way of becoming rooms you actually live in.

5. please, go touch grass.

Go outside — I mean it. Watch people. Sit on a bench and do nothing else. Walk to the beach, or just loop the park a few times. There’s something about being outside, especially in summer, that unclenches a day that’s gotten too tight, too folded in on itself.

I remember the worst of finals week, the kind of days that blur into one long fluorescent-lit hour. My roommate and I would force ourselves out anyway, for a long walk around the park, no real destination, just air and motion and a break from the screens. And every time, I came back and studied better than I had all day. Turns out the mind doesn’t just need more hours at the desk. Sometimes it needs a walk around the block to remember how to focus at all.

I absolutely love, love, love these sisters, along with their monastic and holy lives — and I think we’d do well to actually listen when they speak. Rest is a way to remain humane. Rest makes room for peace. ‎₊˚⊹ 𐦍༘⋆₊ ⊹‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.🪽

That’s all I have to end this week! Thank you so much for reading ‘till the end <3

Share Lind's Library

Here are 5 easy ways to add whimsy to your 9-to-5, while maximising productivity.

1. Decorate your work notebook

I always keep a work notebook on me instead of making everything digital, there’s something chic about going analog, having a pen, a cute notebook, and a handwritten to-do list. It gets even more whimsical when you decorate it. Get creative!

2. Bring a cup of cozy

Every day feels a little better with a good beverage in hand. Instead of dropping $5 on coffee, make it in the office — most workplaces have drip coffee or tea bags just sitting there, free for the taking. Bring a mug you actually love, add a pop of colour to your desk, and suddenly there is a daily joy waiting for you every morning.

3. Go outside, take a walk!

I like to split my breaks in half: part of the time for eating, part of it for walking. Stepping outside for even a few minutes clears your head and gets your legs moving after hours of sitting. Throw on a podcast or a playlist while you’re at it.

4. Play with your outfits

This one depends on your workplace's dress code, so take it with a grain of salt — but I'll admit I usually put in the bare minimum effort on my work outfits. And yet, when you look good, you feel good. Try a statement necklace, swap pants for a skirt, switch up your hairstyle, or slip into kitten heels or loafers instead of your usual shoes. Pinterest is your friend here.

5. Make after-work plans

At least once a week — ideally midweek — make plans with a friend, or with yourself. The gym, a café with a good book, window shopping, a walk in the park, anything. Having something to look forward to after work instantly lifts your mood and your productivity during the day.

For me, that’s Wednesday — my “mini weekend.” After clocking out, I spend time outside, go for a walk, or just do something for myself to recharge before Thursday and Friday hit.

These are small things. But small things are exactly what turn a mundane routine into something a little more exciting, without pulling you away from getting things done. Whimsy and productivity aren’t opposites. They can co-exist.

What’s your go-to way to add a little whimsy to your workday? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you in the next issue! <3

There’s a real difference between resting and doomscrolling. One restores you. The other quietly drains you. Learning to tell them apart is where this all starts.

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The Science Behind Doomscrolling

Here’s the science behind it: this pull comes from the limbic system, the ancient “lizard brain” that runs on the amygdala. Its whole job is self-preservation — scanning for threats, staying alert to danger.

Stress activates it.

And once it’s activated, it sends you hunting for more stimulation. The more you scroll, the more your brain thinks it needs to.

I’ve lost count of the hours doomscrolling has cost me. Every one of those hours could’ve been a workout, a finished article, a study session, something built. So here’s what I do instead (not a miracle fix, just what’s actually worked for me).

1. Build Digital Boundaries

This means, grayscale your phone, delete the apps that pull you in, set hard app-timers, and actually commit to the limits you set.

For me, it’s

• max 3 hours of phone time a day

• glasses on, always, when I’m at the screen

• notifications muted for anything that isn’t essential

• content has to be long-form: podcasts, YouTube, Substack, anything but the endless scroll

• The second I catch myself doomscrolling, the phone goes off.

None of this works without self-awareness. Notice your patterns first — the boundaries follow naturally after that.

2. If you love to read, get an e-reader

I’ve had my Kobo Clara for a month now, and it’s genuinely changed how I spend dead time. On the bus, in line, between classes — instead of reaching for my phone, I reach for this. It’s lighter than a book, and more importantly, it’s boring in the best way: no notifications, no feed, nothing fighting for my attention. My focus has noticeably improved since I made this switch from reading on my phone.

3. Try “healthy” scrolling

Not all screen time is equal. Some of it can actually inspire you instead of numbing you out. For me, that’s

• Pinterest for visual and design inspiration

• Spotify podcasts for long-form listening

• YouTube for long-form video

• Netflix (yes, watching something intentionally is still miles better for your attention span than mindless scrolling)

• Substack for writing that actually makes me think

The goal isn’t zero screen time. It’s screen time that leaves you better than it found you.

We Are All Creatives

The end of the 'career author'

Over the past few months, my author group chats have taken on a slightly funereal vibe. Friends are getting dropped by…

Read more

9 months ago · 3804 likes · 514 comments · Tasmina Perry

4. Time-block your Day

Willpower alone doesn’t beat the habit loop, systems do. Time-blocking has been the single most effective tool for me and everyone I know who’s tried it. Block out chunks of your calendar for deep work, light work, hobbies, whatever matters to you.

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When the urge to doomscroll hits, I look at my calendar and redirect that energy into whatever’s blocked in for that moment. It works because it removes the decision-making in the moment — the plan’s already made.

And honestly, ask yourself: does doomscrolling every leave you feeling good? If the answer is no, that time is better spent almost anywhere else.

5. Create More than you Consume

Gym. Journaling. Writing. Cooking. Baking. Painting. Reading. It genuinely doesn’t matter what it is — what matters is that it makes you create instead of consume.

Doomscrolling doesn’t just waste your time, it quietly holds you back from thinking, imagining, and building — from reaching whatever your version of “maximum potential” actually looks like.

If it’s hard to break the habit alone, document the process. Write about it, post about it, let people into the journey. That accountability alone can be the thing that makes it stick — it’s what’s worked for me.

This isn’t a complete list, and it’s not a magic fix.

But these five things have kept me inspired and productive, without the guilt spiral that comes after a three-hour scroll session.

We’ve become so plastered to our phones, so wrapped up in everyone else’s lives, that it’s easy to forget to actually live our own.

What helps you put the phone down? Drop in the comments, let’s talk. Thank you for reading lovelies and I will see you in the next issue <3

I want to see if I can build one

differently: on Substack, with long-form, well-researched writing. And you’re invited to watch it happen.

Let’s get acquainted

Hi, I’m Lindsay, you’re next Substack best friend, comfort writer, and possibly your excuse to slow down for ten minutes. I write about self-growth, surviving your 20s, and the science and health stuff I can’t help but nerd out on.

I’m a Pharmaceutical Sciences student trying to figure out how to stay in science without living in the lab forever. I’m working part-tine, and running a non-profit — so if you’re wondering whether I actually have time to write every day, fair question. I’m wondering too.

That’s kind of the point of this page though: ambitious, but not burnt out.

Driven, but still soft.

Like a softly ambitious girl.

I’m building this space, this digital garden, for people who want both.

My goal is simple: write daily, grow this into an actual community, and figure out this whole “personal brand” thing in public, mistakes and all.

Start here: my favorite pieces so far

Podcasts I’m obsessed with

I always believe in creating more than you consume, so come along for the ride. Say hi in the comments, I’d genuinely love to know who’s reading. Here’s to building confidence, an online presence, and a brand that still feels like me, one post at a time.

“Nothing will ruin your 20s more than thinking you should have your life together already.”

I read that quote as a 19-year-old college girl, and it hit different. Because honestly? The thought of blowing out 20 candles has felt less like a birthday and more like a deadline — like the start and end of my life all at once.

I’ve read the articles. I’ve listened to the podcasts. Succeed in your 20s. Build wealth in your 20s. Don’t waste your 20s. But almost none of it tells you how to actually prepare for your 20s before you’re standing in the middle of them, overwhelmed.

So here’s my take. Not a listicle of things I wish I did but rather the things I’m actually doing, right now, at 19, to get dangerously ahead before the clock even starts.

1. Let the Compound Interest do the Heavy Lifting

The moment I turned 19, I opened an investment account, and applied for a credit card (that’s the legal age in BC). Not to spend beyond my means, but to build credit. The kind that quietly works in your favour when you need a loan, a mortgage, or an apartment years from now.

I pay it off in full, every time, on time. No interest, just a growing credit score and a stack of cashback points I never had access to on a debit card.

I’ve also been putting $100–$200 a month into ETFs for the past 10 months (more when my paycheck allows it). That’s $2,000 sitting in an account I’ve promised not to touch, a.k.a the money I’m essentially mailing to my future self.

This is the part where compound interest earns its nickname: the 8th wonder of the world. Start early, and time does more work than you ever could.

If you want to actually understand what you’re doing before you dive in:

Books

• One Up on Wall Street

• Psychology of Money

• Rich Dad Poor Dad

Podcasts

• Frugal Chic by Mia McGrath — I’m obsessed

• Friends That Invest

My favorite YouTube videos

2. Purposely Build Networking Skills

One of my personal goals in university is simple: get comfortable talking to people. That includes walking into a room full of strangers and not shrinking.

My first networking event, I said maybe three words the entire night. I mostly just stood there, scoping out the room, trying to get a read on the vibe. My second event, I talked to one person. By my fourth, I was introducing myself to industry professionals, recruiters, and students — some of whom I’m still connected to, and a few I now work with.

A $30 event fee isn’t a cost to me. It was an investment in a version of me who knows how to hold a conversation and leave a room better than she found it.

I really recommend this podcast!

It’s not just events, either. It’s coffee chats. Office hours. Grabbing coffee with a peer who inspires me just to talk about ideas. I never leave those conversations unchanged and I leave motivated.

I can make a whole other article on ways to network for students!

3. Build Longevity, not Burnout through Light, Frequent Workouts

I’m not talking about killing yourself in the gym every day chasing a six-pack. I’m talking about training your heart, your muscles, and your energy so your body doesn’t quit on you halfway through life.

Think long-term. You’re not trying to destroy your knees at 25 — you’re trying to still be able to hike, lift, and move at 60.

A 30–45 minute workout, 3-4 times a week, has made me noticeably stronger — physically and mentally. AND STRETCH YOUR BODY!!

I can carry furniture up stairs. Walk for miles without dying. Go on a 5-hour hike and still feel like a functioning human at the end of it. That’s the goal: a body that doesn’t betray you.

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4. Getting Comfortable with your Thoughts

This means journaling. Regularly. Sitting with your feelings instead of stuffing them down or numbing them out.

Practicing gratitude clears the noise. It makes me more productive, less anxious, and gives me an actual line of sight into what I want my life to look like. Recognizing how you feel, and letting yourself feel it — is a skill. And it’s one you’ll need for the rest of your life.

Two books that shifted something for me: The Mountain Is You and 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, both by Brianna Wiest.

I’ve been journaling since I was 14, and it has always been a priority for me to constantly improve my mindset and well-being (I value my brain too much).

Between those books and my own journaling, I don’t have my whole future figured out. I don’t know exactly what job I’ll have, or who I’ll end up building a life with. But I know my own thoughts. I read other people’s perspectives, and I actually reflect on them instead of just consuming them. That’s the difference.

5. Your GPA is Not the Whole Story

I used to define my worth based on how I perform academically. Don’t get me wrong, grades matter, but they’re not the only thing that matters, and treating them like the finish line is a mistake.

Apply your knowledge outside the classroom. Volunteer. Join a club. Reach out to a non-profit and offer your time in exchange for a skill. Use that experience to unlock the next experience. Everyone starts somewhere.

Recruiters aren’t just looking at your transcript — they want to know the impact you made, what you learned, and how you’ll apply that to the role in front of you. So yes, study hard. But carve out time for the things that happen after class ends: research, clubs, volunteering, side projects.

Your degree is a piece of paper. What matters is what came with it — the skills, the experience, the proof that you know how to do something with what you learned.

6. Watch your Lifestyle Inflation like a Hawk

Building wealth isn’t just about earning more. It’s about not quietly raising your cost of living every time you do.

Treating yourself is fine. Good, even. But that doesn’t mean every raise turns into a phone upgrade, a new wardrobe, or five new subscriptions you forgot to cancel. Staying aware of this now — before you have a real salary — means you won’t be broke and employed. You’ll actually be building something.

I learned this from Frugal Chic by Mia Mcgrath (I love her sm), and she has changed the way I think about money, building wealth, and lifestyle inflation.

The Bottom Line

Doing all of this doesn’t mean my life will magically “be together” by 20. It just means I’ll be making smarter decisions inside the beautiful chaos that is your 20s.

I’m not trying to hustle my youth away or turn my 20s into a productivity project. I’m trying to actually use this time — to build habits, skills, and a version of myself I’m proud of.

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If you’re in your 20s already: what am I missing? Drop it in the comments, I want to hear it. Thanks for reading!

I have basically never not been online.

My parents were posting pictures of me on their Facebook pages before I had a phone. I spent my tween years recording cringey musical.lys in my bedroom. By fourteen, I was making actual income on TikTok through selling digital products and affiliate marketing — a teenager with a crappy phone and a commission link. Social media wasn’t something I used. It was something I grew up inside of.

Last year, that reached its peak. I spent an entire year vlogging my university life — my classes, my friends, the little chaotic moments of campus life — and posting it all to Instagram. The videos did well. Genuinely well. I wasn’t awkward on camera, I loved editing and the whole performance of it. If you’d ask me a year ago, I would have told you my life was going to keep revolving around a feed.

I never expected to just… let it go. And I never expected that letting it go would be where I’d find real accomplishment.

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The Quiet After

A few months ago, I deleted Instagram off my phone. Not dramatically since I still log in through my browser to answer DMs, and every so often I’ll re-But something shifted the moment the app icon stopped living on my home screen.download the app for a day just to post a story with friends so nobody thinks I’ve disappeared. I’m not off the grid. My friends still know I’m a live.

But something shifted the moment the app icon stopped living on my home screen.

I stopped doomscrolling. I stopped feeling like I was standing in everyone else's bubble, watching their highlight reel while living my regular Tuesday. And — maybe most surprising — I stopped feeling guilty for not being one of those people pulling in $20k a month from UGC deals. I know plenty of people are building genuine careers on TikTok and Instagram, and good for them, truly. But I've come to realize I don't want my career, or my sense of worth, tied to an algorithm I don't control.

Instead, I started reading more. Being present at work. Actually focusing on my studies instead of half-watching a lecture while my thumb hovered over an app. I got to know myself without an audience watching me do it. I pivoted toward Substack and YouTube, long-form stuff that’s rebuilt my attention span in a way short videos never could.

I feel more productive. More at peace. I don’t crave seeing anyone’s stories, don’t feel that itch to check what everyone else is doing. Just my own growth, on my own timeline.

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But then, the other feeling…

And yet,

I can’t fully shake the sense that I’m missing out on opportunity by being chronically offline. We live in a world where being visible is basically currency, where “building a personal brand” isn’t optional advice anymore, it’s just how things work. So I sit on this fence: not wanting to be in-your-face online, but also not wanting to vanish into total irrelevance.

So, what do you even do with that?

Here’s where I’ve landed, at least for now: I’m choosing the platforms I actually value instead of trying to be everywhere. That’s Substack, LinkedIn, and a little bit of Instagram, nothing more. I’d gone quiet on all three for a while, but I’m slowly starting to post again and rebuild a presence, deliberately this time.

What I’ve realized is that stepping away wasn’t wasted time, it taught me that breaks are the strategy. Social media genuinely drains you if you never step back from it, and I needed to feel that drain fully before I understood why I kept craving distance from it. Now, when I do post, I’m thinking about it differently: not “what will perform,” but what skills I’m actually building — personal branding, communication, writing. I want to build something quietly, almost mysteriously, and let the work speak before the algorithm does.

Closed mouths don’t get fed. But I’d rather feed myself slowly, on my own terms, than starve waiting for the feed to decide I’m worth watching.

Where does that leave me?

I do love my life off social media, the clarity, the quiet, the version of myself that exists without a caption underneath her.

But I’m not trying to disappear forever, either. I’m slowly and selectively coming back, trying to not let the doomscrolling get the better of me.

Less noise, more signal

Less performing, more actually living the thing I used to just film.

Thanks for listening to my rant <3

“At the end of the day, it’s just you.”

The self-love movement has built entire empires on this idea, and for a long time I took it at face value. But lately, things started to switch up for me.

“At the end of the day, it will always be you.”

Not just you in the lonely, figure-it-out sense. You, reliably, faithfully, stubbornly there. The one person you will never stop being.

If you’re reading this and you like to think yourself as ambitiously driven. If you wake up with a vision and go to bed running through your to-do list — I already know something about you. You work hard, you show up, and when things start to get blurry, when the vision starts to fog up, you do the thing that feels most natural: put your head down and push through. You become a little bit of a robot. Disciplined, efficient, relentless.

That mode is a gift, but it has a cost. Because when you’re always in motion, you stop noticing the ground beneath your feet. You stop asking whether the work still means what it used to. And slowly, without realizing it, you can lose sight of the very thing you set out to build.

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Three months ago, I got dumped by my college situationship (yikes), someone I genuinely thought was everything to me. I was spending so much time with this individual I didn’t realize that my grades were slipping, and I felt unhealthy and untethered. So I did what any 19-year-old girl does: I studied harder, applied for jobs, spent time with my friends, and poured energy into what I already had.

It worked. And it felt amazing. I found an internship I love that actually pays the bills, I’m leading a research project I’m passionate about, I became president of my club, I’ve been showing up to the gym, got straight As, and somewhere in all of that, I got closer with my sister and friends.

But I never stopped. Not once. I just looked for the next thing.

The moment I caught my breath, I went straight back into lockdown mode. No space to feel accomplished, and no space to grieve what I lost. No space to even sit quietly with how much I had grown. I got distracted by the next goal, the next milestone, and the next version of myself I thought I needed to become.

Now, 3 months later, time feels like it slipped through my fingers. I’m tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. I cry myself to sleep sometimes — over the same boy I told everyone (and myself) I was completely over. I don’t feel excited on the opportunities I prayed and begged to have. And I think that’s what happens when you skip the part where you need to feel things, they come creeping back.

That’s why I think gratitude — real gratitude, not the “grateful for a roof over my head” kind (though truly, in this economy, yes) — is worth practicing more deliberately. I mean the kind of gratitude that turns inwards, the kind where you sit down and ask yourself: when did I last thank myself? Not with a sweet treat or sleeping in, but genuinely. What did I learn? What am I actually good at, and am I letting myself know it?

These questions feel small, but they’re not. They’re the difference between moving through life and actually living it.

So this is what I’m working on. Creating space for my thoughts instead of drowning them out with productivity. Practicing a gratitude that goes deeper than a bullet point in a journal. Letting myself feel proud without immediately searching for what’s next.

Because at the end of the day, every day, I will always be there for myself. I will always be worth appreciating. <3

There’s something about June that makes you feel excited and want to start over. Not in a dramatic, burn-it-all-down way, but rather peacefully. A reset. The sun stays out longer, the energy shifts, and suddenly you have this small window to decide what kind of summer you actually want to have.

So here’s my self-made syllabus for the month — goals, playlists, and gentle accountability for less pressure, more intention and more fun!!

First…The Mood Board

If you’re a visual person like me, setting a mood board for the month is genuinely one of the most underrated things you can do. Not a vision board of abstract dreams —a June board. What does this specific month look and feel, and even smell like to you? Gather your images from Pinterest, and let it remind you what you’re moving towards.

Small but Real Goals for June

Personally, I stray away from writing massive goals and long lists. They. Stress. Me. Out! (and I abandon them by week 2). Instead, ask yourself: what went well in the previous month, what didn’t, and what needs a small adjustment? Here’s where I landed:

1. Cooking more, spending less.

The one consistent drain on my budget was the small stuff — a coffee here, a sweet treat there, eating out because I didn’t feel like cooking. I tracked it and realized I was spending around $50 a month just on drinks. This past month? I brought it down to $17.

I’ve also started meal planning, packing lunch, and eating dinner at home — and somewhere along the way I started enjoying it. The ritual of it. For June, I want to keep that momentum and try new recipes, not just the safe ones.

2. Building a fitness routine that actually fits my life.

If you looked at my calendar you’d ask how I have time for the gym. Honestly, theoretically I don’t — but I’ve been experimenting, and what I found is that I’m a morning person at the gym. 6-7 am, before the day has a chance to pile up. I’m not advanced by any means, and I’m still intimidated by half the machines. If you have any advice or good articles on building a beginner gym routine, send them my way please and thank you!!

3. Any free time goes outside.

I started my internship in May and I’ve basically been inside every day, commuting to and from a desk. But now, the sun doesn’t set until 8pm. That means after work, I have 3 full hours of “day time”, and I plan to use them. Solo walks, time with friends, and just sitting somewhere and journal.

4. Growing my digital garden.

I want to be more intentional about what I put into the world online and what I consume. For me, that means showing up more consistently on Substack and finally getting my Pinterest organized in a way that actually reflects who I am and what I care about. These two platforms feel connected to me, both slow, both curated, and both worth tending.

5. Sticking to routines I’ve already built.

I’ve learned that routines work best when you don’t over engineer them. Test them for a week, see what sticks, adjust what doesn’t. I have a few that are genuinely holding — morning devotion, meal planning, a wind-down at night — and the days feel cleaner when I follow them. For June, the goal is just consistency, not perfection.

6. Be spontaneous!! Have fun!!!!

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Video Essays > Instagram Reels

This is something I’ve been intentional about for a while now: while I get ready, cook, or just lay down in bed — I put a video essay or a podcast instead of just aimlessly scrolling. It keeps my attention span from deteriorating and I actually absorb things. It makes the mundane parts of the day feel richer. Here are some video essays I’m looking forward to watching this next month:

Journal Prompts for June

I want to journal outside this summer. Here are some inspiration prompts:

Summer Activities (The Fun Part!!)

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If you’re based in Vancouver (like I am), here are some of my favorite places I’m looking forward too:

• 50% off Kayaking for Students at Jericho Beach (students only)

• Be Fresh market at Kitsilano + walk around the beach (I want to try their banana bread matcha)

• Day trip to Squamish!

• Capture pictures on my digicam!

• Kayaking at Deep Cove

• Day trip to Victoria Island + explore!!

• Visiting a farm in Langley

• Slow time with family, unscheduled and unhurried

• Vlog more

• Beach picnics with a proper Italian sandwich

To Close

Summer has a way of slipping by if you’re not paying attention. Not because you’re lazy — just because life keeps moving and you forget to look up (this happens to me all the time). This curriculum is my way of looking up. Of deciding, in advance, what I want June to feel like.

I wrote a summer syllabus on here once before

If you’re making your own June list, I’d love to see it.

Subscribe for more, and go have a summer worth remembering.

With love, and SPF,

Lindsay <3

But here’s what I’ve figured out: fibre might just be the most underrated thing we’re not prioritising. Everyone’s obsessed with protein. Protein this, protein that. What about fibre?

So, this is everything I’ve learned from actually trying to increase my fibre intake as a broke college girl, the science behind it and the cheap foods that actually work.

So…what even is fibre?

Fibre is a type of carbohydrate found in plant foods, but unlike regular carbs, your body can’t digest it. It passes through your gut mostly intact, and that’s exactly where the magic happens.

Okay, here is the science bit.

How much do we actually need?

Current guidelines recommend 25-32 grams per day for women, but who’s counting? Well, most of us are getting nowhere near that number. The good news: it’s genuinely easy and cheap to fix once you know which foods to lean on.

Why should we care?

The research on dietary fibre is honestly staggering. Here’s what a high-fibre diet is linked to:

💩 No more constipation

⚖️ Weight management

❤️ Lower heart disease risk

⚡ Less chronic inflammation

🩸 Better blood sugar

🦠 Gut microbiome health

🧠 Lower depression risk

🎗️ Colorectal cancer prevention

📉 Lower overall mortality

The gut microbiome part is especially interesting, because the bacteria in your colon ferment dietary fibre, and produce short-chain fatty acids that regulate appetite, metabolism, and inflammatory pathways throughout your whole body. Your gut is literally running a small chemical operation for you, and fibre is the raw material it needs!

Research also shows correlation between fibre intake and reduced depression risk, likely because of the gut-brain axis. The vagus nerve connects your gut to your brain, and what’s happening down there has a direct effect on your mood. Basically: feed your gut well and it might help feed your mind well too.

The broke college girl shopping list 🛒

Here’s where it gets practical. These are the highest-bang-for-your-buck fibre sources, I’ve tried out most of them and they are genuinely cheap, filling and easy to cook / meal prep with.

Here’s where it gets practical. These are the highest-bang-for-your-buck fibre sources — most of them are genuinely cheap, filling, and easy to cook with.

🌱 Chia Seeds

~10g per oz

One of the highest fibre foods by weight. Stir into water, yoghurt, or overnight oats.

🥣 Oats budget

4g per cup cooked

Instant oats are ultra cheap. It’s $0.49 CAD per 100 g at my grocery store, and I get about 250 g every week, so that’s about $1.23 CAD per week! One cup of cooked oatmeal knocks out a solid chunk of your daily goal. Add chia and frozen berries and you’re winning.

🫘 Lentils & Black Beans

15–16g per cup

The fibre absolute units. Canned beans are cheap, last forever, and pair with everything. One cup of lentils covers more than half your daily need.

🍓 Frozen Berries (add this to your oats!!)

~8g per cup (raspberries)

Fresh berries are expensive. Frozen are also nutritious and way cheaper. Raspberries are a fibre MVP — throw them in oats or blend into a smoothie.

🌾 Quinoa

5g per cup cooked

Slightly pricier but worth it. A good trick: mix half quinoa with half rice to stretch it further, reduce carbs, and add fibre in one move.

🥦 Green Peas

9g per cup

Frozen peas are dirt cheap and basically indestructible. Throw them into rice, pasta, curry, or stir-fries for an easy fibre boost.

🥬 Cabbage

Low cal, solid fibre

Criminally underrated. Cheap, lasts weeks in the fridge, and low calorie. Sauté with garlic, add to soups, or make a simple slaw.

🥑Avocado

~10g per avocado

High fibre and genuinely delicious — but on the pricier end, but super delicious and healthy!!

A quick reference: fibre at a glance

I asked Claude AI to make me a table summarising everything, and it delivered.

Now…How to actually start?

One important thing to note is don’t try to go from 0% to 100% of fibre overnight. Your gut and budget needs time to adjust, so here’s how to do it according to Mayo Clinic.

The thing about fibre-maxxing is that it’s one of the most evidence-backed, cheapest, and most impactful dietary habits you can build. Your gut (and your future self) will thank you.

P.S. Please always do your own research beforehand, and seek professional guidance if needed <3

Sources

1. Reynolds, A.N. et al. (2020). Dietary Fibre in Cardiometabolic Health. Nutrients, 12(10), 3209. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/10/3209

2. Mayo Clinic Staff. (2025). Chart of high-fiber foods. mayoclinic.org

Between work, school, summer plans, and actually showing up for the people you love, the weeks can blur together fast. But here’s what I’ve learned from my experiences and hearing from other women: surviving the week isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing the right things consistently.

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Here are five collected, non-negotiable rituals that keep women grounded, productive, and dare a say, a little romantic about the whole thing.

01: morning devotion.

The best days don’t happen by accident, they’re built before the world gets loud. Before you reach for your phone to start an endless scroll, give yourself a slow start.

The most important part: the morning devotion.

This looks different for everyone. Maybe it’s journaling, reading something meaningful, praying, meditating, or simply sitting with your thoughts before the noise kicks in. The point is to start with gratitude instead of diving straight into everyone else’s highlight reel.

Here are some journal prompts to try:

There is something quietly powerful about choosing peace before you choose your phone.

Share Lind's Library

Turn your getting-ready routine into something more — queue up a podcast or video essay and let your morning double as growth time. Here are some it-girl recommendations that will not disappoint:

02: overnight fuel.

Listen, you don’t have to be a full meal-prep girly. But breakfast? That’s one non-negotiable. After hours of sleep, your body is running on empty, and what you eat first thing directly affects your energy, focus, and how sharp you feel at work or school. A slow, nourishing morning starts with feeding yourself well, and having it ready the night before means one less thing to think about when the day kicks in.

My go-to? Overnight oats: cheap, healthy, genuinely delicious, and endlessly customizable. The kind of breakfast that makes you feel like you have your life together, because in that moment, you really do.

20 Best Overnight Oats Recipes for a Quick and Healthy Breakfast

The ingredients that I always use are

Chia seeds bring fiber, plant-based protein, and omega-3s. Oats keep you full, stabilize blood sugar, and are loaded with antioxidants. All of that, before 9 am, in a jar you grabbed from the fridge. It’s the kind of effortless routine that makes you feel like you have it all figured out, even when you don’t.

“The goal isn’t to eat perfectly. It’s to feel good enough to actually do the things you want to do.”

03: move that body!!!

They say sitting is the new smoking, and for anyone clocking 8+ hours in a chair between class and an office internship, that hits a little too close to home.

Your body is built to move — your heart, digestion, your energy all work better when you’re upright and active.

This doesn’t mean becoming a full gym girl (though if that’s your thing, go off!). It just means finding ways to keep moving throughout the day — like using a standing desk, taking a walk on your lunch break, choosing the stairs, doing a 30 minute evening workout, or dropping into a free class on campus. Whatever fits your life.

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The difference in your energy on days you move versus days you don’t is noticeable. Physical activity isn’t just about your body — it clears your head, lifts your mood, and gives you that quiet confidence of someone who actually takes care of themselves.

04: plan something to look forward to.

A week with no light at the end of the tunnel is a week that drags. So before the week even starts, put one thing on the calendar that’s just for you. A solo date, a girl’s day, the book you’ve been meaning to buy, a movie, a sweet treat, a slow walk to the beach with nowhere to be.

It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be something. When you have joy on the horizon, the hard days become easier to push through because you know a reset is coming. And there’s something genuinely chic about a woman who works hard and still makes time for fun. That kind of balance isn’t luck, it’s intention.

05: celebrate the small things.

On Friday (or whenever the week wraps up for you), I like to write down the small things I accomplished. Not just the big milestones — but the little ones too. Sent that email I’d been avoiding, drank enough water, made it to the gym twice. Those things count.

Then write down what you’re looking forward to next week, and anything to keep on your radar. Sync it all to a calendar (Google calendar is a lifesaver) so nothing sneaks up on you. There’s something genuinely calming about seeing your week laid out in front of you rather than carrying it all in your head.

This ritual is part gratitude practice, part strategy session, part self-celebration. It keeps you motivated, self-aware, and most importantly — proud of yourself. Even when the week wasn’t perfect, especially then.

Life is always going to be full. There will always be one more task, one more deadline, one more thing pulling at your attention. But when you build your days around small, consistent rituals, you stop just surviving the week and start actually living it. And that, more than anything, is the whole point.

Thank you so much for getting this far. If you enjoy this, please stick around, subscribe, and be a part of this community of growing and thriving individuals <3.

As it should!!!

For the first time in a long time, there’s a whole industry that looks at women’s bodies and says: this is worth solving for. Apps that track your cycle, wearables that predict ovulation. Devices for pelvic floor recovery, menopause symptoms, postpartum care.

Finally… Technology built for us.

But here’s what the marketing doesn’t tell you: a billion-dollar industry doesn’t mean every product is safe, proven, or actually built for your wellbeing. And before you hand over your most intimate data (your cycle, fertility attempts, symptoms, and mood) you deserve to know what you’re really signing up for.

So let’s talk about it. The good, the problematic, and the products I’d actually put on my wish list.

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First, Why Does FemTech Even Matter?

Coined by Ida Tin in 2016, “femtech” refers to the technology built specifically around women’s health. Everything from reproductive health and menstrual tracking to pregnancy care, menopause management, and mental wellness.

The numbers are staggering. The global FemTech market was valued at $55.1 billion in 2023, and it’s projected to reach $135.9 billion by 2032 (Binariks, 2025).

But it’s not just a market opportunity, it’s a response to a real gap.

Women have been historically underfunded, under-researched, and undeserved by traditional medicine. As of 2025, about 75% of clinical trial participants are men. and only 4% of biopharma R&D funding goes toward conditions specific to women (Binariks, 2025).

Conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, and maternal mental health have been chronically neglected, not because they aren’t serious, but because we live in a society and system where these issues were deemed less worth studying.

McKinsey Health Institute, in collaboration with World Economic Forum, found that closing the women’s health gap could add up to $1 trillion to the global economy annually by 2040.

Femtech, at its best, steps into that void. It gives women tools to track symptoms, advocate for themselves at appointments, and get access to care. This matters, and is genuinely exciting.

But.

The Problem: A Growing Market ≠ A Proven Product

Here’s the thing no one wants to say out loud: most femtech products have never been clinically validated.

Researchers at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health set out to build comprehensive guide to femtech for clinical care, and what they found was sobering. “The clinical evidence of the efficacy of different FemTech products is difficult to find and understand for providers and patients alike”, said Katie D. McMillan, MPH, the lead researcher and CEO of Well Made Health, LLC (UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, 2025)

And there’s reason for that gap. When apps and devices are labelled as “Wellness” products rather than medical devices, they’re not subject to FDA approval. That means companies can make sweeping health claims like;

without ever having to prove them. yikes.

Research from Digital Science (2025) makes the clinical picture even clearer: femtech trials are almost entirely concentrated in fertility and pregnancy. Menopause? Barely touched. Sexual health? Just 3.4% of all trials, despite being one of the most searched areas of women’s health.

The Data Problem: Your Period Is Worth More Than You Think

Okay, now for the part that scares me a little.

Period tracking apps collect a lot. Not just your last period date. We’re talking ovulation patterns, mood logs, sexual activity, medication use, pregnancy, etc. And most of the data isn’t protected the way you might expect.

Researchers at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge found that the business model behind most menstrual tracking apps rests on selling user data and insight to third parties (Taylor, 2025). That includes social media platforms, advertisers, and data brokers.

“There are real and frightening privacy and safety risks to women as a result of the commodification of the data collected by cycle tracking app companies”

said Stefanie Felsberger, lead author of the Minderoo Center report (Taylor, 2025).

Red Flags: How to spot FemTech that isn’t actually for you.

Before you download or purchases, ask yourself:

🚩 Can they show you the clinical evidence?

🚩 Is it “wellness” or is it healthcare? That distinction is a legal loophole. Wellness products aren’t subject to FDA oversight.

🚩 Does it make claims without specifics? “Supports hormonal balance” backed by nothing is not a health benefit. It’s a sentence.

🚩 Is it targeting a condition (endometriosis, PCOS, PMDD) with no doctor involvement? These are medical conditions. They deserve medical-grade tools.

FemTech i actually trust.

Right, now the fun part. Here’s what I actually use, or have on my radar as a young woman navigating her cycle without a whole lot of disposable income. Of course, I saw most or almost all these products from the lovely Vogue UK

Stardust App

This is my go-to, and I honestly love their features.

I’ve been using Stardust for over two years and it has been consistently accurate - tracking my phases (follicular, ovulation, luteal, menstrual), letting me long symptoms, and even offering a partner-sharing function so someone else in your life can track your cycle too.

It’s women-built and data encrypted, which for me, is a non-negotiable (and it’s visually appealing which is cute).

Scarlet rae Heat Pad

For period pain, I’m obsessed with targeted warmth. The rae Heat Pad, which has a built-in pocket for heat pads, is everything my hot water bottle wishes it could be, just, you know, wearable.

According to Scarlet, rae was developed by Scarlet’s Jo, who struggled with endometriosis, and she needed a reusable, portable, and longer-lasting heating pad unlike wheat bags, sticky patches, and hot water bottles (so true).

On a student budget, I still use a regular heat pad most of the time and honestly it does the job. The point is: you don’t need to spend a lot to support your body during your period. But I will definitely try to invest in this in the near future.

From the product description itself, I already know Scarlet invests in a lot of research and clinical evidence towards rae.

Joii

This one is so interesting. Joii is built around the Joii pad, which is a sanitary towel that, after use, is scanned through an app using AI to estimate blood volume and clot size. If you’ve ever tried to explain your flow to a doctor and been brushed off (“that seems normal”), this kind of data could genuinely change those conversations and observations.

Don’t worry, this medical device has been clinically evaluated in NHS primary care with validated improvements in women’s health outcomes. According to their website, the Joii community has seen;

• 52% improvement in menstrual health literacy.

• 36% improved communication with clinicians.

• 33% better symptom screening and recognition.

• Class I UKCA-certified medical device.

Nettle Wearable Headband by Samphire Neuroscience

I’ve actually had this brought up to me during a networking event. For anyone dealing with PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder) or severe menstrual mood changes, this is a fascinating device to keep tabs on. The Nettle headband uses transcranial direct current simulation (tDCS), which is a low-level electrical current to stimulate areas of the brain involved in pain processing and emotional regulation. This is an emerging technology, so do your research, but it represents exactly the kind of serious, condition-specific innovation femtech should be doing more of.

Laser Medicine Red Light Abdomen Irradiator

Founded by Ruth Phypers, this device uses therapeutic lasers to stimulate ovarian function and support egg production, particularly for women struggling to conceive.

“Female eggs contain more mitochondria than any other cell in the body,” Phypers explains. “So if you can increase mitochondrial energy, the egg performs better — which is especially beneficial for older women, where egg energy naturally declines”

It’s a niche product, but it’s built around real biology.

What the industry needs to do better.

Hot take: the burden here shouldn’t fall entirely on individual women to vet every app they download before deciding whether to trust it.

The systemic issues run deep. This industry still struggles with investor bias and a fundamental discomfort, among predominantly male investors with topics like menstruation and menopause (Ignitec, 2025). Femtech companies receive only a fraction of overall digital health funding. And without adequate funding, there’s no budget for clinical validation.

McKinsey’s analysis found that funding for companies focused on erectile dysfunction was six times greater than for companies focused on endometriosis (McKinsey Health Institute & World Economic Forum, 2024). Six times. For a condition that affects roughly 1 in 10 ten women.

The industry needs three things: proper clinical validation as a standard, not an afterthought. Transparent, enforceable data privacy protections. And investors who are willing to take women’s health seriously as a field of medicine and not just a niche market.

Yes, you do deserve better than pink marketing!

I genuinely believe that FemTech has real potential, and is currently doing meaningful work. Work that can change lives, especially for the women who’ve spent years being dismissed.

But the industry is still young, still largely unregulated, and in many cases, still prioritising growth over your safety and your privacy.

So use the tools. But use them with your eyes open.

Ask for the evidence. Read the privacy policy. And choose technology that was actually built to help you.

Sources

Binariks. (2025). FemTech: Unlocking digital health potential. https://binariks.com/blog/femtech-digital-health-opportunities/

Digital Science. (2025, March). Tracking the FemTech research boom. https://www.digital-science.com/blog/2025/03/tracking-the-femtech-research-boom/

Ignitec. (2025). FemTech: The underestimated healthcare revolution for women. https://www.ignitec.com/insights/femtech-the-underestimated-healthcare-revolution-for-women/

McKinsey Health Institute & World Economic Forum. (2024). Closing the women’s health gap: A $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies. https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap-a-1-trillion-dollar-opportunity-to-improve-lives-and-economies

Taylor, L. (2025, August 12). How period tracking apps threaten digital privacy rights. Context — Thomson Reuters Foundation. https://www.context.news/digital-rights/how-period-tracking-apps-threaten-digital-privacy-rights

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. (2022, January 30). UNC researchers review FemTech offerings: Which ones are backed by science? https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/unc-researchers-review-femtech-offerings-which-ones-are-backed-by-science/

Vogue UK. (2024). FemTech treatments, devices and apps. https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/femtech-treatments-devices-apps

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This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Join chat

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1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

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For 20 years, millions of women have taken Ambien every night. They woke up groggy, couldn’t drive, and couldn’t think straight. They told their doctors, they shrugged and kept prescribing.

In 2013, the FDA made a quiet announcement that should have been front page news: women had been taking double the dose they actually need.

Not because science wasn’t there. An FDA reviewer had flagged the sex difference in 1992, it was noted, then ignored.

Ambien is not a story about one bad drug. It’s a story about what happens when an entire system is built around one type of body, and everyone else is just expected to make do.

As a pharmaceutical sciences student, the more I learn about how drugs actually get made, tested, and approved, the more I realized what happened with Ambien wasn’t a fluke. It was and in many ways still is – standard practice. And I think you deserve to know about it.

In this issue, we’ll cover:

• Why were women formally banned from clinical drug trials for 16 years. What caused it?

• The science behind why women experience nearly twice the drug side effects as men

• The Ambien case: what the FDA knew, and when they knew it.

If this is the kind of writing you’ve been waiting for, please subscribe. Every reader genuinely keeps me going.

So…How did we get here?

To understand how this happened, you have to go back further. Back to the late 1950s, when a drug called thalidomide was sweeping across Europe and Canada as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women. It seemed harmless, but it wasn’t. Thousands of babies were born with severe limb deformities – missing arms, legs, hands growing directly from shoulders. The images were devastating, and the fall out was enormous.

The United States was spared the worst of it, largely because of one woman: FDA’s medical reviewer, Frances Kelsey, who refused to approve thalidomide for the American market because she didn’t trust the safety data. She was right.

But thalidomide left a scar on pharmaceutical policies that would shape the next half century. In 1977, the FDA responded by issuing a formal policy recommending the exclusion of women of childbearing potential from Phase I and early Phase II drug trials.

And when they said women of childbearing potential, they meant almost all of us. The policy was broad and recommended excluding even women who used contraception, who were single, or whose husbands had vasectomies.

That policy stayed in place for 16 years.

It wasn’t until 1993 with the NIH Revitalisation Act, that including women in clinical trials became federal law. Think about what that means. Every drug approved between 1977 and 1993 was tested predominantly on men. Ambien was approved in 1992, one year before the law changed.

The science of why this matters.

When you take a drug, your body has to process it

• Absorb it

• Distribute it through your tissues

• Metabolize it

• And eliminate it

This is called pharmacokinetics (PK), and it turns out, nearly every step of this process differs between men and women.

Women have lower body weight and higher body fat percentage on average, which affects how drugs are distributed through the body. Women have slower gastric emptying times, which affects how drugs are absorbed, and they have lower kidney filtration rates, which also affects how quickly drugs are cleared.

On top of all of that, hormonal fluctuations across the menstrual cycle create variability in drug response that has no parallel in male biology whatsoever.

The result? For most drugs, women end up with higher concentrations of the drug in their blood, for longer, than men who took the exact same dose.

Zucker and Prendergast (2020) analyzed 86 FDA-approved drugs and found that:

To make it worse – only 4% of all drugs listed in the Physicians Desk Reference include any sex-specific PK data in their label. Which means for the vast majority of medications being prescribed today, your doctor has no sex-specific dosing guidance to go on.

The Ambien case

When Ambien was reviewed for approval in 1992, an FDA reviewer noted in the data that women’s blood concentrations of zolpidem were running 45% higher than men’s at the same dose. Yet, the drug was still approved. For the next 2 decades, women reported grogginess, impaired concentration, slowed reaction times, and were told it was normal. In 2013, studies confirmed that women taking the standard dose still had blood levels high enough to impair driving the morning after a full night’s sleep (Farkas et al., 2013). The FDA finally cut the recommended dose for women in half.

When asked why it took so long, an FDA official told the New York Times

An FDA reviewer flagged the sex difference at the point of approval. The data was there. What was missing was the urgency, was it because the people affected were women?

So…Where are we now?

A 2025 Stanford study analyzing over 24,000 Phase 3 clinical trials found that 95% now include both men and women (Kaplan et al., 2025). But inclusion is not the same as analysis. A 2018 reviewer of 107 NIH-funded trials that enrolled both sexes found that only 26% reported any outcome by sex, and 72% simply didn’t include sex at all (Zucker & Prendergast, 2020).

Women are in the room, but their data is being folded into the average and the difference is disappearing.

What happened with Ambien was the predictable outcome of a system that spent decades treating the male body as the default human or “standard”. The thalidomide tragedy was real, and the FDA’s caution was understandable, but removing women from research entirely created a different, quieter harm.

For decades, women were told their symptoms were psychological, or exaggerated, or just the cost of taking medication. Some of those women were right and the drug was wrong. If you’re a woman, you deserve medicine that was actually made for your body, not adapted from data collected on someone else, approved in a different era, and handed to you with a shrug. I’ll keep writing until that sentence doesn’t need to be said anymore.

If you have made it this far, I applaud your attention span. Thank you so much for reading my first piece related to my field of study, this has been a fun experience. I have a couple drafts that will be posted this month.

See you all next week <3

Honestly? Not much yet.

I’m not a founder, not an influencer, not interning at some Fortune 500 company. By most definitions, I haven’t “made it.” And I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But here’s what I do know: I show up. I reached out. I say yes to things that scare me, I start projects before I feel ready, and I’ve been quietly investing in myself since I was 17 – long before it looked like anything. No overnight transformation. Just consistent, unglamorous effort, building a skill set the way you build a toolkit.

We all know that wealth builds slowly. So does expertise. So does the kind of confidence that comes from actually doing the work.

This isn’t a guide from someone who’s arrived. It’s from someone in the middle (or even the start) of it – which might be exactly why it’s worth reading.

In this issue

• What “the plan” actually means – and why investing in yourself is the strategy

• Why motivation will always let you down, and what to rely on instead

• How simply showing up becomes your biggest advantage

What are you building?

You’ve seen the vision boards. Aesthetic photos, dream apartments, “that girl” morning routines. But the most powerful vision you can build isn’t a Pinterest board – it’s a skills board. A clear, specific picture of who you’re becoming and what you’re learning to do.

Not vague goals. Not “get good grades” or “make friends”. We’re so past that.

When I started my second year, I stopped setting outcome goals and started setting skill goals, like:

• Go to networking events: learn how to walk into a room, introduce yourself, and make it stick

• Take a director role in a school club, learn what it actually means to lead a team.

• Connect with professors whose work interests me, find out what research feels like from the inside.

• Do job interviews, even before I feel ready, even when I’m under-qualified, just for the experience.

• Find a community I genuinely love, not for the resume, but for me.

Notice what’s different. These goals are about building something: leadership, communication, confidence in rooms that used to intimidate me. The outcomes – the grades, the internship, the opportunities, those are byproducts. You don’t plan for them directly, you build the skills, and they follow.

And they did follow. I ended the year with my best grades yet, a paid internship, a co-presidency in a club I’m passionate about, and a research project with a professor I genuinely admire. None of that was explicitly on my vision board. All of it came from showing up for the skills.

That’s what “the plan” means. Not a rigid map to a fixed destination, but rather a commitment to investing in yourself consistently, before the results are visible. Skills compound. Experience compounds. You compound.

Discipline > Motivation & Perfection.

Motivation fades, but discipline stays. And as a student, that distinction matters more than almost anything else.

You have the plan, you have the vision – now you need the system that keeps you moving when your mood tries to take over. Because it will. I’ve procrastinated, I’ve been lazy, I’ve cancelled plans because I simply didn’t feel like going. That’s not a character flaw, that’s being human.

The difference is having a routine that carries you through those moments, one that builds in rest and recovery, but always brings you back.

Here’s the thing about discipline: you don’t need to be an expert to start. This summer I bought a gym membership with zero fitness knowledge (I don’t even know what a pre-workout is lol). But I’m going anyway. I’ll learn the routine as I build it, and I’ll stay consistent. Because if I wait for motivation? I’ll go 3 days in a row and return next month. Same with this newsletter. Am I an expert writer? No. Will that stop me? Also no. I’ll learn on the way, adapt, and improve – but only because I started.

That’s what discipline actually is: not a restriction, not perfection, not waking up fired up every morning. It’s the quiet decision to do it anyway, even when no one’s watching, even when you’re not ready. Stop waiting to feel ready.

Show Up. Stand Out.

I’ll be honest, there have been plenty of times I’ve talked myself out of going somewhere. A networking event, a speaker panel, a club meeting. My mood said stay home, and I listened. But every time I did, I was left wondering: what if that conversation led somewhere? What if I met someone who gave me a new perspective?

The truth is, you probably won’t miss out every time. But you might. And that “might” is enough.

As a student, showing up is your biggest advantage, and most people are sleeping on it. Show up to class even when it’s recorded. Show up to office hours even when you think you’re question is “stupid” (it’s not). Show up to the networking event even when you know no one. Show up to the club meeting when attendance isn’t mandatory. These moments seem small in isolation, but over months and years, they will compound into a reputation, a network, and a confidence you can’t fake.

You won’t see results after showing up once or twice. That’s not how it works. But people notice consistency before they say anything about it. Slowly, they start to see your growth, your reliability, your potential, and doors open that you didn’t even know existed.

Wrapping up: what to take with you.

This isn’t about being the most talented, the most prepared, the smartest, or the most put-together person in the room. This was a long article so if you’re still here, thank you <3.

Here’s what to bring home:

1. Invest in skills , not just outcomes.

2. Build routines.

3. Show up before you feel ready.

You are building something right now, whether you realise it or not. Every class you attend, every event you push yourself to go, every skill you pick it, it’s all going in the toolkit. The girl who wins isn’t always the most talented. She’s the one who showed up anyway — and kept showing up, long after everyone else went home.

With love,

Lindsay <3

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Now comes the part nobody warns you about: summer isn’t really free time anymore for most students. There’s summer school, jobs, research projects and volunteering that quietly eat up most of your calendar.

And somehow, you’re still supposed to have a social life.

I get it. I’ve been busy every single day and still craved an afternoon that felt like mine.

That’s what this issue is about, not a productivity overhaul, not a “how to optimize your summer” checklist. Just a cozy rundown of how I’m balancing the hustle with the slowness, swapping doom scrolling for small things that actually feel good, and building a little summer curriculum.

Consider this your permission slip to do both – get things done, get ahead, and actually enjoy the season.

It’s June after all & you’re young until September - Ocean Vuong, Because It’s Summer

Course 01: A Playlist for Wherever Summer Takes You.

This summer, I’m trying to get into hiking again. I joined a hiking group – Verso L’Alto – founded by a friend of mine. It means “to the heights” in Italian, which is honestly the most poetic name for a hiking club I’ve ever heard.

Naturally, the playlist had to match the energy.

With Noah Kahan’s new album on repeat, I think it’s safe to say we’re all becoming a little more “granola” by the day – and I’m not even mad about it. Think earthy, warm, walking-through-the-woods-at-golden-hour kind of music. The kind that makes you want to soak it all in.

Course 02: Instead of Doomscrolling

We’ve all been there – 40 minutes gone, phone still in hand, feeling somehow worse than before you picked it up. The algorithm isn’t an accident. It’s engineered to keep you exactly where you are: in an endless, hyper-personalized feed that makes everything else – a movie, a book, a real conversation – feel slow by comparison.

Research backs it up. Chronic scrolling is linked to reduced gray matter in the frontal lobe (the part responsible for planning and impulse control) and disrupted white matter activity, which affects how your brain coordinates thinking, emotion, and behaviour (Lin 2012; Hong 2013; Weng 2012, 2013; Yuan 2011; Zhou 2011). Your attention span isn’t broken, it’s just been quietly rewired.

The good news? It rewires back. You just have to give it something better to do.

Here’s what I’m reaching for instead this summer:

• ✍️ Start a blog — (hi, you’re already doing this one) – write about the thing you can’t stop thinking about.

• 📸 Vlog with intention — not just 8 second clips that will go viral, but something to remember, something intentional and creative.

• 🌅 Take a morning or evening walk with no podcast — just you, the sky, and whatever your brain comes up with when it finally gets quiet.

• 📖 Read for one hour a day — with your phone in another room. It gets easier after day three, I promise.

• 📓 Start a journal — doesn’t have to be deep. A prayer journal, a daily three-liner, a reading log, a place to complain. Just write something that isn’t a caption.

• 🏋️ Build a gym routine from scratch — not a 75 Hard challenge, not a six-week shred. Just show up three times a week and learn what your body actually likes. Consistency over intensity, always.

• 🥗 Learn to cook real meals — Pick five healthy recipes you’d actually want to eat and get good at those first. Knowing how to feed yourself well is quietly one of the most empowering things you can do in your twenties. (and I NEED to get onto that)

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Course 03: Staying Productive without Losing your Mind.

This is probably my busiest summer on paper – internship, research projects, this newsletter, vlogging, running my school club, and summer classes all at once. And honestly? It doesn’t scare me the way it used to. The difference is that I willingly chose all of it. There’s something grounding about busyness that comes from your own decisions rather than obligation.

But choosing a full plate doesn’t mean knowing how to eat from it gracefully. So here’s what’s actually keeping me sane:

Start every day with intention.

The most underrated productivity shift isn’t a new app or a 5 am wake up call, it’s simply deciding what the day is before it starts. Some days are for deep work. Some are for rest. Some are for your friends, your body, or just existing quietly. The mistake most students make is treating every day like it should look the same. It shouldn’t. Give each day a purpose and let that guide the rest.

Use your calendar like it’s your job.

I live inside Google Calendar (or Notion Calendar if you’re cool). Time-blocking, to-do lists, colour-coded commitments – all of it. When everything lives in one place, your brain stops trying to hold it all at once, and that alone reduces a surprising amount of low-grade anxiety.

I also use AI tools to save time, Claude for planning and brainstorming, NotebookLM for turning lecture slides into study notes. I know, I know. But the students who figure out how to use these tools are the ones who actually have time left over for other parts of their lives. Work smarter, not longer.

Protect your sleep like it’s non-negotiable — because it is.

Eight hours minimum. Not as a wellness aesthetic, but as a biological requirement. Sleep is when your brain consolidates memory, regulates emotion, and repairs itself. No productivity system, no amount of caffeine, and no highlight reel of a morning routine will compensate for chronic sleep deprivation. This one isn’t negotiable

Plan ahead, even loosely.

You don’t need a rigid schedule – you need a rough map. At the start of each week, do a 5 minute scan; what’s coming up, what needs to be done, and where does the fun fit in? Whether it’s a hike, a study session, or a dinner with friends, putting it loosely on the calendar means it actually happens instead of getting quietly cancelled by a busier day.

Rest is part of the curriculum.

Burnout doesn’t happen because you worked hard, it happens because you never stopped. Build recovery into your week the same way you build in work. A rest day after the gym. A slow morning after a hard exam. An evening where you genuinely do nothing productive and don’t feel guilty about it.

Recharging isn’t laziness. It’s what makes everything else sustainable. The goal isn’t to squeeze the most out of every hour – it’s to still be standing, and actually enjoying your life, at the end of the summer.

Course 04: A Note Before you Close this Tab.

If you’ve made it to the end of this issue, I want you to sit with something for a second.

You just finished one of the hardest seasons of the year. The late nights, the cramming, the group chats spiralling at midnight before a final – all of it. And you got through it. That’s not small. That’s actually enormous, and most of us forget to acknowledge it before we immediately start worrying about what’s next.

Summer doesn’t have to be optimised. It doesn’t have to be a montage of productivity wins and aesthetic morning routines. It can just be – good. Slow in the right places, full in others. A hike with people you like. A book you actually want to read. A meal you cooked yourself. A morning you woke up without an alarm and just let the day arrive.

The Summer Syllabus isn’t a checklist, it’s just an invitation to be a little more intentional about how you spend the hours that are finally, genuinely yours. You don’t have to do all of it. You don’t have to do any of it perfectly. But I hope something in this issue made you want to go do something that feels like you.

That’s the whole point, really.

I’ll be out there – hiking badly, attempting new recipes, writing things that scare me a little, and figuring out what it means to rest without guilt. I hope you’ll do the same, in whatever way makes sense for your life.

Have a beautiful summer. You’ve earned it.

With Love,

Lindsay

On a bus, a friend asked me: “If you could do anything other than what you’re studying right now, what would it be?” Without thinking, I said: “A writer.”

Weird, I thought. I love biology and chemistry. I appreciate the 4-hour labs and the objectivity of science. I worked tooth and nail to get into one of the best universities in Canada to pursue a STEM degree. So why did that answer come out so fast?

Why not “doctor” ?

“Scientist?”

“Pharmacist?”

Then I felt it – a memory, small and floating. My early teen years spent scribbling poems, writing commentary essays on books I’d just finished, journal entries, a whole essay on Taylor Swift’s Folklore (classic move from a 13 year old). One or two hours a day, just for me. Before life got serious and society expected me to know what I wanted to do in life.

The brain works in interesting ways. The less you use a synapse, the weaker it gets. Neuroscience says so. My writing didn’t disappear – it just got quiet from neglect.

I spent the last years losing myself trying to gain every achievement – internships, research, volunteering hours – surrounded by ambitious and passionate STEM students who had the same drive to get ahead. So yes, I got what I wanted, and ended my second year with a strong case of burn out, being further away from writing, and the thirst of starting something that I know I’d be proud of.

So this is me fixing the dog-earned pages in my life. This Substack isn’t for grades or a resume – it’s for me. Writing about science, student life, women’s health, or whatever else that won’t leave me alone. Two things I love, finally in the same place.

If you’ve made it here, thank you. Stick around.

With love,

Lindsay