Photo caption: the Lloyd ‘ohana circa 1981 (Dad, Mom, Sissy, me)

I didn’t always recognize it, but aloha has been teaching me since I was a child—quietly, steadily, in the places I least expected to be learning.

When I was four years old, I started at Sacred Hearts Academy and asked my mother if the nuns were angels. I was completely serious. There was something about these women—their habits, their quiet presence, the way they cared for people—that fascinated me. By high school, I was volunteering at the senior residence next door, feeding kūpuna and listening to their stories. Some had few visitors. The nuns simply showed up and cared for them. No fanfare. They saw a need and responded to it. I remember thinking that was what love looked like.

I saw it at home, too. My parents carried their own struggles, but somehow our home became a place where people could land. People struggling with addiction, mental illness, hardship, or simply trying to find their footing came through our doors. We made room. We fed people. We helped. I grew up believing this was simply what you did.

You take care of people.

That lesson stayed with me. It probably had something to do with becoming a social worker and eventually finding my way to Liliʻuokalani Trust, where I have spent much of my adult life alongside people who also believe deeply in caring for others.

Years ago, I was introduced to Pua Liliʻu, a way of understanding wellbeing through the image of a flower. Its petals represent the different parts of our lives that need tending: our physical and emotional health (Olakino), ʻohana and relationships (Hale ‘Ohana), culture and spirituality (Na‘au), learning (‘Imi ‘Ike), and the resources that sustain us (Kumu Waiwai) as we strive for Pono (balance, rightness).

I loved the metaphor immediately.

A flower needs all its petals.

Simple, right?

Apparently, I needed several more decades to realize that I was one of the flowers.

Because somewhere along the way, my understanding of aloha became entangled with constant giving—be helpful, be dependable, make room, keep going, give a little more. Generosity became my default language, and I rarely paused to consider whether I was also meant to receive the same care I offered so freely.

There is beauty in generosity. I still believe that with my whole heart.

But life has taught me that aloha was never asking me to disappear.

Motherhood, social work, caregiving, relationships, and even my own body have all taught me this. And, unexpectedly, so have boundaries.

I used to think boundaries and aloha lived on opposite sides of the street—one opening the door, the other closing it.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Aloha is not a single posture. It is discernment. It is knowing what is needed in a given moment and what is sustainable over time.

Sometimes aloha says, Come in. I made enough for you.

Sometimes aloha says, I love you, and I cannot do this for you.

Sometimes aloha stays. Sometimes it steps away. Sometimes it forgives. Sometimes it says, This cannot continue.

And sometimes aloha finally turns inward and asks, How are you doing?

That may be one of the most important lessons of this season of my life.

I have also come to understand hoʻopono differently. For me, it is less about achieving a perfect state of balance and more about noticing when I have wandered from what is pono and finding my way back.

Because I wander.

We all do.

We overextend. We get tired. We become resentful. We say yes when our naʻau is quietly saying no. We carry what is not ours. We ignore our bodies until they stop whispering and start insisting.

Aloha doesn’t shame us for wandering.

Aloha invites us home.

That brings me back to the flower.

If a flower begins to droop, we don’t say, Get yourself together.

We look closer.

Does it need water? More sun? Less sun? Better soil? Has something been affecting its roots?

We tend to it.

Maybe we deserve the same tenderness.

After all these years, that is where I have landed with Living Aloha. It isn’t about being endlessly generous, agreeable, forgiving, or available. It isn’t about getting aloha “right.”

It is about tending.

Tending to our people. Tending to our communities. Tending to ʻāina. Tending to our relationships. Tending to what hurts. Tending to what brings us joy.

And remembering that we belong among the things worthy of tending.

That four-year-old little girl who thought the nuns were angels wasn’t wrong about what she saw. She recognized aloha before she knew what to call it.

She just hadn’t learned the whole lesson yet.

At 62, I would sit beside her now and say, Yes, Melin. Love people well. Show up. Make room. Feed them. Listen deeply.

But I would also take her hand and add, You are not only the one who gives aloha. You are meant to receive it, too. Especially from yourself.

Because this is what I know now: aloha is not complete until it flows inward as well as outward. It is not only what we offer the world—it is what we are willing to offer ourselves when no one is watching.

Aloha for others. Aloha for the world. Aloha for ourselves.

Not one instead of the other.

All of it.

That is the aloha I am still learning to live.

🌺

Aloha, Melin

When we imagine the memories we’ll bring home from a trip, we usually picture the famous places.

The breathtaking views.

The once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

What we don’t expect is to miss…a convenience store.

Yet here I am, back home, thinking about Japan’s konbini.

I loved them all: the beautiful bentos, the fresh onigiri, the endless rows of thoughtfully prepared snacks that somehow managed to be delicious, affordable, and beautifully packaged.

But my heart belonged to FamilyMart.

Specifically, Famichiki.

I don’t know what magic they put into that crispy, juicy piece of fried chicken, but I could happily have eaten one every single day. It became less of a snack and more of a tiny ritual I looked forward to.

And maybe that’s the point.

The moments I’ll miss most from Japan aren’t necessarily the famous ones.

They’re the morning walk to FamilyMart.

Standing in front of the refrigerated case, deciding which onigiri to try.

Greeting the cashier.

Picking up a warm piece of Famichiki for the walk home.

Tiny moments.

Ordinary moments.

The kind you never think to put on an itinerary.

Travel has a funny way of teaching us that joy isn’t always found in the bucket-list destinations. Sometimes it’s tucked into the rhythm of everyday life, hiding in the places the locals barely think twice about.

Maybe that’s one of the greatest gifts of traveling.

It doesn’t just show us another country.

It changes what we notice when we return home.

I’ve found myself wondering where my own “konbini moments” are here in Hawaiʻi. The little rituals, familiar faces, and ordinary places I’ve been rushing past because they seem too commonplace to notice.

Joy hides in plain sight.

Sometimes it’s wrapped in seaweed.

Sometimes it’s tucked inside a bento.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky enough to be near a FamilyMart in Japan, it’s served warm in a little paper sleeve called Famichiki.

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You don’t have to have it all figured out to belong on Substack. 🌺

If you’ve ever:
✨ healed out loud
✨ laughed through hard seasons
✨ overthought a text for three days
✨ wanted deeper conversations than “I’m fine”…

…you’ll probably feel at home in my corner of Substack.

I write about grief, healing, nervous systems, culture, stories, songs, boundaries, joy, leadership, motherhood, and the strange beautiful truth that everything is connected. No really.

Three publications:
🌊 Living Aloha (Rooted and Regulated with Melin)
🌀Everything is Connected (No Really)

Newest is 🌺 Melin Talks Story

An annual subscription is only $30.
That’s basically a couple emotional support iced coffees a month. ☕😅

Come for the writing.
Stay for the aloha, connection, and people who actually feel things.

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Hi, I’m Dr. Landon Eggleston.

I’m an emergency medicine physician living and working in Chicago with my fiancé and two dogs. By profession, I spend my days caring for people on what is often the hardest day of their lives. By inclination, I’ve always been fascinated by the quieter questions that exist underneath those moments: Why are we here? What gives life meaning? How do we become more fully ourselves?

Those questions are what eventually led me to writing.

If you’ve never come across my little corner of Substack before, you’ll find that I often write where medicine and the human experience intersect. I love science, but I love the stories behind the science even more. The emergency department has taught me an incredible amount about the human body, but it has taught me even more about grief, resilience, purpose, love, and the lives we quietly build one ordinary day at a time.

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As I thought about what I wanted to share with Melin’s community, I realized the story doesn’t really begin in medicine. It begins much earlier.

I grew up in Texas in a home where paying attention wasn’t simply a personality trait—it was a survival skill. My father’s moods shaped the emotional climate of our house, and my mother was doing her best to survive within it. Long before I understood what was happening, I learned to read a room. I noticed changes in tone before words were spoken. I watched body language. I sensed tension before anyone acknowledged it. I became remarkably good at interpreting other people’s inner worlds because, as a child, it helped me anticipate what might happen next.

For a long time, I thought that was simply who I was. In many ways, it still is.

It’s part of what makes me a good emergency physician. Every shift, I find myself noticing the things patients don’t always say aloud. Sometimes it’s the expression that doesn’t match the story. Sometimes it’s the spouse who insists they’re fine while quietly unraveling in the corner. Sometimes it’s the person who says they’re here because of chest pain when what they really need is someone to acknowledge how frightened they are. Medicine has only strengthened the part of me that instinctively looks outward. But somewhere along the way, I realized there was also a cost.

I had become so practiced at noticing everyone else’s inner world that I had almost stopped noticing my own entirely. I knew how to sit beside another person’s grief before I knew how to sit beside my own. I knew how to make space for someone else’s fear before I knew how to recognize what I was carrying. My attention naturally flowed outward because, for most of my life, that’s where it had needed to be. Healing, for me, has been less about changing who I am and more about widening where that attention goes.

I’ve had to learn that my own inner world deserves the same curiosity I so freely offer everyone else. That my feelings are worth observing instead of immediately explaining away. That my intuition deserves a seat at the table alongside everyone else’s opinions. Looking back, I don’t think I was always searching for answers. I think I was often searching for permission. Permission to choose differently. Permission to trust a quieter path. Permission to build a life that didn’t necessarily make sense from the outside. The strange thing about permission is that it almost never arrives.

There isn’t a moment when someone taps you on the shoulder and tells you you’re finally ready to become the person you’ve been imagining. Life keeps moving, quietly waiting for you to make the next decision. At some point I stopped asking, “What should I do?” and started asking a different question instead: “What already feels true?”

I’ve noticed that the most meaningful decisions I’ve made have rarely begun with certainty. They usually begin with something much softer. A persistent curiosity. An idea that keeps returning after I’ve tried to dismiss it or a feeling that something no longer fits. It’s like a quiet pull toward something I don’t yet understand. Those moments don’t feel dramatic. If anything, they’re easy to overlook because they’re so gentle. But I’m learning to pay attention to them anyway. Not because they’re always right, but because they’re almost always honest. Writing on Substack was one of those things for me. Adopting two rescues, another.

One of the unexpected gifts of working in emergency medicine is that it has stripped away many of the things I once thought mattered. When you spend enough time sitting with people on some of the hardest days of their lives, your definition of success begins to change. Very few people wish they had been more impressive or accumulated more achievements. What I hear, over and over again, are quieter longings.

I wish I had more time with the people I loved.

I wish I hadn’t been so afraid.

I wish I had trusted myself sooner.

Those conversations have changed the questions I ask myself.

Instead of wondering what other people will think, I find myself asking what feels true. Instead of asking what the safest decision might be, I ask what I would regret leaving unexplored. The answers aren’t always comfortable, and they certainly aren’t always easy. But they feel deeply my own, and that has become more important to me than getting everything right.

I’ve also noticed something surprising. The more I’ve learned to trust that quiet inner voice, the quieter everyone else’s opinions have become. Not because people stopped having them, but because I stopped needing them to determine the direction of my life. I still seek wisdom. I still ask questions. I still change my mind when new information changes my perspective. There is humility in that. But there’s a profound difference between learning from the world and allowing the world to decide who you’re supposed to become.

I think that’s what healing has looked like in my own life.

Not becoming someone entirely different.

Not finally eliminating uncertainty.

Not reaching a place where fear disappears.

Healing has been learning to hear my own voice beneath all the others. It has been discovering that intuition isn’t loud or dramatic. It usually arrives as a whisper that patiently waits until we’re finally quiet enough to notice it.

That’s also why I write.

My little corner of Substack has become a place where I try to weave together the two worlds that have shaped me most: medicine and the human experience. Sometimes that means sharing stories from the emergency department. Sometimes it means reflecting on presence, purpose, grief, or joy. Sometimes it simply means asking better questions. More than anything, I hope it’s a place where people feel a little less alone in the complexity of being human.

Maybe that’s why this question from my guest series ‘The Art of Staying’ resonates with me so deeply.

What brought you, and keeps you, here? (Be sure to check out Melin’s take on this prompt in August)

For me, the answer isn’t a title or a profession, although medicine has shaped me in countless ways. It’s the belief that paying attention is one of the deepest forms of love. Paying attention to the people in front of us. Paying attention to the life we’re living. And perhaps most importantly, paying attention to the quiet voice within ourselves that has been trying to guide us all along.

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I’m so grateful to Melin for inviting me into her community. If these reflections resonate with you, I’d be honored if you joined me for more conversations like this. I have a feeling we’re asking many of the same questions.

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Aloha IS love.

People often think aloha is something we say.

A greeting. A goodbye. A beautiful word stitched onto souvenirs and postcards.

But aloha was never meant to stay on the surface.

This space isn’t about performing wellness or extracting wisdom from a culture for inspiration quotes. It is about bringing aloha to life in genuine ways through your own ways of knowing, being, and doing.

Maybe aloha looks like finally saying no to something that keeps draining you.

Maybe it looks like apologizing when you’ve caused harm.

Maybe it looks like taking a walk, asking for help, making the doctor’s appointment, or sitting quietly long enough to hear what your heart has been trying to tell you.

Aloha is not perfection.

It is practice.

Here, we’ll explore nervous system wisdom, boundaries, relationships, healing, grief, joy, belonging, and what it means to come home to ourselves again and again.

Because the truth is: the world doesn’t need more polished performances of goodness.

It needs more people living their values in ordinary, imperfect, deeply human ways.

If you’ve been looking for a softer way forward—one rooted in compassion, accountability, and connection—you belong here.

Aloha is not just the path.

Aloha is the way.

Let’s learn together.

Aʻo aku, aʻo mai.
To teach is to learn. To learn is to teach.

If this resonates, I’d love for you to introduce yourself in the comments. What does living aloha mean to you right now?

Mahalo for being here. 🌺

P.S. Paid subscribers help sustain this community and allow me to continue creating thoughtful reflections, practical tools, and spaces for deeper conversations about what it means to live aloha in our beautifully imperfect lives. Whether you’re here to read, reflect, or journey alongside us more closely, I’m grateful you’re part of this story.

Me ke aloha pumehana (with warmth and aloha), Melin

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Melin’s narration

Depression

There is something people do not talk about enough.

How depression can travel quietly through generations of women like an unspoken inheritance.

Not always obvious.

Not always named.

Sometimes hidden beneath “she’s just tired,” “she’s emotional,” or “that’s just motherhood.”

But when you’ve lived it, you recognize it.

I saw it in my mother.

I saw it in her sisters.

I saw it in myself.

Photo caption:

Before the shadow (my first baby shower)

And now, watching my daughter after the birth of her third baby, I recognize that same shadow trying to creep into the room again.

That heavy feeling.

That flatness.

That anxiety humming underneath everything.

That sense that joy is happening around you, but somehow not fully landing inside you.

If you’ve never experienced postpartum depression, it can be hard to explain.

Sometimes it arrives slowly and sneaky.

Other times it hits like a Mack truck.

For me, it felt like living under a gray sky no one else could see.

I remember having babies with colic. All three of them.

Crying babies.

No sleep.

A nervous system stuck permanently in fight-or-flight.

And on top of that, a husband who was rarely home and when he was home, he was yelling at me to quiet the babies down.

As if I wasn’t already trying with every fiber of my being.

I was exhausted beyond words.

Pale.

Anxious.

Hypervigilant.

Even when the babies finally slept, I couldn’t.

My body would not let me rest.

I was terrified something bad would happen if I relaxed for even a second.

People around me called it “baby blues.”

I remember my mother-in-law, who had raised ten children, seeing me crying in the corner and casually telling everyone:

“Oh, she’s just going through the baby blues.”

And maybe for some women it is temporary.

But this was not that.

This was something deeper.

Something biochemical.

Something consuming.

I felt irritated all the time.

Overstimulated.

Emotionally raw.

All I wanted to do was hide in my room and cry.

And with each pregnancy, I kept hoping maybe this time I could outrun it.

Photo caption: under the shadow

Newsflash:

You cannot outrun depression.

You cannot willpower your way out of a nervous system in collapse.

You cannot “positive think” yourself out of severe sleep deprivation, hormonal shifts, anxiety, overwhelm, isolation, and emotional depletion.

Depression is a beast.

Pervasive.

Sneaky.

Heavy.

And for many women, especially decades ago, we suffered quietly.

Thirty years ago, women did not openly talk about postpartum depression the way they do now.

There was shame.

Silence.

Minimization.

Women were expected to be grateful.

Maternal.

Glowing.

Meanwhile many were drowning privately.

Photo caption: under the shadow

I believe there can be both biochemical and intergenerational links with postpartum depression and maternal mental health struggles. Research now shows that family history of depression can increase risk for perinatal and postpartum depression.

Truly?

Many of us already knew this long before the research caught up.

We saw the patterns in our families.

The anxious mothers.

The overwhelmed aunties.

The women who disappeared emotionally after childbirth.

Photo caption: my daughter under the shadow

The mothers who survived but never fully recovered in the ways they deserved.

This is why I believe maternal mental health is a public health issue hiding in plain sight.

Because when mothers suffer silently, entire families feel it.

And yet, there is also hope.

I have two dear friends, both clinicians, who experienced devastating postpartum depression themselves.

Instead of hiding, they sought help.

They got treatment.

They healed.

And now they help other women do the same.

There is something profoundly powerful about women who can say:

“I’ve been there too.”

Not from a textbook.

Not from theory.

But from lived experience.

That kind of compassion lands differently.

Today, I am grateful younger women are speaking up more.

I am grateful people are finally naming postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, intrusive thoughts, maternal rage, nervous system overwhelm, and the crushing loneliness that can come with early motherhood.

Because silence protects suffering.

Connection helps healing.

And if you are in this season right now, please hear me clearly:

You are not weak.

You are not failing.

You are not a bad mother.

You are a human being whose body, hormones, nervous system, identity, and entire life just underwent a massive transformation.

You deserve support.

You deserve rest.

You deserve care too.

No mother should have to disappear in order for everyone else to survive.

And healing is possible.

Not overnight.

Not perfectly.

But slowly, gently, with support, treatment, honesty, and compassion, the light can return.

Even if right now all you can see is shadow.

Resources for Postpartum Depression & Maternal Mental Health

If this post resonates with you or someone you love, these resources can help:

Postpartum Support International (PSI) — support groups, education, local coordinators, and provider resources for postpartum mental health.

National Maternal Mental Health Hotline

Call or text: 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262)

24/7 confidential support for pregnant and postpartum mothers and families.

National Institute of Mental Health: Perinatal Depression — information on symptoms, treatment, risk factors, and support.

SAMHSA Mental Health Resources — mental health treatment locator and crisis support resources.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 for immediate mental health support in the United States.

With aloha, Melin 🌺

There’s something profoundly Hawaiʻi about a mix plate.

Not just the food itself.

But the philosophy underneath it.

Two scoops rice.
Mac salad.
Maybe teri beef.
Maybe fried mahi.
Maybe kalua pig next to Korean chicken next to Japanese pickled vegetables with Portuguese sausage hanging out somewhere nearby like it belongs there too.

Because it does belong there.

That’s the point.

The Hawaiʻi mix plate was born from plantation life, where people from all over the world arrived carrying little more than survival, memory, culture, and recipes from home.

Japanese.
Chinese.
Filipino.
Portuguese.
Puerto Rican.
Korean.
Okinawan.
And so many others.

The plantation camps were not easy places. They were built from labor, hierarchy, sacrifice, and struggle. But inside those camps, something else happened too.

People shared.

They traded food.
Recipes.
Language.
Stories.
Ways of seasoning fish.
Ways of cooking rice.
Ways of feeding a family when money was tight.

And slowly, over generations, Hawaiʻi created something entirely its own.

Not assimilation.

Not erasure.

Integration.

A mix plate.

And honestly?
I think the mix plate may be one of the greatest metaphors for aloha culture that exists.

Because nobody had to stop being themselves for the plate to work.

The flavors remained distinct.
The identities remained distinct.

Yet together?

Something richer emerged.

That spirit still lives on today.

You can feel it sitting in a booth at Zippy’s at 1:00 in the morning eating chili over rice after a hard day.

You can taste it at Rainbow Drive-in with gravy soaking into rice while tourists and locals sit side by side trying to decide if they need another scoop of mac salad.

You can see it in the old school diners and drive-ins where the menus are enormous and slightly chaotic because somehow everything belongs there.

Hamburger steak next to saimin.
Fried rice next to roast pork.
Spam next to eggs.
Kimchi next to macaroni salad.

No one in Hawaiʻi blinks at this.

Because this is what we do.

We blend.
We adapt.
We carry each other’s stories forward whether we realize it or not.

That’s why I always smile when people try to define Hawaiʻi too narrowly.

Hawaiʻi is not a postcard.

It’s relationship.

It’s people learning how to coexist in close proximity despite difference.

It’s imperfect.
Complicated.
Layered.
Painful at times.

But also beautiful.

Very beautiful.

And this is where my two publications meet each other.

In Living Aloha, I talk a lot about connection, grounding, regulation, belonging, and the quiet ways we care for one another.

Food is one of those ways.

Aunty bringing over a plate when someone dies.
Families gathering around folding tables at first birthday parties.
Coworkers arguing over whose mom makes the best potato mac salad.
The universal local love language of:
“Eh, you ate yet?”

That is aloha too.

Then Everything Is Connected (No Really) comes walking in holding a paper plate full of existential meaning.

Because the mix plate tells us something larger about humanity itself.

Cultures do not exist in isolation.

We shape each other constantly.

Music.
Language.
Food.
Humor.
Values.
Resilience.

Everything leaves fingerprints.

The plantation camps were hard places born from colonial systems and economic survival. Yet even there, humans still reached toward one another through food, through sharing, through familiarity.

That matters.

Especially now.

In a world increasingly pushing people into camps of “us” and “them,” Hawaiʻi’s mix plate quietly whispers another possibility:

Maybe we do not lose ourselves by sharing space.

Maybe we become more fully human.

What’s in this for the reader?

Maybe this piece reminds you that your own life is also a mix plate.

The people who shaped you.
The cultures you carry.
The traditions you inherited.
The griefs you survived.
The communities that fed you emotionally, spiritually, physically.

None of us are made from one thing alone.

And maybe that is not weakness.

Maybe that is the recipe.

Maybe the goal was never purity.

Maybe the goal was connection.

So this Aloha Friday, maybe take a moment to think about the flavors that made you who you are.

The people.
The histories.
The unexpected combinations.

And maybe honor the fact that even the most ordinary plate lunch carries generations of survival, adaptation, memory, and love.

Everything is connected.

No really.

Aloha,
Melin 🌺

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For 44 days, I thought I was waiting for an answer.

I had applied for a leadership position at work, and somewhere between submitting my application and hearing the final decision, my brain apparently decided it was now responsible for predicting the future.

If you’ve ever waited for news that mattered, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Maybe it was a job.

Maybe it was medical test results.

Maybe it was a relationship.

Maybe it was a loved one whose future felt uncertain.

Whatever it was, you likely discovered what I did: uncertainty can be surprisingly uncomfortable.

At least it was for me.

Now, as shared before, I’ve lived with anxiety most of my life. One of my earliest memories is feeling anxious about going to preschool. My stomach would tighten as we got closer. I chewed my nails to the quick. Long before I knew words like “nervous system” or “anxiety disorder,” my body already knew what uncertainty felt like.

So when those 44 days stretched on, some old patterns showed up.

Not dramatically.

Not in a way anyone else would necessarily notice.

But inside my head? Oh, there was a whole committee meeting taking place.

What if I get the job?

What if I don’t?

What if this is the right opportunity?

What if staying where I am is the right opportunity?

What if I choose wrong?

What if I regret it later?

What if...

What if...

What if...

The funny thing is that very little of my anxiety was actually about the position itself.

What was really bothering me was not knowing.

In other words, my brain wasn’t malfunctioning.

It was doing exactly what brains do.

The problem was that it couldn’t find the answer because the answer didn’t exist yet.

So it did what anxious brains often do.

It started making up stories.

Not because it wanted to torture me.

Because it wanted to protect me.

That realization changed something for me.

Instead of getting frustrated with myself for worrying, I found myself having a little more compassion.

Of course my mind was trying to figure things out.

Of course it wanted certainty.

Who doesn’t?

But life doesn’t offer certainty very often.

Especially not at my age.

By 62, I’ve learned that most of the important parts of life come without guarantees.

Marriage.

Parenthood.

Recovery.

Caregiving.

Leadership.

Aging.

Loving someone with dementia.

None of those experiences arrived with an instruction manual or a promise about how they would turn out.

You simply step forward and learn as you go.

Yet somehow, during those 44 days, I kept acting like if I just thought hard enough, I could solve uncertainty before life did.

What finally helped was recognizing that I was asking the wrong question.

The question wasn’t, “What is going to happen?”

The question was, “Can I trust myself no matter what happens?”

That is a very different question.

One requires predicting the future.

The other requires building self-trust.

And self-trust is something we can actually practice.

Research on resilience consistently finds that people cope better with uncertainty when they focus on what is within their control instead of trying to manage outcomes that haven’t happened yet.

That sounds simple.

It isn’t always easy.

But it is simple.

Every time my mind wandered into the future, I gently brought it back.

What is mine to do today?

What is actually true right now?

What can I influence?

What do I need to let go of?

Little by little, I noticed something surprising.

The uncertainty hadn’t changed.

But my relationship to it had.

I wasn’t spending every day trying to escape it anymore.

I was learning how to live alongside it.

And maybe that’s the real work.

Because uncertainty isn’t just something we experience during job interviews or big decisions.

It’s woven into the fabric of being human.

It’s part of raising children.

Part of watching parents age.

Part of healing from old wounds.

Part of loving people.

Part of creating something meaningful.

Part of becoming who we are meant to become.

The goal isn’t to eliminate uncertainty.

Good luck with that.

What mattered more was discovering that I didn’t need certainty as much as I thought I did.

What mattered more was realizing that I could survive not knowing.

That I could stay present.

That I could stay connected.

That I could keep living my life while waiting for clarity.

Most of all, I learned that self-trust is more useful than certainty.

Certainty comes and goes.

Self-trust travels with you.

If you’re facing uncertainty right now, maybe that’s the invitation.

Not to figure everything out.

Not to predict the future.

Not to make yourself stop worrying altogether.

Just to ask yourself one gentle question:

“What if I trusted myself to handle whatever comes next?”

Because in my experience, that’s where freedom begins.

A Few Things That Helped Me

• Focus on what is true today, not what might happen tomorrow.

• Notice when your mind is telling stories instead of reporting facts.

• Stay connected to people who help you stay grounded.

• Move your body. Anxiety lives in the body, not just the mind.

• Make decisions based on your values, not your fears.

• Remember that uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it is not dangerous.

Resources

• The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris

• Wintering by Katherine May

• The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Research on intolerance of uncertainty (Carleton, 2016), resilience (Southwick & Charney), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Hayes et al.) all point toward the same idea: we don’t thrive by eliminating uncertainty. We thrive by increasing our capacity to meet it.

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Today stretched me… and met me at the same time.

I went live with Dr. Jane, and right from the start, things didn’t go as planned. Tech issues, switching devices, awkward camera angles.

Old me would have spiraled.

Today, I didn’t.

Dr. Jane held such a calm, steady space — you could feel her grounding through the screen. That allowed me to settle into myself instead of trying to fix everything.

I let go of how I looked.
I let go of getting it right.
And I focused on connection.

Public speaking can be so activating for so many of us. I know that experience deeply.

Today, I stayed present inside it.

I’m humbled by the experience.
Grateful for the space.
And deeply appreciative of everyone who showed up live and shared that moment with us.

This is the work. And today, I got to live it.

Aloha, Melin

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Thirty-Three Years Without You, Dad

April 5, 1993 — April 5, 2026

Melvin Douglas Lloyd

A daughter’s tribute to the man who showed up every single day

Hawaiian Superman

Today marks 33 years since my father, Melvin Douglas Lloyd, left this earth. And every April, when Holy Week arrives and the air shifts just a little, I feel him. I feel the enormousness of him. Because my dad was enormous in every possible way.

Six feet, seven inches tall. Hawaiian Superman. That is what I called him, and that is what he was.

Artisan

He was a masonry contractor, an artisan of stone and mortar, and his hands built things that outlasted him. As I drive down Kalanianaʻole Highway in East Oahu, I still pass the stonework he laid, and I have to catch my breath every time. His hands were in that wall. His patience, his precision, his pride. He is still right there, holding up something solid, even now. That is everything you need to know about my dad.

He worked for six days a week, from the first light of morning until the sky turned pink at twilight, building walls and walkways on the properties of people like Tom Selleck, Dolly Parton, Jim Nabors, Richard Chamberlain, and Doris Duke. He was in demand not because he advertised himself, but because his work spoke for itself, and people told each other about him. That was his brand: the quiet excellence of someone who showed up and gave everything.

And then he came home.

Nurturer

He came home and he cooked us dinner. Every single night. Because my mom struggled with mental illness, and my dad understood that our family needed a steady, loving center. He became that center without complaint, without fanfare, and without fail. I always felt safe with my dad. That is a rare and holy gift for a child, and I did not take it for granted then, and I do not take it for granted now.

When his grandchildren came along, he was all the way in. In the pool every afternoon, playing bronco, throwing the kids in the air, laughing that big laugh of his. All of them loved their Papa Mel with their whole hearts, and he loved them right back the same way. He had a charisma that pulled people toward him. You wanted to be in his orbit. I was proud, genuinely and deeply proud, that he was my dad.

I lost him when I was 28. Too young. Too soon. I have now lived more years without him than I ever got to live with him, and that math still hurts.

But here is what I hold onto: he passed during Holy Week. And for me, that has always been a quiet comfort, a reminder that even the greatest losses are held inside something larger than grief. There is resurrection in that. There is hope.

Dad, your legacy is not just the stonework on the highway or the famous homes you built. It is in me. It is in my sister. It is in our children and their children. You are the rock we keep building our lives on, even now, even still.

Thirty-three years. And I miss you every single day.

With so much love always,

Your daughter, Melinda

This was my Dadʻs favorite song combo: God Bless My Daddy/Mom I Love You

It is bittersweet to remember Dad and also Mom who is in late stage dementia and in hospice care.

https://youtu.be/wgIJwZ8uUZI?si=8nutrwr8doPYMg3G

If you lost a parent whose love felt like the ground beneath your feet, I see you today. Drop their name in the comments. Let's hold them together.

This post was written with love for my Substack communities at Living Aloha: Rooted and Regulated and Everything is Connected (No Really). Thank you for making space for stories like this one.

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Photo caption: My first day on the job.

Who Am I Without This Place?

I have been here for 31 years.

Thirty-one.

I was 31 years old when I started.

I grew up here. Not just professionally. As a human being.

This place shaped me.

Gave me language. Gave me purpose. Gave me people.

Let me stretch, lead, build, fail, try again.

I love this work.

I believe in this mission with my whole heart.

And now…

I’m sitting with a question I never thought I would ask this seriously:

Do I stay?

Or do I leave?

There’s an early retirement option on the table.

And on paper, it’s not the “perfect” time.

I’m 62.

Social Security would be reduced.

Medicare is still three years away.

There are practical considerations. Real ones.

The kind that don’t go away just because you want a softer life.

And still…

Something in me is shifting.

Not dramatically. Not recklessly.

Just… honestly.

I’ve gone as far as I can go here.

I can feel that.

Not in a bitter way.

In a completed way.

Like a chapter that gave everything it was meant to give.

An Exciting Assignment

And right now, I’m in the middle of a three-month assignment that feels like a microcosm of it all.

A big organizational shift.

Energy. Vision. Tension. Uncertainty. Possibility.

It’s exciting.

And if I’m being real…

It’s also exhausting.

Because I can feel two truths living in me at the same time:

I still care deeply.

And I’m also ready for something different.

Photo caption: Me on February 20, 2026

Who am I?

What I didn’t expect is this part:

The identity piece.

Who am I without this place?

Not in a dramatic, spiral kind of way.

But in a quiet, honest, sit-with-yourself kind of way.

For 31 years, when someone asked me what I do…

this was my answer.

This is where I belong.

This is where I contribute.

This is where I matter.

So what happens when that changes?

Who is Melinda… without the title, the meetings, the strategy decks, the people who know me in this role?

And maybe the deeper question is:

Was I ever just that?

Who I Really Am…

Because if I’m really telling the truth…

The parts of me that matter most were never confined to this job.

The way I build pilina.

The way I see patterns and meaning.

The way I hold space for people in hard moments.

The way I believe in healing, growth, and second chances.

That didn’t come from a job description.

That came from living.

From breaking and rebuilding.

From learning how not to abandon myself.

From choosing, over and over, to stay.

So maybe the question isn’t:

“Who am I without this job?”

Maybe it’s:

“Who have I become… that I now get to take with me?”

There is grief here.

Let’s be real about that.

You don’t give 31 years of your life to something you love

and just walk away clean.

There are relationships.

Memories.

Versions of myself that only existed in these hallways and conversations.

There is pride.

And there is also… release.

And then there’s this quiet, surprising feeling underneath all of it:

Excitement.

Not loud. Not impulsive.

But steady.

What would it feel like…

to wake up and decide my day based on my own rhythm?

Graphic credit:

To write more.

To rest without earning it.

To follow curiosity instead of obligation.

To build something that is fully mine.

To live in a way that is still purposeful

but not constantly driven by output.

I don’t have a clean answer yet.

I’m still in it.

Still feeling.

Still thinking.

Still running the numbers and sitting with my heart at the same time.

But I do know this:

This is not a crisis.

This is a threshold.

And thresholds are uncomfortable

because they ask you to become someone new

while honoring who you’ve been.

So here’s where I am today:

Grateful.

Tender.

A little scared.

Also ready.

Standing between a life I’ve loved

and a life I haven’t met yet.

Graphic credit:

And trusting…

that I won’t lose myself in this transition.

I’ll meet myself there.

If you’ve ever stood at a crossroads like this…

where both staying and leaving make sense…

tell me:

How did you know?

Or did you just… choose

and learn yourself on the other side?

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Your presence here matters to me. Whether you read quietly or engage out loud, you are part of this unfolding in ways you may not even realize.

Thank you for walking alongside me as I listen for what’s next.

Aloha, Melin 🌺

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They said you were too much.

Too emotional. Too intense. Too sensitive. And if you grew up in a house where your feelings were a problem to be managed rather than a story to be heard, you probably learned to believe them.

Maybe someone even told you, “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

I heard that. I lived that. And for years, I carried the quiet shame of feeling everything so deeply in a world that seemed to reward people who felt nothing at all.

What Nobody Explained

Here’s what I wish someone had told me decades ago: I wasn’t broken. I was wired differently.

Roughly 1 in 5 people are born as Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs), a trait rooted in how the nervous system processes information. HSPs don’t just feel more. Their brains actually process everything more deeply, including emotions, sensory input, other people’s energy, and even the unspoken tension in a room. That’s not weakness. That’s a finely tuned instrument in a world that never handed you the manual.

Growing up, I could feel how people were feeling before they said a word. Animals too. I was the kid who cried at commercials, who felt the weight of a stranger’s sadness, who walked into a room and immediately knew something was off. I was brought to the brink of tears almost every day because I was carrying the emotional load of everyone around me without knowing that’s what I was doing.

The Cost of Being Unseen

When you’re a highly sensitive child living in an unpredictable home, the sensitivity doesn’t go away. It just learns to hide.

For me, that meant becoming the perfect child. If I could be quiet enough, good enough, small enough, maybe the chaos would stop. Maybe I wouldn’t be invisible. Maybe someone would finally see me and say, “I’ve got you.” Children who grow up with emotional neglect, or with a parent whose mental illness made them emotionally unavailable, learn one brutal lesson early: your needs are inconvenient. And so you stop having them, at least out loud.

You walk on eggshells. You read the room before you enter it. You become a master of everyone else’s emotional weather while your own inner world goes unwitnessed. The irony is devastating: the most empathic people among us are often the ones who received the least empathy growing up.

When Sensitivity Meets Abandonment

Here’s where it gets layered. Highly sensitive people who also experienced childhood trauma carry something researchers now call Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) — an intense, often overwhelming emotional response to the perception of rejection or failure. It’s not just feeling hurt. It’s feeling annihilated.

When your earliest experiences taught you that love was conditional, unpredictable, or withheld, your nervous system learned to scan constantly for signs that it was happening again. You weren’t being dramatic. You were being a brilliant survivor of a childhood that never felt safe. The fear of abandonment, the feeling of unworthiness, the belief that you have to earn your place in every room, those aren’t character flaws. These are entirely logical responses of a child who needed protection and didn’t consistently get it.

Research links early emotional neglect directly to chronic shame and feelings of unworthiness that persist well into adulthood. The internal message becomes: “If I stay small and strong and perfect, no one will leave.” Sound familiar?

The Aloha (Love) Connection

There is something deeply Hawaiian about the HSP experience, even if the world never named it that way.

Aloha is not just a greeting. It is a way of moving through the world with an open, feeling heart. Ha (the breath, the life force) is central to who we are as Pacific peoples. To feel deeply is not a flaw in our culture. It is a calling. The highly sensitive among us were never too much. We were, perhaps, the ones meant to hold the emotional memory of our ʻohana, to feel what others couldn’t name, to be the bridge between what is spoken and what is true.

But aloha also requires that we extend that same grace inward. The child who had to be perfect, who had to earn love, who learned to be invisible to survive, she deserves aloha too. Especially from herself.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

It doesn’t look like becoming less sensitive. It looks like finally having a safe enough container for all that feeling.

It looks like understanding that your tears were never weakness but fluency in a language most people never learned. It looks like recognizing that your deep empathy, your ability to read a room, your attunement to animals and children and suffering humans, are not symptoms. They are gifts that came at a cost, and you paid that cost in full long before you were old enough to consent to it.

A few things that actually help:

• Name the trait, not the shame. Knowing you’re an HSP reframes your entire history. You weren’t too sensitive. You were under-supported.

• Grieve the childhood you deserved. The perfect child who stayed quiet to keep the peace deserves to be witnessed, even now, even by you.

• Practice noʻonoʻo (deep reflection) without self-judgment. HSPs need more processing time. Build it in. Honor it.

• Distinguish the past from the present. When RSD flares and rejection feels like the end of the world, gently ask: “Is this now, or is this then?”

• Stop performing okayness. Find the one or two people in your life with whom you don’t have to manage your emotions and let them actually see you.

A Note to the Child Who Was Too Much

Caption: you were perfect, just as you were born

You were never too much.

You were, in fact, exactly enough, in a home that wasn’t equipped to hold you. That is not the same thing. The world needs people who feel things deeply. The world needs the ones who notice, who care, who stay when it gets hard, who cry at the right moments, and who know, intuitively, that connection is the whole point.

That’s you. It was always you.

And if nobody ever told you that growing up, consider this your retroactive permission slip to feel every single thing.

Me ke aloha pumehana,
Melin

Authorʻs Note: this post was inspired by Mayim Bialikʻs podcast episode about highly sensitive people (HSP) and rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD).

🌺

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There is a Japanese proverb that warns: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

It is a saying rooted in collective survival. And for many of us, it was not just a cultural lesson. It was a lifeline.

For historically marginalized communities, blending in has never been simply about modesty. It has been strategy. Visibility carried risk. Standing out meant becoming a target for ridicule, rejection, or worse. The instruction to not shine too brightly, to not speak too boldly about your gifts, was often an act of protection passed down through generations who learned, through hard experience, that safety lived in the shadows.

I understand that. I carry it, too.

My own version came wrapped in a phrase my dad used like a reflex: “Who do you think you are, Billy big shit?” It was delivered as humility. What it taught me was erasure.

The Weight We Were Handed

There is a profound difference between humility and self-erasure. But when you are raised inside a culture of shrinking, those two things get braided together until you cannot tell them apart.

I spent decades believing that speaking well of myself was a form of selfishness. That naming my accomplishments was arrogance. That pride, any pride, was dangerous. So I kept quiet about the hard things I had overcome. The losses. The trauma. The long road back to my own voice and agency.

And here is what I know now, at 62: that silence was not humility. It was a wound I kept reopening.

What Healthy Pride Actually Looks Like

Healthy pride is not bragging. It is not performing for an audience or diminishing someone else to elevate yourself. Healthy pride is the quiet, grounded knowing that what you have lived, built, and survived matters. That your gifts are real. That your story deserves to be told by you, in your own words, without apology.

It took me years of intentional work to get there. To walk into a room without pre-emptively making myself smaller. To say “I wrote that” or “I built that” or “I survived that” without immediately following it with a disclaimer.

The shift was not about ego. It was about wholeness.

Community Cannot Thrive on Dimmed Lights

Here is the question I keep sitting with: How can we celebrate and uplift each other if we cannot first do it for ourselves?

Community care is not just about holding others up. It requires that we each show up whole, with our gifts visible, our stories honest, our pride intact. When we hide our light to keep others comfortable, we are not being generous. We are modeling invisibility and calling it virtue.

Spaces that invite us to name our brilliance, to own our accomplishments, to stand in healthy pride together are sacred spaces. They are countercultural. They are healing.

This thread, this community, this corner of Substack is doing exactly that.

For Those Still Learning to Shine

If you were raised to shrink, I see you. The instinct to minimize yourself runs deep, and it did not come from nowhere. It came from real places, families, cultures, systems that taught you safety lived in smallness.

But you are safe here. And the world needs what you carry.

You do not have to choose between honoring your roots and honoring yourself. You can hold both. You can understand why you were taught to dim your light and still choose, with love and intention, to turn it back on.

Dimming your light never actually protected anyone. It just left you in the dark.

And we need your light. All of it.

A Moment to Reflect

Take a breath and sit with these questions. There are no right answers, only honest ones.

What is one accomplishment, gift, or strength you have been hesitant to name out loud? What voice or experience taught you to keep it quiet? And what would it feel like, just for today, to say it plainly, without apology, as if it were simply true?

Because it is true. You are allowed to know that.

With aloha and in community,

Melinda 🌺

Aloha ’oe. One love. Same thing.

Queen Lili’uokalani wrote her farewell

not in bitterness, but in aloha.

“Aloha ’oe, aloha ’oe,

O ke onaona noho i ka lipo…”

Fare thee well. Fare thee well.

One fond embrace before I depart.

And Bob said it too, differently —

“One love, one heart.

Let’s get together and feel alright.”

He aliʻi ka ʻāina, he kauwā ke kanaka.

The land is a chief; man is its servant.

You are the land.

I am just here to tend what we grow together.

Thank you for letting me.

Thank you for showing up.

Thank you for being the proof

that beloved community is still possible —

even on the internet,

even in these times,

even now.

Aloha ’oe.

One love.

Same thing.

🌺🤍🌿

Aloha, Melin

If you’re not already here, please join our beloved community, be part of this circle of Aloha.

Living Aloha | Everything Is Connected

Two artists. Two centuries. Two traditions.

One truth:

Love is how we say goodbye AND hello.

Love is how we build AND how we sustain.

Love is the whole point.

I write in two spaces because I contain multitudes.

Living Aloha: Rooted and Regulated with Melin is where I bring you grounded, intentional writing about healing, emotional regulation, boundaries, and what it means to care for yourself without losing yourself. Rooted in Hawaiian culture. Informed by thirty years of clinical practice. Written for the helpers, the healers, and the humans running on empty.

Everything Is Connected. No Really is where I follow the threads. The ones between your nervous system and your ancestry. Between personal healing and systemic change. Between what the research says and what your grandmother already knew.

Same writer. Same heart. Two rooms in the same house.

Come find the one that feels like home. Or stay in both.

Aloha, Melin 🌺

Thank you for being a patron of the healing arts. That title is free. The good feeling is priceless. 🌺

Buy me poi, ke ‘olu‘olu ‘oe?

I go by Melin.

I have been a social worker for more than thirty years. That means I have sat across from people in the hardest moments of their lives and tried to be useful. Not heroic. Not fixing. Just present and useful. Some days I got it right. Some days I drove home wondering if I had done more harm than good. That tension never fully goes away. I think that is what keeps you honest in this work.

Right now I have the honor of serving an aliʻi trust here in Hawaiʻi, working to strengthen the people and systems that hold kamaliʻi and families across these islands. Queen Liliʻuokalani’s story is woven into everything I do here. A queen who lost everything and still spent her final years fighting for her people. That kind of legacy does something to you. It raises the bar on what showing up actually means.

I am a researcher. An evaluator. A clinical supervisor. Someone who finds genuine joy in frameworks and data and then gets frustrated when organizations collect all that information and do nothing with it. I care deeply about the gap between what we know and what we actually do. Closing that gap is most of what I think about professionally.

But here is the part that does not fit on a bio

I am also a daughter caring for a mother with dementia. And that has taught me more about compassion, patience, and letting go of control than thirty years of graduate school and clinical training ever could. Some lessons only come from sitting beside someone who no longer remembers your name but still reaches for your hand.

I am a mother of three adult children who somehow turned out to be remarkable humans. I am a grandmother, or Puna, which is the best thing I have ever been called. And I am a writer who started this publication because I kept noticing that the people most committed to caring for others were the ones least likely to care for themselves. I have been that person. I know what that costs.

So I write here about the things that helped me come back to myself. Boundaries. Healing. Emotional regulation. Self-trust. The slow, unglamorous, completely worthwhile work of becoming someone you actually recognize in the mirror again.

I write from a Hawaiian cultural lens because I live here, work here, and believe that Indigenous wisdom has always known things that Western frameworks are only now starting to catch up to. I write as a clinician because the research matters. And I write as a human being because the research is never the whole story.

I am a Sacred Hearts Academy alumna who still lives by Orāre et Laborāre. To Pray and To Work. Not as two separate things but as one continuous act of showing up.

I believe, with Roxane Gay (one of my favorite writers), that it is not enough to acknowledge privilege. We have to actively work to dismantle the systems that uphold it. That belief is not a talking point for me. It is the reason I get up and do this work every day.

If you landed here because something in you is looking for a place that is honest, grounded, and genuinely on your side, I am glad you found it.

Pull up a chair. Stay a while.

Mahalo for being here.

Aloha, Melin 🌺

Thank you for being a patron of the healing arts. That title is free. The good feeling is priceless. 🌺

Ke ‘olu‘olu ‘oe

Buy me fish and poi?

This episode will give you:

✔️ A breathing technique that resets your nervous system in 60 seconds

✔️ A grounding visualization rooted in Hawaiian tradition

✔️ A reminder that being regulated does not mean the storm stops — it means YOU do not

I recorded it during a real flash flood warning because some episodes are born from necessity.

This is one of them.

Press play.

Aloha, Melin 🌺

Thank you for being a patron of the healing arts. That title is free. The good feeling is priceless.

Ke ‘olu‘olu ‘oe

💕

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Let me tell you about the girl I used to be.

She was sixteen, achingly shy, a straight-A student who felt like a stranger at every party she was ever invited to. She was the girl pressed against the wall, watching everyone else seem comfortable in their own skin, wondering what was wrong with her. And then one night, something shifted. A drink. A tab. And suddenly she was there. Laughing loud, moving through a room like she belonged in it, cracking jokes, making friends, feeling for the first time in her life like she was not too much and not too little but exactly right.

I am not going to lie to you. Those early years were genuinely fun. The camaraderie was real. The laughter was real. My friends and I were invincible and electric and we thought we had found the secret door that the boring people never found. Alcohol and LSD were my drugs of choice, and what I know now that I did not know then is that I was self-medicating. A nervous system that had never learned to feel safe in a room full of people had finally found a shortcut. The problem with shortcuts is where they take you.

The shift from fun to necessity is so gradual you almost do not notice it happening. And then one day you realize you are not drinking to feel good anymore. You are drinking to feel okay. To feel human. To get through a Tuesday. The disease does not announce itself. It just slowly becomes the operating system.

By the time I was twenty, the flashy party girl had a 1.7 GPA and a letter from the university asking her not to come back. I want to sit with that for a moment, because I need you to understand what that meant. I was a lifetime 4.0 student. Academic achievement was the one place I had always known who I was. And I threw it away without even fully registering that I was doing it, because I thought I was having too much fun to care.

I got sober because I got pregnant. I want to be honest about that too. It was not a spiritual awakening. It was not a moment of clarity. I was furious about it. I grieved the life I thought I was losing. I white-knuckled those first years of sobriety with a fist full of resentment and a deep, quiet terror that I would never feel joy again without a drink in my hand. I was wrong. But I did not know that yet.

What I did not see coming was everything sobriety was going to hand me. Not immediately. The early years were hard. Post-partum depression folded into withdrawal folded into the very unglamorous work of becoming a functioning adult while caring for a baby and getting out of a dangerous situation with her father. I am not going to romanticize it. I transferred the addiction to food and spent years what they call a dry drunk, sober in body but not yet free in spirit.

But I went back to school. And then again. And then again. I built a career I love in a field that matters deeply to me. I raised children I was actually present for. And slowly, without my noticing exactly when it happened, I became a woman who could walk into a room full of strangers and be okay. Not because of anything in a glass. Because I had done the slow, unglamorous work of learning to be myself.

The hardest part of where I am now is watching some of my oldest friends still living lives dictated by their addictions. I carry no judgment. I know exactly who I would be if one small thing had gone differently. The disease does not choose by intelligence or talent or how much someone deserves a good life. I am not better than anyone who is still in it. I am just grateful. Genuinely, quietly, every-single-day grateful to be here. Truly here. Present. Alive in a way that does not require anything other than my own two feet on solid ground.

If you are somewhere in the middle of this story right now, I want you to know something. The fun you think you will lose is not lost. It transforms. The self-consciousness that you are medicating does not disappear, but it becomes workable. There are other ways through. And the life waiting on the other side of sobriety is so much larger than anything that was ever in the bottle.

I know because I am living it. 🌿

If this resonated with you, I would love to hear your story. You do not have to carry it alone.

Aloha, Melin
Living Aloha: Rooted and Regulated

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Thank you for being a patron of the healing arts. That title is free. The good feeling is priceless.

Ke ‘olu‘olu ‘oe 💕

Buy me a spam musubi?

I was very good at disappearing.

Not the dramatic kind. No storming out of rooms, no slammed doors. I mean the quiet, practiced art of making yourself small enough that no one clocks you leaving. I had perfected the lean. You know the one. Back against the wall, arms loosely crossed, eyes scanning the room like I was just observing. Which is what I told myself. I wasn’t hiding. I was observing.

(I was hiding.)

As a child, I felt everything. And I mean everything. The tension in a room before anyone spoke. The way a teacher’s tone shifted when she was disappointed. The loneliness of the kid eating alone three tables over. I absorbed it all like I was made of tissue paper in a rainstorm. What I didn’t know then, what nobody told me because nobody had the language for it yet, was that I wasn’t broken or “too sensitive” or “too much.”

I was wired differently. Neurodiverse. A highly sensitive person. A deep-feeler in a world that rewards people who can just shake it off.

But at seven, at twelve, at seventeen? I just thought something was wrong with me. So I got very, very good at the wall.

The wall had perks, honestly. I want to be fair to it. From the wall, I watched everything. I learned people. I read rooms before I read books. I became a keen, quiet observer of human nature, which turns out to be not the worst foundation for a career in social work. The wall taught me how to listen. How to hold space without filling it. How to notice what everyone else was too loud to see.

But the wall also kept me from being known.

I didn’t raise my hand. Not because I didn’t know the answer. I almost always knew the answer. Being right in front of people felt like standing under a spotlight with no exit. Attention felt dangerous in a way I couldn’t explain. Being seen meant being assessed. Being celebrated felt like being set up for something to go wrong.

So I stayed quiet. Let others take the credit. Smiled from the back row.

For decades.

Here is what I know now that I wish someone had handed me at age nine on a small folded note: sensitivity is a frequency, not a flaw. Not everyone can receive what you transmit. That was never your problem to fix.

At some point, and I wish I could tell you there was one glorious cinematic moment but it was more of a slow and unglamorous thaw, I started to ask a dangerous question. Why not me? Why not my voice? Why not my words in the room, my story on the page, my name on the work, my presence taking up space?

I had spent 55 years sincerely convinced that other people’s stories were more worthy of air time than mine. That my insights were just derivative. That someone else probably said it better. That I should wait until I was more polished, more credentialed, more certain, more “something”.

I am done waiting.

Stepping into visibility, really stepping in and not just dipping a toe, is one of the bravest things I have ever done. And I don’t say that lightly. I’ve done hard things. I’ve sat with people in their darkest hours. I’ve held grief that wasn’t mine and carried weight that would buckle most.

But choosing to be seen? Choosing to say I have something worth saying?

That required a different kind of courage. A quieter one. The kind that doesn’t look brave from the outside. It just looks like a woman typing at her laptop, sharing a post, clicking publish and sitting with the vulnerability hangover that follows.

The shift wasn’t one thunderbolt moment. It was a thousand small reckonings that added up to this: I am as worthy as everyone else. Not more. Not less. As worthy. Equally deserving of a seat, a voice, a page.

And so are you, reading this from wherever you are, maybe from your own wall.

The wall gave me gifts I still use every day. My sensitivity shapes the work I do and every word I write here. But I don’t live there anymore. These days I write from the middle of the room. Messy, uncertain, fully present.

Turns out being seen doesn’t destroy you.

It just makes you real.

And real, I’ve decided, is worth every uncomfortable second.

If you’re a fellow former wallflower, neurodivergent, introverted, always the observer, I’d love to know what finally pulled you off the wall. Drop it in the comments. I read every single one.

Aloha, Melin

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Come. Sit with me for a moment.

You don’t need to have it together right now. You don’t need to fix anything or figure anything out. All you need to do is breathe — and let yourself be held by this practice.

Today, we’re going somewhere sacred together. We’re going to the heart.

What we’re practicing is called PERT — the Positive Emotion Refocusing Technique — gifted to us by Dr. Fred Luskin of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, one of the luminaries behind the work of Mindful Forgiveness. But more than a technique, what you’re about to experience is a remembering. A return to what has always been inside you.

This is the teaching at the center of it all: you can maintain your peace in any situation, no matter how upsetting, no matter how much it hurts. That’s not a platitude. That’s a practice. And today, you’ll feel the difference.

An Invitation to Stillness

Wherever you are — let yourself arrive here fully.

Feel the weight of your body. The ground beneath you. The air around you. You are held.

Now, let’s breathe together.

In Hawaiian tradition, the breath is sacred. The inhale is hanu — the drawing in of life. The exhale is hā — the releasing, the offering back. Every breath is a conversation between you and the world.

Breathe in... hanu... let your belly rise gently, like a wave coming to shore.
Breathe out... hā... let your belly fall soft, like that same wave returning to the sea.

Again. Hanu. Hā.

Feel that. Something in you already knows how to do this. Something in you has always known.

The Heart Practice

On your third breath, I want you to let an image come — don’t force it, just allow it. Someone whose love has felt like shelter. A place in nature that made you feel small in the most beautiful way — the kind of smallness that reminds you that you belong to something vast and good.

Let that image fill your mind like light filling a room.

And now, dear one — feel it. Not as a memory. As a living, present reality. Let it bloom in your puʻuwai, your heart. That sacred center. Let it radiate outward with each soft breath.

Stay there. If your mind wanders — and it will, because you are human and beautiful in your wandering — return. Hanu. Hā. The practice will always welcome you back.

A Blessing Over You

From this place of warmth, receive these words:

May you be happy and healthy.
May you have peace and ease.
May you have aloha and warmth woven through your days.

And now, let your heart expand even further — to the people you cherish, to those who are suffering, to every creature breathing on this earth and beyond:

May we all be safe and protected.
May we all live together in peace, ease, and happiness.

Feel what that generates in you. That warmth — that is not something you manufactured. That is something you uncovered. It has always lived inside you.

Come Back Gently

When you’re ready, begin to notice your body again. Your feet. Your seat. The rise and fall of your chest. You are here. You are whole.

This is the gift of Mindfulness, of Forgiveness, of Aloha — they are not three separate things. They are three doorways into the same home.

Every time you choose this practice over reaction, over despair, over disconnection — you are healing. You are, in the most sacred sense of the word, becoming.

Hanu. Hā. Hanu. Hā. Hanu. Hā.

Mahalo, beloved. For showing up. For breathing. For returning to yourself.

Before you leave…

Melinʻs tools and resources

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I have been sober a long time, 40 years!

Long enough that most people assume the temptation is gone. Sometimes I assume that too.

But addiction was never just about substances for me. It was about coping. It was about finding a way to survive feelings that felt too big to hold.

Recently, with the world feeling chaotic and unsafe in ways that hit some very old fear circuits in me, I felt something I had not felt in years.

The pull.

Not dramatic. Not overwhelming. Just a quiet thought.

You could numb this.

That moment mattered. Because I have been here before.

There were three times in my life when I came close to relapse. Not because I wanted to destroy my life. Because I wanted relief.

The first time was after my first baby was born.

I was supposed to be happy. Instead I was depressed, exhausted, hormonal, and overwhelmed. My marriage was abusive. I felt trapped and alone. My nervous system was in survival mode around the clock.

I wanted to use. Badly.

What stopped me was breastfeeding. I could not bring myself to put substances into my body that would reach my baby. So I white knuckled my way through that period. Looking back, I have enormous compassion for that younger version of me. She was drowning and still chose protection.

The second time was years later during the pandemic while I was caring for my mom as her dementia progressed.

Dementia is grief layered with unpredictability. The stage she entered included aggression and verbal abuse. It reactivated old childhood wounds in ways I did not expect.

Again, I felt the pull. The thought that numbing out would make it easier.

Again, I white knuckled. I stayed sober, but it was hard.

The third time was recently.

Everything happening in the world created a sense of danger and instability in my body. Old survival feelings came back online. I felt that familiar whisper again.

You could escape this.

But this time I did something different.

I reached out immediately.

I talked to my sponsor. I talked to safe people. I let myself be supported.

And the urge passed faster than it ever has before.

Not because I am stronger.

Because I am more supported.

What helped were very ordinary things.

Holding my kitten Pippa and feeling her tiny heartbeat against me.

Reading uplifting books before bed instead of doom scrolling.

Letting myself rest instead of pushing through.

Remembering I am not alone anymore.

These are not dramatic recovery interventions. They are regulation. They are connection. They are safety.

Here is something I believe deeply from both my own recovery and loving people with addiction in my life.

Addiction is not about weakness.

For me, addiction is about relief.

It is about nervous systems trying to survive distress with the tools they learned. Substances. Food. Work. Control. Over-functioning. Avoidance. Different behaviors. Same purpose.

Numbing pain.

In the earlier times I survived through willpower.

This time I survived through connection.

That is growth.

I also want to say I do not think I am better than anyone else. I do not think I have this all figured out. I am not special. I am just a person in recovery trying to live one day at a time the best I can.

Some days are easier than others.

Recovery is not the absence of temptation but having more choices when temptation shows up.

I am sharing this from my own lived experience with sobriety and from loving people who struggle with addiction. I am not speaking for everyone. Recovery paths are deeply personal.

But I do know this.

Urges do not mean failure is coming.

They often mean your nervous system needs care.

I am not that trapped younger woman anymore.

I have tools.

I have people.

I have self trust.

And I have a kitten named Pippa who thinks I am the center of the universe, which honestly helps a lot.

If you are feeling the pull toward old coping strategies right now, you are not broken.

You might be overwhelmed.

Reach for connection before you reach for numbing.

You deserve relief that does not cost you your life.

Aloha, Melin 🌺

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Thank you for being a patron of the healing arts. That title is free. The good feeling is priceless.

Ke ‘olu‘olu ‘oe 💕

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