I paused at the top of the stairs, letting my daughters and their cousins go ahead while I stood still for a few seconds.

I had the perfect view of the always bustling street.

The tram tracks unaged.

The same brown train.

I was 22 years old again.

I was a student with no children yet, perched on those same stairs with my future sister-in-law, both bundled against the cold, strategizing about which store to visit first. She was talking while I was transfixed by the architecture before me.

It’s a street that looks like a wide alley with tiles on the floor and tram tracks running through the middle like a tunnel. On each side stands a majestic four-story building, looking as though it had been teleported right from the 15th century.

Every window, every stone, every curve, every artistically crafted design seemed to showcase the remnants of a world that was no longer there. A world both gone and still present.

At the very end of the alley you can see the statue of Joan of Arc, the most iconic figure in Orléans’ history. You can’t miss her.

There was the moment my children were toddlers, when I worried about the tram gliding through the alley while people and children walked or ran nearby. I held their hands tightly at the sound of it approaching.

Years later, I noticed the flower-adorned windowsills while my kids and their cousins grew excited over ice cream, merchant stands, and the big wheel at the summer fair.

The winter of the QR codes, we stood at the Marché de Noël near Joan of Arc’s statue, deep in Covid. We felt inadequate presenting our paper vaccination cards while the French, and the cousins, tapped QR codes from their phones to get in.

There was my teenage son in the shoe store. A boy who never cared about fashion, now wandering the aisles, carefully considering styles, discovering his preferences one pair at a time. It took him over an hour to find the right ones.

So, as I stood there at the top of the stairs, I couldn’t help but feel the presence of the street witnessing mine over the years. It hadn’t changed. It had stayed exactly itself.

If it could speak, it would say the woman standing here now has. She went from a twenty-something — hopeful, uncertain, people-pleasing her way through life — to this now grown, confident woman. She went from following the rules, never questioning a culture that demanded sacrifice over her own happiness, to a version now on a self-discovery journey. She went from focusing entirely on others to nurturing herself, relying on her own intuition.

I felt happy and sad at the same time.

Comforted by the sameness of it all.

But sad, too, that one day I’ll stop coming, and the street might wonder why I’ve stopped.🤍

Have you ever traveled to a place that became part of your identity? I’d love to know.🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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Fear or love.
That’s the question.
Every time.
For every decision.

It’s the central argument in Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul.

What’s your intention?

The answer came many years ago for me, disguised as love. Love for my children. I had all three in eight years. With no family around to help and my husband traveling, it was just me. So I made the decision to quit my job on autopilot. No one told me to add myself to the equation. I did what was expected of a young mother raising three little people. I couldn’t hear or see myself even if I wanted to. I went with the flow.

I disappeared and got focused. Because it was not about me anymore. It was about doing everything in my power to make sure my children were fed, bathed, supported emotionally, entertained, happy — and anything else that came with being a mom. It was about keeping them alive.

After six years, I was deep into a routine. School, homework, extracurricular activities, lunchboxes, dinners, doctor’s appointments, maintaining a home. I was caught in a whirlwind and couldn’t stop long enough to hear my own thoughts.

So when the question came — out of necessity — it forced me to pause.

Was I capable of being more than a mother? Was I capable of creating, becoming something for myself first that would also benefit my family? Financially, the responsibility was starting to shift toward me too. The answer hit me like a brick.

Before I was a mother, I was a person. A person with dreams. A person with a profession. A person with relationships that did not involve playdates.

I had to sit quietly with that truth. Let it go beneath the surface. And then figure out how to put all these parts of me back together.

With a fuller picture of myself emerging — not just as a mother but as a human being — I instinctively knew what I needed to do.

I needed to go back to work.

For the first time, I wasn’t deciding from fear. I was deciding from love. Love for myself. Love for my children.

It felt scary at first to step back out into the world. But eventually I felt an excitement I couldn’t quite name. For the first time I truly believed I could be a mother who cared for her children and also be something else entirely.

I’ve always known I had an intuition. Something to guide me. But I wasn’t always aware of its power. I didn’t look for it and wasn’t consciously choosing to turn to it.

With time, I did. And I learned the consequences that can arise from both ends of the spectrum.

I remember one moment it spoke to me clearly — and I didn’t listen.

I was in Paris for work, spending an entire week in back-to-back meetings with little time to roam around, sit outside a café, and actually see the city. I felt the pull to call my uncle who lived three hours away. I just wanted to let him know I was in the country. That I had to go straight home for the kids and wouldn’t have time to visit. I knew he was working and didn’t want him making the trip to Paris just to see me for a few hours.

Because he would have.

I told myself we had time. That I’d go see him next time — with the kids.

I didn’t call.

He passed away two months later from a heart attack.

That decision is still eating at me today. I’m still paying the price for not listening.

But I also know what happens when I do listen.

A few years ago at work, I felt the pull to ask for more. I was happy with what I was doing. It felt right. My intuition told me it was time to speak up for myself. To ask for what I deserved.

I did.

I found no resistance from my boss. I got the title and the raise. The same day.

Today, I turn to my heart often.

I ask the question with almost every decision I make. Am I deciding from fear or from love? What’s my intention? What’s my reason for doing this?

I’ve had a difficult relationship with a colleague for a few years now. After every conversation with them I feel physically and psychologically drained. I didn’t want to feel that way anymore. So I decided to bring love into every interaction. My intention became to have a more harmonious relationship — and to will them, quietly, toward the good in themselves.

It’s a constant effort. But I’ve noticed a small, encouraging shift. I’m hopeful.

Living with intention is living consciously.

And that gives me mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it feels extraordinary to be present. To listen to my intuition. To feel alive and aware through most of the day.

On the other hand, it feels like a weight. Because I have to respond to every decision I make. I cannot blame anyone else. I have to own the version of me that is now living and choosing.

That’s the price.

And I’m paying it willingly. 🤍

Have you ever felt the need to set an intention for everything you do? I’d love to hear about it. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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I sat on my living room couch. Put on my shoes, meticulously tying the laces.

Then I checked my phone.

No missed call.
No “I’m on my way” text.
Silence.

That’s when it hit me. Jennifer wasn’t coming. Not because she was running late — she had been on occasion — but because she was now living in an entirely different state.

I sat with that for a while. A cloud of sadness settled over me, pulling me toward a place I had worked so hard to avoid these past weeks. Since the day she playfully hit my arm and uttered the words “I bought a house.” This was much harder than I had anticipated.

How was I supposed to do this without her? How was I supposed to just continue a tradition we started out of survival in the middle of a worldwide pandemic?

I thought about staying home and skipping the walk entirely. But I dismissed the idea almost as soon as it appeared.

Instead, I sent a text. A simple “I miss you.” Then I got up, ventured outside, and made my way into the Miami morning heat.

I’ve walked that path alone before. So I didn’t expect this time to feel different.

But it did.

I smiled at my own hesitation on whether to go left or right to complete the circle. One of us would always remember what we did the previous Sunday and we would take the opposite direction to balance it out.

Things seemed different but also the same in a way. The poincianas were still vibrantly red. I looked up and noticed not only the distorted shapes of the branches, but the character they were displaying — as if each one had its own personality. I wanted to share that with Jennifer. To point out how much taller the trees had grown. To appreciate the lushness of the forest green leaves together.

But I kept walking.

The fruits lay generously on the ground and I had no desire to claim them. Which was unusual for me. The flowers were out in all their glory, soaking in the morning sun, releasing their sweet scent into the air. I took a deep breath and inhaled their perfume — and felt another wave of sadness move through my body.

Just like that, resentment showed up without an invitation.

I was a little mad at the flowers. At everything, really.

Unreasonable, I know. So I just kept walking.

I texted her a picture of the path, following the “I miss you.” She texted back: “I miss you too.” She was just arriving in Delaware, getting ready to tackle unpacking, working remotely, school, and a whole host of other things happening all at once.

That text was saying everything and anything.

The week before the first walk without her was also her last in Miami. We had two full days before she and her family left. I went to her house to help in any way I could. The movers were everywhere — focused, on a mission. They emptied the house in one day.

She needed to pack the small items making the journey in her car. She also needed to give me one of her Kombucha starters, with full instructions on how to prepare and care for it.

We sat on her living room floor — now a sea of boxes — and went to work. We talked. We reminisced about the days our kids spent swimming in her pool. We remembered the birthday parties in that now empty house. The Thanksgiving dinners. The just because gatherings. We laughed as I made fun of the very specific way she folds plastic bags. It’s a whole science.

We both protested when her husband said: “I hope you find another Odile in Delaware.”

I tried to stay present for everything. We both did.

And now I have those memories too.

And then she was gone.

That first Sunday confirmed what I had suspected all along. Distance changes things — not the friendship, but the texture of it. Ours is getting even deeper.

We text more now than when she lived five minutes away. We send pictures — a new tradition — and we give more details about what’s going on in our lives. She recently finished her school program and sent me the screenshot. I was so proud of her I sent back an unreasonable amount of emojis.

That’s what really surprised me. We not only express more — we show more. We make the effort to give details. Distance made us deliberate about something we used to take for granted.

That first walk without her was lonelier than expected.

And the sadness caught me off guard.

Sunday walks now happen in the evening.

Because mornings are reserved for when Jennifer can do the walk virtually. 🤍

Has a relationship change ever caught you by surprise? I’d love to know. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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“You have to say that because you’re my mother.”

That’s what my then 8-year-old youngest daughter told me as she was struggling to get her outfit right. I offered my help, but she didn’t want it and started crying. I told her she looked beautiful and the outfit was perfect. She didn’t believe me.

I sat with that for a while. Did I really believe that, I asked myself? That she was beautiful? Not just because she was my daughter, but because it was the truth? The answer was immediate. A resounding yes.

Here is something I know: my first instinct is always to see the struggle behind the problem at hand. It’s never about what’s happening at the surface. Never. I looked at my daughter and smiled. I told her she made that dress work, because she was so beautiful. I think she believed me. She smiled back.

I realized she just wanted to be seen. It wasn’t really about the way she looked, the outfit, or the mirror. It was about reassurance. About feeling beautiful in her own skin. About me seeing her.

And I did.

That’s kindness.

In that moment, I was reminded of the kindness someone showed me when I was around 18. We were celebrating my baby sister’s first communion at my mother’s house, with friends and family gathered for a nice meal. The air was warm, the chatter was gentle, and the conversations seemed to hold the room together.

At some point during the meal, someone said there should be a speech to mark the occasion. They said I should do it since I was the oldest.

I panicked. Me? There was no way I was prepared to speak in front of all these people. Impossible. So I said no.

A friend of my uncle, a man in his late twenties, stepped forward and smiled at me. He said: “Odile, there’s nothing to be scared of. You’re smart. You’re beautiful. You can do it.”

I believed him. Reluctantly. So I gave a short speech and didn’t collapse. It felt great.

I don’t even remember his name. But I remember how he made me feel. He gave me the courage I didn’t know I had. He saw me when I couldn’t fully see myself.

It was the most memorable act of kindness anyone has ever shown me.

I carried that moment with me, even through seasons when people were not kind to me.

In my marriage, I was often the recipient of someone else’s discontentment every time something didn’t go as planned. I would ask myself — how is that my fault? At work, I remember sitting in a management meeting, expressing my opinion, when someone interrupted me. Just like that. As if what I was saying didn’t matter. As if I didn’t matter.

Each time, I chose silence. I chose kindness. It felt like survival. Like the only thing I could hold onto. A refuge of sorts.

I’ve often asked myself whether kindness was worth the effort. Especially when the people around me didn’t think it was.

A colleague once called me weak. A pushover. That moment didn’t break me, but it revealed something about who they really were. Because I have always known, instinctively, that kindness is not weakness. It is part of who I am. It is my strength.

Treating people badly and making them feel small is not strength. No mistake, not a single one, justifies making someone feel bad about themselves.

I think about a story a coworker once confided in me. Her manager had scolded her in front of other people. She was upset because it wasn’t the first time. She resigned the next day.

The leader had the power of position. But kindness would have kept her in the room.

Yet I also know this: kindness without courage can cost you.

I saw it first at my mother’s house. She cared for everyone who came through our door. Family members with nowhere else to go — a cousin or two staying for months, contributing nothing, because they simply couldn’t. She fed them. She helped them financially. She mothered people who weren’t even hers to mother.

And some of them were deceptive in return.

I’ve lived my own version of that lesson. The boundaries I didn’t set in my marriage. The promotion I could have asked for sooner but didn’t, trusting that my manager would simply see my value and act. They didn’t.

That’s the part of kindness worth watching for. Because if you’re not careful, kindness without courage lets others quietly dictate your life.

So I am making sure I pass it on, the right way.

My children have no doubt about what kind of person their mother is. And I tell them explicitly: be kind to yourselves first, to each other, and to others.

Recently my two daughters were arguing — something I can’t even remember now. They were furious with each other, saying unkind things. I waited for them to calm down and then I sat with them.

I told them that no matter how angry they got, they needed to remember that the other person was a human being.

And how do you treat a human being?

With kindness. The way you would want to be treated.

That’s really what kindness is about.

The yearning to be seen. We are all interconnected. We share this world and live side by side without truly seeing the people around us. We don’t see our colleagues because we are so consumed by work and results. We don’t see our neighbors because we are too wrapped in our own universe. We don’t see the people we pass on the street because we have made them other.

But at the core, kindness is about truly seeing others.

And expressing it.

Where does kindness come from for you? I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

Nothing prepares you for the moment you become someone’s manager.

Not really.

Some organizations invest in leadership training, workshops, programs designed to ease the transition. But mine handed me a small team of two, a promotion, and a smile that said good luck. And just like that, I was a manager.

I remember the first time I met my team in that new capacity. They were smiling. They were warm and expectant. I looked at their faces and told myself — relax. It’s going to be okay.

I had no idea what I was doing.

What I did have was something I had been carrying my whole life without knowing it had a name.

I had always tried to put myself in other people’s shoes. I had always taken other people’s feelings into consideration. Because it had always been clear to me, instinctively, before I had the language for it, that every person we meet or work with is carrying something we cannot see. Something heavy. Something invisible to everyone else in the room.

So why not be kind? Why not offer a smile? It costs nothing. And it might be the thing that makes all the difference for that person on that particular day.

From day one I made a quiet commitment to myself: I would treat my team the way I wanted to be treated. Manage them the way I would have wanted to be managed.

It felt simple. It felt right.

And then, about five months in, reality arrived.

She was an older colleague on my team. More experienced than me in some ways, and from the beginning, more challenging than I had anticipated. She was defiant in a way I couldn’t quite name. And there was a pattern I kept noticing; whenever she had a question about an assignment, she didn’t come to me. She went to others.

I had told the team repeatedly: my door is always open. Come to me with questions. Come to me with concerns. I’m here.

She didn’t come.

The moment it crystallized was this: she was working on a document for a product we were preparing to promote. I gave her everything she needed. We agreed she would come back to me if anything was unclear.

Instead, she went to three engineers and a vice president with questions I would have answered without a second thought.

The vice president came to me directly. He said: She’s asking me questions. Don’t you already have the answers?

I felt it immediately. The embarrassment, the confusion, the sting of it. I didn’t know what to do. So I did what I’ve always done when I’m lost. I went to someone I trusted.

My mentor was a vice president with decades of experience leading people. He had watched me grow professionally and I knew that if anyone could help me make sense of this, it was him.

I told him everything.

He listened, and then he said something I have never forgotten.

Sometimes in life, he said, you will find yourself working with someone who has a different personality and will challenge you. Focus on what the person does well. Keep the dialogue open on the challenges. And don’t take it personally.

I sat with that for a long moment.

Don’t take it personally.

How? It felt deeply personal. It felt like she was going to others because she didn’t want to talk to me. Like something about my leadership was failing before it had even properly begun.

But I had to try.

So I did. I focused on what she did well. I kept the conversation open. I stopped making her behavior about me and started making it about the work, and about her.

We never became close. But the relationship became cordial. Functional. Respectful even.

And I learned something that has shaped every team I’ve led since: the behavior of the people around you is rarely about you. It’s about them. It’s about their history, their fears, their way of moving through the world. Your job as a leader is not to take it personally. Your job is to stay open anyway.

A few years later, a different scene.

My high performer came to me frustrated. The junior on the team had been assigned what should have been a straightforward task, which was creating an Excel file with a couple of simple formulas. The junior didn’t know how to add a formula. My high performer was ready to unload.

I stopped her.

I told her to be more understanding. That people perform at different levels. That instead of frustration, this was an opportunity to mentor, to guide, to show someone how to figure things out when things get hard. It was an opportunity to focus on what the junior had done right and build from there.

She paused. She listened.

And then she calmed down, and she thanked me.

That moment felt like something clicking into place. Like the approach I had been trying to build, the one rooted in empathy, in seeing people as people first, was actually working.

Today, their relationship is much better.

I used to think a leader’s job was operational. Get the work done. Hit the deadlines. Deliver the results.

I know better now.

A leader’s job, first and foremost, is to grow and nurture their team. The operational piece matters, yes. But the human piece is what makes the operational piece possible.

Today I give life advice alongside project feedback. I recommend books. I make myself available not just for work questions but for the moments when someone needs to unload, to process, to be heard. I pay attention to whether my team is mentally okay while they’re getting things done.

Because every person sitting across from me in a meeting is carrying something I cannot see.

That hasn’t changed. It never will.

What has changed is that I now understand it’s not just a personal philosophy.

It’s leadership.

The most important kind.

If you’re a leader, what’s one thing you wish someone had told you before you became one? I’d love to hear it.

Leave a comment

Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

I was reading The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav when it happened.

He was writing about the Teacher within us. About how the ability to communicate with that Teacher consciously is a gift that is available to all of us, but only when we are ready to receive it. He wrote about how every decision we make either moves us toward our personality or toward our soul. That each decision is the answer to a question we are always being asked:

How do you choose to learn love? How do you choose to learn authentic empowerment? Through doubt and fear, or through wisdom?

I read those words and something cracked open.

Not gently. Not the slow, quiet way things usually arrive for me. This was sudden and physical. It was an intense wave of sadness, something close to anger, something that felt like betrayal. My heart ached. My eyes filled with tears.

And then the thought came, unbidden and overwhelming:

I should have known this sooner.

I sat with that feeling for a moment that lasted longer than a moment.

All those years. All those decisions made from a place I can now clearly name as fear. The marriage I stayed in long after I knew I had no voice in it, long after I had slowly, quietly turned to silence because silence was the only place I felt safe. The version of me who made that choice wasn’t weak. She was surviving. But she was operating from the deepest kind of fear: fear of the unknown, fear of not being enough on her own, fear that she could not stand on her own two feet and succeed.

Every decision she made was the answer to Zukav’s question.

And the answer, for too long, was fear.

I felt the grief of that. The grief directed at life, at the circumstances that kept me circling this knowledge without landing on it. And at something harder to name inside myself. Some part of me that sensed, in all those years of feeling like there was something bigger out there, that there was a direction I was supposed to turn, and kept turning away from it, or turning toward it too soon, before I was ready to hear what it had to say.

Why didn’t I find this sooner?

It’s the question grief always asks. And grief, I’ve learned, doesn’t wait for a reasonable answer.

But then something shifted.

The wave passed. I sobered, as I put it to myself. I became more reasonable, more gentle. The sadness remained, but softer now. And I began to think more clearly about what had actually happened.

These books, this knowledge, this particular language for the soul, it has been out there for a long time. Zukav published The Seat of the Soul decades ago. And I’m quite sure I had heard of it, in the way you hear of things before you’re ready to receive them. The title floating past. A recommendation half-absorbed. A moment of recognition that didn’t quite take hold.

Because I wasn’t ready.

And here is what I’ve come to understand, sitting with the grief and letting it settle into something truer:

The books were always there. The Teacher was always there. But I had to become the person who could hear them. Who could sit with Zukav’s words and feel them land not as concepts but as recognition, as something my soul already knew and had been waiting for language to confirm.

That journey took the years it took.

The readings that led me here — The Alchemist, Ikigai, the neuroscience, the biographies, the slow accumulation of understanding that happiness was an inside job — all of it was preparing me. Widening the channel. Making me ready for this moment, this book, this particular crack of light through this particular window.

I was meant to read Zukav now. Because now, I can listen. Now, I can take action. Now, the meaning lands in a way that will actually change something.

I want to be gentle with the version of me who wasn’t ready.

The one who stayed in silence because it felt safe. The one who made decisions from fear because fear was the only language she had been given. The one who sensed something bigger but couldn’t yet find the door.

She was doing the best she could with what she had.

And she kept going, even without the language, even without the Teacher’s name, even without knowing exactly where she was headed, until she arrived here. At this book. At this moment. At this lifetime of finally being ready.

I don’t want to waste time grieving the years before this.

I want to use what I know now.

Every decision from here forward is an answer to Zukav’s question.

And I am choosing consciously, gratefully, with everything I’ve learned and everything I’m still learning.

Wisdom.

Over fear.

Every time. 🤍

Have you ever encountered a book or an idea that arrived at exactly the right moment, not a moment sooner? I’d love to know what it was. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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Six weeks ago I sent my first cold email.

My finger hovered over the send button longer than I’d like to admit. Not because the email wasn’t ready. But because I wasn’t sure I was.

That’s the thing about starting something new, especially something you’re building for yourself, on your own terms, from scratch. The preparation can only take you so far. At some point you have to press send and step into the silence that follows.

I pressed send.

And then I waited.

I’ve been building a consulting practice. Six weeks in, which means I am still very much in the beginning, in that particular stretch of the journey where the vision is clear but the evidence hasn’t arrived yet. Where you are doing the work without yet having proof that the work is working.

The silence is the hardest part.

Not because I expected instant results. But because silence has a way of finding the oldest wounds. When an email goes unanswered, when nothing seems to move, when the only sign of life is one person glancing at your LinkedIn profile and moving on, the old voice shows up.

You are not enough. You will never succeed. Not on your own terms. Not like this.

I know that voice. I’ve been writing about it for months now. I know where it came from. A nine year old girl absorbing scarcity after her father died, learning without anyone saying the words that security was fragile and belonging to yourself was a luxury she hadn’t earned.

But here is what I’ve learned to do when that voice arrives:

I move.

Literally. I get up. I walk. I run. I let my body do what neuroscience has been teaching me it can do, interrupt the pattern, shake off the old wiring, come back to the present moment where the story isn’t finished yet and the evidence is still on its way.

And then I keep going.

This week I had a meeting with a vendor I’ve known since 2018. I went with intention, not to talk business, but to ask him something I needed to know. How did you start? How did you keep going? What carried you through the beginning when nothing was certain?

He has been in business for thirty years.

He told me about the early days in New York. Running out of the money his father had given him to start. Calling local restaurants, offering to deliver their food in exchange for enough money to survive. Doing whatever it took, for as long as it took, because he believed, even then, even in those moments, that it would work out. That it would just take longer than he’d hoped.

I never wavered, he said. I always believed I would succeed. You have to believe that too. And do the work.

I sat across from him and felt something settle in me.

Not because his words were new. But because I recognized them. Because somewhere between sending that first cold email six weeks ago and sitting in that meeting, something had shifted in me that I hadn’t fully named until that moment.

I wasn’t waiting for permission anymore.

I wasn’t waiting for the silence to break before I allowed myself to believe.

I already believed.

This is what the neuroscience work, the meditation, the daily practice of choosing a different story has been building toward. It’s not the absence of the old voice, but the ability to hear it and keep moving anyway. The ability to feel the fear viscerally, in my body, and get up and walk it off and come back to the desk and press send again.

Neuroplasticity isn’t just a concept I’ve been reading about. It’s something I’m living in real time, six weeks into building something that is entirely mine.

Every cold email is a new neural pathway.
Every walk that shakes off the doubt is a new neural pathway.
Every morning I sit in meditation and choose the present over the past is a new neural pathway.

I am not waiting to become someone who believes she can do this.

I already am her.

He made me realize I was already believing it. Already doing it.

The evidence will come. I know it will. And when it does, I want to remember this: the weeks of silence, the old voice showing up, the walks, the vendor who built a successful business, and the moment I sat across from him and understood that I never wavered either.

Not really.

Not where it counts. 🤍

Are you in the beginning of something right now, sending emails into silence, building without proof yet? I’d love to know. You’re not alone in it. 🤍

Leave a comment

Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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I almost stopped the taxi.

We were pulling away from the dormitory, our luggage in the trunk, a flight to catch, my daughters beside me, and I turned to look back.

He was standing on the street in front of the building. Watching the car get smaller. Trying to be brave in the way that eighteen year olds try to be brave when they are terrified and don’t want you to know it.

Our eyes met briefly through the rear window. I smiled and waved. He smiled and waved back.

And then he just stood there.

My youngest said, quietly, he’s going to cry.

I said, probably.

I didn’t say what else I was thinking. That it felt like my heart was staying behind with him on that street in Tokyo, 7,500 miles from home, while the rest of me got in the car and left.

It started with a library.

Every week, when my children were small, I took them to the library. It was one of our routines. The kind of simple, unremarkable thing you do without thinking about it, because it seems like the right thing to do and because children need somewhere to go that feels like theirs.

My son found the anime shelf in the children’s section.

I didn’t know this for years. I learned it when I read his college application essay. The one he wrote about his love of Japanese culture, tracing it all the way back to a shelf of manga books in a library his mother took him to every week.

I planted that seed without knowing I was planting anything at all.

He was obsessed, the way only children can be obsessed, completely, joyfully, without apology.

The books. The television series. The figurines lined up with quiet reverence. The video games. Manga wasn’t just something he liked. It was a world he lived in alongside this one.

It was no surprise, then, that Japanese restaurants became his choice for every birthday celebration. He found one not far from our house, discovered it himself, brought us there, and it became the family favorite. We still go. The staff still knows our names. They still ask about him when we walk in without him.

How is he doing in Japan? they ask.

He belongs there now, I tell them.

And I mean it more every time I say it.

In high school, when college conversations began, Japan kept appearing.

I listened the first time and thought, sure, but how would that even work? I assumed it was an idea, the way teenagers have ideas. That by junior year, reality would settle in and the conversation would shift to something closer, something more familiar.

He never let up.

And so I did what mothers do, I started researching. I found two American universities with campuses in Tokyo. They made it seem almost simple: study abroad at the cost of a public university. He applied. He was accepted. He enrolled for the spring semester after graduation.

We booked four tickets to Tokyo for winter break of 2022.

Before we left, I found a Facebook group, parents of children going to study in Japan. I don’t know what I expected. What I found was an entire community of people who had already walked this road and were holding a lantern for those of us just beginning.

They answered every question. They anticipated the fears I hadn’t named yet. They helped me breathe a little better in the weeks before we left.

I will always be grateful for them.

We arrived on Christmas Day.

The jet lag was disorienting. The culture shock was real. My daughters and I moved through those first hours in a kind of daze, overwhelmed and wide-eyed and not quite sure where we were.

Not my son.

He was like a child who had finally arrived somewhere he had always known existed. He absorbed everything, the signs, the sounds, the subway system, the particular orderliness of Tokyo’s streets. I watched him stand a little taller with every passing day.

We did everything. Tokyo Tower. The shrines. The malls that seem to go on forever. Mount Fuji on a clear morning, which felt like standing at the edge of something sacred. Nikko. Disney Tokyo for my youngest daughter’s birthday, because of course.

Through all of it, I watched him fall in love.

But the moment I knew he would be okay came when we visited his university. Everyone was warm and organized and clearly committed to making this work for students and parents alike. They gave us a tour. And I watched my son — my son — take the lead. Ask questions. Pick up pamphlets. Walk into the campus store and come out with university merchandise, all of us following behind him with our own hoodies and t-shirts, proud in a way that felt almost too large to hold.

That was the moment.

Moving-in day was also our departure day.

We took a taxi to the dormitory with all our luggage. We watched him meet the dorm manager, sign paperwork, receive instructions, ask all the right questions. Then, they gave him his key.

We went upstairs.

And then I unpacked.

I don’t know exactly what I was feeling in those 45 minutes. Nothing, maybe, or everything compressed into the particular numbness that comes when you still have tasks to complete and falling apart is not yet an option. I was on autopilot. I directed him and his sisters, his desk needs this, your bathroom needs that, these go here, these go there. They executed. There was light banter between the siblings, the way there always is, the sound of them being themselves together one last time before the shape of things changed.

I glanced out the window occasionally. Saw the bike parking below. The ordinary life of a dormitory on an ordinary street in Tokyo.

I kept moving.

We said our goodbyes inside. I told him he was going to be okay. He looked at me with a nervous smile, the kind that knows it’s being watched and is trying to hold itself together.

I think in that moment he felt the full weight of it. Not the excitement, not the planning, not the adventure. The actual reality of staying behind. Alone. In a city where he didn’t yet speak the language, in a building full of strangers, at almost 7,500 miles from everyone he had ever known.

And I felt it too. Everything I had been preparing for, arriving all at once.

It took everything I had not to fall apart. Because it wasn’t about me. It was about making sure he believed — truly believed — that I trusted him. That I knew he could do this. That my confidence in him was real and not performed.

He asked the security guard to call us a taxi.

More goodbyes on the street. Then the car. Then pulling away.

I turned to look back.

He was standing there. Watching us go. Trying to be brave.

Our eyes met. We smiled. We waved.

My youngest said he was going to cry.

I said probably.

And I held my heart together with both hands for the rest of the ride to the airport.

He is fluent in Japanese now.

When I visit Tokyo, he is the one who chooses where we go. He moves through the city like someone who has always lived there. He knows which train to take, which restaurant to try, which neighborhood to wander. He speaks to people in their language and they respond to him naturally, without surprise.

He is self-assured in a way I recognize and don’t quite recognize at the same time. The same person. Someone new. Both things true at once.

He moves like he belongs.

I think about the library often.

About the fact that I took him there every week without knowing what I was giving him. That he found a shelf, and the shelf became a world, and the world became a calling, and the calling became a life I could not have predicted or planned or even fully imagined for him.

That’s the thing about children. You plant seeds in the ordinary moments, the weekly routines, the small yeses, the places you take them simply because it seems like the right thing to do.

And then one day you’re in a taxi pulling away from a dormitory in Tokyo, watching your son stand on a street corner 7,500 miles from home.

Trying to be brave.

Already belonging.

And you realize the seed grew exactly as it was supposed to.

You just didn’t know you were the one who planted it. 🤍

Have you ever discovered, later, that something ordinary you did for your child changed the direction of their life? I’d love to hear about it. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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Jennifer is moving to Delaware.

She bought a house. She sold hers. And this weekend, her last in Miami, she invited me and my daughters to watch the fireworks with her family at the Biltmore.

That’s the kind of person she is.

We met the way so many lasting friendships begin, not with a grand moment, but with proximity and repetition and the slow accumulation of ordinary days.

Our children attended the same preschool, then the same elementary school. We were both stay-at-home mothers then, both woven into the fabric of school life, both showing up every morning and then heading to the gym together afterward. We didn’t choose each other so much as we fell into step beside each other, and then one day looked up and realized we had been walking together for years.

Twenty of them, as it turns out.

I could tell you about the milestones. The birthdays we celebrated, ours and our children’s. The Thanksgivings, the Christmases, the Hanukkah gatherings. The Halloween tradition we built at her house, because her neighborhood drew the biggest crowds, me helping her decorate in the afternoon, then the two of us sitting outside together in the evening, passing out candy to trick-or-treaters while her husband took the kids around the block. Just the two of us. Talking. Watching. Perfectly content.

I could tell you about the years we became each other’s backup, picking up each other’s children from school when work ran long, the kind of practical, unglamorous love that holds a life together when family isn’t nearby.

I could tell you about the day she drove me to vote for the first time as an American citizen. How she insisted on coming. How she took a photograph to commemorate it, so proud of me she could barely contain it.

I could tell you about the times she and her husband lived briefly in France and both tried to practice their French with me. The warmth of that, two people making themselves a little vulnerable, a little silly, just to meet me where I came from.

But what I want to tell you about are the Sunday walks.

Most Sundays, Jennifer drives to my house, parks her car, and we walk.

We chose my neighborhood because it’s lined with trees. Real trees, tall and generous, with an actual path running through them. The same path I take alone on weekday mornings, which feels different when she’s beside me. Wider, somehow. More forgiving.

We walk for two hours sometimes. More, on the weeks that need it.

And we talk about everything. Work. Children. Life. The things we’re afraid of and the things we’re hoping for. The week I carry into Sunday and need to put down somewhere before Monday comes back around.

But here is what I want you to know about those walks, it isn’t only the conversation.

It’s the trees.

We know all of them by now, every turn of the path. The fruit trees and the flower trees. We stop to smell the blossoms without thinking about it, the way you do with something that has become ritual. Sometimes we pick up fallen flowers and carry them with us for a while, just because they’re beautiful and there.

There is one tree that produces decorative fruits, small, perfect things, the kind you’d place in a bowl on a table and just let sit there, being lovely. We always stop. Jennifer always picks one or two. She has a collection now, somewhere in the house she just sold. Little pieces of our Sunday mornings, preserved.

And then there are the poincianas.

They don’t have much of a scent, that’s not why we love them. It’s the color. That particular red-orange that Miami does better than anywhere else, vivid and almost aggressive in its beauty, the kind of color that makes you stop mid-sentence and just look for a moment.

We’ve stopped mid-sentence for those trees more times than I can count.

Jennifer is one of the most loving people I have ever known. Devoted. Practical. The kind of person who follows a recipe exactly as written, which is the opposite of me, and somehow that has always made us work.

She is my cheerleader in the truest sense. Not the performative kind, but the kind that sees you more clearly than you see yourself and refuses to let you shrink.

I remember telling her recently about my strategy for asking for a raise at work. She listened, then told me I had a good foundation but needed a different angle. And then she said something that made me stop and take out my phone to write it down:

Odile, if you really want this freedom, you have to ask for it without fear. Because you’re talented, serious, intelligent, and kind. They’re lucky to have you.

I already consider myself a confident person. But something about hearing it from her, from someone who has known me for twenty years, who has watched me become who I am, who was there before I fully knew myself, landed differently. It landed like truth.

I do the same for her. I encouraged her to ask for more at work, to go back to school for her accounting degree, to reach for the roles she was ready for. We have spent twenty years doing this for each other, holding up the mirror, refusing to let the other one settle.

She knows my whole story. I don’t have to explain anything. That is a rare and irreplaceable thing, to have someone who holds your entire history without you having to repeat it, who can hear you say three words and already understand the other thousand behind them.

Jennifer has always wanted to live closer to her family. Two of her children are now in the workforce. One is still in college. Her husband has been traveling back and forth to China for work. And so she looked at her life, looked at what she wanted, and chose herself.

I know that feeling. We’ve talked about it for years, she and I, this journey of choosing ourselves, of learning that our own needs are not an afterthought. She has been my sounding board through all of it. And now she is living the very thing we’ve always encouraged each other toward.

How could I be anything but happy for her?

And yet.

I am also sad. I want to be honest about that.

Not for her. Her path is clear and right and exactly what she deserves. But for me. For the Sunday mornings I will feel differently. For the poincianas we won’t stop to look at together. For the particular comfort of having someone who knows your whole story living five minutes away.

Distance changes things. Not the friendship, I know us well enough to know that. But the texture of it. The ease of it. The way you can call someone and say I’m outside and they already know what that means.

I will miss that ease.

This is her last weekend in Miami.

And she spent it inviting me and my daughters to watch the fireworks with her family.

Somewhere in her collection, there are small decorative fruits from our Sunday mornings. Little things she picked up off the ground because they were beautiful and worth keeping.

That’s us. That’s twenty years.

Beautiful. Worth keeping.

Delaware is not the end of anything. It’s just a new shape for something that has already proven it can hold.

But I am going to miss my friend.

I am going to miss our Sundays. 🌺🤍

Is there someone in your life who knows your whole story? Tell me about them. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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Growing up, I was terrified to be around adults.

Not because they frightened me. Because they amazed me. I thought of them as gods, people who knew everything, who had an answer for every question the world could possibly ask.

My father drove a car, which felt like commanding a small miracle. My mother taught school and always, always had an explanation, for anything, as if knowledge simply lived inside her. My uncle Charles was studying in France, an entire ocean away, doing something I couldn’t even picture. My aunt Sophie ran a business after her husband died, which to my child’s mind meant she had figured out how to survive the unsurvivable. My aunt Charlotte was a nurse who healed people with her hands. My favorite teacher, Ms. Elise, was simply God herself, as far as I was concerned.

All adults. All doing extraordinary, impossible things.

I believed, with the complete conviction only a child can have, that growing up meant arriving somewhere. That on the other side of childhood was a place called Knowing. And that everyone older than me already lived there.

The first crack shocked me to my core, the way most important things do.

My father died.

And the question that has stayed with me since, the one I still don’t fully have an answer to, is this: how can you be magical, extraordinary, and just one day die?

If he could die — if the most solid, capable, certain person in my world could simply stop existing — then what did that mean about all the others? About the entire architecture of adulthood I had built in my mind?

The second crack arrived later, quietly.

My mother came home one day with Aunt Sophie. They greeted us quickly and went straight into my mother’s bedroom. I could hear her crying through the door. Overwhelmed, by four children, by teaching, by managing my father’s business on top of everything else. She didn’t have it together. And neither, it turned out, did Aunt Sophie, sitting beside her, offering no answers, just her presence.

I remember standing outside that door, confused in a way I didn’t have words for yet. She was crying? She didn’t know what to do?

I became a teenager, and the rebellion that followed wasn’t loud. I didn’t scream or slam doors. I went quiet instead. I kept to myself. I watched, and what I watched no longer matched what I remembered.

I started seeing my mother hide to cry when things got hard, the way she had that day with Aunt Sophie, except now I understood what it meant. I saw my uncle eventually leave his wife for another woman, the uncle who had studied in France, who I had once placed somewhere near divinity. I saw both my aunts struggling, quietly, to hold their families together with hands that were tired and uncertain.

The magic was gone. Not all at once. Just steadily, the way light fades from a room as the sun moves.

I didn’t understand it then, but I started making a plan. If the adults around me didn’t actually have the answers, then I would get them myself. Through education. I held onto that idea tightly, that knowledge would be the thing that finally let me arrive in that place called Knowing. That it would protect me in ways it apparently hadn’t protected anyone else.

It took me a long time to notice the obvious. My mother was educated. My father had been. My uncle, my aunts, Ms. Elise, all educated. And none of it had spared them from heartbreak, from struggle, from crying behind closed doors.

I’m still not entirely sure why I believed it would be different for me.

The moment it became undeniable, the moment I truly understood that I had become one of them, with none of the answers I’d once assumed they had, came on an ordinary afternoon that turned into an emergency.

My youngest daughter fell and hit her head on the coffee table. The amount of blood frightened me before I even had time to think. We needed the emergency room.

My son and my other daughter were asking question after question — what happened to their sister, why was there so much blood, was she going to be okay — and I remember standing there, trying to stay calm, trying to think clearly, and realizing that I had three sets of panicked eyes on me.

And I was just as lost as they were.

I told them everything was going to be fine. I don’t know if that was true. I said it anyway, because that is apparently what adults do, they speak certainty into existence even when they are standing in the exact same fog as everyone else in the room.

That was the moment. Not a slow realization this time, but a sudden, clarifying one: I had become the very thing I once thought was magic, and I had no magic at all. Just love, and fear, and the willingness to figure it out anyway, in real time, for the sake of the people looking at me.

Here is what I understand now, decades after my father’s death, decades after that bedroom door, years after that emergency room:

None of us ever arrive in the place called Knowing.

We are all just going through the motions of existing, hiding our most vulnerable parts. The parts struggling to make sense of ourselves, of our choices, of the people we’ve become and the people we’re failing to become. My mother. My aunts. My uncle. Ms. Elise. Me.

We are all just children who grew taller.

This understanding has changed something fundamental in how I move through the world.

When I meet someone in a position of authority now, I have no trouble speaking to them as though we are old friends. Not because I think less of them, or because I believe myself their equal in some competitive sense. But because I see the person first. The human first. Underneath the title, the position, the apparent certainty, just someone figuring it out, the way I am, the way everyone is.

A coworker confided in me recently. Her manager was unpredictable, kind one moment, harsh the next, and she never knew which version she would get. She described walking on eggshells every day, watching it wear on her mental health.

I told her, as gently as I could, that her manager’s behavior likely had nothing to do with her. That there were probably unresolved things underneath that behavior, old wounds, private struggles, the same kind of invisible weight my mother carried behind that closed door all those years ago. I told her not to take it personally.

Easier said than done. I know that better than most.

But here is what I’ve come to believe: some of us choose to carry our unresolved things and treat others with cruelty because of them. And some of us choose, even while struggling, to treat others with kindness, because we understand, on some level, that we are all fallible. All improvising. All afraid, some days, that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.

When I think of my parents now, my uncle, my aunts, even the version of my mother crying behind that door,

I don’t feel disillusioned anymore.

I feel something closer to tenderness.

Because they were never gods. They were just people, doing their best with what they had, the same way I am doing my best now with what I have. The same way my children will, one day, when they are standing in some room of their own, trying to sound certain for someone who is looking up at them like they hold all the answers.

We are all just human.

No matter how old we get. 🤍

Was there a moment you realized the adults in your life were simply human? I’d love to hear about it. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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Papa,

I need to tell you something first, before anything else.

For most of my life, Father’s Day didn’t exist for me.

I didn’t mourn it. I didn’t dread it. I simply didn’t let myself go there. If you weren’t here, then the day wasn’t either. It was easier that way. To not stop, not look, not feel whatever was waiting for me if I did.

But I’m stopping today. I’m looking. And I’m writing to you instead.

I still remember the drive.

The radio was on. News, then music, that ordinary mix that filled so many of our car rides. You explained where we were going before we even got in. My brother and I sat in the back, and you drove us to a school with a fence around it, bigger and better kept than the one near our house in Yaoundé.

I didn’t understand most of what you said to the principal that day. I just remember how you felt. Light. Happy. Certain. Like you knew exactly what you were doing and exactly why it mattered.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I understand it now. You were building something. A life. A family. A business you were in the middle of growing into something successful. And in that car, on that ordinary day, you were doing what fathers do, making sure your children had a better starting line than you did.

A few months later, you were gone.

And so much of what you were building stayed unfinished. Including, I think, you.

I’m sorry, Papa.

I’m sorry you didn’t get to finish what you started. I’m sorry the dream you were so clearly living toward — the one I could feel in the car that day, even without understanding it — got cut short before you could see where it led.

You don’t get an update on your business. You don’t get to see how the family grew, or shrank, or carried on without you. You don’t get to know if any of it worked out the way you imagined.

So today, I want to give you what I can. An update on me.

I became a marketing communications director. I lead teams. I’ve spent nearly two decades learning how to say hard things gently, how to build trust, how to advocate for people the way you once advocated for me in a principal’s office I didn’t fully understand.

I have children of my own now. And every single day, I find myself doing exactly what you were doing in that car, trying to give them the best possible chance. Better schools. Better opportunities. A wider sense of what’s possible for their lives.

I think about you every time I make those decisions for them. I didn’t realize until much later that I was just continuing what you started.

I graduated. More than once. Education mattered to you so deeply, and I carried that without even meaning to. I wish you had been there. I wish you could have seen it, not because I needed you to witness it, but because I know how much it would have meant to you.

I think I’ve become a decent human being, Papa. Someone who knows what she wants and is willing to work for it. Someone who leads with kindness, even when it’s hard. Someone who, despite everything, still believes in showing up.

I don’t know if that’s the daughter you imagined raising. But I hope, somehow, it’s the one you’d be proud of.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this. I’m not sure letters like this are supposed to have one.

I just know that for the first time in a long time, I let myself remember the car, the radio, the fence, the light in your voice. I let myself feel the absence instead of stepping around it.

Happy Father’s Day, Papa.

I see you now. Even after all these years.

Especially now.

Odile

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I have two dominant voices.

Not literally. But close enough.

There is the woman who speaks English, professional, precise, navigating the world with the quiet confidence of someone who earned her place in it word by word, dream by dream. And there is the woman who speaks French, softer, freer, a little more flirtatious, a little less guarded. The one who laughs more easily. The one who feels, when she speaks, like she is handling something delicate and beloved.

Both are me.

But only one of them feels like home.

I grew up in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where French was simply the air I breathed. There were three more languages, but I’ll focus on the one that carried the weight in my childhood.

Every summer, my siblings and cousins and I would go to the village to spend the long warm months with my grandmother. And then, at the end of August, we would come back to the city for la rentrée.

There is no English word for la rentrée. I’ve looked. I’ve tried. And I’ve come to understand that the reason it doesn’t translate is because it isn’t just a word. It’s an entire cultural experience compressed into two syllables. The return. The beginning. The collective exhale of a society that takes summer seriously and greets September like a ceremony.

I remember one la rentrée in particular, when I was in middle school. My mother took me shopping for my uniform and school supplies. Money was limited, there was never quite enough, but always just enough to start. I remember the uniform. The way it smelled of new fabric and apprehension. That particular combination of excitement and nerves that lives in the stomach and won’t let you sleep.

I lay awake the night before, anticipating everything. The moment I would see my friends. Which teachers would be assigned to my classes. What the new year would ask of me.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

That is what la rentrée means. And English has never given me a word for it. Because some things belong to the language they were born in.

English came later. Gradually, then completely.

When I arrived in Washington D.C. for college, one of my English professors gave me advice I have never forgotten. She told me that in order to truly master a language, I had to live inside it — movies, television, friends, neighbors, the texture of daily life. She told me that the moment I started dreaming in English, I would know I had arrived.

I waited for that dream.

It came during graduate school. I dreamed about an assignment that was due the next day, incomplete, while my study group seemed completely unbothered. I woke up in a quiet panic, and then I remembered what my professor had told me. And I lay there in the dark, heart still racing, realizing that something had shifted. That I had crossed something. Like standing on the other side of a river, looking back at the crossing I had just made.

I had arrived somewhere.

English was mine now.

Later, when my children were small and all in school, I taught English at a language school. Mostly business English. But occasionally I would get a student who could barely say hello.

One of them was Eloiza, from Brazil.

We started with signs. Pictures. Pronunciations. The slow, patient work of building a language from the ground up, the way you build anything that matters, one word at a time, one small victory at a time. Three months later, the director of the school told me that Eloiza had carried her first full conversation with people in the office. That she had done it proudly.

I wasn’t there to see it. But I didn’t need to be.

I already knew she could do it.

Teaching Eloiza taught me something I hadn’t fully understood until then, that I hadn’t just learned English. I had mastered it. I could navigate its nuances, its rhythms, its unspoken rules. I could give it to someone else.

English was no longer something I was surviving. It was something I owned.

And yet.

English also became something else. Something I didn’t expect and couldn’t fully name until recently.

It became armor.

Someone once called me weak. In English. The word landed, as insults do, but it didn’t devastate me. It didn’t reach the place where the real hurt lives. I absorbed it, processed it, moved on.

I’ve thought about that. About why.

And here is what I believe: the language we learn first is the language that reaches us deepest. French is where I am most vulnerable. Where words land without a filter, without the protective distance that comes from operating in a language you had to consciously build. An insult in French, faible, someone calling me weak, powerless, helpless. That would have found me. That would have stayed.

English keeps certain things at a distance. Not just insults. But also a way of life. A culture where you are expected to absorb everything in silence, to be strong in the way your mother was strong and her mother before her, without complaint, without need, without taking up too much space.

When I speak English, I feel removed from that inheritance. Free from it, at least partially. English gave me permission to be a different version of myself, one who could ask for things, negotiate for things, name things that French, and the culture wrapped around it, had taught me to leave unnamed.

That is what I mean by armor.

Not that English made me hard.

But that it gave me a shield I didn’t know I needed.

The French version of me still exists.

She comes out at work, with my French colleagues, with my boss who is from France and meets her regularly. That’s when the best laughs happen. The best conversations. An ease that doesn’t require translation, in any sense of the word.

She is more flirtatious, that version of me. Freer. Less guarded. She says things the English version of me would carefully consider first.

I love her. I’ve missed her, sometimes, without realizing that’s what the missing was.

Home is not always a place.

Sometimes it is a language. A rhythm. A word that exists only in one tongue and carries an entire world inside it.

I left Cameroon. I built a life in English, in America, in Miami, in the professional woman I became word by deliberate word. English gave me distance, precision, armor. It gave me the ability to move through a world that wasn’t built for me and make it mine anyway.

But French is still where I live when no one is watching. French is still where I go when I need to feel held.

And I am passing both down.

My son carries three languages now, French, English, and Japanese. Three doors into three different worlds, three versions of himself available to him whenever he needs them. My daughters are finding their French, slowly, the way you find something you always had but forgot to look for.

I think about what I am giving them. Not just vocabulary or grammar or the ability to order coffee in another country. But the thing underneath all of that, the understanding that you are never just one self. That the version of you that exists in one language is not the only version that is real. That home can be carried inside you, in the words that reach you deepest, in the rhythms that feel like breathing rather than translation.

My grandmother didn’t speak English. My mother’s French shaped everything I became. And somewhere between the village at the end of summer and a dream about an unfinished assignment in a Washington D.C. apartment, I became someone who belongs to more than one world.

That is not a loss. That is the inheritance I am passing on.

A language for armor. A language for home. And the wisdom, hard won, to know which one you need

and when to take the armor off. 🤍

Is there a language, a place, or a word that carries home for you in a way nothing else can? I’d love to know. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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I was reading an article recently about sickle cell disease.

And just like that, I was ten years old again.

Her name was Nathalie.

She was my age exactly, my cousin, my friend, my playmate. The kind of child who could make a room feel fuller just by walking into it. She appeared healthy in a way that surprised people who knew her diagnosis. Where others with the same disease often looked fragile, thin, visibly worn by what their bodies were carrying, Nathalie looked like herself. Bright. Present. Alive.

I remember one afternoon at her parents’ house, a family gathering the way families gather, loud and warm and spilling out into every room. Nathalie and I were running through the house playing hide and seek. I can still hear her laugh. Full and unguarded, the laugh of a child who is simply, completely in the moment. The laugh of two cousins with nowhere to be and nothing to worry about except who was hiding where.

There was nothing in that laugh that said she was sick.

There was everything in that laugh that said she was here.

We always knew, in the way families know things they cannot bring themselves to say out loud. Nathalie was a frequent visitor of the hospital. There were treatments, careful management, her parents doing everything within their reach to keep her with us.

And yet we believed, the way you believe in impossible things when the alternative is unbearable, that she would beat the odds.

She didn’t.

I was devastated. Not in the way adults are devastated, with language and ceremony and space to grieve. I was ten. And the adults around me were so consumed by their own grief, so focused on the loss in front of them, that no one stopped to think about the little girl on the edges of it all.

No one thought about me.

So I carried it alone. The way I was learning, even then, to carry things alone. Quietly. Without asking for space I didn’t know I was allowed to take.

For those who may not know, sickle cell disease is a genetic blood disorder that affects primarily people of African descent. It is transmitted when both parents carry the sickle cell trait. In the 1980s and 1990s, when Nathalie was alive, life expectancy for those with the disease was well below twenty years.

Nathalie’s fate, in that sense, was sealed before she could run or laugh or play hide and seek.

I have never fully made peace with that.

Why her and not me?

I have asked myself that question for over thirty years. I still ask it. Not every day, but often enough that it never feels fully settled. This persistent guilt of having won what I can only call the gene lottery. Of carrying a body that was spared something she was not.

It isn’t rational. I know that. I didn’t choose my genes any more than she chose hers. Neither of us had any say in what we inherited, what we carried, what our bodies were quietly deciding before we took our first breath.

And yet.

Why her?

She was sweet. She was joyful. She laughed like there was nothing wrong with her, even when everything was.

Why her and not me?

I don’t know. I have sat with that question long enough to understand that it may not have an answer. That some things in life resist explanation no matter how long you turn them over. That grief, real grief, doesn’t always arrive at resolution. Sometimes it just resides somewhere in the back of your mind. It becomes a little more familiar. Something you learn to carry with more grace than you once did.

But you carry it still.

The article that brought all of this back mentioned something that stopped me completely.

A cure.

Researchers are now talking about a cure for sickle cell disease. Life expectancy has already climbed to well over fifty. Children being born today with this diagnosis have a future that Nathalie was never given access to.

Had she been born ten years later, she might have had a full life.

I sat with that for a long time.

The joy of it, that children will be spared what she endured. And the grief of it, that she wasn’t one of them.

Both feelings true at the same time. Both feelings deserving of space.

I think about Nathalie often.

About the life that could have been. The woman she would have become. Whether she would still laugh that way, fully, freely, like there was nothing in the world to worry about.

I think she would have.

I carry her with me still. In the unexpected reminders. In the articles I stumble across that take me back without warning to a family gathering, a house full of noise, two cousins playing hide and seek in the afternoon.

I still hear her laugh.

I always will. 🤍

If sickle cell disease has touched your family or someone you love, I’d love to hear about them in the comments. Say their name. They deserve to be remembered. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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I spent years waiting.

Not dramatically. Not with any grand awareness that waiting was even what I was doing. Just quietly, persistently, handing my happiness to other people and wondering why I never felt full.

I was waiting for my husband to fix what was broken between us. To hear me. To give me space. To stop certain behaviors. To figure out, without me having to say it, what I needed. I was waiting for my boss to see my value without me having to negotiate for it. Waiting for the people around me to do something, anything, that would finally make me feel the way I was convinced I was supposed to feel.

It never occurred to me to look inward.

I genuinely did not understand that I had anything to do with my own happiness. It felt like other people’s job. Like something that would arrive when the right conditions were met, when the right people behaved the right way, when the world finally arranged itself into the shape I needed it to be.

I was waiting for a happiness that was never going to come from the direction I was looking.

I’ve been reading Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics recently, many years into a self-discovery journey I began not with intention but with necessity.

One sentence stopped me cold.

Unhappiness doesn’t create happiness.

Simple. Almost obvious. And yet I sat with it for a long time. Because I recognized myself in it completely. All those years of waiting, of quietly suffering, of telling myself that things would be better when… that was not a path to happiness. It was just a longer road to the same place.

The sentence didn’t break new ground for me. By the time I read it, I already knew it to be true. But there is something about seeing a thing you’ve lived confirmed in black and white. A kind of exhale. A recognition that says, yes. That. Exactly that.

Here is what people didn’t know about my smile.

I have always been someone who smiles. Warmly, easily, genuinely, or so it appeared. For a long time, that smile was doing a great deal of invisible work. It was covering loss. Covering the particular sadness that comes from having handed your wellbeing entirely to others and standing there, waiting, while they did everything except the one thing you needed.

I had no courage then. I went with the flow. I didn’t know what true happiness actually felt like from the inside, because I had never really looked for it there. And sometimes, even now, that still makes me sad. The years of not knowing. The years of the masked smile.

But here is what I also know about that smile:

It was never nothing.

Even when I didn’t want to smile anymore, when there was so much uncertainty about who I was, so much uncertainty about the direction of my life that the very act of smiling felt fraudulent, I still chose it. Not for myself, exactly. But because when I stepped out of my house, the people I encountered had nothing to do with my personal struggles. They were probably carrying their own. And kindness being the philosophy I have always returned to, I chose to leave my heaviness at the door. To focus outward. To give what I could, even when I felt empty.

And something strange happened in those moments.

It helped. Not because I was pretending. But because choosing something, anything, on purpose, choosing how to show up even when you feel powerless over everything else, is itself a form of agency. A small, quiet declaration that you are still here. Still moving. Still choosing.

I just didn’t have the language for it yet.

The before and after didn’t arrive in a single moment. It came gradually, the way most real things do.

It started with necessity. I found myself caring for three small children alone, in a place with no family nearby, with only a couple of friends I had made along the way. No safety net. No one to call at midnight. Just me, and what I could find inside myself, and the absolute requirement that I keep going because three small people needed me to.

I had to dig deeper than I knew I could go.

Somewhere in that season, someone gifted me a Kindle.

I started reading at night, after the children were in bed. At first I fell into romance novels, stories of love that was effortless and reciprocal, of being chosen and cherished. I didn’t fully understand then what I was longing for. I just knew the longing was there, nameless and persistent, rising up in the quiet after the children were asleep.

But gradually, the books changed.

The Alchemist. Ikigai. The biography of Sidney Poitier. The Count of Monte Cristo. Self-help. Memoirs. And eventually, neuroscience. Each book adding something. Each one quietly, persistently teaching me that the life I wanted was not going to be handed to me by anyone. Not my husband. Not my boss. Not the circumstances arranging themselves into something more favorable.

It was an inside job.

It had always been an inside job.

And that included my husband. That was perhaps the hardest thing to fully own. That I had been so focused on what he wasn’t giving me that I had never stopped to ask what I was giving myself. What I was building for myself. What I was choosing for myself, on purpose, every day.

The answer, for a long time, was very little.

I am choosing differently now.

Not perfectly. Not every minute of every day. I am human, and some days the uncertainty still sits heavily and the smile still requires effort. But most days. Most minutes of most days.

I choose to look for the good even when it isn’t obvious. I choose to release what I cannot control. I choose to build my happiness from the inside, quietly, daily, from choices so small they almost seem insignificant.

A genuine smile, not a mask. A moment of stillness before the day begins. A book that teaches me something about who I am becoming. A choice, made on purpose, to be here. Fully. Presently.

Unhappiness doesn’t create happiness.

Neither does waiting.

I know that now. I know it in my body, not just my mind. And I am done waiting for anyone to bring me what only I can build. 🤍

When did you realize happiness was an inside job? I’d love to hear where that understanding found you. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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I’ve been to the Willis Tower twice.

The first time, I couldn’t do it.

The second time, the one that exists only in my mind, in the version of me I am still becoming, I step out without hesitation.

Let me tell you about both.

A few years ago I was in Chicago for work. We were hosting a customer event for three hundred guests and had booked the Willis Tower as our venue. The day before the event, I went to visit the space, accompanied by the venue manager who walked me through everything with the easy confidence of someone who has done this a thousand times.

And then we reached The Ledge.

For those who haven’t been, The Ledge is a glass box that extends from the 103rd floor, suspended 1,353 feet above the city of Chicago. The floor is glass. The walls are glass. The city stretches below you in every direction, miniature and impossibly far down.

The manager stepped out onto it to encourage me. Smiling. Completely unbothered.

I could not move.

Not a step. Not an inch. My body simply refused. There was no internal debate, no moment of hesitation I could reason my way through. It was pure, total, physical paralysis. The kind that doesn’t ask for your opinion. The kind that has already decided.

I walked away.

And I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t a little embarrassed. Standing there, a professional woman who was about to organize a three hundred person event in this very building, frozen at a glass box while the venue manager waited patiently. The gap between who I was presenting myself to be and what my body was doing in that moment felt very wide.

I thought about it for a long time afterward.

Here is what I understand now that I didn’t have language for then:

My body wasn’t reacting to The Ledge.

It was reacting to every story it had ever been told about heights. Every moment of fear it had catalogued and stored. Every time, across a lifetime, that it had learned: this is dangerous, this is the edge, this is where you stop.

The brain, I’ve been learning, is a prediction machine. It doesn’t experience the present moment as freshly as we like to think. It is constantly, automatically, reaching into the past, into its accumulated library of experiences and responses, and using that library to decide what the present means and how the body should react.

In other words: I wasn’t standing on the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower.

My body thought it was standing in every frightening high place it had ever encountered. It was living in its own history. The present moment was simply a trigger for the past.

And that’s not weakness. That’s just how we’re wired.

The question is, what do we do with that wiring?

This is where everything I’ve been learning about neuroscience meets the woman I am becoming.

Because the brain is not fixed. The body is not fixed. The responses we’ve rehearsed across a lifetime are not permanent sentences.

They are habits. Neural pathways worn smooth by repetition. And what repetition has built, intentional practice can rebuild.

I’ve been doing that work. Slowly. Through meditation, through stillness, through the daily practice of interrupting old patterns and choosing, consciously, a different response. Through learning to notice when my body is living in the past and gently, firmly, calling it back to the present.

The woman I am becoming, the one I can feel emerging, essay by essay, morning by morning, she is not run by old fear.

She has done the work. She has rewired, or is in the process of rewiring. She has learned to separate what is actually happening from what her nervous system insists is happening based on decades of accumulated caution.

And that woman?

She steps out onto The Ledge.

Not because the height changed. Not because the glass became less transparent or The Ledge moved closer to the ground. But because she is no longer living in the past. She is present. She is new. She is connected to a version of herself that fear has not yet written the story for.

I see her clearly.

I am walking toward her every day.

Fear is rarely about the thing itself.

It’s about what the body has decided the thing means, based on everything that came before, everything it learned without asking your permission, everything it stored away to keep you safe even when safe and small became the same thing.

The Ledge was never the problem.

The past was the problem.

And the past, I’m learning, is not as permanent as it feels.

What has your body decided something means, that your mind is finally ready to question? I’d love to know. ✨

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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I almost didn’t go.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

I almost talked myself out of the run entirely. It would have been easy. I had a long list of reasonable excuses: a busy week, tired legs, the kind of low-grade exhaustion that doesn’t show up on paper but lives somewhere in your chest. The kind that makes even small things feel heavier than they should.

But I went anyway.

Not with enthusiasm. Not with the clean, motivated energy I used to have when running felt like joy rather than obligation. I went the way you go when you know you should, even when every part of you is negotiating an exit.

And from the very first step, I was struggling.

The honest truth about falling out of rhythm

I had been skipping my runs.

Not dramatically. Not with any grand decision or injury to blame. Just quietly, gradually, the way we let things slip when life gets loud. A walk here instead of a run. A rest day that stretched into several. The slow erosion of a habit I had worked hard to build.

And the thing about falling out of rhythm is that it doesn’t just affect your body.

It affects your relationship with yourself.

There’s a particular kind of guilt that comes from knowing what you’re capable of and choosing the easier thing anyway. It’s not loud guilt. It doesn’t announce itself. It just sits quietly in the background, coloring everything with a faint shade of I should be doing better than this.

So there I was. Out on the road. Headphones in. Legs heavy. Mind negotiating.

Just get to the next block. Then you can turn around.

And then a car slowed down.

A honk cut through my music and I startled, the involuntary full-body flinch of someone pulled suddenly out of their own head.

I braced myself. Because honestly, when a car slows down beside a woman running alone, you brace yourself. That’s just the world we live in.

But instead of what I feared.

“Keep it up. You’re doing amazing.”

And then they drove away.

Just like that.

A stranger. Someone who owed me absolutely nothing. Who had no idea what kind of week I’d had, what I was negotiating in my own head, how close I was to turning around and going home.

They just, saw me. And said something.

I stood there for a moment, almost laughing at the surprise of it.

Then I put one foot in front of the other and kept going.

How did they know?

That’s the question I couldn’t shake for the rest of the run.

How did they know I needed that?

And the longer I ran with it, the clearer the answer became:

They didn’t.

That’s the whole point.

They didn’t know I was struggling. They didn’t know I had almost stayed home. They didn’t know that their five words were going to be the thing that carried me through the second half of a run I had almost given up on.

They just saw a person and chose to say something kind. Without calculation. Without knowing what it would mean. Without needing anything in return.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

And somehow, that’s the most profound part of it.

What kindness actually is

We talk about kindness like it’s a grand gesture. A donation, a sacrifice, a significant act of generosity that requires something substantial from us.

But the stranger in the car didn’t give me anything that cost them more than ten seconds and a breath of air.

They just paid attention and then acted on what they noticed.

That’s all kindness ever really is.

Attention, followed by action.

I think about how many moments in a day we notice something, someone struggling, someone doing their best, someone who looks like they could use a word, and we don’t say anything. Not out of cruelty. Just out of the habit of moving through the world in our own heads, consumed by our own narratives, assuming someone else will say something, or that it isn’t our place, or that they probably don’t need it anyway.

But what if they do?

What if the person you pass every morning on your way into the office is two seconds from their breaking point?

What if the colleague who seems fine isn’t fine?

What if the stranger running down the road is quietly negotiating with themselves about whether to keep going?

You’ll never know. That’s the whole point. You give it anyway.

Never give up on humanity

I finished the run.

Not gracefully. Not fast. But I finished and I carried that stranger with me for every step of the second half.

When I got home, I sat with it for a while. The way you sit with something that surprises you into feeling more than you expected to feel.

And I thought about all the times the world has felt heavy lately. The news cycles that make you want to look away. The cruelty that seems to travel faster than kindness. The moments that make you question whether people are fundamentally good or fundamentally exhausted or fundamentally something else entirely.

And then I thought about a car that slowed down on a quiet road.

And five words from a stranger who owed me nothing.

And I shook my head and made myself a quiet promise:

Never give up on humanity.

Because kindness still exists. It still moves through the world freely, finding people in the moments they need it most, from sources they never would have predicted.

Sometimes it finds you in a therapist’s office or a best friend’s kitchen or a long conversation with someone who loves you.

And sometimes…

It finds you on a run you almost didn’t take. From a stranger you’ll probably never see again. Who had no idea what they gave you.

That’s the gift. That’s always been the gift.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of unexpected kindness from a stranger? Or been the person who chose to say something when you didn’t have to? I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

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And if this resonated, share it with someone who needs a reminder today that humanity is still worth believing in. 🌿

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This essay was inspired by a question asked in her chat this past week. Thank you Florence!

Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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This Mother’s Day, I’m not celebrating the perfect mother.

I’m celebrating Sarah.

I don’t even know her last name. We met once, twelve years ago, at a park near our children’s elementary school. She sat down at my picnic table, we exchanged hellos, and somewhere between the kids playing and the afternoon light fading, she told me her story.

I have never forgotten it.

It was a routine we had that school year, my three children and I. After the bell rang, we would walk to the park and let them run and play before heading home for homework and dinner. It was a small thing. But those small things held us together.

Sarah appeared one afternoon, her kids about the same age as mine. She seemed younger than me. We started talking the way mothers do at parks — easily, without agenda, the way strangers sometimes open up to each other precisely because they will probably never meet again.

She told me she was newly remarried.

I said — oh, what happened? Because she seemed so young.

And that’s when she told me.

Her first husband was loving at the beginning. Attentive. Present.

Also a little controlling. But she was young, and she told herself that was just how he was. That it would soften with time.

It didn’t.

After their first child, a boy, the control tightened. After their second, a girl, it became something else entirely. He started hitting her. His reasoning — if you could call it that — was that she was too focused on the children and not enough on him.

She became, in her own words, very amiable. She did everything she could to manage his moods, to anticipate his anger, to make herself as small and frictionless as possible. She walked on eggshells every single day. She learned the geography of his emotions the way you learn a dangerous road: every curve, every drop, every place where things could go wrong.

And still it wasn’t enough.

She didn’t know where to turn. Who would believe her? He was charming to everyone outside their home. Generous. Well-liked. The kind of man people described as a good provider, a good husband. The kind of man no one questioned.

That detail landed in me like a stone dropping into still water.

Because I knew something about that. About living inside a life that looked fine from the outside. About the particular loneliness of not being able to name what was wrong because nothing, on paper, was wrong. About carrying something heavy in a room full of people who couldn’t see the weight.

I said nothing. I just listened.

Sarah only had a high school diploma. She had left a job to care for the children. She had no financial independence, no clear exit, no one she felt safe enough to tell.

But she had something else.

A plan.

She enrolled at the local community college without telling him. Quietly. Carefully. She had decided she would become a nurse. She chose the future she wanted and began walking toward it in secret, one class at a time.

For two years, she endured.

For two years, she held her breath and her tongue and her ground.

For two years, she held onto her children like a compass, reminding herself, every hard day, what she was doing this for and where she was going.

She never wavered.

When she finished, she found a job at a hospital. She began preparing. She said nothing, showed nothing, gave him no reason to suspect that the woman walking on eggshells in his house was also quietly, methodically building her way out.

And then one day, while he was at work, she packed her children and what little she could carry.

And she left.

I sat across from her at that picnic table, watching our children play in the late afternoon sun, and I was simply in awe.

In awe of her strength. In awe of her patience with a plan. In awe of the particular kind of courage it takes to survive something while simultaneously building your escape from it.

I didn’t ask for more details. I didn’t need them. What she had given me was already more than I could hold.

Because here is the truth I have never written down until now:

Sarah’s story didn’t just move me. It stirred something in me.

I too was living inside a life that looked fine from the outside. I too had left a job and found myself financially dependent, with three children and a husband who was often absent — traveling for work, coming and going — while I held everything together alone. I too knew the particular silence of not being able to complain, because on paper, everything was provided for.

I hadn’t found my courage yet. My culture told me this was simply how it was. That staying was loyalty. That this was the shape of a marriage.

But Sarah sat down at my table that afternoon and showed me another shape was possible.

She didn’t know she was doing it. She was just telling her story to a stranger at a park. But she walked into my life at exactly the right moment, handed me something I didn’t know I needed, and then walked back into hers.

I never saw her again.

I never forgot her.

This Mother’s Day, I’m celebrating Sarah.

And every mother like her. The ones living in impossible situations, holding their children close, making a plan no one knows about yet, surviving one day at a time.

The ones who look fine from the outside. The ones who are anything but. The ones who are walking, slowly and without applause, toward something better.

Financial freedom is not just an ambition. For some mothers, it is a lifeline. A door. The difference between staying and leaving. Between enduring and living.

Sarah knew that before she had the words for it.

She built her freedom one nursing class at a time, in secret, while the world saw only a compliant wife.

That is not weakness.

That is the most extraordinary kind of strength I have ever witnessed.

I admired her then, at that picnic table, watching our children play.

I admire her today. 🤍

This Mother’s Day, who is the woman you’re celebrating? The one whose strength the world didn’t see? I’d love to know. 🤍

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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I have a thing for cabins by the lake.

I don’t know exactly when it started—this pull toward still water and tall trees and the particular quiet that exists nowhere else. But it lives in me like a compass needle, always pointing in the same direction. When I imagine peace, truly imagine it, it looks like a lake at dawn.

So in the summer of 2022, when I sat down to plan our family vacation, I already knew, somewhere deep and unhurried, where I needed to go.

I had been on a journey of self-discovery for a while by then. Reading voraciously. Asking harder questions. Slowly, quietly beginning to understand that some of what I had accepted as normal was not the only way things could be.

I was yearning for peace. Not the performative kind—the kind you announce on social media. The real kind. The kind that settles into your bones and stays.

I had a choice to make. I could plan the kind of vacation my kids would talk about for years—theme parks, cities, spectacle. I had always done that. Always put them first. Always placed myself last, if I placed myself at all.

Or I could be, just this once, a little selfish.

I chose the lake.

Entourage Sur Le Lac sits in Lac Beauport, thirty minutes from Quebec City. I found it online, half-dreaming, clicking through photographs of still water and green mountains and red Adirondack chairs lined up at the edge of the lawn like they were waiting for someone.

They were waiting for me.

As soon as we arrived, I knew I had made the right choice. What I didn’t know, couldn’t have known, was what the place was about to do to me.

My mornings were slow in a way I had forgotten was possible.

I would wake before the kids, make coffee or tea, and carry it out to the terrace. The lake would be covered in dew, catching the early light in a way that made it look like something out of a dream. The birds were already awake. The trees were already breathing. And I would sit there, hands wrapped around my cup, and simply exist.

No agenda. No one needing anything from me. No version of myself required except the quiet one—the one who had been waiting, patiently, for years.

In those mornings I began to dream. Not the anxious kind of dreaming, the kind that comes with a to-do list attached. Real dreaming. The kind where you let yourself want things. A life with more space in it. More peace. More of exactly this feeling—that anything was possible, that I was not yet finished, that something was beginning.

It was the first time in as long as I could remember that I had sat still long enough to hear myself think.

One afternoon, I got into a kayak for the first time in my life.

I didn’t know what to expect. I paddled out slowly, finding my balance, getting used to the way the water moved beneath me. And then, almost without deciding to, I stopped.

I was near the middle of the lake. The hotel sat in the distance, framed by forest and mountain and open sky. My children were somewhere on the shore, happy, occupied, not needing me for once. And I was there—suspended between water and sky, held by something I couldn’t name.

I closed my eyes.

What came was not what I expected. It was not purely peaceful. It was grief and relief arriving at the same time, tangled together, impossible to separate.

Grief. Because somewhere in those years of reading, of slowly learning what love was supposed to feel like, I had come to understand that what I was living was not it. And grieving a familiar life, even an unloving one, is still grief. You mourn the version of yourself that stayed. You mourn the years. You mourn the simplicity of not yet knowing what you now cannot unknow.

And relief—quiet, tentative, but real—because I could feel, there on that water, that another direction existed. That I was allowed to choose it. That choosing it was not betrayal or failure or selfishness. It was survival. It was the first honest thing.

I didn’t have the language for any of this in that moment. I understand it now, looking back, the way you understand certain things only after you’ve moved through them.

What I knew then was simpler. I stopped paddling. I closed my eyes. And I let whatever needed to arrive, arrive.

The moment felt longer than it was. It always does, when something important is happening.

I still go back there sometimes. On the hard days, when life presses in from all sides, I close my eyes and I am back in the middle of that lake. Sky above. Water below. Everything, for one breath, still.

The forest walks were their own kind of medicine.

I followed the guide through trees older than anything I had ever stood next to, taking notes and photographs of plants and fruits I didn’t recognize, feeling the particular wonder of being a student of the world again. At one point I wanted to lie down on the fallen leaves and simply sleep there. To let the forest hold me. To disappear into it, just for an hour.

I didn’t. But I wanted to. And wanting to felt like something.

I left Lac Beauport happy and a little dizzy—the way you feel after something significant has shifted inside you but you can’t yet see its full shape.

Quebec City planted seeds I wouldn’t fully understand for months, maybe years. Seeds for this writing. For the self-discovery journey I am still on. For the version of me that is slowly, deliberately, emerging—the one who chooses herself not out of selfishness but out of the deep understanding that she was never meant to come last.

I did not know, paddling back to shore that afternoon, that I had just begun something.

But I had.

And I am still becoming what that lake started. 🌊

Has a place ever cracked you open unexpectedly? I’d love to know where it was and what it gave you. 🌊

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so gad you’re here.

Odile

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Last weekend, my daughters and I were invited to celebrate a 70th birthday.

Not just any birthday. A survival birthday.

Ms. Pierre had just come through a cancer diagnosis, chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. She was on the other side of it — standing, smiling, and very much still here. And the people who love her wanted to make sure she knew it.

We are not related to Ms. Pierre. Not by blood, not by paperwork.

We met three years ago through our daughters — her grand niece and my daughter, crossing paths at volleyball matches the way mothers and aunts do, standing on the sidelines, eventually talking, eventually laughing, eventually becoming something that doesn’t have a clean name but feels very much like family.

That’s the thing about living far from home — far from the relatives who knew you before you became who you are now. It can feel lonely in ways that are hard to explain to people who have never experienced it. I’ve learned to power through. But I’m not always successful. And so when I find people who feel like home, I hold onto them. Quietly, fiercely, gratefully.

Ms. Pierre is one of those people.

The celebration was a tea party — elegant, intentional, and deserving of a photo spread in a garden magazine.

We were encouraged to wear colorful clothes and hats. The flower arrangements ran the full length of the dining table like a meadow had decided to move indoors — roses and daisies and wildflowers in every shade of pink and lavender and cream. Blue florals cascaded from the ceiling. The food was prepared with the kind of care that makes you close your eyes on the first bite. The desserts — layered parfaits, cupcakes crowned with butterfly decorations, miniature works of art — looked almost too beautiful to eat.

Almost.

But more than the flowers, more than the food, more than the exquisite dessert tower — it was the atmosphere that I will carry with me. Warm. Unhurried. Full of laughter and stories of past travels and the particular ease that comes when you are surrounded by people who truly see each other.

When it came time to present Ms. Pierre with her flowers — her real flowers, the ones made of words — there was not a dry eye in the room.

We took turns. Each person standing up, finding the words, letting her know what she means to us. What her generosity has done. How her presence has shaped us. How deeply, completely she is loved.

She was beaming. The kind of joy that doesn’t perform itself — it just spills out, quiet and bright and unmistakable.

Then came the music.

Haitian music — old songs, the kind that carry an entire world inside them. The family came from Haiti, and its culture lives in them the way culture does when you’ve had to carry it far from where it was born. The music filled the room and people began to dance. And something shifted in the air — something loosened. Joy became movement. Memory became present.

I felt it in my own body. That particular ache and warmth of watching people connect to where they come from. Of being welcomed into someone else’s culture and feeling, for a moment, like you belong there too.

I will never forget it.

I wrote recently about my aunt Sophie.(You can read the article here)

About standing in a hospital room in Cameroon, holding her hand, flooded with everything I had never said. About how she was gone the very next day. About the price of silence. The cost of waiting.

Ms. Pierre’s birthday celebration felt like the other side of that story.

This is what it looks like when we don’t wait.

When we gather while everyone is still here. When we say the words out loud — not in eulogies, not in hospital rooms, not in the quiet aftermath of loss — but in the middle of living. Over tea and flowers and Haitian music and desserts that are almost too beautiful to eat.

Give your loved ones their flowers today.

Not when they’re gone. Not when the room is quiet and the words come too late.

Tell them. Show up for them. Dance with them. Let them know, in whatever language love speaks in your family, that they are seen and cherished and irreplaceable.

Life is fleeting. Anything can happen to anyone at any time.

Ms. Pierre knows this. And she was beaming.

That is the lesson I’m carrying home. 🌸

Who is the person in your life who deserves their flowers today? 🌸

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m so glad you’re here.

Odile

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Not because I have any particular affinity for physics or mathematics. Honestly, numbers and I have always had a complicated relationship. But something about his story pulled me in. The way he saw the world differently. The way he questioned what everyone else accepted as fixed and certain.

And then I stumbled onto his relationship with his own mind.

The way he described thought experiments — entire universes playing out in his imagination before a single equation was written. The way he trusted his intuition as much as his intellect. The way he seemed to understand, almost intuitively, that the mind operates on levels we can barely articulate.

That’s when I fell down the rabbit hole.

And I haven’t climbed back out yet.

I thought I knew how my brain worked.

Twenty years of professional experience. Two decades of navigating corporate environments, leading teams, crafting messages. I assumed that somewhere along the way, I had figured out how I think. How I react. How I make decisions.

I was wrong.

Because here is what neuroscience is quietly, persistently teaching me:

Most of what drives us was written long before we had any say in it.

I was nine years old when my father died.

He was smart. Loving. A man who believed his most important job was to take care of his family — and he was doing exactly that. I remember him taking me and my little brother to visit a private school he thought would be better for us. He had plans. He was building something.

And then he was gone.

No one sat us down and talked about it. There were no conversations about grief, about fear, about what happens to a family when the person holding it together suddenly isn’t there anymore. It was quietly absorbed. We were left alone with it. And life continued, the way life does, whether you’re ready or not.

My mother was left with four children of her own and three stepchildren. And she carried it. All of it. Without showing fear. Without falling apart in front of us—or if she did, she made sure we never saw it.

I understand now, having children of my own, what that must have cost her. The weight she moved through every single day while making it look like solid ground. I couldn’t see it then. I can see it now with a clarity that takes my breath away.

She was extraordinary. She was doing the best she could with the cards she had been dealt.

But the child watching her—the nine year old who lost her father and was never given space to grieve—absorbed something else too.

She absorbed scarcity. She absorbed fear. She absorbed the quiet belief that there was never quite enough—enough money, enough safety, enough certainty that everything was going to be alright.

And that belief grew up with her.

For a long time, I carried a voice inside me that whispered—you are not enough.

Not successful enough. Not capable enough. Certainly not enough to build the kind of financial security my father had been building before he was taken. That felt like something that happened to other people. People who came from different circumstances. People who had not learned, early and without words, that the ground beneath you can disappear without warning.

There were seasons of my life—particularly in my closest relationships—where that voice was loudest. Where I learned to make myself small. Where vulnerability felt dangerous rather than connective, because it had too often been used against me. Where I poured myself into being enough for everyone else, because being enough for myself felt like a luxury I hadn’t earned.

I didn’t have the language for any of this then.

Neuroscience is giving me the language now.

What I carried wasn’t weakness. It was wiring. Neural pathways laid down in childhood, deepened by experience, reinforced by repetition, until they felt less like beliefs and more like facts. Less like a story I was telling myself and more like the truth of who I was.

But here is what neuroscience is also teaching me:

The brain is not fixed.

It can change. It can rewire. It can build new pathways where old ones once felt like the only road.

That realization landed in me like a door opening in a room I had forgotten was there.

I started meditating at the beginning of this year. Consistently, for the first time.

I wasn’t sure what I expected. But what I discovered surprised me.

There are moments, in the stillness, when something shifts. When my body responds in a way that feels almost independent of me—calmer, quieter, more spacious than my usual self. Like watching the river from the bank instead of being pulled along by the current.

It’s subtle. And it’s real.

And it’s teaching me that the person I have been is not the only person I can be.

I am learning — slowly, imperfectly, with a great deal of patience for myself — to design a version of me that is kinder to who I am. More courageous. Less afraid. More willing to take up the space I was always allowed to take, but never quite believed I deserved.

I am still just at the beginning. Still trying to figure it out. Still becoming a person I am proud of.

But I am grateful. Genuinely, deeply grateful that I get to create a new version of me—while being gentle to the version of me that didn’t know better.

I want to hold her and tell her it’ll be okay.

And I think, finally, she is starting to believe it.

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Have you ever stumbled onto something that completely shifted how you see yourself? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. I have a feeling I’m not alone in this. 🤍

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