There are few things less dignified than wondering where a man is after you have already disentangled your life from his.

He is somewhere. Probably wearing shoes. Perhaps eating. A thriving mystery.

For a while, though, some part of my brain still treated his whereabouts as relevant information. Where is he? What is he doing? And eventually I realized every one of those questions had the same problem: they were about him.

We had already divided the life. The plans. The future tense. And yet apparently nobody had collected his keycard to my brain.

So I started practicing something that initially felt almost cruel: not caring. Not pretending not to care. Actually declining the inquiry.

Where is he? I don’t know. What is he doing? No idea. Who is he with? Godspeed. Completely disengaging from all interaction with the idea has become a whole new freedom in itself.

I am not interested in becoming colder. I am interested in belonging to myself again.

Because attention is a form of possession. What I rehearse in my head, what I allow to alter the temperature of my day—those things begin to own a little piece of me. And let me tell you, he already had enough.

He had years and we had vows. Vows said before an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas, but I’m pretty sure those count. He had access to my body, my loyalty, my plans, my tenderness, my fear, my future. He does not also get my Wednesday afternoon.

There is something almost embarrassingly sensual about realizing this. My attention comes back into my own body. The taste of coffee in my mouth. The scent of my body oil on my bare legs. An entire evening ahead of me, with nobody else living inside it unless I approve their invite.

I used to think freedom meant being allowed to leave. Now I think another kind begins when you stop carrying the person with you.

Not because you forgive everything. Not because you’ve reached some enlightened state of compassion. Sometimes a man simply no longer deserves this much interior real estate.

And slowly, but not imperceptibly, your life stops facing in his direction.

Not caring about him does not make me less loving. It gives me back ownership of myself—my thoughts, my craving, my own desires. My body. My day.

So every once in a blue moon when my brain occasionally asks, out of old habit, Where is he?

The answer is becoming very simple.

Not here. But I am.

The maddening thing about pleasure is that it’s rarely waiting in the shallow end. It’s an ocean, and it doesn’t truly begin until you’re past the break.

A couple of weeks ago, I set off for an urgently needed mini-retreat to the Mexican Caribbean. After six months of spinning plates and making money moves, I found that my executive function was hitting a wall, and all ability to create was at a total standstill. I needed a break.

I was trying to escape into this lofty place inside my head where ultimate productivity might finally unlock ultimate creativity. I wanted to write more, read more, travel more, learn, earn, and somehow experience everything available to me.

But in pursuit of experiencing everything, I had started experiencing the easiest version of things.

I listened to books instead of sitting down to read them, so I could multi-task. I typed into digital journals instead of writing by hand. Every tool promised to help me do more, and I accepted the promise without asking what all that efficiency was costing me.

I wasn’t exactly living less. I was living more constantly, but maybe with less depth—skimming across the surface of a life I thought I was living in more fully.

Once home, I began slowly peeling back my reliance on things engineered to keep cueing that sweet, sweet dopamine hit and returning to the ones that asked something of me first. I want to allow myself to grow, change and adapt without abandoning the old routines that require a little more effort to access. They provide something deeper and slower-burning.

Which brings me, naturally, to the incredibly lovely man whose head was buried between my legs the night before.

I had laid my head back as his tongue moved over my clit again and again, patiently, while some vigilant little part of my mind remained hovering above the experience—watching, anticipating, trying to control how the pleasure was going to happen instead of allowing myself to disappear into it.

Letting go required more mental gymnastics and much more intentional effort than taking the quick, superficial route of having a controlled, “pretty” orgasm. I had to stop monitoring every sensation, stop trying to direct my body toward its destination, and let myself engage on a deeper level.

The moment I finally surrendered, the sensation exploded, carrying me past the break and into the deep. Pleasure opened into more pleasure, radiating outward until it was everywhere—so intense and complete that the smaller orgasms I’d had just an hour before felt like they all stopped mid-way. Pleasant enough, technically successful, but only shallow impressions of what was waiting underneath.

Apparently, the difference between a half orgasm and an earth-shattering one is not unlike the difference between consuming a life and inhabiting one.

Both require presence. Both require a willingness to remain inside an experience after an easily available reward has already been presented. And both are made more difficult by the part of my brain that insists on hovering above everything, directing traffic.

These are the things I’m considering from another escape, although this one was technically for work. Work I’m lucky enough to do with a man’s head between my thighs.

Los Angeles is definitely of the West Coast in the same way Seattle is, but she’s a very sexy Seattle who gets lots of sunlight, wears fewer hoodies, and gets a cheeky little tan too. She’s Seattle’s extremely cool stepsister who was doing the coolest things way too early for her age. She’s just so goddamn cool.

At the time of writing most of this, I was sitting in a private little jungle oasis off Santa Monica Boulevard called “In The Woods”—owned by actor Woody Harrelson— that is also a weed café with a full coffee and food menu. Like a bar, but instead of that bottom-shelf liquor smell that the good dive bars always have, you’re instead surrounded by plants and are served whatever the fuck kind of joint you can dream up.

And what was I having? (Other than a delightful little marijuana cigarette of course.) An almond-milk cappuccino. It might just be the most LA thing I’ve ever done.

There is something wonderfully absurd about contemplating the spiritual importance of friction while sitting beneath tropical foliage with a cappuccino and a joint. But perhaps that is also very LA: earnest self-examination conducted somewhere so thoughtfully designed for pleasure that it borders on parody.

Afterward, I went thrift shopping! When in Rome . . .

There, I stumbled upon what I can only assume is the country’s precious strategic poncho reserve.

I also found several little crop tops, which I would later fulfill my patriotic duty by wearing without a bra.

Later, back at my temporary home at the Hollywood Grande, I planned to finish an overpriced in-room movie, fold my newly thrifted crop tops, and settle into bed before the long haul across the country the next day.

The overpriced movie in question was Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and it is largely about what happens when we stop being present in our own reality and take the easiest possible route toward everything.

Which I did not, ironically enough, choose based on my current circumstance, but it was a delightful little surprise.

A part of the story was about a man who says he doesn’t believe in phones in a world consumed by them even more than our own who, by freak coincidence, tries a virtual-reality set. The experience is so good that he gives up his actual life and all his belongings, leaves the love of his life, and chooses to live in the virtual world permanently and abandon his body in the traditional sense.

It is pure and simple addiction: a drug that removes every imaginable struggle and hardship and replaces them with a lovely, euphoric happiness. No more lows and nothing but highs. Why wouldn’t you sometimes want that?

It is an uncomfortable question when so much of modern life is designed to offer exactly that bargain in miniature. Why struggle through a book when I can listen at twice the speed? Why endure boredom, uncertainty, or the possibility of failure when I can reach for a little glowing portal engineered to replace all three?

None of those substitutions is inherently terrible. Some are enormously useful. The danger is in mistaking access for intimacy, and information for understanding. Constant stimulation for a life fully experienced.

I encountered a similar idea in The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis—a book that I have not yet finished, in true lazy-girl-wants-to-be-a-better-human fashion. In both stories, people are lost inside worlds of entertainment, distraction, and whatever else allows them to wander through a blissful wasteland unaware. A life that is frictionless and devoid of pain. Again, a little voice cries out, “Why wouldn’t you want that?”

In The Great Divorce, the souls of the dead are divided between Heaven—and all of its orgasmic greatness—and Hell, which offers an on-demand version of anything you want, only grayer and more “meh.” They can choose to visit heaven at any time—and even stay there—with one caveat: getting past the lobby and into the hills of heaven hurts. The ghosts are so insubstantial that grass cuts their feet and rain passes through them like bullets, and staying requires them to surrender the familiar little miseries that made their private hells comfortable.

The pain is not evidence that they don’t belong in Heaven. What keeps them out is their unwillingness to endure the discomfort of becoming capable of inhabiting it.

I think I wanted my emergency retreat to deliver me directly into the life I had been constructing: rested, creative, endlessly curious, and wildly capable of doing everything. But perhaps there is no such a direct route. Maybe I can’t optimize myself into it, because the very things I’m trying to optimize away—effort, boredom, uncertainty, repetition, even frustration—are what give the experience weight.

The retreat gave me the interruption I needed. What comes afterward is less cinematic: writing by hand, reading with my eyes, and resisting the impulse to turn every minute of my life into evidence of progress.

The goal is not to become less ambitious or less curious, or even less willing to change. Being able to constantly grow and change is part of what I think makes this one beautiful life of mine so very sweet. The goal is to stop abandoning the slower parts of myself every time a more efficient version becomes available.

I still want the enormous life. I still want to read everything, write everything, travel everywhere, learn more, and experience as much as one life can contain.

I just don’t want to experience the half-orgasm version of it.

As a friend once told me long ago, when life derails well-laid plans, a pessimist will see a disaster, but an optimist sees an adventure.

Sometimes people who grow up in chaos create order. And for some of us with strict military parents, people who grow up in order create chaos. And as a woman who has chosen an unconventional life, that is what my life evolved to be: chaos inside order with a healthy dash of pure unadulterated freedom.

But a woman can choose freedom and still need structure. Unfortunately, there are significantly less well-worn roadmaps to happiness in this type of life. In fact, perhaps the more freedom she chooses, the more deliberately she has to build the structure that holds it piece by piece, based on life experience, smart choices, but also desire and intuition. She has to be more intentional with how she lives her life. Because I most certainly did not choose the ‘normal’ path. And the other women that did the same don’t always leave directions to follow in their footsteps.

I’m also remembering that not every “bad” outcome is a problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes you just have to become curious about what else can be done with it instead.

When life gives you lemons, sometimes lemonade feels like an unreasonable amount of effort. So instead, I just say ‘That’ll do,’ and order a shot of tequila.

But she made it!

Lots of love from Mexico,

Very spontaneous. Bohemian, even. Very follow the TSA PreCheck line all the way home though, too.

I’m beginning to suspect that the opposite of control isn’t chaos so much as occasionally trusting the first answer, so, in that vein, I offer you these two beauties from my last shoot.

(Also me before donning a soaking wet, freezing cold t-shirt for the rest of the shoot. More to come ... )

And as fun as it is to drop photo bombshells, I’d pictured this whole thing unfolding rather differently.

Something more slow, seductive and poised, like a burlesque dancer peeling off a glove. A little skin here, a pop of color there, glitter floating down like powdered snow. Some especially fleshy tidbits about who I am and what surrounds me.

Instead, I’m interrupting myself. Because this sudden escape, brought to you by Emergency Retreats for Workaholics Presents, in association with Take a Damn Break Already, may tell you more about me than any polished introduction could.

The last six months have been a blur of airplanes, tight dresses, dog parks, Ubers, strip club VIP rooms, hotel suites, spreadsheets, new beginnings, very old problems, and an increasingly ambitious experiment in exactly how close to the sun I can girlboss before my Louboutins catch fire.

Somewhere in there, I’ve started over in a new city and moved twice. Re-established my business. Passed exams. Started my first retirement plan. Made decisions that felt brave, reckless, and a few that were almost certainly both.

There is something mysterious and powerful about the woman who can handle everything on her plate and still keep all the others spinning. She gets on the plane. She runs the prediction models. She makes the analysis. She teaches herself the new skill. She finds the sold-out dress somewhere else. She figures it out. And at several places in between, she waits patiently while the cashier opens the till for the first time that day to accept cash payments with hundred dollar bills.

But eventually, even she starts fantasizing about nothing more ambitious than lying horizontally beside the Caribbean.

So that is what I’m doing.

I’m taking a week to ingest the fact that an enormous amount of life has happened in a very short time. To sleep. To swim. To write, or to not write, and mostly to read. Almost certainly not to run my phone out of full battery power twice a day.

And while I’m there, I think I’m going to tell you about it. Not chronologically, and probably not in any sensible order. Through the strange little moments that stayed with me: the difference between constructing a beautiful life and actually inhabiting one; what ambition costs; what freedom costs; how allure and temptation allow intelligence to bleed into sexuality; and why betting on yourself can feel an awful lot like gambling when the stakes are your own life.

Apparently you’re meeting me somewhere between a spreadsheet and the skinny margarita.

The elbow-length gloves will have to wait.

Some women keep diaries. I’ve always preferred correspondence. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing photographs that have remained tucked away, stories that refuse to behave themselves, cities that continue to seduce me, and the beautiful things that insist on stealing my attention.

Consider this an open invitation to follow along. After all, the best affairs rarely begin all at once.

Lots of love,