Real Talk

I always thought something was wrong with me because I never had the best friend I saw on TV. Then, 13 years after study abroad, I walked back into a room with my people and had to rethink everything I believed about connection.

I lost my job and my mom got cancer in the same year. It was the collapse of everything I'd built for stability and the thing that finally broke me out of someday thinking for good.

You got the thing. And then nothing landed the way you thought it would. Here's what the arrival fallacy actually explains about why achieving goals doesn't make you happy and the one question that finally breaks the cycle.

I tried morning pages as a burned-out overachiever who had already tried everything else. They didn't fix me but they made it impossible to keep lying to myself. Here's my honest review, including the three things I changed that made them actually work.

January is loud. Everyone seems to have a plan, a vision, a glow-up timeline. Meanwhile, I’m sitting with a cup of tea, watching the trees rest, wondering why we expect ourselves to bloom on command.

This is a reflection from the space between endings and beginnings — about pressure, self-trust, and what it means to build a life without forcing clarity before it arrives.

A reflective essay on how loss became a language of its own — from losing a phone in a Scottish bog to losing jobs and identities years later. A story of creative recovery, writing as an anchor, and learning to live through the in-between.

October keeps pruning my life back to what's real. This year, it isn't a job, a place, or a person I need to release. It's fear — and the joy it's been quietly stealing from me.

By society’s standards, I’m a loser — unemployed, living at home, writing from the same bedroom I grew up in. For a long time, I carried the weight of that label like proof I’d fallen behind. But the truth? Living at home became the foundation for everything beautiful, brave, and free about my life. This Tiny Rebellion is about redefining what “making it” really means — and learning that sometimes, coming home is the most radical move of all.

One cruel moment at a middle school lunch table left me afraid to be seen for twenty years. Here's what The Artist's Way helped me finally understand about creative self-worth and the fear behind the publish button.

I used to think my dream life would begin when I “made it.” But sitting here in Rockport with coffee in hand, seagulls overhead and salt air filling my lungs, I realized: this is it. The dream life isn’t pinned to a board—it’s rooted in presence, contentment, and creativity.

When my mom was diagnosed with cancer and I was laid off four months later, I learned something I didn't expect: crisis doesn't just shift your priorities — it reshapes your relationships entirely.

Somewhere between 26 and 32, I started shrinking my desires, believing I was too old, too late, too much. But I’m learning that wanting isn’t dangerous—and naming what we want is its own quiet rebellion.

In Glasgow, I learned the difference between being alone and being lonely. Often, I am asked how I handle being alone on the road. In this post, I try to answer this question by discussing my experiences tackling these issues.