I am a 29 year old teenage girl who knows very little about a lot, but I do know how to pay attention. I know what has transformed my life the most has been learning to hold beauty in one hand and grief in the other. I know that what I write on Substack comes from the most solid place within myself, and writing these posts helps me to step into that woman more and more each time. And I know that I feel most alive when I’m engaging with ideas; noodling on them, sharing them, turning them into something new.

But, in the spirit, of never positioning myself as someone with all the answers, I wanted to start a new series here—my monthly marginalia—to capture some of the observations and ideas and memories that feel alive for me each month. I want to share them in case you’re noodling on anything similar, to give you a preview of thoughts that could turn into essays later, and to create a space where we can wonder and find connections together without the pressure to have things fully figured out. There are many places where performance is mandatory, but not in this room, my friends.

Here is my May 2026 Marginalia—if I had to give it a theme, it’d be something along the lines of creating conditions that make life feel more spacious, meaningful and bearable, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

We Need to Have More Fun

I’ve been thinking about the different kinds of realizations have fully unblocked parts of me and parts of my life over the years; lessons that, once you internalize, permanently change how safe you feel with yourself, the ones that suddenly make you feel like you don’t need to watch everything you say and do and think in order for you to belong, and be okay. Looking back now, life used to be so much more uncomfortable, and so stressful! And I used to think the solution was to watch everything I said and did until I just stopped saying and doing stupid shit. I was like, surely once my frontal lobe is developed, no more awful decisions will be made again!

What I see now though is that what loosens a life, what loosens your self-surveillance, is not the elimination of whatever you perceive is wrong with you, it’s just adjusting the terms of your relationship to what about you feels tight and scary and urgent.

There may always be a part of me that feels drawn to imagining myself through others eyes, to getting ahead of perceived—or anticipated—judgements. But this pattern doesn’t feel as life-or-death as it used to. At this point, I only notice myself slipping back into it in a hypervigilant way if I’ve really deprioritized enjoying my life. Once I re-focus on what I would actually enjoy doing in my free time during my days, others’ opinions mean absolutely nothing to me.

I’m saying this as much as a reminder to myself, as insight for you to try too. I have not been prioritizing enjoying my life as much in the last few weeks, and I am FEELING it, and I will be recommitting my energy toward having more fun this week.

“There is much pain in the world, but not in this room.”

I saw this quote on a Tik Tok earlier this month, and it just stuck with me. Upon further investigation, it appears this quote came from a recent Creator Week Africa panel with women in the music industry in South Africa. I just love the sentiment, I want it framed in a poster in my living room, and it left me with a lot of questions:

How does a room become a place for pain to be set down? How do we become the kind of people that can create an environment for others to put things down, and how can we be the kind of person who can hold something for others for a moment without carrying its weight into other areas of our lives?

How do we hold heavy things with responsibility, letting people in without handing them all the weight? When is the right time to share something hard? How do you find your balance again after losing someone who was “in” on it? Where are there more rooms where pain can be set aside? How do we find them? How do we invite others into them? How sustainable are these rooms? Or are these rooms ones that can only be held together for an evening at a time, ones that need time to gather their walls and their sturdiness before they can be a place for pain to be set down again?

Finding Ritual in The Doolough Valley

In 2023, my Dad and I headed out for a two week trip to Ireland. It was meant to be a celebration of my college graduation back in 2019, but we had deferred it a year while I got my feet under me professionally, and then the pandemic hit, so we put the trip on pause for a few years, and then finally made it happen in April 2023.

The most meaningful part of our whole trip took place in the Doolough Valley in County Mayo. After a drive through the Mweelrea Mountains and Sheeffry Hills along the Wild Atlantic Way, we reached the Famine Memorial. We knew ahead of time—thanks to our trusty guide Rick Steves—that the memorial was described as “haunting,” but stepping out of the car with the wind whipping through the valley, not another car in sight, and the ground as rocky and dry as we’d ever seen along that road, that sense of desolation was thick in the air.

It’s a site of tragedy; starving residents living in the valley were told they would only be given food if they walked 19km to Delphi on a freezing night through the Doolough Valley, and many didn’t survive the walk, nor did many even receive food when they arrived.

When we approached the the Celtic cross marking the memorial, we noticed stones stacked on the ledge of the cross, and it was clear to me that this was a way to pay respect to those who passed—by pausing a moment with a stone in hand, offering them what we could: acknowledgement.

As I turned to my Dad, we were both holding back tears, and I imagined the emotion welling up within us as not ours, but the parts of us that those ancestors who survived the Famine passed down to us—a kind of gratitude reverberating through the ages as we stood where they (maybe) stood, held them in our thoughts, and wished them well wherever their spirits may be now.

I’ve thought back to this moment a lot lately. I think I’m charmed by the tiny ritual of the small stones stacked at the base of the memorial; I think things like this provide me with a sense of awe, like these small ways of making meaning, honoring people we’ll never know yet somehow love, highlights the place where the best parts of our humanity live within us.

When I’m writing short stories, I love writing about personal rituals like this; small things we imbue with meaning—in groups, or alone—to mark transitions, to acknowledge what is heavy but can’t be fixed, to bind us to one another in some tiny way. I’m thinking there’s a short story collection in here somewhere… We’ll have to wait and see!

Let me know if any of these topics sparked any new thoughts or ideas for you too, and whether this marginalia series of half-formed thoughts is something you like to see!

I think a bad journal prompt understands itself only as a question in search of an answer. I would consider questions like, “how do you define success?”, “what would you write if you weren’t afraid?”, and “list ten things you’re grateful for” as perfectly fine questions, but bad journal prompts, because these kinds of questions ask you to know something and report on it, instead of creating space for you to discover your own answers.

Instead, I think my favorite journal prompts are more generative. They don’t just ask you to mine your memory and your experiences to come up with examples to fuel your answers, but give you more to work with: an image, a unique word, a situation. They create some tension and ambiguity; they contain specificity and provoke emotion; they open a door that makes you wonder. And a good journal prompt can be returned to over time—not just because you’ve grown and so your answers grow with you, but because its line of inquiry is never truly satisfied with one answer.

For all of these reasons, one of the best places I’ve been finding inspiration for journaling lately has been in reading poetry. And I’ve found that the more you practice looking for generative questions—in poetry, and just in life—the more you’ll notice them all around you day-to-day. Here are 25 journal prompts inspired by lines of poetry I’ve been keeping tucked in the back of my journal for the days I feel expansive enough to use writing to explore something new.

Inspired by “Grief” by Richard Bronstoff: What absence have you held at your center as if it were a life?

Inspired by “The Journey” by Mary Oliver: What do you finally know you have to begin, in order to save the only life you can save?

Inspired by “Ripe Peach“ by Louis Glück: Where is certainty bringing you false joy?

Inspired by “Rumi“ by Joseph Fasano: What in you needs to be witnessed?

Inspired by “All That Wanting, Right?“ by Devin Kelly: What is the room you have made out of your wanting, and how is it different from the room of where you are.

Inspired by “& whoops how the bones confuse ache for wonder“ by abeo chimeka-tisdale: How is ache a lens in your life?

Inspired by “The Problem with Early Warnings“ by Charles Rafferty: Where in your life are you the kind of person who doesn’t like to leave a party unless the house is actually on fire?

Inspired by “Love After Love“ by Derek Walcott: How can you give back your heart to itself?

Inspired by “Small Inconveniences“ by Elise M. Powers: Is your existence slow-simmered, sticky-fingered, full of the big flavors and small inconveniences that make up a life?

Inspired by “Loneliest Job in the World“ by Tony Hoagland: Where have you been an accountant of the heart?

Inspired by “You Do Not Have To“ by Elise M. Powers: What slow-moving arrivals are landing in your life?

Inspired by “Letter“ by Joseph Fasano: How did you look before love came and before love went?

Inspired by “What I didn’t know before“ by Ada Limón: What in your life came out fully formed, ready to run?

Inspired by “The Thing Is“ by Ellen Bass: How do you love life when you have no stomach for it?

Inspired by “Words for The Road“ by Joseph Fasano: If you cannot have a home, what song can you become?

Inspired by “Potluck“ by L.E. Bowman: How can you gather the ache and make it into a meal?

Inspired by “Wild“ by Maggie Smith: How are you holding out your hand, feeding yourself to the hungry future?

Inspired by “Hope and Love“ by Jane Hirshfield: What hopes are the hardest loves you carry?

Inspired by “A woman on reddit has trained herself to stop raising her eyebrows in the name of less wrinkles“ by Tyndal Elizabeth Schreiner: Where are you trying not to pulse or to sing, refusing to ripen, and be known?

Inspired by “While Drowning We Might Say“ by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza: How are you rehearsing your survival?

Inspired by “Dirt of My Making“ by David Flint: What lies in your strata of almosts and never-weres, fossilized laughter and failure buried beneath years of trying and trying again?

Inspired by “This Human Life“ by Maggie Smith: What, from the inside, feels enormous, unlimited, by your self?

Inspired by “Things to Think“ by Robert Bly: When do you think in ways you’ve never thought before?

Inspired by “Someday, If I Am Lucky“ by Matthew Nienow: Today, alive, you linger in the listening. What do you hear?

Inspired by “Field Guide“ by Tony Hoagland: Where would you tell the next reader to look for the good parts?

I hope these spark a bit of wondering! Let me know your favorites, or any others you’re noticing in your life lately in the comments. Write on.

In retrospect, I tried to force a habit tracker on myself for years. I think I’ve only kept up with one for maybe one longer streak in my entire life, and otherwise I’ve maintained one for a few weeks at a time before the novelty would wear off, or the habit or routine I was so convinced I “should” do just felt like too much of a chore to continue.

Before we fully put the personal development and self help content to rest, I think it’s important to honor why we all clung to it so tightly; it was a way we tried to make meaning. Setting our goals and putting in the reps day after day towards them was a way for us to construct a story about ourselves that made us feel engaged and gave us purpose. And this was at a time when traditional sources of meaning no longer carried as much weight as they used to, things like religion, community, and careers. Our vision boards and weekly planning routines and 12 week goals allowed us to give our lives shape and direction.

The problem was that while we chased a goal to its end, prioritized it above all else, beat ourselves up for life getting in the way of today’s reps, the meaning we were chasing through all our trackers and habit streaks was deferred until tomorrow for a future version of ourselves that had earned it. Everything in the personal development space promised us meaning: a warm home, a long table of loved ones, a shared meal, bookshelves filled to the brim in the living room beside the fireplace—if we just used the scaffolding they laid out for us to build the house.

And so we began building. We changed the blueprints as new trends came and went. And we kept building. And the movement felt great for a while. It was motivating and energizing to imagine the life we would one day get to step inside because of all the work we were putting in today.

And then, maybe because of the pandemic, maybe because the primary demographic for this content just got old enough to have fully functioning frontal lobes, we looked at all we had been building, and we started asking:

What if we didn’t need to fix something about ourselves to deserve the warm home with the long table of loved ones and Olivia Dean on the record player and the wine glasses full and the laughter loud and the sink full of dirty dishes and the living room filled with books and people telling stories around the fireplace with the dog curled up at our feet? What if we’ve already built a home and life to keep the rain off, and it’s perfectly good as it is?

What if who we are right now is just as worthy of joy, of beauty, of connection, of creativity, of effort—as who we’re becoming. What if the lives we imagined for ourselves, that we ruthlessly optimized all the joy and fun out of our present to reach, were accessible to us today, maybe just in smaller doses. What if what we were chasing all along, through every podcast episode and every page turned, was a way to feel more alive and present each day.

I am delighted that in 2026, fun is back in. That we’re embracing silly resolutions, whimsy, and conversations about how things like joy, awe, and beauty are not frivolous or light, but are in fact load bearing, like pillars we can rest against during times of grief and uncertainty. That in-person events are making a comeback and gen Z is dating at run clubs. That there are queer kickball leagues and moth storytelling hours and Barbie raves, and nobody wants to see a beige apartment full of Amazon furniture ever again.

The world is weird and wonderful, and we’re paying attention again, and we’re telling each other about it. That feels like a more hopeful sign to me than much else these days. And honestly, I’ve found myself feeling like the culture is catching up to what poetry has known all along: that the most meaning and transformation you will experience in your life will come from your ability to notice, to pay attention. I know this, because I’ve lost it and gained it back again.

I spent most of my twenties focused on my mental health, and in all those ups and downs, the only times I ever truly began to worry, were the moments when I realized that I wasn’t noticing things like I used to: the light in my room at sunset, the larger themes and questions of a book I was reading or movie I was watching, whether I was hungry, or sad, or lonely. I guess we call this “languishing” now; that sense of stagnation and emptiness and disengagement. And I did what I knew to do at the time: I built habit trackers, and set goals, and found an accountability buddy in one of my uncles—and even with more external structure around me, and some consistent weeks of habit after habit checked off, the languishing remained.

I went to the tools I knew looking for more than they were capable of giving me. I wanted to feel engaged in my life again, to feel creative and inspired—even if just a few times a week. I wanted to notice light and bird sounds in the morning and be moved by a poem or a movie. I wanted to fully inhabit my body—to feel safe enough inside of it for it to tell me what it needed and to share what it knew. I wanted to feel like I was in a relationship with my own life; that it might surprise me, challenge me, hold me. And I wanted to just enjoy my life. We don’t do that enough.

So, I started paying attention. I asked myself things like: What actually happens to make me go to bed feeling whole, like I’d just had such a good day? And what kinds of things can I do today to genuinely enjoy my day? And I took notes.

It turns out there are seven types of experiences that really contribute to whether or not I feel like I had a good day. They include:

• Whether I noticed beauty in the world around me, and whether it moved me.

• How engaged I felt with ideas; whether I learned something new or experienced flow in working on a creative project.

• How I felt about my media intake; whether I scrolled for hours or read a book or watched a movie that made me think about life differently.

• How connected I felt to other people and to myself.

• Whether I spent time getting out of head and into my body—and while this does include exercise, it also includes sitting with my emotions if they’re present enough to need my attention.

• How much resistance vs openness I felt during my day; whether I procrastinated, or felt resilient and open to new experiences and people.

• How much structure I built into my day; whether I carved out time to squeeze in the things that matter to me, or if I reacted to my day as it happened.

Once I laid out these categories, I wanted some sort of tool; one that could hold the different degrees of each of these experiences I could have in a day, without this turning into another set of daily checkboxes for me to hit. I wanted something that I could check in with to gauge how alive and present I felt in my own life, and if things felt off, to help me identify in which areas I needed to prop a door open to let life in again.

And I ended up with what I’m calling an Aliveness Rubric:

I’d be lying if I didn’t share that when I first started using this rubric I approached it thinking that it would help me to have more days where, in every single category, I have experiences that align with column number two. But what’s been most surprising—and relieving—about using this rubric, is that a good day for me, only has to have one or two column two experiences. Just like a good poem with one solid image, a good day just needs one solid moment of aliveness to shift how it sits in you.

I’m now approaching this rubric and holding it more like a compass. Over time you start to notice how often one category is in column 0, and then, you can brainstorm ways to bump that category at least up to a 1.

Another observation is that each category is broad enough that so many different things can “count,” and it’s not about “did you or did you not do x,” but is instead a retroactive process of looking back at your day or your week, and honing your noticing skills by sorting your experiences into these categories. From there, you can decide if you want to intentionally do something to bump up the Connection category. Or maybe you live somewhere like Seattle, and you find it so beautiful every time you leave your house, that you don’t need to put in much effort to get an experience of beauty in column 1, and then your column 2 experiences of beauty are for the bigger moments like seeing Orcas in the Puget Sound.

This rubric is mine and is personalized to my own observations about myself, but the question that led to it belongs to everyone. And the question is simpler and harder than any the self-help canon ever asked: not who you want to become or what did you accomplish, but were you actually here, inside your life, today?

This post’s title was inspired by the poem “Happy Ending” by L.E. Bowman.

To download my rubric or create your own,
you can “make a copy” of my google doc here.

I meant to wake up at 3 am to leave at 3:30 am for a 6 am flight—I’d seen videos of Laguardia Airport posted just the day before where getting through security took 4+ hours, and I had wanted to give myself extra time and less stress. The Lyft driver on my phone kept turning in the wrong direction on the map, and my anxiety grew as the clock ticked closer to 4:45 am, and I was still there—standing, waiting, hoping.

And then, a taxi pulled up and parked about ten feet past me on the street, the driver just taking a call, and the magic of New York hit me square in the chest.

I ended up jumping in the back of that taxi, made it to the airport by 5:10, made it through security by 6, had time to grab a coffee and a pastry (ordered ahead so literally grabbed off the counter while running), and I made it to my flight, back home to Seattle, just as they called the last group for boarding. But as the taxi sped through those early morning streets, I held back tears the entire drive.

To understand my emotion in the back of that cab, you need to understand a couple of things first. Number one, I just turned 29, so I’m in the expected reflective window around my birthday (give me some grace). And number two, this was my first real trip back to New York since I lived there my first year out of college. So my emotion had to do with recognizing the growth that has happened between the ages of 22 and 29, but more than that, it had to do with finally reaching a vantage point in my life where I could see how one thing has led to the next.

I could see how lifelong habits and patterns had to run me into walls to get me to choose something new. I could see how the rejections and disappointments had nudged me in new directions. I could see how grief had been an initiation, an unrelenting but necessary doorway to appreciating things anew; things like compassion, curiosity, beauty, care, creativity. I could see how many mindset shifts had to take place, how many books and podcast and conversations and therapy it took to become a safe place for myself to rest.

And most importantly, I could see how all the growth over these years had taken place in the company of others; others who met me where I was—friends that laughed with me when I messed up, a therapist who withstood me being mad at her through no fault of her own for months on end, a silly roommate who was always down for a lunchtime swim or a Buffalo Exchange run, a physical therapist willing to spend the time to retrain my gait, unlocking movement in my ankle I’d always been told was impossible, friends who sent me poems, sent me Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, sent me episodes of OnBeing, Wild Geese, Good Hang, sent me texts saying “Safe Travels! ✈️”, “Happy Birthday!! 🎉”, “How did that go??”—all of them, a yellow taxi pulling up beside me when I needed it most.

I cried in the back of that taxi on the way to the airport because I recognized that the magic of New York, the energy and possibility, comes from 8 million lives intersecting; 8 million chances for someone or something to meet you exactly where you are. And now, at 29, I can see that the accumulation of moments like these in a life is enough to shape a new person out of one that’s been exhausted and scared and lost. They’re enough to turn grief into power. They’re enough to turn fear into trust. They’re enough to turn blame into compassion.

Perhaps my tears that morning were gratitude. Maybe just awe—that the taxi pulling up when I needed it felt orchestrated by something larger than myself.

I know that I felt held.

I know that I had held myself through this trip in a way I never had before.

I know that in order to learn how to hold yourself, you need to be held well; not forever, not perfectly, just long enough for the steadiness in another’s hands to become your own.

This post’s title was inspired by the poem “Field Guide” by Tony Hoagland.

It’s motivating, for a time, to let yourself believe that you’re building towards something, that things might be solid this time, but when that belief doesn’t yield the results you’d hoped for, it’s devastating, to once again, let go of the life you thought you were about to step into.

And yet, how often do we do this? It seems like we do it pretty often, or at least I do!

When I was dealt a disappointment this week, my first instinct was to blame myself for getting my hopes up, to regret imagining all the creative avenues I could explore once that door opened, how much relief would come with this stamp of approval. And I REALLY imagined the one bedroom apartment in Fremont in Seattle I’d move into, and the cocker spaniel puppy I could finally welcome into my life by the end of the year. And then, the door closed, because some do, despite your best efforts.

In previous years, this would have crushed me. I would have allowed self-blame and regret to take over my narrative about how things went. I would have let not being chosen dictate how I felt about myself for weeks afterwards.

But the truth is, I let myself briefly inhabit the future where this door opened, because I left the conversations leading up to it feeling so clear about—and proud of—who I am now. I had enough confidence to overcome anxiety (for the most part, but for the first time!), to speak with my whole chest, to claim my own perspective, and to stand strong in it. And even now that I know it wasn’t what they were looking for, I still have both feet on the ground, because I can hold my perspective in one hand, while holding the hope that there is another container out there that will be a better fit for me in the other—nothing wrong with them, nothing wrong with me, just a mismatch.

Am I disappointed? Absolutely. Did I cry and DoorDash a burrito when I found out? 100%. I’m not saying that there is a “right” way to move through things like this, or that bypassing your emotions is in any way part of this process either. The grief you feel over a path not taken matters just as much as grief you might feel at the end of the path you did.

I am curious about my first instinct to beat myself up for hoping, though—and this may be one of the first times I’m pausing to give my hope the credit that its due instead of only blaming it for the grief I’m feeling now. Like most beliefs formed early, I know that seeing hope and longing as my enemy is one way my brain is just trying to protect me from future pain and disappointment.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the chapter of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron about jealousy this week. She writes:

“Jealousy is a map. It tells us—with excruciating precision—just where and for what we yearn.”

Jealousy is longing that’s been forced outward, longing we’re too scared to claim as our own. Jealousy is what protects us from the vulnerability inherent to saying clearly, and with your whole chest, this is what I want. Jealousy is the little flag going up, the map with an X marking the spot, to say hey, this matters to you too. You want what they have. Perhaps, longing is similar, and can be another kind of map.

I spent way too much time as a kid and teenager in my head. I created imaginary places and relationships where I could feel safe to be as sensitive as I really was, where my honesty about what I’d noticed was welcome, where I could rehearse receiving the care that I deserved. These imagined scenarios made me a writer, for sure. I don’t regret this habit. It gave me an escape, kept me close to my longing, and let me create a more compassionate world for myself—even if only in my head. But, even now, years after I’ve worked to break the habit of escaping into my imagination, I’m still learning how to let longing in enough, to welcome its map toward the kind of future I should build for myself, without letting it move in, totally redecorate my home, and kick me out of my own bed.

Longing seems to be a friend I will carry with me for the rest of my life—and given how young I began imagining a different present and future for myself—I think that, perhaps some of my frustration with it is because some part of me sees my longing as immature, the product of a “beginner” part of me who doesn’t actually understand what the life and career and relationships I most want would actually take.

And yet, how many things would we never start without a bit of idealization at the beginning? We choose career paths based on TV characters we’ve loved. We make huge decisions believing the situation will change later. We move across the country or the world, maybe knowing hardships will crop up theoretically, but with a bit of overconfidence in our ability to manage them. You don’t know what you don’t know, until you learn more. Being “ready” is a choice, not a feeling. You can spend your entire life preparing to begin, gathering more info, waiting to feel less anxious, without ever actually starting anything. Any many times, the antidote to anxiety is simply action.

Maybe longing isn’t the problem—but finding the right amount of hope and longing is. Maybe it’s not about stopping yourself from reaching, but keeping enough presence of mind to still be able to see the quality of your reach—to see how grounded in reality, in your values, in what you know you actually need to feel and do your best, whatever you’re reaching for truly is.

And maybe I didn’t lose the future I imagined, I just briefly inhabited it for information. If I look at it that way, I came away having learned that what would make me feel most steadied, most creative, most like I’d “made it,” and therefore most open to beginning and hoping again (despite knowing some of those hopes and beginnings may end in grief) were actually pretty simple. Things like moving closer to my favorite bike path, putting in a bit more effort to find a spot nearby to catch sunsets on clear nights, reading and writing more, focusing on feeling stronger, and, of course, continuing to save up a puppy emergency fund.

Longing becomes a problem when the thing you’re longing for is framed as the ONLY path to the future you’ve imagined. If anything has become clear to me in the last few years, it’s how dangerous and self-abandoning it is to put the weight of the future you most want onto any one thing going a certain way. When you’re fixating on one win to help you escape or fix multiple areas of your life, I think that’s the clearest sign that longing has entered your home and is starting to redecorate. But as long as you can notice and reflect on how much weight you’re asking this opportunity to hold, you still have agency.

As long as you can still ask questions like, what this win would actually change—and what you could choose to change even if it doesn’t happen—then no single door, opening or closing, gets to take your feet out from under you.

Longing doesn’t have to disappear for you to keep going. It just has to know which room in your home is its own. You can want things deeply without abandoning yourself, and you can keep building a life that feels inhabitable now, not someday. The future you most want is one you don’t have to leave yourself to reach anyway.

Before 2025, I entered every moment as if someone else had been gracious enough to let me experience it. The baseline assumption was that if there was a problem, if someone seemed angry or annoyed, it started with me; I hadn’t tried hard enough, I was behind, I was too awkward, too navel-gazing, too online (and therefore without jokes beyond memes that you really just had to see to understand).

I hustled for my worth (à la Brené Brown) anywhere I could. I needed my worth reflected back to me by every person in my life, and if they didn’t (whether that was because they were tired or annoyed or simply didn’t realize what power I had given them), a spiral of negative thoughts would descend on me for days. A spiral that ended with action steps—I was integrating all the self-help media I’d consumed over the years, after all—of ways I would adjust how I showed up next time, new ways I would perform better socially to be more aligned with what I guessed whoever held my worth at that moment, had wanted from me when I had last fallen short. I resolved to fix whatever was wrong with me, or at least not let other people see that there was something wrong with me so clearly.

That sad truth is, people didn’t exist to me outside of my uses for them, and in that way, I needed other people to feel safe in my own body and nervous system, and I needed them calm, regulated, steady. Desperately. I was constantly scanning their faces and bodies for signs my worth had or hadn’t been earned, and when I inevitably found signs that it hadn’t—because of a raised eyebrow at a crucial moment, or a deep breath after I told a story—the hustle began, which, for a time, was motivating.

I really believed that if I just stayed aware, noticed everything, analyzed everything, and then did and said the right things, acceptance and safety from judgement was just around the corner. And then my self-worth would turn solid, I would arrive, and I would never get anxious in social situations ever again. I’m sure you can understand the magnetism of that belief. But, I know now, that’s not how self-worth and self-trust work.

And I wish I had a better answer for how this change landed in my life, but in this case, the obstacle was the way and the only way out was through. It took fully grieving the loss of a relationship I had put at the center of my life a few years prior, staying present with each wave of longing and confusion, riding out the stress in my body and the thought spirals as my brain tried to locate what I had done wrong to bring this upon myself. It took my habit of scanning the people around me now, gathering data, and truly believing that new losses of people who had made me feel safe were on the way.

I had to sit with the discomfort of believing I had been judged.

I stayed there long enough for that discomfort to morph into accountability—into seeing myself with clear eyes.

I sat with accountability long enough to bring in self-compassion: to validate my own perspective, to clarify where my own patterns had come from to provide myself with the balm of understanding, and to take the sting off the perceived judgement long enough that I could hold the truth of my experience alongside the truth of another.

I reminded myself that if I had survived the first loss, I could survive another.

And then I looked back at the perceived judgement, and I agreed with it. It hurt because I had been seen in a way I didn’t like, but that didn’t make it untrue. And I really didn’t want it to be true—the story my mind created from one detail naturally went to the worst, what would be most threatening.

I sat there for a while, embarrassed, my mind spinning, seeking clarity—until I came to this: you can only change what you’re conscious of, and the fact is, our brains and bodies are smart, they understand our capacity long before we do.

I could face a potential loss again, because the worst had already happened. I could face seeing the truth of that perceived judgement, because I had enough data to know that the pattern was only going to continue unless something changed. I could face the parts of myself I didn’t like, because I had slowly found a few that I do—and I was starting to believe that those parts of myself deserved better, that all of me was not wrong.

And then, I was just grateful for the mirror and the new awareness.

As someone who assumed they were the problem since childhood, when you can finally let in the idea that there are parts of you that shame hasn’t touched, you naturally have to start asking more questions, to zoom out.

To start to place my own center of gravity back within myself, I listened to my body. I noticed where my social hypervigilance lit up, and I left the hypervigilance there—I noticed, knew that what I wanted to do or say was coming from the desire to be seen a certain way, and I paused and held it in.

I realized that in a lot of situations, I was looking for belonging and alignment in places where it simply didn’t exist for me. I was shapeshifting to keep other people comfortable, to try to fit in to the aspirational spaces I thought would make me grow into someone who would be worth my own care. But underneath all the hustling, a lot of the things I thought I wanted melted away when I removed the need for love and approval to come from outside of myself—what I realized I wanted most was my own care to be enough for me, for who I am now to be enough even if I still have aspirations around which direction I want to grow into next, and to be met by those around me as if we’re standing side by side.

The greatest lesson from 2025 for me was that some people and places just aren’t for you, and that is okay. Things can be set down or left behind, AND that doesn’t have to mean that one perspective is right and the other is wrong, or one person is better and the other is bad. Choosing what is right for you requires no positioning, just noticing—just listening to your own body, and acting on what you find.

Here are the major things I noticed this year that brought me delight:

• Seattle Sunsets. They really can’t be beat.

• My parents new puppy, Maeve. She asks for pets and cuddles and attention without shame, and she loves my dad’s laugh as much as I do.

• Getting a roommate and realizing how wrong I was about needing more solitude to heal my nervous system, when I really needed co-regulation and someone to watch Rupaul’s Drag Race with once week.

• Clear Days on the ferry with stunning views of Mount Rainier.

• Sending a soul friend off to her new life abroad + chatting or writing for 2-3 hours every other weekend to stay in touch.

• Midday swims in the river near my new apartment. Don’t text, I’m in my Copenhagen era.

• Going to NWSL games (Go Seattle Reign!), and remembering how good it feels to be in a large group with a common goal. Collective effervescence is unmatched!

• The walking path along the river near my new apartment, especially on a sunny morning.

• Ending the year writing daily for the last two weeks. I’m feeling a huge part of myself returning to me, and I couldn’t be more grateful for it.

I’m looking forward to more learning, growing, and noticing in 2026.

This year though, in 2025, the 1144s disappeared, leaving a word in their place: reorganizing. At least once a week this year, I saw “reorganizing” in a book, or in my frantic research as I began to feel the effects of tapering off of a medication I’d been on since I was 11, or I heard the word on a podcast, or my therapist said it as she reminded me that I was just in a liminal space, that finding your center again takes time.

Organize, by definition, means, “to form into a whole consisting of interdependent or coordinated parts, especially for united action.” Reorganizing means, “to organize again.” Reorganizing is what happens when the thing that was solid, suddenly isn’t. Reorganizing is what happens when the center doesn’t hold. Reorganizing is what happens when there is suddenly a vacuum where the center used to be. I’m reminded of the “decentering” trend across social media; for a time, everyone was decentering dating or decentering work or decentering consumerism. It seems collectively, a lot of us were becoming oriented to what had been placed at the center of our lives, and why those things had become the pillars holding up our self worth, and how they even got there in the first place—but orienting is only the first step.

Orienting is about taking in what’s real, updating expectations, and locating yourself in this time and this place. Orienting ends only when you stop scanning for missing information: yes I’m by the river, yes the path just collapsed, yes that person is gone. Orienting is about identifying the reality you’re holding, reorganizing is about changing how you carry it—both signal a moment of transformation, a before and after.

When I think back to my teenage self, I picture her sitting on her bed at 8 pm, tumblr open on her laptop, a pen in hand, as she copied quotes into her journal and the sunset turned her room gold. Life so far had taught her that words were often used for sleight of hand; that narratives were used to provide comfort, but not always to those most in need of one—and yet, she knew words could be used for so much more. She spent whole weekends searching for words to mirror back what she felt, what she noticed, what she was learning and what it all meant. She reached for insight, understanding, and for a voice to affirm that her life could look different than the examples she had been given—and for instructions on how to build something different.

At the time, I couldn’t have explained why I felt such a pull to hold certain words so closely, but I trusted the pull to savor what I found most meaningful, and I honored that pull towards more without knowing why.

What I know now is that I was chasing moments of epiphany; the way a thought lands and you feel the ripples of it, your former ideas and understanding shifting like tetris tiles to accommodate the shape of this new perspective. I was borrowing beliefs, borrowing voice, trying on each worldview as I found my feet within my own. Each quote I saved in my journal was essentially saying to me, “Stand here. Look at the world from this angle. See if that helps make more sense of things.” Quotes and poems, gave me a framework to approach challenges, to carry myself through grief, to shape my beliefs about safety, love, forgiveness, faith, creativity, and, and, and.

Maybe this habit means I’m an optimist. Maybe I’m just a bittersweet type who experiences outsized amounts of yearning and longing. Maybe I just knew what I needed and found creative, imaginative ways to keep this knowing part of me alive—even if it would take 28 years for me to trust what I had known all along, and to honor the part of me that made a practice of savoring the crumbs of what I was so clearly hungry for.

Every once in a while, there was a quote or a poem I committed to memory; one I could sense had layers that would unlock as I grew older and gained more life experience—one that had the potential to reorganize my life from the inside out if I let it. One of these quotes was the following by Cheryl Strayed:

On a first read: a beautiful sentiment—we should all watch more sunrises and sunsets.

On a second read: a call to actively look for the silver lining in a tough situation.

On a third read: something else.

That third read for me, came in 2021, after the cocoon of the pandemic had forced open a period of reorganization in my life, as some puzzle pieces from my past shifted into place and I could see the whole of my life in full color for the first time. In moments of escape from reality in those days, I daydreamed about sitting on a beach on the pacific coast of Washington, about taking deep breaths in misty mossy woods, about sitting in a park with a warm coffee in my hand with a view of mountains across the water. I thought often of the Mary Oliver quote, “we need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.” I thought of my teenage self who so easily saw beauty all around her—in words, in light, in music, in movement—and I felt grief, and a bit of fear, that I would never get that part of me back.

But then came that third read of Wild and this particular quote, and I made a choice; I would put myself in the way of beauty. I would move somewhere where I would encounter beauty each day, whether I sought it out, or not; I would respond to the reorganization of my life that was outside of my control by actively choosing to center beauty.

So, I moved to Seattle. I made a habit of journaling on my roof at sunset, I made sure to look at the mountains every day, even if that meant I just stepped out onto the stairwell for a moment. I woke up to the sound of seagulls flying overhead outside my window, I hung a disco ball in the perfect spot to catch and mirror morning light, and day by day I learned a softer way to hold myself.

I don’t know that I believe in looking for silver linings at all anymore. There are some things in life—some loss, some grief, some knowing—that we simply have to look square in the face, and find a way to carry with us. These are the kinds of things you never really “get over,” the ones that you’ll convince yourself you’ve moved on from only for a single reminder to bring all the feelings rushing back.

Every life has them. You are not special for carrying something hard, but you are more human, and more connected to everyone who came before you.

Putting yourself in the way of beauty is not about looking for the good in something bad—sometimes things are just bad and we just have to endure them—but putting yourself in the way of beauty can be about holding something good in one hand when you have to hold something shit in the other.

The fact is, when something reorganizes your life, it does so by focusing your attention—and I’ve been focused in this post so far on the reorganizations in our lives and our bodies that can’t be fought, the ones that catch us off guard and force us to adjust, the ones that narrow our attention to danger and survival—but by putting myself in the way of beauty, by adopting beauty as a daily companion, I didn’t drop the heavier things I have to carry, but I did balance the load by finding my agency—by focusing my attention—beneath it.

And the reward for this choice to center beauty? (Besides hella sunsets and spotting seals and the solid comfort of knowing yourself and what you need).

Gentleness. Warmth. A sense of sturdiness. Compassion for yourself and others. And ultimately, awe and a sense of meaning and connection to something larger than yourself. Life is both and—and when your capacity to hold beauty alongside grief expands, your life becomes wider; your attention shifts from what hurts and what’s missing to what’s possible; to how excited you are about who you might grow into and get to be.

You don’t have to use this time to decide what about you needs to be “fixed.” Your New Year’s resolutions can be fun and silly and for no purpose beyond filling your life with more joy.

Here are 50 fun and silly new year’s resolution ideas for your 2026 plans:

1. Eat every pasta shape — a crowd favorite!

2. Spot 100 seals / birds / rabbits

3. Read every book by one author

4. Only read books under 100 pages long / over 400 pages long \ with blue covers \ that were published the year you were born

5. Collect a list of your favorite peoples’ favorite books and only read books on that list (and let each of them know what you think when you finish!)

6. Only read books found in little free libraries near you

7. Try a new walking route every single day in 2026

8. Limit yourself to a certain color palette and only wear clothes in those colors this year

9. Explore EVERY museum in your city

10. Explore EVERY park in your state

11. Find your city’s best espresso martini / ice cream flavor / chocolate chip cookie / pizza / sushi

    

12. STOP ASKING people “what do you do for work?” and find your own signature question to get to know new people

13. Memorize one poem per week

14. Write one poem every week

15. Go to every concert at one venue in your city this year

16. Host a monthly themed dinner or hang out with a funny dress code (for example, everyone must show up dressed as a character from a TV show to watch the new episode that’s dropping on Apple TV that night together)

17. Have one of your friends teach you a new skill every month or every quarter

18. Watch every Rom Com created between 1985 and 2005

19. Find the perfect number of times you can eat tacos in a month and still fully appreciate them

20. Cook the same recipe once per week so by the end of the year you’re a MASTER chef at it

21. Attend every home game of your favorite sport in your city / go to a watch party for every away game

22. Watch a sunrise or a sunset from the same spot every single day - rain or shine

23. Teach yourself to do a full at home manicure by doing your nails once a week

24. Find the perfect mocktail recipe

25. Knit one scarf every month in a different color

    

26. Pick restaurants like you’d pick wine: based on how pretty the label is

27. Figure out your perfect curly hair routine

28. Draw one picture every day or week

29. Only take the scenic route

30. Find the best bench in your city

31. Learn every kind of tree or bird in your area

32. Go through one disposable camera per month this year

33. Watch all of Grey’s Anatomy from start to finish

34. Visit every bookstore in your city

35. Send letters to your friends every month

36. Track your time and make sure to spend more time creating something than you do scrolling on your phone

37. Find your favorite hiking trail

38. Listen to an album in full with no distractions once a week

39. Run every 5k in your city

40. Start a monthly kindle smut book club with your friends

41. Take a free course from Yale in a subject you’ve always found interesting

42. Actually visit the towns you’ve always driven past

43. Try one new creative class or hobby every month until you find your thing

44. Keep a list of funny things you overhear people say on your commute

45. Find the best local public bathroom and make a ranked list based on vibes

    

46. Learn all of your neighbors’ dogs’ names

47. Keep a list of things you’ve learned this year

48. Time your errands and try to grocery shop faster each week of the year

49. Listen to every episode available of a podcast

50. Make playlists with whatever songs you’re loving each month

Please take this post as your permission slip to center joy and delight in 2026, and please drop any more ideas in the comments!

The crux of the lack of progress is that writing nonfiction is really hard and scary; I much prefer escaping behind the mask of fiction, slipping into a character’s voice to try on the idea that I have the right to use the power in my own. Between the rush of a strong sentence and the plausible deniability of “it’s just a story,” writing fiction has a magnetic quality—a level of possibility that’s too hard to resist when your life has been threaded with longing.

However, the years since 2020 have been my own crucible. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “there are years that ask questions and years that answer,” and 2020 to early 2025 I was forced to practice what Rainier Maria Rilke called, “loving the questions themselves” as one question about my past and my patterns opened into another and another with no answers in sight.

At some point this year though, I got angry.

I got angry with the questions I’d been endlessly circling about what was “wrong with me”, with how much emotionally thawed this summer as I tapered off a medication I’d been on for 17 years (since I was 11 years old), with the recognition that those who have done me the most harm throughout my life have been those who chose their own comfort—particularly to maintain a story about themselves—at my expense.

So, I guess you could say, my relationship to fiction feels a bit more complicated this year than last, and I’m feeling particularly drawn to the truth these days. Nonfiction will require me to use some new muscles—even this post has taken listening to “Which Witch” by Florence + The Machine on repeat for 2 hours while writing for me to maintain my belief in what I want to say in my own voice—but as my roommate and I have said after swimming in the bay near our apartment all summer, you never regret a swim, and I have a feeling that writing on Substack will feel the same, after a bit of conditioning.

The other thing I’ve been pretending not to know, that’s halted my Substack progress thus far, is the worry that each post needs to encapsulate my most evolved and open-hearted understanding of whatever topic I’m writing about.

Maybe this is my own concern about what story people will make about me based on one post? Maybe I’ve fallen for the idea in today’s productivity culture that the destination is more important than the process—even though I know that the best part of writing or creating anything is sinking into it?

I know that each finished creative project is a stepping stone placed down in front of us so we can move forward in the next direction of growth. I think the act of creating something and who you become while making it is the point—and what you make will always capture whatever consciousness you can bring to the material at the time.

And still, I’m finding myself needing daily reminders of these lines from David Whyte’s poem “Lost”:

“Wherever you are is called Here.
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger”

Here is worth documenting. Here is enough. The right time is always Here. Here has everything you need—as long as you stay Here long enough to learn what Here has to say. But staying Here, that’s the hard part.

Staying Here, especially in a year like 2025, is a herculean task, one requiring you to make the same choice again and again based on the faith that Here is temporary and Here has something valuable to teach you. I’m leaning towards writing nonfiction, not because I’m angry (for the first time in my life!) and I want to tell the truth for revenge—nothing like that. I never intend to write about anything other than what I’m learning from my own life.

But right now, I’m learning that fiction has kept me alive in some ways, it’s been an escape, but the future is asking something else of the present. The future is asking me to practice staying Here—with myself, with my thoughts and feelings, and to document the powerful stranger that’s Here, as I’m able to document it now.

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