May Marginalia
Observations, half-formed ideas, memories, and questions that have felt alive for me this month.
As I really, finally, commit myself to building a life as a writer—writing consistently on Substack, getting the first draft of my novel done, returning to writing short stories and submitting them—one of goals for my writing, is for anyone who reads what I write to feel accompanied.
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!
