Last week, I bought a small pouch from a boutique near my house. Ostensibly, it was for lip glosses and other purse essentials. In reality, it was an attempt to impose order on the girl mess that has somehow developed at the bottom of my handbag.

When I got to the register, the woman ringing me up smiled and asked if I was shopping for anyone specific or important.

“Myself,” I said.

The answer came out before I really thought about it.

For a second, I wondered if I’d answered incorrectly. I could have said nobody. I could have said it was for a friend. Somehow, “myself” felt strangely vulnerable.

But she smiled and said she loved that. She thought there was something special about making room for small pleasures of your own.

And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized how unusual that question felt.

Not because I was shopping for myself, but because the question implied that the important person was probably someone else.

We’re remarkably attentive when it comes to the people we love. We remember their coffee orders, notice the things they admire, and file away small details for later. We pick up little gifts simply because something reminded us of them.

The strange part is how rarely we extend that same consideration to ourselves, treating pleasure as something to justify, postpone, or earn.

The pouch itself wasn’t important. It cost less than lunch.

What mattered was that, for a brief moment, I was forced to answer a question I don’t think we get asked very often:

Who is this for?

And for once, the answer stood on its own.

No holiday. No milestone. No special occasion.

Just me.

The conversation stuck with me. Perhaps because life contains far fewer special occasions than it does Tuesdays.

When you’re young, people are always telling you it’s the little things in life. It’s one of those phrases that sounds cliché until you get older and realize how much truth it contains.

For me, it’s fresh flowers on a Sunday afternoon. Clean sheets pulled tight across the bed. The feeling of lotion soft skin slipping between them at the end of a long day. A crisp Diet Coke with the good ice, you know exactly the kind I’m talking about. A fresh manicure before a busy weekend. Another lip gloss I absolutely did not need, though I’ll happily blame it on my perpetually chapped lips, thanks Accutane. The overpriced latte from Commonwealth that I return to with remarkable consistency. Staying in on a Friday night and ordering my favorite takeout without a shred of guilt.

Small ways of saying, this life is mine, and I intend to savor it.

And yet, I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to explain that impulse away. Dressing it up as self care. As necessity. As good taste. Anything but admitting that sometimes I simply want life to feel a little nicer.

Of course, there are moments that practically invite us to go all in. The event where the new dress feels non-negotiable. The vacation that somehow justifies five Pilates classes a week and an entirely new version of your wardrobe. The occasions that invite us to step into a slightly more polished version of ourselves.

But those moments are few and far between.

Most of our lives are spent on Thursday afternoons. Grocery runs. Making the bed. Folding laundry. Washing our hair. Driving home from work.

It seems only fair that some of life’s simplest delights should live there, too.

In treating the laundry detergent aisle like a perfume counter, convinced that if you’re going to fold laundry, it might as well smell divine. Buying the good hand soap for the kitchen sink because the most used corner of the house deserves to feel nice. Pouring sparkling water into a wine glass while making dinner alone. Using your good body oil after a shower, even if you’re putting pajamas on immediately afterward. Transferring olive oil into a beautiful bottle because dinner starts long before the food reaches the table.

A meaningful life is not merely a collection of memorable moments, but the accumulation of small decisions that say, this is for me.

I need reminders of this more often than I’d like to admit.

Left to my own devices, I’m the first person to leave the house looking completely unbothered, hair thrown into a bun, sweats that have seen better days, comfort prioritized above all else.

It’s one of the reasons I love working in person. Not because I particularly enjoy the commute or waking up earlier, but because it gives shape to the day. It reminds me that getting dressed, taking my time, and putting a little care into myself isn’t about impressing anyone else. It’s another way of making everyday life feel a little more elevated.

There’s something surprisingly powerful about treating yourself as someone worth showing up for, someone you’re actually looking forward to spending the day with. Because being intentional about ourselves is not always indulgent. Sometimes, it’s simply a small act of consideration directed inward.

The woman at the register was asking who the pouch was for.

What stayed with me wasn’t the purchase, but the permission embedded in answering, “Myself.”

The permission to be the recipient of my own thoughtfulness.

To stop treating pleasure as a destination and start treating it as a daily ritual.

Perhaps paradise is less a place than a practice.

As it turns out, it also has excellent hand soap.

I would like to formally apologize to my weekend. And to the version of me who thought she’d spend it resting. What an optimist.

I entered the weekend hoping for renewal, balance, and, if all went according to plan, the feeling that I had my life together.

With two trips coming up, I had every intention of using the weekend to reset.

Instead, I spent most of it feeling vaguely but persistently overwhelmed.

There were errands to run, appointments to keep, laundry to do, bags to pack. Nothing extraordinary, but enough to demand my attention.

By Saturday morning, however, I was behaving as though I was coordinating a military operation.

My brain had taken a handful of entirely manageable tasks and stacked them on top of each other until they formed one giant, vaguely threatening entity.

Not errands. Not laundry. Not packing. Just EVERYTHING I HAVE TO DO. A category far more intimidating than any individual task could ever be.

The pressure I felt was real. The crisis was self-authored.

Yet somehow, I spent the entire weekend carrying it around. Not the tasks themselves. The weight of anticipating them.

Which, as it turns out, was much heavier.

It all started last week.

I was sitting at work, calendar open, looking ahead at the next month when I realized I had plans every single weekend for the next five weeks.

Objectively, this is a good problem to have. The calendar was filled with trips, birthdays, celebrations, and all the things that make my life feel full. Nothing on it inspired dread. Yet somehow, seeing it all laid out in front of me made my chest tighten.

I think we’re often reluctant to admit that exciting things can be overwhelming. As though gratitude and stress are mutually exclusive. As though being excited for something means you must also feel completely at ease about it.

But that’s never quite been true for me.

I like routine. I like knowing what my week looks like. I like feeling settled. And while I love having things to look forward to, I also know that every trip, every plan, every change in schedule asks something of me in return.

There is a woman I have invented in my head and she is doing remarkably well. She has plans, responsibilities, looming deadlines, and somehow remains completely unbothered. She throws a few things into a carry-on the night before a flight and leaves for the airport with complete confidence. She does not maintain a running mental inventory of everything she needs to remember. She certainly doesn’t start worrying on Friday about something that won’t happen until Wednesday.

I am, for better or worse, a planner. Which is to say, I am not her.

Weeks before a trip, I’ll have a packing list, a to-do list, and occasionally a list dedicated to reminding me to check the other two lists.

To be fair, this system works. I rarely forget anything. I arrive equipped for nearly every scenario my imagination can invent.

The problem is that somewhere between organized and prepared, it’s remarkably easy to lose perspective. Every task begins to occupy more space in your mind than it does in reality.

Which brings me to this weekend’s experiment.

Less out of productivity and more out of desperation, I made a list of every single thing that needed to get done before Sunday night and started timing it, task by task.

Not because I wanted to optimize my life. Because I needed proof that my brain was an unreliable narrator.

I’ve noticed anxiety has a strange relationship with time. A trip next week, a package that needs to be returned, an appointment on Thursday, a text I forgot to answer three days ago, somehow they all end up occupying the same space in my head.

Google Chrome provides you with an option to neatly group related tabs together. My brain, unfortunately, does not.

Every unfinished task lingers in the background. Not loudly. Just enough to make its presence known. Kind of like a houseguest who keeps clearing their throat.

And the longer a task remains undone, the less it resembles reality.

A ten minute errand begins to feel like an afternoon commitment. A phone call acquires the emotional weight of a board meeting. Packing for a weekend trip starts to feel logistically comparable to relocating abroad.

The task itself remains unchanged.

The story around it does.

There’s a mental bandwidth cost that comes with all of this. The realization I’ve slowly arrived at is that the task itself often requires very little energy, but thinking about the task repeatedly requires a lot.

That’s why you can end a day feeling exhausted despite accomplishing very little. You’ve spent hours carrying the cognitive weight of ten unfinished things at once.

And the part I’ve yet to overcome is how anxiety treats possibility as probability.

I know packing for a trip isn’t stressful in and of itself. Forgetting something, however, is possible. Running late is possible. Missing a detail is possible.

And anxiety has a habit of treating every possibility as though it’s inevitable. Uninterested in what is likely, it prefers to live in the realm of what if.

The theory was simple.

If these tasks were consuming so much of my mental energy, surely they must also be consuming an enormous amount of my time.

The results were not particularly supportive of my position.

Picking up clothes from the tailor took ten minutes. My Telehealth appointment with my dermatologist took about the same. The lab work I had been dreading all week took forty five minutes, maybe an hour if you include the drive. Packing for two trips took thirty minutes, thanks to my packing list that would make a project manager proud. Returns were done in under seven.

Convincing myself my life was spiraling out of control consumed the entire weekend. Easily the most demanding task, despite never actually making the list.

Somewhere in all of this, I was reminded of something else, I am terrible at asking for help.

I’ve become so accustomed to carrying things by myself that I rarely consider the alternative. It’s my schedule, my responsibilities, my stress, so it feels logical that they should also be my burden.

My mom, being far wiser than I am, could see exactly what was happening.

She offered to take care of the returns I couldn’t complete. She offered to pick up my prescription from the pharmacy. More than once, she asked, “What can I do to make your week easier?”

It’s such a simple question, and one I rarely know how to answer.

Maybe because accepting help feels like surrendering a responsibility I’ve already assigned myself. I’ve spent so much time carrying the weight of things that I sometimes forget some of it can be set down.

What I’ve learned is that help rarely arrives in grand gestures. More often, it looks like someone taking one thing off your plate, creating just enough space for you to exhale.

Reflecting on it now, the observation feels surprisingly simple. There is an immense difference between time and dread.

I can think of very few occasions where I have genuinely run out of time. Very few days where I worked from morning until night and still couldn’t get everything done. Yet I’ve spent countless hours convinced that was exactly what was about to happen.

Dread expands to fill whatever space you give it. The tasks themselves rarely do.

For me, breaking everything down minute by minute wasn’t a productivity hack so much as a psychological one. It forced me to stop carrying the entire week at once.

Because that’s the trick anxiety plays. It takes a dozen separate responsibilities and stacks them on top of each other until they become indistinguishable and eventually there is no longer any separation between them.

The realization was that I wasn’t overwhelmed by what I had to do.

I was overwhelmed by carrying all of it at once.

This week will still be busy.

I’ll still go to Vegas. I’ll still go to New York. There will still be flights to catch, bags to pack and repack, a hundred small details to remember, and something I’ve inevitably forgotten.

None of that has changed.

What changed was my understanding of the problem.

Not because I discovered some revolutionary productivity system. Not because I’ve suddenly become the carefree woman who throws a toothbrush into a carry-on and heads to the airport on instinct.

But because most things take twenty minutes.

What I know now is that there’s a world of difference between doing the work and carrying the idea of the work.

And if history is any indication, one of those things will always be far more exhausting.

We’ve spent years engineering friction out of everyday life.

The waiting. The inconvenience. The things that slowed us down.

The future, it turns out, wasn’t flying cars. It was a thousand tiny efficiencies woven into the fabric of daily life.

Small improvements, almost invisible on their own, but transformative in aggregate.

The default setting appears to have changed.

Or the expectation, at least, has.

Because once life became more streamlined, it wasn’t long before we started expecting the same from ourselves.

I can’t remember the last time I did just one thing.

If I’m walking, I’m listening to a podcast. If I’m driving, I’m catching up on calls. If I’m making coffee, I’m packing lunch. If I’m waiting, I’m scrolling.

Every spare moment seems to come with an implied question, what else could I be doing right now?

Productivity has stopped being something I practice and became the operating system running in the background of my life.

The irony is that it doesn’t feel like it’s working.

By all accounts, I should have more time than ever.

I can order groceries from my phone. My maps tell me exactly where to go. I can listen to an entire book while walking the dogs and turn nearly any waiting room, checkout line, or spare five minutes into an opportunity to get something done.

Most inconveniences that frustrated previous generations have been automated, optimized, or eliminated altogether.

For decades, the future has been sold to us one convenience at a time, each innovation carrying the same promise, that this will make life easier.

And it did.

We’ve built a world increasingly designed to reduce effort.

Every shortcut seemed to point toward the same destination, more time.

That was the deal, wasn’t it?

Because despite becoming increasingly efficient, it feels like all I’ve done is increase the processing speed.

I’m still sprinting.

I’ve tried to find a name for this instinct.

There’s a popular term online, habit stacking. That’s not exactly what I’m talking about here. Habit stacking is attaching one habit to another. After I brush my teeth, I floss. After I pour my coffee, I drink a glass of water. One behavior becomes the cue for the next.

Then there’s multitasking, which needs no introduction.

There’s looking for small ways to consolidate, combine, and get ahead, which I’ve become particularly fond of. Making Monday and Tuesday’s coffee at the same time. Meal prepping for the week.

What I’m describing here is slightly different.

I’ve developed the instinct to look at any block of time and wonder what else could fit inside it.

The return package sits in my trunk until it can be combined with another errand. Folding laundry becomes YouTube time because apparently neither activity is allowed to exist on its own. The sauna, originally intended to be relaxing, has become a wellness pentathlon: dry brushing, gua sha, red light therapy, NuFACE, you get the idea. Less a place to unwind and more a one-woman productivity incubator.

Did you catch that?

When I’m sitting in a sauna, part of my brain is still asking, could this also be accomplishing something else?

It’s a ridiculous thought when you stop and examine it. And yet it feels completely normal.

Every pocket of the day seemed capable of holding more. Every activity became a candidate for improvement. If one task could absorb another, it would.

And if a moment served only one purpose, part of me couldn’t help but feel like it was underperforming.

Which would make sense if all of this effort had resulted in an abundance of free time.

It hasn’t.

The time never arrived because every gain was quickly filled.

Emails got faster, so we sent more emails. Work became flexible, so work expanded. Content became easier to consume, so we consumed more of it.

Every improvement increased capacity.

Every increase in capacity became an invitation.

And before long, the amount of life we were trying to fit into each day had expanded to match.

Maybe that’s why I’m less interested in whether it’s productive and more interested in what it teaches us to expect from ourselves.

Making coffee for two days at once is sensible. So is meal prepping. So is combining errands.

The issue isn’t any one habit.

It’s how quickly the desire to get the most out of every moment becomes the lens through which we evaluate everything else.

And I can’t help but wonder whether this constant urge to optimize has changed our relationship with time itself.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people say life has moved faster since the pandemic.

And of course COVID changed our lives in a million ways.

But one thing it couldn’t have done is make time move faster.

Twenty four hours remains twenty four hours.

What changed was us.

Maybe after spending so long on pause, we came back with an even lower tolerance for stillness.

Not for lack of time.

For lack of patience with it.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this isn’t really a story about time.

It’s a story about adaptation.

A world designed for speed eventually teaches its inhabitants to move faster too.

The systems we build inevitably leave their mark on us.

The world accelerates, and we adapt.

Our systems become more efficient, and so do we.

It’s tempting to think the problem is all this advancement.

It isn’t.

The real shift happened when the logic of our tools became the logic of our lives.

I’m just not entirely sure we were meant to operate that way.

Somewhere between convenience and optimization, between productivity and self improvement, we’ve begun treating ourselves like systems to be upgraded rather than people to be lived as.

Maybe the promise was never that we would become faster too.

Maybe the promise was that we wouldn’t have to.

Elegantly engineered.

And somehow still human.

Every so often, it’s healthy to take a break from examining your life and instead examine your shopping cart. So, in the interest of giving both myself and my readers a brief reprieve from self observation, personal growth, and the ongoing project of becoming a slightly better person, I’d like to turn our attention to what has been a strangely specific collection of purchases this week.

I have never been particularly good at liking things casually.

Every so often, something takes up residence in my mind and refuses to leave.

These are the current occupants.

The first purchase, and perhaps the least surprising, was Rhode’s Summer Kit.

This was never really a question. The launch had been teased for months, and by the time it arrived, it felt less like shopping and more like fulfilling an obligation.

The glow drops, bronzer, and lip products will all be put to good use. But what I was really drawn to was the woman they seemed to belong to.

The one with impossibly good skin and a perpetual golden-hour glow. Who adds a touch of bronzer and a little gloss, then somehow looks effortlessly put together. Whose beauty appears less like the result of a routine and more like a fortunate circumstance.

Perhaps this was a particularly vulnerable launch to encounter while navigating an unwelcome relationship with acne, making this fantasy feel especially appealing. Because when your skin is misbehaving, nothing is more convincing than a brand promising radiance and effortless beauty.

Either way, between the campaign imagery, glowing endorsements from fashion editors and beauty writers, a steady stream of impeccably curated Instagram posts, and Mrs. Hailey Bieber looking impossibly luminous as always, resistance felt increasingly futile.

The distinction between wanting it and needing it became difficult to identify.

It arrives today, and I could not be more excited. If this experiment in documenting my questionable purchasing decisions proves even remotely entertaining, consider this the first installment of a recurring series. Should that be the case, I’ll happily return with a full review and final verdict.

The second purchase, and arguably the dumbest, was an ice cube shaped squishy fidget toy from Amazon. This is the sort of sentence that forces you to confront the fact that targeted advertising may know you better than you know yourself.

Unlike the Rhode purchase, which at least came attached to a fantasy, this one came attached to absolutely nothing. No future version of myself. No lifestyle aspiration. No carefully curated vision of who I might become.

I didn’t need a fidget toy. I didn’t particularly want an ice cube. And yet I became convinced that I would enjoy owning a tiny squishy one.

An ice cube fidget toy promises remarkably little. It won’t make me prettier, more productive, more organized, or more interesting. It won’t transform my apartment or improve my morning routine. It doesn’t represent a goal, a habit, or a better version of myself.

Its only promise is that it is a tiny squishy ice cube.

And somehow, that felt refreshingly honest.

In a world where nearly everything is marketed as self improvement, there was something oddly appealing about wanting something for no reason other than the fact that it seemed delightful.

The internet remains undefeated.

The third item arrived under entirely different circumstances. It was not marketed to me, delivered to my door, or accompanied by a confirmation email. It was simply watermelon.

At least that’s how it started.

It began innocently enough with a container of pre-cut watermelon from Plum Market. Then another. Then enough subsequent containers that I stopped considering them groceries and started considering them a recurring expense.

I decided the sensible thing to do was buy an entire watermelon and cut it myself, because nothing says restraint quite like committing to forty pounds of fruit.

What followed was less a solution and more an expansion.

Watermelon Hint water. Watermelon electrolytes. Watermelon popsicles. Watermelon gum.

The obsession has become surprisingly well rounded.

Perhaps this is what eating seasonally is meant to look like. Although I suspect most wellness experts would recommend a little more variety before one becomes this closely associated with a fruit.

Then again, much of my life seems to unfold in temporary fascinations.

The subject changes. The pattern remains remarkably consistent.

I had intended for this to be a list of things I purchased this week.

Instead, I’ve spent several hundred words documenting something much stranger, the curious ways our attention attaches itself to certain things and refuses to let go.

One had been sitting on my wish list for months. One made very little sense. And one took on a significance entirely disproportionate to its role as a fruit.

Perhaps self observation found its way into this essay after all.

Either way, I remain remarkably easy to influence.

As far as weeks go, I’ve certainly had worse.

If you’re really interested in who I’m becoming, don’t ask me.

Skip the vision board, ignore my goals, and stop analyzing my habits.

I have a better source.

My weekly grocery shopping list.

I’m serious.

Nothing documents my evolution better than the things I throw into a shopping basket every Sunday.

The first sign is almost never a big decision. It’s usually a different set of groceries.

A year ago, my cart was full of processed foods with ingredient lists longer than my arm.

By fall, I’d developed a deep distrust of anything that came in a wrapper.

Now my cart looks a lot less certain.

A little protein. A little produce. A little ice cream.

Which, ironically, might be the healthiest it’s ever been.

In six months, who knows.

Scientists say taste buds regenerate every 10 to 14 days. We accept that our bodies are constantly changing, but for some reason we expect our personal preferences to stay exactly the same.

As if every like and dislike is supposed to be permanent. As if every opinion we’ve ever had signed some kind of lifetime contract.

The truth is, I’m constantly mistaking my current taste for my permanent nature.

I hate tomatoes.

I’d never eat mushrooms.

Avocado is disgusting.

Country music isn’t my thing.

I’d never wake up that early.

I’d never need medication.

I’d never be that kind of person.

I’d never do that.

Looking back, this wasn’t a list of things I’d never do. It was a list of circumstances I hadn’t encountered yet.

Which is probably why I’ve stopped trusting the phrase “I’d never.” My track record is terrible.

More often than not, it’s just a placeholder for “I can’t imagine it yet.”

We make declarations based on the palate we have today. Without realizing that our taste is already changing.

Most of the evidence is surprisingly ordinary.

There was a time I swore I’d never take Accutane. Not me. Not ever.

I had read the side effects. I had watched the TikToks. I had decided it was far too intense, far too toxic, and far too extreme.

Then my skin got worse.

Then I tried everything.

Then life served me an experience I had never tasted before.

Frustration.

Exhaustion.

Desperation.

And suddenly the thing I had judged from a distance tasted very different up close.

Funny how often “I would never” turns into “well, given the situation…”

Around the same time, I became deeply committed to a non-toxic lifestyle.

Which is a polite way of saying I once spent over thirty minutes researching hand soap.

For a while, purity was the flavor I craved.

Then I discovered my favorite perfume wasn’t non-toxic.

Neither was my favorite lipgloss.

So, my taste evolved.

I became far less interested in extremes and far more interested in balance.

Why are we so certain about things that are clearly capable of changing?

Most of us don’t stop at, “I don’t like that.”

We feel compelled to add, “and I never will.”

And eventually those predictions stop being about food, music, or hobbies.

Nobody wants to be the person who needs help.

The person who takes the medication.

Goes to therapy.

Changes their mind.

Asks for a loan.

Walks away.

Starts over.

Then life lets you sample the situation for yourself.

Suddenly, their choices make perfect sense.

You realize you were judging the recipe without ever knowing the ingredients.

Experience is a ruthless editor of certainty.

The people you once swore you’d never become don’t look weak.

They look human.

Which makes it difficult to keep pretending you know exactly what isn’t for you.

Maybe the story of our lives isn’t hidden in the big decisions after all.

Maybe it’s hidden in our taste.

The tattoo that eighteen year old me was certain I’d want forever is now being removed by twenty two year old me.

Proof that forever can have a surprisingly short shelf life.

They’re just preferences.

Cravings.

Obsessions.

Comforts.

But taste is never really about taste.

It’s about affinity.

Resonance.

What we can’t quite explain.

What we’re hungry for.

Of what appealed to us.

What challenged us.

Of what I kept returning to.

The lesson was there all along, hidden in the taste buds themselves.

I know I talk about change a lot.

I’ve built the foundation of this platform by finding increasingly elaborate ways to say that people change.

And while I am physically incapable of resisting that temptation entirely, this feels slightly different.

Because taste feels lower stakes than identity.

This isn’t another essay about becoming someone new.

It’s an essay about becoming someone who suddenly likes mushrooms.

About developing a taste for things we once rejected.

About acquiring an appetite for things we once swore we’d never want.

And that’s okay.

Nobody panics when they suddenly like spicy food.

Nobody has an identity crisis because they ordered the salmon instead of the chicken.

We understand that our palate evolves.

We acquire taste.

Refine it.

Expand it.

We learn to appreciate bitterness.

Grow comfortable with complexity.

Discover that not everything worthwhile is sweet.

Lose our appetite for things we once couldn’t get enough of.

We celebrate a refined palate.

We question a revised opinion.

As if changing your taste is growth, but changing your mind is inconsistency.

Maybe that’s why I’ve become suspicious of certainty.

I’ve spent a lot of my life declaring what wasn’t for me.

Looking back, that seems like a terrible strategy.

It’s hard to discover new flavors when you’ve already decided what you won’t order.

And life got a lot more interesting once I stopped defending my palate and started expanding it.

Because at the end of the day, a life spent acquiring taste is far more interesting than one spent protecting it.

Every summer, the edges of my life soften, and I become someone I recognize immediately.

The strange part is that she isn’t new.

I’ve known her my entire life.

Yet for most of the year, she feels impossible to find.

She disappears beneath routines and responsibilities. Beneath calendars and deadlines. Beneath the version of me that is always trying to get everything right.

Then June arrives, and somehow she finds her way back.

But nothing about my life really changes.

I still have responsibilities.

I still have deadlines.

I still have the same insecurities.

But every year around this time, I stop moving through life like I’m bracing for impact.

Every year around this time, I meet her again.

The girl I spend the rest of the year waiting to become.

Which would be inspiring if it weren’t so confusing.

There’s a fine line between living too much in the past and living too much in the future. We all know we’re supposed to live in the present, but the truth is most of us spend our days drifting between what already happened and what hasn’t happened yet.

Not even in a particularly serious sense. More so the everyday tendency to drift either ahead of ourselves or behind ourselves, rarely settling into the moment we’re actually in. Thinking about tonight’s dinner, tomorrow’s schedule. Wishing I could rewind to last night when the only thing on my mind was how much longer the dogs would stay in my bed before our nightly routine came to an end.

Which kind of proves my point, doesn’t it? Even in a moment of pure bliss with my puppies curled up beside me, I was already thinking ahead.

I have a tendency to experience things twice, once while they’re happening, and again when I realize they’re gone.

I know the present is the goal. I get it.

But lately, I’m less concerned with achieving perfect mindfulness and more concerned with the fact that my brain seems determined to treat life like a five year strategic plan.

I’d like to spend a little less time imagining myself in my thirties, married with children, somehow simultaneously balancing a successful career, maintaining flawless impossibly youthful skin, hosting dinner parties, and remembering to thaw the chicken.

Because if that version of me ever arrives, she’ll probably spend a fair amount of time looking back at twenty two.

Back at the quiet time spent writing little Substacks. Back at the freedom of deciding what to do with an entire Saturday. Back at the luxury of silence, of spontaneity, of having nowhere to be but exactly where I am.

But that’s the cruel thing about being human, isn’t it?

We’re always standing in the chapter we’ll one day miss, busy imagining the next one.

And we all do this, maybe more than we’d like to admit, maybe more than we even realize.

I’ll wear that outfit when I lose five pounds.

I’ll schedule my blowout around my Friday night plans.

I’ll do that when I’m more confident.

I’ll take the trip when I have more money.

I’ll host the dinner party when my home looks better.

I’ll start putting myself out there when I feel more ready.

I’ll stop worrying so much when life settles down.

I’ll be happier when I get there.

Wherever there happens to be.

The problem is that there’s always another version of ourselves waiting in the future.

We spend so much of our lives waiting for permission from people who don’t exist yet.

The version who finally has it all figured out. As if they’re going to arrive one day, tap us on the shoulder, and let us know we’re ready to begin.

But in the meantime, we keep postponing pieces of our lives until they finally arrive.

If they finally arrive.

Which brings me back to summer me.

Sun-kissed me. Windows-down me. Long-way-home me. Stay-for-sunset me. Say-yes-before-I-overthink-it me.

I’ve spent years treating her like a future version of myself.

The version who is more confident, more spontaneous, more willing to trust life.

And yet she returns every summer as if to remind me she was here all along.

The problem with waiting to become her is that she keeps finding me before I find her.

She has a better attendance record than most people I know.

Her return is one of the few guarantees in my life.

And still, every June, I greet her with the surprise of someone who wasn’t expecting company.

Which raises an even bigger question:

What makes her so compelling in the first place?

Usually, by this point in an essay, I’ve arrived at some neat conclusion. Some tidy realization that ties everything together. This time, I’m not so sure.

I could take the scientific route.

There are plenty of biological explanations for why I feel better in the summer. Increased sunlight exposure is associated with higher serotonin activity, which influences mood, motivation, and emotional well-being. Longer days help regulate our circadian rhythms, improving sleep, stabilizing energy levels, and creating healthier cortisol patterns. More time outside means more movement, more fresh air, more vitamin D, and less time trapped in our own heads.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years living outdoors. Natural light was constant. Physical activity was unavoidable. People gathered, worked, and spent time together in ways that feel increasingly rare today. Compared to that, fluorescent lighting, Zoom calls, and spending most of the day indoors are relatively recent inventions.

In some ways, summer me may simply be operating under conditions that feel more natural to the human brain.

And maybe that’s part of it.

Serotonin can explain improved emotional well-being.

Vitamin D can explain a better mood.

Early morning sunlight can explain better sleep.

What they can’t explain is why her arrival feels so familiar.

Like, there you are.

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to her.

Not because she’s better than me.

Because she feels more like me.

Every August, I start grieving her.

Not all at once. At first, it’s just a feeling. The kind that sneaks up on you in the middle of a perfectly good evening.

The air is still warm. The trees are still green. The sun still lingers longer than it should.

Everything still looks like summer, but it doesn’t quite feel permanent anymore.

Like the calendar hasn’t caught up yet, but part of me already knows what’s coming.

Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon.

And with it comes the quiet fear that she might leave again.

And that’s where my theory starts to fall apart.

Because even if science can explain why I feel better, it doesn’t explain her.

The way she moves through the world.

The way she trusts that things will work themselves out.

And maybe that’s why I can’t quite figure her out.

Every year, I treat her as though she’s something summer created.

A version of myself that belongs to the season rather than to me.

Like she arrives with the sunshine and disappears with the leaves.

But what if summer isn’t creating her at all?

What if it’s simply reminding her she’s allowed to exist without needing to become someone else first?

What if she’s here in November?

In February?

On ordinary Tuesdays and rainy Thursdays?

What if the real tragedy isn’t that she leaves every August?

What if it’s that I spend the rest of the year forgetting where to find her?

Every summer, the edges of my life soften, and I become someone I recognize immediately.

Every June, she returns exactly as she always has.

Sun-kissed.

Windows down.

Long way home.

And every year, I greet her like a stranger.

Even though she knows her way back to me by heart.

I love staying in beautiful hotel rooms.

Not in a shallow or entitled way. I don’t need marble bathrooms or five star service. I just love getting to try on a different space for a few days, no strings attached.

I find myself admiring the room, stepping into a space shaped by someone else’s decisions, one that somehow belongs to no one and everyone at the same time.

Your book ends up on the nightstand. Your sunglasses land on the dresser. A sweater gets tossed over a chair. A dress hangs from the closet door instead of a suitcase.

Little traces of you start appearing in a place that was never really yours. Like the room starts remembering me.

At least a little.

It’s easy, in those moments, to play a game with myself. I imagine the room completely empty. What would I keep? What would I replace? Which details would stop feeling charming after six months? Which ones would make me fall in love with the place even more?

That’s why I love beautiful hotel rooms.

Not just because I’d like to live luxuriously. But because I like getting to borrow a life.

Sometimes I convince myself I could stay forever.

Then I remember that’s the magic trick of a hotel room.

You never have to know it long enough to get annoyed with it.

You don’t have to deal with the leaky faucet. The neighbor upstairs. The drawer that sticks. The lightbulb that’s been flickering for three weeks.

You get the edited version.

The highlights.

The version that’s just passing through.

And then it occurred to me that most people know me the same way.

Not all of me.

Just the room they happened to stay in.

Some people know me through the Business Suite.

Bright lighting. Early mornings. A desk facing the window.

Everything in its place.

Others know me through the Balcony Suite.

Windows open. A swimsuit drying over the railing. The Beach Boys drifting in from somewhere nearby.

Fresh flowers on the nightstand. Gauzy curtains moving with the breeze.

The version of me that loses track of time.

Nothing is being analyzed there. Nothing is waiting to be fixed.

Some have wandered into the Inquiry Suite. The room with too many doors and no clear exit.

The version of me that needs answers. Every possibility considered. Every loose end tugged at.

Others have spent time in the Honeymoon Suite.

Everything romanticized. Everything softened by flowers. Every moment worth savoring.

Pretty things. Sentimental things. Things chosen not because they were necessary, but because they made me feel something.

The version of me that falls in love with life a little too easily. The version of me that has always believed life is better when it feels pretty.

Yet somehow each room shares the same address.

They’re all living inside the same person.

Whether consciously or not, I think we curate ourselves like hotel rooms.

We decide what stays and what goes. What earns a permanent reservation and what gets checked out. What is chosen for function and what is chosen simply because we find it beautiful.

We are always making adjustments. Fluffing pillows. Rearranging furniture. Changing the lighting. Convinced we’ve finally perfected the room, only to find ourselves redesigning it once again.

Maybe that’s what life is.

And just like a hotel room, not everyone gets the same access.

Some people are respectful guests. They stay awhile, enjoy the space, and leave everything exactly as they found it.

Others leave the room completely transformed.

They pull back the curtains. They turn on lights in rooms you’ve been keeping dark, illuminating corners you didn’t realize were still waiting to be seen.

Some leave the room better than they found it.

Some don’t.

And some never realize they changed the room at all.

The astounding part is that most people only know the room they stayed in.

Not the entire hotel.

So how well do they really know me?

And why do I give so much weight to the opinions of people who only ever saw one room?

My boss knows the Business Suite.

The polished version. The scheduled version. The version with a running list in her head.

My coworkers know the lobby.

My friends know the Balcony Suite.

My sister knows the room with limited access.

The one that requires a special key. The one people spend years earning access to, if they ever do at all.

And still, I’m left wondering.

If I walked through each room one by one, which would I recognize first?

One of them must feel more like myself than the rest.

And I don’t find that two faced.

If anything, I’ve started to think maturity has less to do with consistency than we pretend.

Maybe authenticity isn’t choosing one room and declaring it the original.

Because the older I get, the more I realize how often people try to hand us keys to rooms we never even chose.

Be impressive.

Be effortless.

Be someone worth watching.

Be someone worth choosing.

Be whoever they’re looking for.

Be everything.

Be enough.

This is your room now. Stay there.

But I’ve never lived that way.

I’ve been the girl who wakes up before sunrise and the girl who loses entire afternoons to sunshine.

I’ve been the girl who needs answers and the girl who can leave a question untouched for days.

I’ve been practical.

I’ve been sentimental.

I’ve been all of them.

So maybe consistency was never the goal.

Maybe the goal is recognizing that every room was decorated by the same person.

That we’re allowed to keep renovating.

Allowed to outgrow rooms.

Allowed to invite some people in and quietly lock the door on others.

I used to think I was different people in different places.

Now I think each room simply tells a different part of the same story.

Hotel rooms make it easy to believe a place can be understood all at once.

Walk through the door. Look around. Take it in.

People aren’t like that.

The longer I’ve known someone, the less convinced I’ve become that any of us can be reduced to a single room.

More often than not, those who know us best aren’t the ones who’ve spent time in our most beautiful rooms.

They’re the ones who ended up in the wrong room and stayed anyway.

The unfinished ones. The messy ones. The ones still waiting to become something.

The parts that don’t match. The parts we’d probably remove from the brochure.

We’re collections of contradictions.

And maybe being loved isn’t having someone choose their favorite room.

Maybe it’s having someone wander through all of them and decide they’d like to stay anyway.

Last week, I gave my two weeks notice.

A few hours later, I asked my dad to come say goodnight and leave my door open a crack.

Lately, growing up has felt a lot like that.

Half building a life of my own. Half appreciating the one that built me.

Equal parts independence and familiarity. Equal parts figuring it out and wanting someone to remind you that everything is going to be okay.

Nobody tells you that one of the most confusing parts of your twenties is feeling older and younger at the exact same time.

Because the weirdest part isn’t that I’m old enough to order a martini. It’s that I can spend the morning talking through career moves, salary expectations, and what I want from my next chapter, then spend the evening waiting for my mom to call me downstairs for dinner and hug me before bed.

For the longest time, I thought growing up would feel more linear than this. I thought each year would carry me farther from the person I used to be.

When you’re eighteen, graduating high school and moving away to college, independence feels like the goal. You feel so grown up then. Maybe you’re living in a different state, meeting entirely new people, building a new version of yourself from scratch. You choose your own class schedule, make your own decisions, and learn from your mistakes without your parents looking over your shoulder. For the first time, you’re proving you can do life on your own.

And you can.

I did.

I moved away. I learned how to navigate a city by myself, advocate for myself, and handle all the little inconveniences nobody prepares you for.

I became capable of doing things on my own.

Yet somehow, the older I get, the more I appreciate having a place where I don’t have to.

Maybe maturity isn’t outgrowing home. Maybe it’s finally understanding its value.

When you’re a kid, your parents take care of you because they have to. At twenty two, my parents take care of me because they want to. And I let them because I want them to.

It’s a completely different relationship.

This realization has hit me especially hard over the last few weeks. I’ve been spending more time at home this summer, doing what I’ve done for most of my life, splitting my time between my parents’ houses.

Half here. Half there.

It’s funny because there was a time when I would’ve seen that as regression. A step backward. Now, it feels like something else entirely.

Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to see my parents as people now, not just parents. I genuinely enjoy spending time with them. So why wouldn’t I enjoy getting to split my time between both houses when I’m home?

One thing that has never been lost on me is how lucky I am. My parents have been divorced for most of my life, but somehow they’ve always found a way to put me, Zach, and Olivia first. I know not every child of divorce gets that version of the story.

So lately, life has looked like hot dinners waiting on the table instead of throwing together something quick and eating alone in my apartment. My dogs greeting me at the door before I can even take my shoes off. Someone to take an evening walk with. Coffee already brewing in the morning.

None of those moments are particularly remarkable. They’re the kinds of things I spent years taking for granted.

Now, they feel like the parts I’ll remember.

A familiar rhythm that asks nothing of me except to be there.

Half one life. Half another.

The other day, I was thinking about taking a PTO day from work for no particular reason. Before I did, I called my mom and asked what she thought.

She laughed and told me it was entirely up to me. It was my job, my PTO, and my decision to make.

For a second, I almost forgot that.

I didn’t end up taking the day off. My guilty conscience won. But the conversation stuck with me.

One day you realize your parents are no longer telling you what to do. They’re just there if you want advice.

There’s something both comforting and terrifying about that.

At twenty two, I get to make my own choices. I get to decide where I work, where I live, what opportunities I take, and what risks I don’t. If I make a mistake, that’s mine too.

But maybe one of the best parts of growing up is realizing those things aren’t mutually exclusive. I can be responsible for my own life while still knowing my parents are there when I need them. Not to make my decisions for me, but to remind me I don’t have to navigate every decision alone.

I think this new job is what’s triggering so much of this reflection.

For most of my life, every chapter came with a built in next step. Freshman year became sophomore year. Junior year became senior year. Even graduation came with a ceremony, a clear ending, and a clear beginning.

But this feels different.

For the first time, I’m making a professional decision that isn’t attached to school. There’s no predetermined next step.

Just me deciding that this chapter is over.

Nobody throws you a ceremony for giving your two weeks. You don’t walk across a stage or receive a certificate. You send an email, make a phone call, have a conversation, and suddenly a chapter of your life starts coming to an end.

When I accepted this new opportunity and gave my notice, it felt surprisingly emotional. Partly because this job has been a positive experience, and partly because it was something I had never done before.

Before I did it, I asked my mom to sit with me.

She said no.

It wasn’t a lesson in independence. It was a vote of confidence.

Because some things you’re meant to do yourself, even when you know someone will be waiting on the other side.

It probably sounds insignificant to someone who’s changed jobs a dozen times. But to me, it felt like one of those quiet milestones nobody talks about. One of those moments where you realize you’re making decisions that shape your life, and nobody else can make them for you.

It’s exciting. It’s scary. It’s a little sad. And maybe that’s why home feels so comforting right now.

Not because I’m becoming less independent, but because life is becoming more complicated.

But the older I get, the more I’m realizing that adulthood isn’t a straight line away from the people who raised you.

When I turned twenty one, everyone acted like I had crossed some major threshold. And technically, I did. But ordering a drink never felt nearly as strange as giving my two weeks notice. Or watching my parents get older. Or realizing I genuinely enjoy spending Friday nights at home. Or understanding that the people who raised me are becoming people I enjoy, not just parents I need.

That’s where the real growing up is happening.

As a planner, I’m always trying to figure out the next step. What will tomorrow look like? Where will I be next year? How do I get myself closer to the life I want?

But maybe twenty two isn’t a year of certainty.

Maybe it’s a year of contradictions, of realizing how much of life exists in the middle.

Half Birmingham. Half Ann Arbor

Half at my mom’s house. Half at my dad’s.

Half excited for what’s next. Half wishing time would slow down.

Half convinced I know exactly what I’m doing. Half certain I have no idea.

I thought growing up would feel more definitive than it does. Like eventually I’d arrive on one side or the other.

Independence or home.

Adulthood or childhood.

Leaving or staying.

Instead, twenty two has felt a lot more like learning how to hold both.

The older I get, the more life seems to be a mix of things ending and things staying exactly the same.

New jobs. New responsibilities. New versions of yourself.

And yet every morning, there’s still coffee.

So last week, during the familiar little maintenance ritual I return to every few weeks, I got a manicure. Instead of the same semi-sheer pink I get every single time, I decided to switch it up and go cherry red. In the moment, it felt chic. Spontaneous. Like maybe I was the kind of woman who could pull off red nails effortlessly.

I spent the next 18 hours feeling spiritually miscast.

While the woman at the salon was painting them, I kept trying to convince myself they were right. With sheer polish, everything sort of blends together. Where my hands end and my nails begin feels softer somehow. More natural. More like me. But with red, suddenly my hands looked loud. Defined. Like they were demanding attention in a way I was not used to.

When she finished, I stared at them thinking, Okay wait, these actually look really good. But deep down I knew I was trying to talk myself into them. They did look good. They just didn’t look like me.

The next morning I woke up, looked at my hands, and genuinely had to process that they were attached to my body. Even washing my face felt off. My fingers looked foreign somehow. I could not settle into them the way I normally do.

It was Memorial Day Monday, meaning every nail salon was closed, but I still was so determined to undo the situation that I DoorDashed acetone and all the proper gel removal supplies to my house. I knew one thing for certain, I would not be going to sleep Monday night with red nails.

In my defense, I had chipped two of them almost immediately, and red polish has absolutely no grace for imperfection. Sheer pink lets you live a little. Red exposes you.

So my lovely Nana painted over them with the same sheer pink I always get, just enough to hold me over until I could make it back to the salon later this week and fully restore order.

And somewhere between aggressively soaking off cherry red gel polish and staring at my semi-transparent pink nails back where they belonged, I realized the problem was never that the red looked wrong.

The problem was that they made me realize how attached I am to being recognizable to myself.

Which sounds insane until you realize how dependent you can become to tiny rituals of self recognition. The same manicure. The same jewelry. The same routines. The same version of yourself, repeated over and over until it starts feeling less like preference and more like identity.

I didn’t realize how much of my personality was stored in a semi-transparent pink manicure until I replaced it with cherry red.

There is something deeply human and a little vulnerable about the way small rituals become psychological anchors. I am deeply loyal to the version of myself I recognize most easily. The same nail polish. The same jewelry. The same lip combo. The same perfume rotation. The same filter on all my photos, which is the one thing I will absolutely gatekeep, sorry Tess <3.

And for a long time, the same bow phone case too. Although since I last wrote about that, I have unfortunately been forced into personal growth after upgrading my phone and discovering the bow case does not exist for this size.

None of it feels boring to me. It feels like continuity. Like safety. Like knowing exactly who is looking back at me in the mirror every morning.

The red nails interrupted that ritual in a way I was not expecting. They exposed how attached I have become to repetition. It got me thinking about how much of a person can become tied to aesthetic scaffolding. If you strip away the little signatures you have carefully collected over the years, is there still a clear version of you underneath?

It is kind of a silly question, but also not really.

Because sometimes aesthetics stop feeling playful and start feeling like self surveillance. You stop experimenting because deviation feels strangely personal, like losing the plot a little bit.

Realistically, nothing about me changed because of a manicure. But maybe we all have versions of ourselves we quietly protect. And after enough repetition, those versions eventually become the ones we trust most.

This strange attachment I have to tiny aesthetic rituals feels very specific to the current era of highly curated living online. Not in a cynical sense, and not even necessarily in a negative one. More so that we now move through the world constantly interpreting ourselves and each other through aesthetics. Entire ways of being distilled into visuals, routines, and references. The clean girl. Old money. The wellness obsessed minimalist. The woman who drinks raw milk, journals in the morning, and somehow owns an entirely beige wardrobe.

And I understand the appeal because, to some extent, I participate in it too.

What interests me is how quickly aesthetics stop feeling superficial and start carrying emotional weight. A haircut is no longer just a haircut. A manicure is not simply a color. Everything arrives attached to a version of womanhood. A mood. A life.

When Hailey Bieber darkened her hair, people were not asking for brunette. They were asking for “expensive brunette,” “teddy bear brunette,” “cinnamon cookie butter brunette.” The language itself became aspirational. It was never really about brown hair. It was about the life and kind of woman that seemed attached to it. People were not chasing a color as much as they were chasing whatever Hailey Bieber appeared to represent at the time. Polished. Cool without trying. Desired. Entirely at ease within her own image.

The same thing happened when Love Story came out and the internet rediscovered Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Suddenly everyone wanted to dress like her, live like her, exist with that same restrained elegance. Which is ironic, because what made Carolyn Bessette Kennedy so compelling was how unconstructed she seemed in the first place. Her style felt like an extension of herself rather than an attempt to become someone.

And yet there we all were, trying to recreate something so innately hers through the correct trousers and perfectly undone hair.

There is a scene early in the series where she is getting her nails done and briefly considers red before ultimately choosing something softer and understated instead. Such a small moment, but it says so much, quietly marking her movement into an entirely different world.

I could not stop thinking about that scene while staring at my own red nails.

Because the truth is, tiny beauty choices often reveal far more than we expect them to. They expose the versions of ourselves we naturally settle into and the ones that still feel slightly performative, even when they seem perfectly suited to us from the outside.

And maybe that’s why trends move so powerfully now. They do not just offer inspiration. They offer identity. A recognizable framework for the kind of person you might want to become.

Until eventually you are left wondering how much of yourself exists outside the aesthetic language you have learned to describe yourself through.

Which is a very dramatic conclusion to arrive at over a manicure color, but unfortunately the red nails revealed something.

Maybe someday I will try red nails again and feel entirely like myself in them. Or maybe I will always be a semi-sheer pink person. For now, my signature shade is back on my hands. The bottle is also back in its usual place in my car, where I keep it at all times in case I end up at a random salon that does not carry the exact color. Which, now that I see it written out, probably tells you everything you need to know.

Still, honestly, I feel relieved. A little more like myself again.

Maybe the things we wear, repeat, and return to are not disguises at all, but quiet confirmations.

Maybe the best personal style does not transform you. It reminds you.

The older I get, the more I think spider sense is just feminine intuition with better branding.

Because the whole concept feels suspiciously familiar to me. Sensing something before it happens, feeling danger before it arrives, knowing who someone is before they fully reveal themselves.

Maybe that’s why the idea resonates so deeply. “Spider sense” has always represented a kind of heightened awareness, the ability to recognize something before logic fully catches up to it. A feeling in your chest before you have proof. An instinct that sounds irrational until it turns out to be right.

Spider-Man is iconic for having a superpower built around perception and sensing things before proof, while people in real life are often taught to distrust those same feelings unless they can immediately explain them.

I don’t think we talk enough about this hidden internal alarm system, the one quietly running in the background at all times. Always observing. Always collecting. Always firing when it needs to.

I’ve started to recognize how intuition actually shows up in real life. Not like a movie scene. More subtly than that. Bodily. A feeling you can’t explain in the moment but somehow understand completely in retrospect.

Sometimes it arrives as a thought so clear it almost startles me, only for the rational part of my brain to immediately shut it down.

Sometimes it begins in my stomach, but I’ve always hated the phrase “gut feeling” because what I feel never stays there. It spreads. Tingling. Buzzing. A certainty moving through my entire body.

If intuition is something that cannot be seen or touched, measured or proven, then what exactly is it?

Mine has always surfaced most clearly in dreams, as if my subconscious delivers the message before I’m fully ready to hear it consciously.

A few years ago, I did a writing program called Writers in New York, a four-week program built around craft seminars, workshops, and personal essays that forced us to dissect our own experiences. One of our prompts was to take a bizarre or unexplainable moment from our lives and connect it to something tangible enough to research.

I chose the night before my college acceptance.

I went to sleep with no certainty that a decision would even arrive the next day, only to wake up completely convinced I had gotten in.

Not hopeful. Certain.

Hours later, the notification appeared in my portal. I opened the letter and found out I was right.

Part of me wonders if my brain had simply processed the possibility before I consciously could. I had spent years terrified of rejection. I had obsessed over applications, decision letters, and outcomes. Maybe my subconscious recognized something before my conscious mind caught up.

For a long time, I tried to answer that question scientifically. At nineteen, I called it extrasensory perception because that felt like the closest available language for what had happened to me. A thought formed from seemingly nowhere, rooted in nothing tangible, only to later become true.

I became obsessed with researching it. ESP. Precognition. Manifestation. Neuroscience. Divine timing. I wanted an explanation for why my mind seemed to know something before reality confirmed it.

The problem with intuition is that it exists in a space science still struggles to fully explain. There are studies arguing our brains are constantly predicting future outcomes based on subconscious patterns, emotional memory, and repeated experiences. Other theories lean spiritual. Some people call it coincidence. Others call it magic. Most people simply call it irrational.

I am less interested in proving whether intuition is “real” and more interested in why we are so uncomfortable trusting things we cannot immediately rationalize.

Not everything meaningful arrives with proof attached to it.

I love The Body Keeps the Score, which popularized the idea that the body holds onto memory, tension, and trauma long before the conscious mind fully catches up. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk argues that the body and mind are not separate systems but deeply intertwined, constantly absorbing, processing, and reacting to information beneath our awareness. Emotions do not just exist psychologically. They live physically too. In tension. Exhaustion. Restlessness. Hypervigilance. In the quiet ways the body reacts before the mind can fully explain why.

I notice this in random moments all the time. Like work mornings, when I almost always wake up a few minutes before my 4 am. alarm, as if my body already knows it is time to go. Yet on mornings where I do not have to wake up early, I almost never beat the alarm.

Or a few years ago, during a particularly stressful period of my life, I started waking up nightly drenched in sweat, so much so that I would have to change clothes and lay a towel down before going back to sleep. At the time, I brushed it off as anxiety, hormones. But looking back now, I think my body was recognizing something long before I was willing to consciously confront it myself. That something in my life felt emotionally unsafe, unstable, and overwhelming.

The strangest part about intuition is not that it exists. It is how quickly we learn to distrust it.

How many times have I felt something instantly, only to convince myself I was overreacting? How many times have women throughout history sensed something about a person, a situation, a shift in energy, only to be dismissed because they could not logically prove it yet?

We are taught to call ourselves dramatic. Emotional. Too sensitive. Crazy. We learn to rationalize away the quiet alarms going off inside of us because logic is considered more respectable than feeling, proof more trustworthy than perception.

And maybe that is why intuition feels so difficult to articulate. By the time reality finally catches up, the feeling itself is already old news to your body.

Peter Parker did not become Spider-Man because he was fearless or confident at first. He became Spider-Man because he learned what happens when you ignore the responsibility that comes with power.

Uncle Ben’s death is what transformed the spider bite from an accident into a calling. “With great power comes great responsibility” was not really about super strength or climbing walls. It was about recognizing that being given something meaningful and choosing not to act on it still has consequences.

I keep thinking about intuition this way.

It feels small when compared to the kind of powers superheroes have. It is quiet. Invisible. Impossible to prove. But it changes the trajectory of our lives constantly. A feeling in your stomach. A pull toward something. The sense that a person, decision, or moment matters before you can logically explain why.

Maybe intuition is its own form of power.

And maybe the responsibility is not to silence it just because it cannot immediately defend itself in a courtroom of logic. Maybe the responsibility is learning how to listen before life forces you to.

Spider sense, after all, was never really about spiders.

The birds have been quieter lately, and I think that’s how I realized spring was ending.

A few weeks ago, outside my window, they sounded relentless. I’d wake up to them before the sun fully came up, hear them through the glass doors at dinner, stop mid-walk just to listen. Most evenings, I opened my windows to let the songs pour in, like I was Snow White. It felt like I was trying to make up for the springs I spent in New York, where the seasons always struggled to compete with the sirens.

But this past week, the chirping has softened. Not gone completely, just farther away somehow.

In my first piece, “Why March Feels Like A Second New Year,” I wrote about the emotional shifts that come with seasonal change. And with Memorial Day this weekend, I’m starting to feel another one.

I know it’s not technically summer yet. Especially in Michigan, where Tuesday was 90 degrees and by Wednesday it barely hit 60. But the feeling is still there. The unsettling beauty of late May. Spring isn’t fully gone, but summer is already arriving. The birds quiet down, daylight stretches impossibly long. Still light at 9 PM, bright again by 5 AM.

And it’s weird how much bittersweetness can come with change. It’s not sadness exactly, just noticing subtle loss inside of so much growth.

Of course, I’m not really talking about the seasons anymore. Or maybe I am, just not only them. I’ve spent the last few months changing in some of the same gradual ways nature does. So quietly, actually, that I barely noticed it happening at all.

That’s the strange thing about change. It rarely arrives all at once. There’s no exact moment spring dissolves into summer. No singular day where the air suddenly feels different, where the trees fully settle into green, where the birds decide to stop singing as loud as they did before. It happens gradually, then all at once in retrospect.

I think people change like that too. You do not notice the exact moment you become happier, older, softer, lonelier, more confident, more comfortable in your own skin. Healing is rarely dramatic. Most of the time, it looks like tiny shifts you only recognize later. Looking back and realizing something that once felt unbearable does not ache quite as much anymore. Realizing your thoughts have softened. Realizing you laugh easier now. Realizing you’ve become someone slightly different.

I’m on Accutane right now, it feels similar to this. Day to day, I can barely recognize the progress in my face. I still lean too close into mirrors. Still catch myself searching for flaws and blemishes before anything else. But then someone takes a photo of me, or I scroll back to pictures from a month or two ago, and the difference feels undeniable. Healing happens like that sometimes, too gradually for the person living inside of it to notice.

I love my sister to death. But God, does she love to go through my things. Ever since Mother’s Day, I’ve been spending more time at home again. Naturally, my things have followed me there. I come back to my sunglasses missing, find my favorite lip combo tossed into her bag, somehow realize my new clothes have slowly become hers too. And honestly, I get it. I do the same thing to my mom. As I sit here typing this, I’m pretty sure every single thing I’m wearing belongs to her.

And she never really minds, as long as I ask and bring it back eventually. Lately, I’ve realized I don’t really mind with my sister either. Maybe because I finally noticed we’re all doing the same thing. I borrow from my mom, my sister borrows from me, and somehow love exists inside all of it. Some little circle of womanhood happening inside our house.

Which sounds small, maybe even silly, but it feels significant to me. Last year, my sister stayed with me for a weekend and asked to borrow my face wash. I completely spiraled over it. To keep it short and sweet for you, I massively overreacted, though “overreacted” probably does not even cover it. Looking back now, I’m surprised she didn’t book a flight home that same night.

Of course I feel awful about it now. But these things are never really about the face wash, are they?

I think I was holding so tightly onto tiny things because I did not know how else to cope with everything I was feeling at the time. And when I look back at that version of myself now, I do not feel embarrassment as much as I feel tenderness. She was trying her best with the tools she had.

I’m still that person in some ways. I still feel things deeply. I still like control more than I should. But not to that degree. Not in the way I once did. Somewhere along the last few months, I became gentler with myself without even noticing when it happened.

And somehow, I arrived at all of this because the birds have slowed down on their chirping.

At first, I kind of thought this was all in my head. Until I spent part of my free time researching birds and their mating patterns.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Apparently, birds sing significantly less as the season progresses because the primary reason for the singing is to attract mates and defend breeding territories. By mid-summer, many adult birds begin shedding and regrowing their feathers. During that process, they become more vulnerable to predators, less capable of flying, and much quieter as a result.

And for some reason, learning that made everything click into place for me.

Spring offers hope and rebirth, like I wrote about in my March piece. Maybe that’s why it feels so emotional to me. Everything in it seems to reach toward something. Toward warmth, toward light, toward life returning. The trees fill back in, flowers try again. The whole season feels full of anticipation, like the world is stretching itself back awake after months of dormancy.

Summer feels different, less restless somehow. Less like becoming, more like arriving. It offers embodiment. What spring wants, summer settles into. By then, the world no longer feels like it is trying to bloom. It already has.

Spring reaches toward life. Summer settles fully into it. Spring is desire. Summer is realization.

Human beings are obviously less neat than seasons are. We are constantly changing, constantly cycling through different versions of ourselves at different times. But nature never announces its transitions dramatically, it just slowly becomes something else. The shift is not solely visual, it’s atmospheric. One season dissolves while another takes its place.

I think our bodies do the same thing. Maybe that’s why we often feel change emotionally before we can fully articulate it consciously. Nature prepares us for transitions before we even realize they’re happening. Somehow, we do too.

One day the air turns warm enough to linger after sunset. The light stretches impossibly late into the evening. The trees hold their green without trying so hard anymore. Everything around you feels fuller. More settled into itself.

And somewhere alongside the season, you shift too. Your face has softened. Your thoughts have softened too. You’ve loosened your grip on things that once felt impossible to release. You’ve become gentler with yourself without even noticing when it happened. The version of you that treated healing like something to chase instead of something to live through, slowly slips further away.

Not because anything ended.

But because life kept returning to itself, season after season, and eventually, you found yourself doing the same thing too.

I’ve always believed that when I ask for reassurance, something eventually answers.

Some people would call these coincidences.

And perhaps they are.

But to me, that has never been the point.

I am not interested in proving that the universe is sending me coded messages, or that every unusual encounter carries some hidden meaning. I do not look for signs to predict the future or to make decisions for me.

I look for them because they make me feel less alone.

They are small, deeply personal reminders that I am in conversation with something greater than myself. Call it God. Call it the universe. Call it intuition, faith, synchronicity, or simply the comforting sense that life is unfolding with more meaning than we can always see.

Whatever language you choose, the feeling is the same. Gentle reminders that I am being guided, that my prayers are being heard, and that even when I cannot see the full picture, I am not navigating life by myself.

My relationship with faith began long before I ever asked for signs.

I was raised Jewish, but I also grew up under the steady and loving influence of my Moms parents, whose Christian faith has always been a cornerstone of their lives. My Dad respected their beliefs deeply and welcomed their spiritual presence. Faith was never presented to me as rigid or exclusive. It existed as naturally as anything else in our home.

As a little girl, I prayed every night.

My Dad still laughs when he tells stories about those prayers. He says I would thank God for everything, from the birds outside my window to my family to my erasers and everything in between. Even after I said amen, I would keep going.

Looking back, I think I was doing what I still do today.

Paying attention. Expressing gratitude. Speaking into silence and trusting that something, somewhere, is listening.

So while faith and spirituality have always been part of my life, my understanding of both deepened after my childhood dog, Milo, passed away in January of last year.

We were able to say goodbye to him peacefully in our home, surrounded by love. After he had fallen asleep, I asked my Papa when he thought Milo would arrive in heaven.

He did not hesitate.

“To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”

Something in me settled the moment he said those words.

I knew Milo was safe. I knew Milo had made it to heaven. I knew Milo was in God’s hands.

I knew he was free from pain and held in something far greater and more loving than I could fully comprehend.

For the first time, heaven felt less like an abstract concept and more like a place of certainty.

That certainty became the foundation for a much deeper spiritual relationship.

The following fall, during a fifty minute drive to a Labor Day barbecue, I began talking openly to God and the universe for the first time in a long time. I spoke about everything, my hopes, my fears, my questions, and my desire to feel reassured that I was on the right path.

Somewhere along that drive, I asked for a very specific sign, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the kind we call a slug bug.

I wanted to see one before the drive was over.

It felt like the perfect request, distinctive enough to catch my attention and uncommon enough that I would know it had been placed in my path with intention.

When I didn’t see one that day, I was disappointed.

But weeks later, there it was.

And in that moment, I understood the universe is always listening, but it rarely answers on my timeline.

Since then, yellow slug bugs have become one of the signs I see most often, and one of the ways I am reminded that my life is unfolding as it should.

Once, after wondering in the parking lot of Plum Market whether I had somehow stopped receiving signs, and what I was doing wrong, I turned the corner and saw a yellow slug bug waiting as if to say, I am still here.

And so I kept asking.

During a season of deep questioning, I found myself wanting to know that there was meaning in what I could not yet understand.

One night, I woke suddenly and checked the time on my phone.

It was exactly 4:44.

If you are familiar with the meaning often associated with angel number 444, you will understand why this felt significant to me. An unmistakable answer to a prayer I had been carrying in my heart.

Not because I believe every repeating number holds some fixed universal meaning, but because I had asked for reassurance, and in the middle of the night, I woke up to exactly that.

Over time, I began to realize that signs are not limited to the symbols I explicitly ask for. Sometimes they appear through the things that already feel woven into my identity.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have more or less trademarked the name Dolly. Not because I grew up as a devoted Dolly Parton fan, though I have become one, but because my mom has always called my sister and me her Dollies. The name feels soft, feminine, playful, and full of affection. Over time it has become a charming little part of my identity.

And somehow, Dolly seems to find me, too.

On my final walk back to my apartment in New York City, at the crosswalk in front of my building, I looked up and saw a man carrying a Hello Dolly tote bag.

Another time, during one of those long therapeutic drives where I sort through my thoughts, the car in front of me had a sticker that read, “What Would Dolly Do?”

Maybe that’s what happens when something becomes part of who we are, the universe begins to scatter little reminders of it along our path.

By then, I had become more comfortable asking for signs, trusting that they would arrive in their own time.

So I asked for a rainbow.

I did not specify that it had to arc perfectly across the sky. I simply asked for an unmistakable rainbow.

This sign took a long time to arrive, but it was well worth the wait.

On the morning of Yom Kippur, I was driving to work, my eyes moving between the road and the sky, when I saw a brilliant ribbon of color vertically through the clouds.

It did not resemble the classic curved rainbow of childhood drawings.

It was more ethereal than that, a luminous streak suspended in the sky.

Since that morning, rainbows seem to find me everywhere.

They appear as prisms scattered across the floor, fleeting little spectrums of light that seem to materialize precisely.

My sister recently told me that she notices these rainbow reflections all the time. That they are not special.

But that does not diminish their meaning for me.

The significance is not in how common they may be, or in how often someone else happens to notice them.

The significance is that I asked for it.

Before I began this practice, I rarely noticed them at all.

Now they appear with such frequency.

In a way, they carry me back to my childhood.

I remember visiting my Nana and Papa’s home one winter and noticing a small pool of rainbow light resting on the carpet beside a Christmas tree dedicated to their son and nephew, both of whom died far too young.

The ornaments reflected the things they loved, baseballs, sports memorabilia, and little cars.

The tree became a quiet memorial to lives that were brief yet deeply cherished.

Even then, before I understood what signs could mean, light was finding ways to speak.

Eventually, I grew even more specific.

I had once asked to see spotted dogs, and I did, but they felt too ordinary to carry the significance I was looking for.

So I narrowed my request and asked for a dalmatian.

At the time, I had never seen one in person.

But after asking for this sign, I saw four Dalmatians within a matter of weeks, all in Ann Arbor.

Since then, I have seen several more.

The most recent appeared just last week, during a time where I am seeking clarity about what comes next.

I have been praying, asking for guidance, trusting that what belongs in my life will make itself known and that what does not will dissolve in its own time.

Driving home from dinner with my dad and sister, there it was.

A dalmatian.

Elegant, unmistakable, and perfectly timed.

I know this piece will not resonate with everyone, and it is not meant to.

But for those who have asked for signs and received them, for those who have felt connected to something larger than themselves, for those who place their faith in God, in the universe, or in whatever sacred force brings them peace, I believe you will understand exactly what I mean.

I do not believe signs are meant to prove anything.

They do not arrive to eliminate uncertainty or hand us a perfect map of the future.

Their purpose, at least for me, is much more intimate than that.

They are small reminders that life is more connected than it sometimes appears. That even in seasons of uncertainty, when we are questioning where we are going or whether we are being heard, something can still find a way to meet us.

Signs are not here to tell us exactly what comes next. They are here to remind us that we are loved, that our lives are unfolding with intention, and that we are held and protected within something vast and unseen.

That, to me, is what faith really is, believing that there is meaning beyond what we can see. Asking the question with genuine intention and trusting that the answer will appear.

Maybe all signs are really saying is, you asked, and you were heard.

And I have come to believe that the most extraordinary thing is that when you ask with an open heart to be guided, to be reassured, or simply to be shown that you are not alone, life has a beautifully remarkable way of answering in forms only your soul will recognize.

There was a version of the truth I used to reach for without thinking.

It was not always wrong. Just easier.

The kind that feels right enough to say out loud.

Someone asks a question, and I already know what I am going to say.

It comes quickly. It fits the moment.

But it’s not always the exact answer, just the one that is easier to give.

I never thought of it as lying. I really don’t like that word. It feels too fixed, too absolute for something that subtle.

But there were moments I would look back and notice the difference. What I said worked. It moved things along.

It just was not exactly the truth.

Growing up, I lied in ways I did not fully understand at the time. Not the small kind, not the ones that keep things easy. Bigger than that. Enough to notice, and hard to forget.

I learned from it. I can see that pattern clearly now. And I know I do not move through things that way anymore.

Even then, though, there was always something in the background.

Quiet, but consistent.

Not loud enough to stop me, just enough to register.

Like something in me noting, that was not exactly right.

I started paying attention to it this past fall. I had gone home for a few days, like I always do, and ended up in my mom’s closet, like I always do. I took a sweater. It was one of those pieces you can tell someone loves. The kind you know will be noticed. I folded it into my suitcase anyway, like it was nothing.

On my drive back, she called and asked if I had taken anything.

I said no.

Then she asked about the sweater, the exact one.

I said no again.

I don’t know how she knew. Then again, mothers usually do.

After we hung up, I felt it immediately. A steady, sinking feeling.

It was not even about the sweater. It was the feeling of carrying something I didn’t need to. The way I had answered without thinking, and the immediate realization that I did not want to keep it going.

So I called her back. I told her I had it, that I had not even thought before answering the first time, it just came out that way. She was not upset. Actually, she was proud of me for telling the truth.

And just like that, everything felt lighter again.

That was the part I could not ignore.

Because the truth about lying, at least the kind I knew, is that it rarely announces itself as a lie.

It feels like smoothing something over. A quick adjustment. A version that keeps the conversation moving and asks very little of you.

For a while, it can feel harmless. Almost practical.

But what seems easier in the moment has a way of leaving something behind.

You spare yourself a brief discomfort, only to create distance later.

Everything costs something.

A lie simply feels cheaper at first.

But the cost does not disappear. It just arrives somewhere else.

And I had felt that enough times to name it. That slight disconnect. That slight feeling of being out of alignment.

At some point, I stopped wanting to smooth things over at my own expense.

I would rather someone sit with the truth than be comforted by something that only resembled it.

So little by little, that instinct lost its hold.

Someone asks an uncomfortable question, and I can still feel the well-worn answer surface almost instantly.

The polished one. The convenient one.

It’s familiar. Like second nature. Old habits have a way of staying close.

But there is something else there now too.

A version of me that does not rush to fill the silence. One that can let things sit, even if they do not land perfectly. One that is comfortable saying things as they are, without adjusting it first.

Because I understand now how quickly certainty begins to blur. How one small inconsistency can make everything else harder to believe.

And I don’t want to be someone who has to be questioned.

The truth asks for more. A little more patience. A little more courage. A willingness to let it stand on its own.

Sometimes I still pause in the space between the two. Not because I don’t know what’s true, but because I do.

And there is something unexpectedly freeing in that. Letting things be what they are, whether they are well received or not.

And finally, I understand.

It comes easier this way.

There’s a version of me who travels with one perfect bag. Light, not bursting at the seams. A small tote on the plane, not a weekender on top of what’s already checked. She doesn’t exist for me yet. I am not her.

It’s never the clothes. I’m actually reasonable there. It’s the rest of it, the small things that make the difference, the things that make me feel like myself. The three pound hand weights I insist on bringing. The heating pad. A sound machine. Supplements. A dry brush. A steamer, if it will fit. And the toiletries… that’s its own situation.

I grew up moving between houses, always packing, always unpacking. You get good at being prepared.

For a while, everything I needed had to fit in a bag I could carry. And I was precise about what made the cut. My full routine came with me, skincare, toiletries, the exact versions of things I was used to. Nothing interchangeable. The details mattered.

I didn’t like substitutes. I didn’t like guessing. Even the smallest things had to be right.

My parents offered to get me two of everything, one for each place. It made sense. I just never liked the idea. I wanted to know exactly where my things were, and that they were coming with me.

As I got older, the list grew. Naturally, the bags did too. A duffel turned into a suitcase, then another. At one point, I was showing up with two suitcases and a laundry hamper, not because it was full of dirty clothes, but because it held everything I’d need for the week. It was easier to carry it all than pretend I could narrow it down.

It stayed like that for a while.

When I moved into my dorm freshman year of college, it was the first time I unpacked and thought, this can all stay here. I can leave things and trust they’ll still be mine when I get back.

Of course, anytime I had to go home, for a weekend, a break, I reverted instantly. My trunk was full, my bags were heavy, and I looked exactly like someone who had no intention of needing anything left behind.

Naturally, the pattern followed me when I started traveling. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t like this. It’s almost comical. A weekend up north and I arrive with a suitcase big enough for everyone on the trip. An overnight at my parents means luggage that would not pass a Delta weight limit. I’ve paid to check a bag more times than I can count, and every time it’s the same feeling, frustration, like I should’ve been able to make it work with less. I’ve gotten smarter about it now, packing a large carry-on with just enough room to redistribute when I need to.

The other part, I have to unpack once I arrive at my destination. Growing up out of bags means I make a home wherever I land, no matter how short the stay. On my last trip to Nashville, I even brought hangers.

It’s funny how patterns start early, for one reason, and follow you into adulthood in ways that look completely different but feel exactly the same. Because at the root of it, I do want to pack light. I always start there. A short list of what I actually need. A carefully planned lineup of outfits, convincing myself this time will be different.

And then the suitcase opens.

It starts off reasonably, and then something shifts. I definitely need scissors. I should bring the bone broth. The teddy bear might fit this time. A book, even though I haven’t picked one up all week. Still, maybe this is when I will.

I know this isn’t about needing more. It’s about control. I do use everything I bring. These aren’t extras, they’re my everyday things, and I’m not yet willing to go without them, even for a few days. The instinct is still there, that pull toward “just in case,” toward keeping myself comfortable, covered, certain.

And I have gotten better. I make adjustments where I can. Resistance bands instead of weights. The sound machine app instead of the real thing. Wrinkle spray instead of the steamer. Small negotiations, small proofs that I don’t need quite as much as I think I do.

And maybe it’s not even being a light packer that I admire.

Maybe it’s the ease of not needing to account for every version of myself. Not needing to bring everything that makes me feel okay. Trusting that what’s mine will still be there when I get back.

Learning to hold space for the version of me who needed control and reassurance, without letting her take up as much room now.

Understanding that sense of safety and security isn’t something I have to pack, or something that takes up space at all. It’s something I carry within me.

So maybe I’m not the girl who learns to pack light, the one who looks effortless while doing it, moving through it all without needing to bring her whole life along.

But I can be the girl who starts to travel a little differently. Who brings what still matters, and leaves a little more behind each time.

I don’t have to pack my whole life to feel like me.

And I don’t have to be a light packer to be her.

Maybe she isn’t lighter because she brings less, but because she’s learned she doesn’t have to carry it the same way anymore.

I miss a world I never existed in.

Not because I think I was born in the wrong era, but because so much of what shaped me belongs to a version of life that no longer exists.

There’s a specific kind of nostalgia that comes from 90s entertainment. It’s not nostalgia in the way we usually mean it, because I wasn’t there for it. More like borrowed memory.

Somewhere between Sex and the City brunches, Beverly Hills, 90210 drama, and Friends apartments, mixed with Clueless closets and the kind of effortless reinvention you only really see in Pretty Woman, I built this expectation for how life is supposed to feel.

And it’s very specific.

It’s a life without texting back and forth all day. Without checking someone’s location before trusting them. Without knowing everything, all the time, immediately. No refreshing, no tracking, no instant access to every answer.

Just calling a home phone and hoping the right person picks up.

Like Carrie Bradshaw waiting all week for a date. No texting in between, no “on my way,” no constant check-ins. You just showed up when you said you would and hoped they did too.

There was something in that.

The anticipation. Not knowing. The space for something to actually build.

Now it’s gone.

Even the idea of waiting feels outdated. People used to wait a full week for a new episode of a show. Now if something doesn’t load in two seconds, it’s a problem. I guess we still technically wait, but it doesn’t feel the same. There’s always something else to fill the gap.

Nothing gets the chance to linger anymore.

“The suspense is killing me” used to mean something.

Now it doesn’t.

Because if we’re being honest, the suspense never stood a chance.

We killed it.

And I know. Obviously I know. It’s idealized. It’s scripted. It’s literally written to be watched.

But still.

Everything felt more intentional. The outfits were thought out, not in an over-the-top way, but in a chic, understated, true-to-yourself kind of way. The conversations actually landed. Even the drama felt like it belonged there, like it had somewhere to go.

And I’m not saying that everything was better before. I like how things work now. Online shopping has saved me more times than I’d like to admit.

But I also can’t ignore the fact that what I’ve chosen to consume over the years has shaped me.

It’s probably why being called an old soul has never felt confusing.

I was talking to one of my best friends about why she stopped watching Beverly Hills, 90210, and she said she prefers watching older people. I immediately agreed. Then she clarified, she meant older as in age, like adults instead of high schoolers. Which is fair. That makes sense. But that’s not what I meant at all. I meant older as in everything. The feeling. The energy. The way life was presented.

And it shows up in the smallest ways.

Like when my Dad sends me his 28 hour Spotify playlist from what he calls his prime, and it’s all Elton John, Michael Jackson, Prince, Billy Joel, and I know almost every song. Not casually. Fully.

There’s probably something to be said about the fact that my favorite yoga classes feel more like a 90s soundtrack than a workout.

Lisa puts on NSYNC, Usher, Backstreet Boys, and somehow all of it blends into the flow without trying too hard.

We move through it without really thinking, but I notice I stay in things a little longer. A hold doesn’t feel as long when Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone comes on, which feels unfair but also completely valid.

Which, I’ll admit, does not beat the occasional yoga class where Lisa leans a little heavier on Drake than usual. Nothing really does. But it’s close. Closer than it should be.

So when people clock me as an old soul early on, it’s not surprising.

Because I didn’t just watch those worlds. I absorbed them.

And this weekend really made me think about it.

My little sister had prom. And later that night, I ended up watching season three of Beverly Hills, 90210’s prom episode.

It was hard not to notice the difference.

Back then, prom felt like the biggest deal. Something you built up to. Something you imagined. A night that actually meant something.

Now it feels more like a scheduled appearance.

You used to go to a department store with your mom and pick out something special. Now we order ten dresses online and hope one works. Getting asked in some overly thought out, slightly embarrassing but sweet way turns into… nothing. Or something so low effort it almost feels ironic.

And we all just accept it.

Now we go to prom for the three P’s. Pictures, pregame, party. The actual prom is not even included in that list, which feels telling.

We stay for the minimum amount of time required, take what we need from it, and leave.

And I get it. I did the same thing.

But watching it back like that, seeing how much it used to matter, it makes you wonder what shifted.

Where did the romance go? The build-up. The idea that something could just be enough on its own.

Why does everything now feel like something to move through instead of something to be in.

I’m guilty of it too. I know I am.

I just didn’t realize how obvious it was until I saw the difference side by side.

It’s easy to blame our culture, or the time we’re in. But that’s kind of pointless, because the truth is, there’s no going back. Life isn’t just moving forward, it’s accelerating. Everything is getting faster, smarter, more efficient, more connected. And it’s only going to keep going in that direction.

So it’s on us to make our lives feel meaningful anyway.

And I’m not just talking about the 90s, or prom, or Beverly Hills, 90210 anymore.

I’m talking about intention. Effort. Making things feel like they matter.

Handwritten notes for no reason. Flowers just because. Letting something be a surprise instead of documenting it. Stepping away from our phones and the constant need to know everything, all the time.

Being bored, and not rushing to fix it.

Opening a book or a magazine because you want to, not because you’re trying to unwind as efficiently as possible. Running errands without turning it into a race. Letting a slow morning actually be slow.

Living in the moment and caring more about the memory than the proof that it happened.

Not everything needs to be optimized.

Life used to come with built-in pauses. Now we have to choose them. And most of the time, we don’t.

I know I don’t.

But I also know I don’t need to live in the 90s to create a life that feels like it did.

I know I’ll always have the oldies music and the movies and the 90s shows to come back to.

But maybe the point was never to go back.

Maybe it was just to recognize what I was missing.

And start choosing it, here.

I’ve spent a lot of time becoming someone I actually like. Not in a self-absorbed way, just in the way it happens when you keep returning to yourself and making small adjustments along the way.

It’s something I’ve started to notice more in therapy. I know I can be hard on myself, but it’s never felt like criticism. It feels more like a baseline.

There’s a level I expect myself to meet, and I don’t spend much time debating it. I find my way there. Not perfectly, not every time, but often enough that it’s become familiar.

For a long time, I didn’t think of it as expecting too much of myself. I thought of it as how things were supposed to go.

Most of the time, I still feel that way. Lately, I’ve been learning how to soften, to recognize when I’ve reached my limit and not immediately ask for more. I’ve been paying closer attention to what’s already there, letting myself sit with it instead of moving past it too quickly.

And still, the thing I keep returning to is this understanding that I do love who I am. I value her. Even in the moments where I compare, or pick something apart, or imagine it slightly differently, it rarely feels heavy. If anything, it feels more like curiosity than criticism. Like trying something on rather than wanting to keep it.

Because underneath all of that, I don’t actually wish to be anyone else. I’ve spent too much time becoming this version of me to want that.

It hasn’t always felt this way. There was a time I wished a lot of things were different. When you’re younger, it’s easy to look around and feel like everyone else’s life fits better than your own.

But over time, that perspective starts to take on a different shape. You start to see that everyone is carrying something, that no one is moving through life untouched by it. And in that realization, there’s a kind of settling.

Not in a way that feels limiting, but in a way that feels clarifying. Like you stop reaching for something else and start working with what’s already yours.

Of course some people have more. Of course some have less. That part never changes. But it starts to matter less when you begin to find a sense of purpose and contentment within your own life.

Which makes me wonder what I’m still pushing for.

Even with that sense of acceptance, there’s something in me that keeps reaching just a little further. Adjusting, refining, continuing. It doesn’t feel like dissatisfaction. If anything, it feels like instinct.

Like we’re not really meant to be finished here. Like part of being alive is getting to keep exploring that, testing it, stretching it, seeing how far it can go.

And so much of that happens in the smallest moments. The ones we move through quickly, not realizing they’re the ones shaping us the most.

I always think of the song Seasons of Love. How do we measure a year in a life? We all have our own way of keeping track. My sister and I talk about this all the time. How a year ago can feel closer than three months ago. Or both can feel like completely different versions of you.

Her and I measure it in music tied to certain months. In perfumes that belong to a memory and can’t be worn again without bringing everything back. In notes I’ve written to myself and come back to later.

I think about who I was before working, when I was still a student. It’s recent enough that I should feel close to her, and in some ways I do. But in others, not at all. My life looks different now. My priorities do too, even if I didn’t realize they were shifting in the moment.

That’s the strange thing about growth. How nothing feels different while you’re in it, and then you look back and realize everything is.

And I think that’s where I start to see it differently.

Because even though growth has a way of happening on its own, I’ve never been someone who leaves it entirely up to chance. I get involved. I pay attention. I step in.

I think about the life I want. I pray about it. I give it more time than it probably asks for. I come back to it in small ways, in the middle of ordinary days.

And I’ve never looked back at my life and thought it was better than this. Even in moments that felt so good I wanted to hold onto them, somehow it kept getting better, like life keeps meeting me where I am.

I don’t think that’s random.

I don’t just let myself change. I make sure that I do.

And I don’t always see that level of control as a bad thing. It comes up a lot in therapy, when we start unpacking certain patterns or tendencies. There are some I’m willing to refine, to work through, to question, to unlearn. But there are others I’ve never felt the need to give up.

The focus. The discipline. The attention to detail. The independence. The parts of me that keep me aligned, that allow me to move through my life in a way that feels intentional and grounded. Some of it may come from anxiety. But not all of it feels like something that needs fixing.

Even the way I pull back feels intentional. It’s not something I fell into, it’s something I’ve learned how to choose. Knowing when to ease up instead of pushing past a certain point. Letting something be enough, even when I know I could ask for more.

It might look natural from the outside, but I know how much awareness it takes to hold it there. It doesn’t come from a lack of drive. It comes from knowing when to use it, and when enough is enough.

And I think that’s where the line starts to blur.

Because what I call discipline doesn’t always feel like a choice. It feels natural. Familiar. Like something I return to without thinking. But that’s also what makes it hard to release.

I don’t always know if I’m holding myself to a standard, or if I’ve just stopped giving myself the option not to.

From the outside, it all looks the same. Showing up. Following through. Staying consistent.

But internally, it shifts. One feels grounded. The other feels like something you don’t quite give yourself permission to let go of

And I felt that difference this weekend.

I was sick, I could feel it settling in, heavy and present. And still, part of me wanted to keep going. To cold plunge, to sauna, to hit my steps. To stay on track, even when my body was clearly asking for something else.

But I knew. I knew it wouldn’t actually serve me. That pushing through wouldn’t make me stronger this time, it would just delay what I needed.

So I let myself rest.

I slept on the couch. Getting to the grocery store felt like enough. I moved my alarm back, letting the morning come a little later. The routine didn’t disappear. It just waited.

And nothing fell apart. My body didn’t change in two days. My mind didn’t unravel. Everything I’ve built was still there, steady, even without me gripping it so tightly.

If anything, it made me realize that maybe this is part of it too.

Not just knowing how to push, but knowing when not to.

Letting it be lighter. Letting it be simple. Letting it be toast with butter, hot showers, a bath that lasts longer than it needs to.

If I say I love who I am, then this has to count.

Letting myself just be, when that’s what I need.

The way I show up for my life, for my routines, for holding myself accountable, comes from knowing myself well. From understanding my capacity. What I’m capable of. How I can show up. When I can show up. And just as importantly, when I need to slow down.

That’s what it really comes down to. Balance. Not in a perfect, evenly distributed way, but in an aware one. Understanding that what I’ve built is solid, it’s there for me. And when I need to step back, adjust, add, or remove, that isn’t failure. That’s care. That’s self respect.

I don’t spend much time wishing my life looked different, or that I was someone else. I like the way I think. The way I live. The life I’ve built.

And still, I grow. I evolve. I keep raising the bar. Most days, it doesn’t feel like pressure. But it also never really lets up.

I love who I am. I just don’t think I’ll ever let her be finished.

I don’t want to be anyone else.

I just want to keep meeting her a little further ahead.

Some things still deserve a call. Not because they’re urgent. But because they carry something a text can’t quite hold without flattening it a little.

I’m fully aware I’m typing this, which does make my entire point slightly questionable. Me, typing out why not everything should be typed, as if I wouldn’t immediately say “just call me” if this were an actual conversation. It’s a little hypocritical. I know. Just stay with me.

Sometimes all I do is scroll. It’s kind of impressive. One app to the next, barely thinking, just moving. Socials, shopping, emails, texts, back to socials again like I forgot something important there. It all blends together in a way that feels normal until it doesn’t.

And then I’ll catch myself texting someone I actually care about in the middle of all that. Half paying attention. Rereading their message like it deserves more than the two seconds I’m giving it.

That’s usually when it feels off.

Because I don’t think the people you love are supposed to exist in the same rhythm as everything else. Answered between notifications. Slotted in wherever there’s a second.

Calling just feels different. I want to hear you. I want to see your face if I can. I want the version of you that isn’t edited down into something that fits in a message bubble.

Maybe that’s just how I grew up.

Calling was never a big, intentional thing. It was just constant. I had a phone when I was pretty little, one of those tiny flip phones, and I used it exactly how you’d expect. I called my parents all the time. Not for anything important, just because I could. I liked hearing them. I liked that it was immediate.

I don’t think I ever unlearned that.

People definitely notice it. I’ll FaceTime my Dad from a bar like it’s completely normal behavior. Which, to me, it is. If I don’t talk to my Mom a few (hundred) times a day, something feels slightly off. Not even that deep, just off. I call for things that could very easily be texts.

But I don’t think it’s childish. I think I just never got comfortable keeping the people I love at a distance when I don’t have to.

At some point, we all kind of agreed everything could be a text. And to be fair, most things can. I love a text. Huge fan. Quick thoughts, half thoughts, almost feelings, things that sound like feelings but aren’t fully committing to it. It’s efficient. It moves. No one has to hear your voice shift or sit in a pause that lasts a second too long.

Which, in a way, is exactly why some things should not be texts.

There’s a certain kind of message you can feel yourself adjusting in real time. You reread it. Change a word. Change it back. Maybe add something to soften it. Maybe take something out so it doesn’t sound like too much. You’re not even overthinking it, it just isn’t landing.

That’s usually the tell.

And if you’re rewriting it three times, it was never meant to be a text.

I’ve absolutely hidden behind a message before. More than once. Probably more than I’d like to admit. It’s just easier. You can take something that feels a little too honest, sand it down, make it sound lighter, less like a real thing. Something that wouldn’t require a follow up. Something that wouldn’t open the door too wide. Send it, lock your phone, and suddenly it’s not sitting with you anymore.

Which is convenient. Almost suspiciously convenient.

Because texting gives you distance. Just enough to say something without really having to stand in it. You can smooth it out, clean it up, send it off, and detach like it didn’t carry any weight.

A call doesn’t really give you that option.

It’s a little more exposed, slightly inconvenient.

And I think we know that.

“I need to talk” becomes “Haha random but…”

“I didn’t love that” becomes “Wait lol was that serious”

You start translating yourself into something more manageable.

And it works. That’s the problem.

It works so well that you can almost forget what you were actually trying to say.

And then you get a response that doesn’t quite match what you meant. Enough that you reread your own message and realize… yeah, I didn’t really say it.

That’s the trade.

You get convenience, but you lose precision. You get distance, but you lose feeling. You get to avoid the moment, but you also miss it.

And I think I notice it more because I’ve always been someone who calls.

It’s subtle, but it’s there.

Like when you’re catching up with someone you haven’t seen in a while and it stays surface level, even though you both know there’s more underneath. Or when you’re trying to explain something that actually matters to you, and it comes out sounding casual when it’s not.

Or worse, when something does matter, and you convince yourself it doesn’t. At least not enough to call.

I’ve done that too.

Told myself something wasn’t worth the time or energy, when really I just didn’t feel like fully showing up for it. Which sounds harsh, but it’s true.

Because calling asks more of you. It asks you to be there, fully, without editing every second of it. You don’t get to perfect the delivery. You don’t get to take it back once it’s out there. You don’t get to hide behind timing or tone or the benefit of the doubt.

It’s just you, saying it, and someone else hearing it exactly how you say it.

Which is a little uncomfortable.

And I think that’s why it matters.

Most things can stay texts. I’m not giving them up. I like them too much. They’re easy, they fit into everything else, they don’t ask much of you. But every once in a while, you can feel it. That moment where you’re typing something and it just refuses to sound right, no matter how many times you fix it.

And I’ve started noticing the moments where I’m about to use one as an exit.

Where I could say something properly, and instead I’m about to send a version of it that’s just easier to deal with. Easier to ignore, honestly.

And I don’t always notice it in time. Sometimes I still send it. Sometimes I choose easy.

But when I do, it’s kind of obvious.

And that’s usually the cue.

It’s just not a text.

So call me instead.

There’s this quote my friend sent me once that I keep coming back to.

I am washing my face before bed while a country is on fire. It feels dumb to wash my face and dumb not to. It has never been this way and it has always been this way. Someone has always clinked a cocktail glass in one hemisphere as someone loses a home in another while someone falls in love in the same apartment building where someone grieves. The fact that suffering, mundanity, and beauty all coincide is unbearable and remarkable.

I remember reading it and feeling something rearrange. Not dramatic, just enough to make everything look slightly different after. The kind of shift you don’t announce, but carry with you.

I think I owe Thea for that one.

It comes back to me in small moments. Standing in a crowd at a concert. Sitting in traffic that isn’t moving. Looking around and realizing every person I can see is living a life I will never fully understand.

And then, without really meaning to, my perspective widens. It moves past the moment I’m in, past the people around me, until it becomes something harder to hold. Too many lives, too many moments, all unfolding at once.

There’s a word for that feeling. Sonder. The realization that every person you pass is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

It’s obvious when you think about it. But it never really feels obvious. Everything is happening everywhere, all the time. And still, we move through it from one singular point of view.

My friend Lucy sent me something that ended up becoming this piece. We have a habit of sending each other things that stick. This was one of them. You’ve probably seen something similar while scrolling, but I’ll place the image here so you can sit with it the way I did.

No two lives unfold the same way. It sounds simple, almost over said, but it’s easy to forget how absolute that truth is. Every person is moving through a version of reality shaped entirely by their own history, their own thoughts, their own patterns. Entire inner worlds existing side by side, rarely overlapping in full.

I’ve always been drawn to ideas like this. Not theories in a dramatic sense, but ones that reorient how you see things. The burnt toast theory, that delays might be protection in disguise. The 90 second rule, that emotion moves quickly through the body unless we keep it alive. The unfinished room theory, that every relationship leaves something behind, not always resolved, not always clean.

And then there’s this one. The invisible guest.

It’s the idea that when you walk into a room and feel exposed, as if attention might be fixed on you, the reality is far less centered. Most people are absorbed in themselves. Their own appearance, their own thoughts, their own internal awareness of how they are being seen. You are not the focal point. You are simply passing through.

I understood this concept intellectually long before I ever felt it.

There was a time when my skin was at its worst, a phase where it becomes the first thing on your mind and the last thing to leave it. I went out one day with my boyfriend, my hair pulled back, which felt almost unfamiliar. My hair had become a kind of cover, something to soften what I didn’t want fully seen. We ran into someone we knew and stopped to talk. I don’t remember much of the conversation. I remember being aware of my face in a way that made it difficult to be present at all.

When we got back to the car, I teared up, subtle crying that feels small on the outside but carries more than it should. Jake said something simple. Even if they noticed, it would be a passing thought. Something that dissolves almost as quickly as it forms. People return to themselves almost immediately.

It didn’t erase how I felt, but it shifted something. Just enough to create space.

Because there is a simple truth to how we move through the world. We are, by nature, oriented inward. Not in a harsh or careless way, but because it’s the only experience we have direct access to. It’s why our emotions feel so large, why our moments feel so defining. They are the only ones we inhabit completely.

But every space you enter is already layered with things you cannot see. Not just people, but what they carry. Low grade stress, private grief, small victories, quiet battles, and moments of anticipation that feel good. Entire narratives moving beneath the surface, unannounced, but shaping everything in real time.

We react to what’s visible, but we are shaped by what’s invisible. Most of it sits just outside our awareness.

So we end up responding to fragments. A tone, a pause, a reaction, without access to what formed it. We assign meaning from within our own perspective, while everyone else is doing the same inside theirs.

It creates a kind of underlying misalignment. A room full of people, each one both seen and unseen, responding to things no one else can fully name.

The invisible guest is not just you in someone else’s world. It’s everyone. Moving through spaces where so much remains unspoken.

And there’s something strangely freeing in that.

Today, my sister sent me something that will stay with me. If everyone in the world wrote down their problems and put them into a hat, would you risk picking one at random, or keep your own.

It’s a simple question, but it shifts something, if only slightly, to make you reconsider the weight of your own problems. Not to dismiss them, just to see them more clearly.

You can move through the world assuming your experience is the central one, or you can start to recognize that you are one of many unseen stories unfolding at the same time. Not just that others have something going on, but that what they carry might be just as complex, just as consuming, just as real as anything you feel yourself.

Our perspective isn’t wrong, it’s just limited. But every so often, something widens it. Not enough to lose yourself, just enough to realize how much more is there.

And that reframe doesn’t make life heavier, it makes it deeper. It softens reactions. It creates space where there used to be assumptions. It changes the way you interpret small moments, and the way you hold the larger ones.

You begin to move differently. More aware, more patient, less quick to center everything around yourself. Not detached, just less wrapped up in every passing interaction.

It doesn’t take anything away. It just places it where it belongs, instead of letting it feel like everything.

You are passing through. Just like they are.

One life, among many.

One moment, inside thousands unfolding at the same time.

The same way someone is washing their face while a country is on fire, someone might notice you, and then just as quickly return to their own world, something we rarely register.

You are not being held in people’s minds the way you think you are.

And once you really understand that, something realigns.

You can move through the world feeling watched, measured, defined by every glance and interaction.

Or you can move through it knowing most of it is passing. Most of it is not about you.

One way tightens everything.

The other lets you move through life with a little more ease.

Everyone has a sneaky obsession.

The kind that doesn’t look like a problem because it’s small. Contained. Easy to justify.

Mine lives in every bag, drawer, and pocket I own.

Lip products.

Some people collect shoes. Some people collect books.

I collect lip products.

And the worst part. I don’t think I’ve ever actually finished one.

I find them everywhere. Last season’s coats. Last week’s going out bag. Random drawers I don’t even remember opening. Toiletry bags I swore were organized. Extras I keep “just in case” I travel. You will almost never catch me without one.

It’s harmless, really. That’s how it starts.

Bad week. Let me cheer myself up with a new gloss.

Bored. I could browse. No pressure.

I won’t buy anything. I’m just looking.

Looking turns into testing. Testing turns into swatching. Swatching turns into, well, I’m already here.

Liners, stains, glosses, sticks, balms. If it exists, I’ve probably tried it.

I wish I could say it was random. It wasn’t.

I remember exactly when it started. College. My first liner, from Rinna Beauty. Looking back, it was completely wrong for me. Way too pink. Almost aggressively so.

Now, I’ve refined it. Of course I have.

A muted mauve. Pink, but not too pink. Brown, but not too brown. My lips, but better.

That’s where it gets a little ridiculous.

I kept thinking I was choosing variety, but I was always drawn back to the same place.

So now I don’t just have options. I have duplicates. Of one thing. Over and over again.

Moving to New York made it worse.

I had one of those mirrors that opened into a medicine cabinet. I loved it. Not for what it was, but for what it could look like.

Because if you’re even slightly particular like I am, you know. It couldn’t just be functional. It had to look perfect.

Not like my medicine cabinet. Like something curated.

That’s when the lip products became the display.

By then, I had enough to justify it. Lined up, organized, intentional. Or at least that’s what I told myself.

And from there, it stopped being a preference and started being a pattern.

It became a system.

This isn’t just collecting, it’s repetitive, predictable behavior.

I started to wonder why I kept ending up with different brands and different packaging, but the same shade and the same result. And it made me question what I was actually reaching for, because it clearly wasn’t expansion. It was something else entirely.

A feeling I thought I could get to, just by adding one more.

And when I found one I really liked, I’d buy two. Just in case it disappeared. It wasn’t logical. It felt more like a need to hold onto something I’d decided I couldn’t go without. Which is what makes it strange, because I’ve never really known what it’s like to go without, not in the ways that matter. I’ve always been taken care of, supported, secure. I know that, and I don’t say it lightly.

So it wasn’t about lack. And it wasn’t really about the product either. I know how easily buying things can turn into an escape, and this didn’t feel like that. It felt more specific, more subtle. It was the attachment. Something small and easy, almost weightless. Something that fits in my bag, my pocket, my routine. Something that made me feel put together, covered, taken care of.

At some point, my sister came over and counted them. Over fifty. And that was just what was lined up in my medicine cabinet.

Not purchased all at once. Collected over time, one here, one there. Which almost makes it worse. It didn’t feel excessive in the moment. It just added up.

And I can see it now for what it was. It wasn’t just a habit, it had crossed into something more obsessive, slight enough that I didn’t question it while it was happening.

That’s when it clicked. Not dramatically. Just clearly.

Lip products weren’t the point. They were just the entry.

Because what I was really doing was trying to fill something internal with something external. And slowly realizing it doesn’t work.

Everyone probably has a version of this. Mine just happens to come in glosses and balms.

Refreshing something over and over to see what’s new. Repeatedly opening the fridge without being hungry. Checking your reflection, hoping it lands differently. Adding something to your cart just to feel something.

I didn’t connect it at the time, but it’s something I had seen before.

In my senior year at NYU, I took a class called Dante’s World. We read The Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Boethius, and what I expected to be a snooze turned into something that continued to resurface.

He wrote it while imprisoned, waiting to be executed, as a kind of imagined conversation with Philosophy itself. Which sounds intense, and it is, but the idea that stayed with me was surprisingly simple. He keeps coming back to this tension between what we chase and what actually holds. Fortune, status, things that feel good for a second but don’t last. Versus something steadier, something internal.

He basically argues that most of what we reach for isn’t wrong, it’s just misplaced. We look for stability in things that can’t sustain it. And then we’re surprised when it doesn’t stick.

I didn’t fully connect it at the time. It felt too philosophical, a little removed from my life.

But looking at it now, it feels familiar.

Because it’s not that different from what I was doing. Different glosses, same promise. That I’ll feel more put together. More like I have it handled.

And for a second, it works.

Then it doesn’t.

And that’s it. That’s the pattern.

I can see it now, but the awareness doesn’t immediately change anything. I still reach for it. I still have my favorites.

The only difference is I notice the moment now.

And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I realize what I’m actually looking for has nothing to do with what’s on my lips.

The idea of alignment has been showing up in my writing more than I expected. If you read my piece When I Fast, I Go Slow, you’ll remember it was one of my words for 2026.

At its core, the concept is uncomplicated. It’s when your thoughts, your actions, and who you actually are all move in the same direction. There’s a steadiness to it. A kind of quiet clarity. You’re not forcing it, you’re just in it.

And when I look back at the constant pull to have something new, another gloss, another version of the same thing, it feels like the opposite of that.

Because you can’t stockpile a sense of alignment. You can’t build it by adding more. And you don’t run out of it the way you think you do.

It doesn’t come from what you have. It comes from how you’re showing up.

That’s the part that’s easy to miss.

That feeling isn’t something you gather. It’s something you come back to. It lives within you, a kind of internal stability that doesn’t depend on what you have or don’t have.

And I know I’ve always had more than I could ever need. So I’m starting to understand that what I was looking for was never something I could run out of.

It looks different now.

Taking care of myself in ways no one else sees. Following through on something I said I would do. Moving slowly instead of rushing through everything. Being honest, even when it’s uncomfortable. Waking up and not immediately reaching for something external.

I’m still your go to girl when you need a gloss. I probably have enough lip products to get us through another pandemic or a zombie apocalypse.

But it’s different now. There’s intent behind it. No more buying just to buy. I sit on it. I decide if I actually need it.

The trait is still there, just softer.

Before I left New York, I did a massive purge. I donated bags of products to a women’s shelter.

And now, more often than not, I know what’s behind the buy before I go for it.

I used to think it was about finding the right one.

Now I know there was never a right one to find.

For a long time, I thought I was collecting things.

Now I know I was collecting a feeling.

A feeling of having it together.

But nothing I bought ever actually gave me that.

It just distracted me from it, for a second.

And the strangest part is realizing it was never sitting in anything I could buy.

That sense of fulfillment only ever shows up when I choose to show up for myself.

There’s a split second where you can choose comfort or courage.

It doesn’t announce itself, but it’s there, in the pause before you decide.

Most days, it looks small. Some days, it looks like cold water.

The water is always colder than I expect.

There’s a moment, right before I sink in, where my mind fights me. Every instinct says don’t do it. And that’s exactly why I do.

I don’t cold plunge because I enjoy it.

I do it because a part of me needs to prove that discomfort doesn’t get to win.

And somewhere along the way, I started craving the feeling on the other side.

The clarity. The energy. The rush. And then that quiet, steady certainty settles in. I did that.

This hasn’t always been part of my life. It still feels new, like something I’ve only just been let in on.

I’ve only plunged a handful of times, really. And yet, now that I’ve started, I can already feel the shift, and there’s a knowing in me that I won’t be able to go without it.

The first time, I had just gotten out of the sauna. I stood there over the plunge, going back and forth in my head, staring into the water, perfectly still. Skin flushed, sweat dripping.

Can I really do this?

I tested it with my finger first. Sharp, immediate cold. Then my face, just for a second, enough to make me pull back and laugh in disbelief. I checked the temperature, 44 degrees. It felt almost theatrical, the way I stood there, looking into it, like it was something much bigger than it was.

And then, almost out of nowhere, a different voice cut in.

Are you serious? It’s just water. Since when does something like this get to have power over you?

That was the moment. Not dramatic, not loud. Just decided.

I told myself I could get out immediately if I needed to. That I only had to try. That this was mind over matter, and I wasn’t going to hand over control so easily.

I pressed play on Drake’s More M’s, the same song I reach for anytime I need to get out of my head and back into my body. Blood draws, cryotherapy, anything that asks something of me. It’s become a kind of cue, a ritual of bravery.

And then I stepped in.

The shock was immediate. My breath left me in a way I wasn’t prepared for, like my body had forgotten how to hold it. Everything in me reacted at once, shaking, bracing, alive in the most overwhelming way. I remember how impossible it felt to lower my arms, how even the smallest movements felt like decisions.

But I stayed.

The cold settled in. My breathing slowed. The initial shock passed. To my surprise, I wasn’t fighting it anymore.

A minute and a half later, I pulled myself out, skin buzzing, heart racing, and something in me felt completely reset. Not just proud, though I was that too, but clear. Like I had stepped through something and come out different on the other side.

I ran upstairs, almost weightless, telling my mom and stepdad like I had just discovered something extraordinary. My voice had this airy, sing-song quality to it, like I was still riding the feeling. My stepdad called it a cold plunge high, and that was exactly it. A kind of feeling I didn’t know I could create for myself.

Now, it’s become routine. After the sauna, I step in. Not because it’s easy. The moments before never really soften. There’s always that quiet negotiation in my mind, the familiar question, am I really doing this again?

But underneath it, there’s something steadier. A knowing.

I’m not leaving the room until I do.

And it’s almost ironic, when I stop to think about it. All the things I do in a day that ask so much more of me, take so much longer, feel so much heavier. And this, in the end, is only two minutes.

Two minutes that remind me exactly who’s in charge.

Remember the original Lululemon bags? The ones covered in affirmations, each one trying to tell you how to live a better life. There were plenty that made sense. Friends are more important than money. Jealousy works the opposite way you want it to. A daily hit of athletic induced endorphins gives you the power to make better decisions. All true. None of them stayed with me.

The one that did was simple. Do one thing a day that scares you.

For a long time, I didn’t question why that was the one that stuck. If anything, it felt slightly at odds with who I am. It was easy to agree with. Easy to admire. But if you haven’t gathered, I like control. I don’t naturally seek out discomfort. I like to know what I’m walking into, to manage it, to handle it well. And I do think I’m mentally strong. I trust my ability to steady my mind. If anything, cold plunging has only reinforced that.

But that line stayed anyway.

I think it’s because it stripped discipline down to something practical. It didn’t ask for anything dramatic. Just one moment a day where you don’t default to what feels good. One decision where you override the instinct to avoid.

It made grit feel less like a trait and more like a practice. Something you build, quietly, over time, in moments that most people would rather skip.

And for me, that’s exactly what it became.

I don’t always practice it, and it’s not something I actively think about. But somehow, it stuck. Even when I assumed it hadn’t.

At some point, you don’t get to keep something like that as a nice thought. You either live it, or you don’t.

For me, that moment started to take shape in the smallest, most unassuming way. It looked like standing at the edge of a cold plunge, asking myself a very simple question.

Am I going to choose comfort, or am I going to choose courage?

I’m not really talking about cold plunging anymore. This isn’t about cold water, it’s about a pattern.

In the plunge, everything is controlled. I decide when to get in, when to get out, how long I stay. Life doesn’t work like that. Things shift. What feels certain proves otherwise. Control, in that sense, isn’t guaranteed.

What I can carry with me is different.

Breathe. You will be okay. Stay calm, because panic only creates more chaos. Mind over matter. I can steady what’s happening in my head, even when everything around me feels out of my control. And most importantly, this will pass. Whether it’s two minutes, two hours, two weeks, or two years, the feeling is temporary. It always is.

Cold plunging has built what I think of as the “one more” habit. One more minute. One more breath. One more second of staying when everything in me wants to leave. And that has started to show up everywhere else. One more rep of something I’d rather skip. One small task when I don’t have the energy to do it all. One more thing checked off when I feel completely done.

How often the mind calls it before the body actually needs to. How quickly it decides something is too much, too uncomfortable, not worth pushing through.

And how often that limit isn’t real, just practiced.

There’s this idea I’ve come across before, the 40% rule, popularized by David Goggins. The premise is simple. When your mind tells you you’re done, that you’ve reached your limit, you’re actually only operating at a fraction of your capacity. The rest is still there, just held back.

I don’t think about it in an extreme way. I think about it in moments like this.

Standing at the edge of the plunge, everything in me feels certain I can’t do it. Not later, not after, but right then. It feels definitive.

But I’ve started to notice how quickly that certainty shows up.

It reminds me of how the body works in other ways. We’re physically capable of more force, more intensity than we’re allowed to access. Not because it isn’t there, but because something in us steps in first, keeps things contained, controlled.

And I’m starting to wonder how often that same thing is happening here.

Not just in the plunge, but in smaller moments too.

That initial “I can’t” feeling less like a true limit, and more like a first response.

So yes, I’ve proven to myself that I can do it. But that pause is still there. That moment of hesitation hasn’t gone away. It just feels different now.

It’s quieter. Shorter. I don’t debate it the way I used to. The decision comes faster, like something in me has already made up its mind.

The routine is almost always the same. Before I even step into the sauna, I take the cover off the plunge. It’s small, but it matters. It starts to tell my brain this is happening. Then I sit in the heat for twenty uninterrupted minutes, the water in my line of sight, letting the idea settle in before I have to act on it.

When I step out, there’s still that brief flicker. Am I really doing this again? But it passes quicker now. I press play on a song, get myself positioned, and about twenty seconds in, I’m under. Timed, intentional, the hesitation doesn’t get a say.

I used to think control meant avoiding discomfort. Keeping everything steady, predictable, contained.

Now I understand a different kind of control. The kind that can face a challenge and stay.

The cold forces an immediate stress response. The loss of breath. The pull toward panic. It’s automatic. But what’s interesting is that you can interrupt it. You can use your breath to slow things down, signal safety, and override that initial reaction. The more you do it, the more familiar it becomes.

You’re still in the same cold water. But the experience changes.

That’s the part that stuck with me.

Because it’s not just physical. It’s neurological. You’re working against that initial alarm system, using the more rational part of your brain to step in and say, we’re okay, stay.

And over time, that shift carries.

The cold plunge is a form of hormesis. A deliberate stress. Just enough to challenge your system without overwhelming it. And the more consistently you step into it, the more your baseline changes. You become less reactive. More steady. More grounded, even when things aren’t.

It builds what I think of as a tolerance for resistance.

And then there’s the part that feels almost unfair.

That shock triggers a surge in dopamine and norepinephrine, the same chemicals tied to focus, energy, and motivation. Except here, there’s no crash. No tradeoff. Just a clean, sustained clarity on the other side.

It’s a kind of high you can’t manufacture. No shortcut, no substance, nothing external that gives you the same return without taking something with it. This one is earned. It comes from your own body, your own decision to stay when you wanted to leave.

It makes you realize how much is available to you, if you’re willing to sit through the initial resistance.

For me, it always comes back to the Lululemon quote. The things that feel the most uncomfortable, the most mentally demanding, almost always give something back.

It’s not about doing anything extreme. It’s about not defaulting to what feels safe.

Most of the time, it’s small. Standing up for yourself. Setting a boundary. Prioritizing what you actually want. Admitting you were wrong. Apologizing when you need to. Asking for help. Accepting a compliment without deflecting it. Trying something new. Sharing something you’re proud of.

None of it looks impressive. And that’s the point.

They don’t have to be big to matter. In fact, it’s usually the smallest moments that end up changing the most.

It shows up in all of our lives, one way or another. We gravitate toward comfort. We sidestep the moments that feel difficult, even when they’re the ones most likely to change us.

Maybe it’s avoiding the conversation you know you need to have. Letting something slide that’s already crossed the line too many times. Holding onto someone longer than you should. None of it is irrational. Of course you want to avoid it.

But there’s always that split second. The one right before you decide.

And the question is whether you notice it. Whether you pause long enough to choose something different.

I think about what would have happened if I listened to that first instinct, standing over the plunge. If I had just chosen safety and walked away. How easy it would have been to never find out what was on the other side of that decision.

There’s still that split second.

It’s always there. Unchanged. Unavoidable.

But I don’t see it as hesitation anymore. I see it for what it is. The moment before the decision. The moment where everything could go either way.

And now, more often than not, I don’t linger there.

Because I know something I didn’t before.

It doesn’t decide for me.

I do.