living in this way is rebellious because it makes you unmanipulable
MAY 10, 2026
It’s Sunday morning. Our foster puppy is scratching at my bedroom door, whining to come in. Scooters are whirring by on the road outside. There’s a half-eaten breakfast bagel crumpled in foil on the bed next to me, and an empty mug that I used for my morning “healthy hot chocolate” — raw cacao powder stirred into hot water, topped with raw milk, a sprinkle of sea salt, and a heaped teaspoon of raw honey.
Oh no. She’s found someone’s shoe that she’s now enthusiastically destroying.
I am writing in bed — my favourite way to start a day — and a recent rarity. Who would have thought that I’d move to a tropical island and life would get busier and fuller than ever?! Not me.
Two and a half months ago I arrived here having only just scrambled the edges of my existence together into a coherent heap of a human after the f*&ckery of a year 2025 was for me, and now it feels like that version of myself is dead and gone.
I am someone completely new. Braver. Clearer. Happier. More myself than I have been in years. Which means I’m remembering what I’m actually about, now that I’ve been freed from the clutches of survival in a social ecosystem that was so foreign to me.
I think and live and write a lot about living as close to the nexus of your soul as possible. A life that feels, in the deepest and most cellular sense, like an extension of your own heart, your own rhythm, your own soul. And while I often focus on what you do with your life — your work, your purpose, your gifts, the way you spend your mornings, the people you choose, the risks you take, the dreams you refuse to abandon — it also includes how you live your life. The little details of beauty and luxury and lifestyle that align with who you are.
One thing I find so fascinating is that when you live close to the nexus of your soul, the innermost, truest point of yourself, you tend to do less. Need less. Want less.
All your beauty rituals become so much more meaningful and also so much less expensive.
Living in this way is rebellious because it makes you unmanipulable.
Uninterested in the trends and forces that charge our modern consumer world, because you’re whole. You don’t experience a gap between who you are and who you should be. So you see things for what they are.
True beauty is so much more accessible than we’ve been led to believe, and not only because it starts within. I mean that structurally, not sentimentally. Beauty is relational. It’s energy before it’s aesthetics. It’s why we can look at someone who is, by every conventional measure, physically attractive, and feel nothing — or worse, feel a low-grade repulsion — because something in their presence doesn’t match. Because the exterior and the interior are running different programmes. And it’s why a face that contains none of the features we’ve been culturally trained to identify as beautiful can be so magnetic, so endlessly interesting to look at, so alive. Because whatever is happening inside that person is leaking out through their eyes, their expression, the way they hold themselves in the world.
Beauty, at its most real, is the coherence between inner and outer.
So, what makes you feel most you? Most beautiful? Most enigmatic? What beauty rituals reflect the nexus of your soul? There are no right or wrong answers here, which is what makes it so unique!
Here are 8 of mine:
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