plus: a year later ~ with 5 new rules of engagement
“Would you be 19 again if you could?” he asks. We are sitting shoulder to shoulder on a small plane to Berlin. His purity, his ash-blonde hair, his Cambridge accent and his innocent excitement fill the air we breathe.
“Absolutely not,” I say, laughing and grimacing at once. “But I would love to take everything I know about myself and life and use it as a 19-year-old.”
He nods solemnly. “What would you do?”
“I’d live more recklessly and more fearlessly. I’d be less insecure and say yes to more things. I’d spend less time people-pleasing and more time experiencing as much as I could.”
He leans in. “What do you think I should do to get the most out of clubbing in Berlin this weekend?” His eagerness is palpable.
“Lose yourself in the music. Meet a local girl. Let her show you her world.”
His eyes shine. “I think you’re right. I want to do that. But my friends wouldn’t like it if I went off without them.”
“Then you’ll have to decide what matters more to you. Your personal journey or the group.”
We talk for the entire two-hour flight, about life, about the twenty years between us and the different ways we see the world. When we land, we hug goodbye. He tells me, with total enthusiasm, that he loved our conversation and that I’m one of the coolest people he has ever met. I grin, tell him to enjoy his life, and turn towards the train station.
I knew that coming back to Europe would be confronting. I did not know how much. Being here has stretched my capacity for moving quickly through uncertainty on deep trust. September has been a blur of unexpected chaos, and from the chaos, a spell I had placed myself under broke.
Chaos tends to arrive just before things reorganise. Life gets loose around the edges, old structures stop holding, and suddenly there is room for something else to take shape.
One year ago, in one of the most difficult periods of my life, I wrote an 8-part series on how to change your life in 6-12 months. I was heartbroken by the loss of my cat, the end of a relationship and the future I thought I was building. My career had been painfully disrupted when my Instagram account was hacked and stolen. I was standing in the wreckage of a life that had ended, trying to remember what it would take to start again.
A year later, I can see that under the banner of “healing,” I had been micromanaging my own soul. I opted out of anything loud, unpredictable or slightly chaotic, under the guise of self-preservation. When a surge of intense excitement or a wave of creative mania arrived, I treated it like an intruder. Let’s stay grounded. Let’s stay safe. I was terrified of the messiness of my own flow, because I had decided that the passionate, erratic, adventurous parts of me were responsible for the heartache of last year.
It is annoying to realise you have become your own warden.
Walking through the Berlin train station, watching his ash-blonde head disappear into the crowd, I feel a sharp pang of envy for his ignorance of the stakes. For twelve months I had lived inside a fortress of my own making, handling my life like a porcelain cup that would shatter at the slightest dysregulation.
On that concrete platform, with the rumble of distant tracks in my ribs, the truth caught up with me. I had become my own jailer. The train pulls in. I decide to stop negotiating with my fear. I boarded, sat down, opened my notebook, and rewrote the rules of my own engagement.
what I know now
1. not everything that activates me needs calming
Social media has taught us to read excitement as dysregulation. We reach for breathwork, for chamomile tea, for a boundary.
2. safety grows from trust
For the past year I confused a predictable environment with a safe soul. I believed that if I took impeccable care, I would be immune to heartbreak. Real safety is the confidence that I can survive the fallout. I am the kind of person who can follow a sudden, illogical pull, get on the plane, and trust myself to find the exits after we’ve landed. I want to return to myself.
3. my energy is information.
When a city, a certain person or a new project makes me feel suddenly, violently alive (or dead), I want to pay attention to that rush. The intellect loves to rationalise us out of our own desires, because desire is inherently untidy.
4. I want a life that feels safe even when messy
I want to say yes to a dinner I wasn’t planning to go to, stay until the lights come up, and end the night on a rooftop with someone whose name I will mispronounce. I want to miss the last train and find out what happens next.
5. I want to feel everything
I am building the internal capacity to live with just how much that is. I am expanding my capacity until the grief, the ecstasy, the awkwardness and the reckless beauty of being alive can all coexist inside me.
Thank you for being here with me through it all.
P.S. I am accepting new private clients after being booked out for most of the year. Email me for details: studio@viendamaria.com.