confessions from a high-speed train jostling me across europe
SEP 20, 2026
postcards from paris: I thought the ‘after’ picture of our fruit feast was even better than the ‘before’ which is really saying something
Outside, central Germany is wet pine forests and concrete overpasses, a landscape scrubbed of recognisable human history. The train does not rock so much as it vibrates, a low hum settling into my bones. I close my eyes and feel myself drifting, wondering exactly what I am running towards and what I am leaving behind.
People like to think that a transformation is an architecture of accumulation. That it is about adding more, acquiring more, stacking new habits like clean linen in a closet. They do not tell you about the wreckage. They do not talk about the sheer volume of inner infrastructure that has to fall away, the absolute erosion of the self, just for you to occupy the space you are standing in now.
I sit in the compartment and run through the inventory of the discarded. The old patterns. The worn-out defaults. The frantic, administrative courtesy of people-pleasing: a symptom of an advanced alienation from oneself, the terrible habit of tolerating the intolerable simply because you lack the nerve to imagine an alternative.
What we fail to understand about growth and evolution is its physics. We imagine the word leap as an act of grace, an upward trajectory, but in the immediate geography of the moment, it feels entirely like a fall. A trust fall into a clean, unblinking unknown. There is no safety net in true surrender; there is no guardian angel waiting at the trailhead with a legal guarantee that it is definitely going to work out. A quantum leap is a hostile act against your own comfort zone. It requires a cold, blind faith, a willingness to sit in a room and make the scariest decisions of your life without knowing if the floor will hold.
You have to become, if nothing else, best friends with the art of uncertainty.
I look at the grey blur moving past the window and realise how many limiting beliefs I had to systematically dismantle just to allow that uncertainty into the room without letting it consume me.
This unexpected European tour has been less of a vacation and more of a systematic dismantling. Athens, Valencia, Paris, Leipzig, London. Each stop a coordinate on a map of my own undoing, a series of safe houses run by the life-giving web of female friends who hold the perimeter while I allow myself to fall.
In this latest video, in the quiet sanctuary of a Parisian kitchen, come join me as I chop vegetables, make a slow lunch, and have a real, unvarnished chat with you about finding my way home.
Which brings me to the question people always ask: Where to next? What is the plan?
My most logical and elegant approach is always to follow the path of least resistance. In the language of alignment, that simply means following the threads that create a definitive, resonant yes in the body. Right now, that flow is directing me toward looking at apartments in both Paris and Marseille. Whichever door opens smoothly, whichever lease falls into place: that is where I will stay for a while.
But if I am being entirely honest, if I am willing to make a true confession on this high-speed train, the truth is that I am being haunted by California.
For over eighteen months, there has been a steady, golden-frequency yearning to spend three to six months in Southern California. Somewhere in South L.A. or Orange County. It makes absolutely no sense. I am acutely aware of the energetic, financial, and emotional investment a trial period in that part of the world would demand of me. Part of me is terrified.
Yet the pull persists, warm and blindingly optimistic, vibrating beneath the surface of my skin. It exists as an inconvenient, sharp intuition that my next expansion is waiting on that coast. That there are people I am meant to meet, a specific manifestation frequency I need to tune into, and literal land I need to touch.
I exist in the terrifying, beautiful friction of true surrender: planning for an apartment in France, but leaving my heart wide open for the opportunity to orbit under the Californian sun.
postcards from Paris: forever will take pictures of flowers because I am forever romantcising my life no matter where I am
When this platform first materialised, the pitch was simple: it was a newsletter platform. It promised an uncomplicated transmission from my mind to your inbox. Enamoured, I migrated all the emails I had systematically accrued over the span of a decade of working online, and I continued to send emails exactly as I always had. But the architecture of the internet does not stay static.
Over the past two years, Substack has engineered an evolution, shifting from a newsletter utility into a sprawling, long-form social media network.
I find myself loving it for two very specific reasons.
First, like any functioning social matrix, it opens a door for organic discovery; it is the most elegant way I know of right now to let new eyes find my words and naturally grow my ecosystem. That is a beautiful, expansive thing.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, it rejects the old internet economy of scarcity. Unlike traditional networks that demand you perform for free, this space actively encourages us to place a definitive premium on our labour. It allows us to assign actual value to the hours, the weeks, and the cumulative years spent honing our perspectives, our tastes, our expression and our internal alignment.
I think this is an incredible, almost radical milestone, particularly for women, who have been systematically conditioned by our culture to undervalue our output. We finally possess the agency to place a protective boundary around work that is meaningful, valuable, and precious. We call it a paywall, but it is actually an act of self-respect.
Based on this shift in the digital climate, two things are altering in this space.
I will be paywalling more of my writing moving forward.
The truth is that while this platform is incredible for generating a body of work, being discovered and sharing one’s voice, it is no longer the most frictionless way to guide you directly toward my tangible offerings.
Because of that, I have made the decision to split the stream and build a brand-new email list. Four hundred of you have already followed the shift and hopped over. If you receive these letters purely as a reader and you have no interest in participating in another social network, I highly suggest making the jump now.
For the past few years I have been repeatedly asked a specific question. You wanted a dedicated space where we could gather and continue the deep, structural labour we initiated inside my creative and business containers. I always possessed the desire to build it, but the internal alignment wasn’t there. The timing was off.
Until now.
muses is a weekly, ninety-minute creative co-working container designed for the explicit purpose of bringing your visions into concrete reality. It is a held space to write, think, make, dream, and systematically move the things that matter to you forward, alongside an ecosystem of others who are also forging their own distinct paths into the world.
We meet live on Zoom every Tuesday.
You show up on time, land in the space while soft music plays, state your intention, and then for the next sixty minutes, we put our heads down and we do the work. There are no weekly lessons, no homework, and no dense curricula to consume; it is a pure, unadulterated creative co-working space.
Maybe you have looked at your life and realised that your experiences, your obsessions, your half-finished projects, and your notes app full of brilliant thoughts are all pointing somewhere. That they are material. But they require a container to hold them so they don’t dissolve into the ether.
muses is for those building a body of work and for following that ephemeral project. Whether you dream, write, teach, think, create, or run a business, you do not need someone to tell you what to do, but need the time, the structure, the companionship, and a reliable sanctuary where you can bring the work and execute it. This is for you.
Upon request and because I want this container to remain accessible to different financial levels, it operates on a sustainable, sliding scale of €33 to €59 per month. Each option grants you the exact same, dedicated experience.
To protect the continuity and the organic frequency of our community, we only open the doors quarterly. Our next quarterly entry point is right now. If you are ready to stop putting off the creative life you keep saying you’ll get around to, consider this your invitation into easy, co-creative consistency.
postcards from paris: forcing my friend to go flea market shopping with me but also enjoying this stranger enjoying us taking a selfie
The train finally slows, its metal wheels grinding with a heavy, predictable finality as we pull into the Leipzig station. A drizzly German afternoon is waiting outside the window. I look at my hands, at the notebook open on my lap, and I realise that the person arriving on this platform is not the same person who left Bali four weeks ago.
The old defaults have been left somewhere, scattered across the continent as it insisted on my undoing, but the new foundation hasn’t materialised yet. There is no apartment lined up, no physical land beneath my feet, no guarantee of where the trajectory ends.
The fall is not over. I am still entirely in it, breathing inside the emptiness until the right frequency reveals where I am meant to land. But as the doors hiss open and I step out to meet a friendship that has survived two decades, the unknown is more than a vacuum of unease; it is also where the future is actively being made.
much later, when you are back in the rush and the noise of your own life, you will open a jar of honey or press a drop of resin into your skin, and remember
The three-hour bus ride from Athens International Airport to Delphi felt like I had been catapulted back in time to a place before my own birth. The highway soon gave way to narrow, two-lane blacktop that bit into the dry belly of the countryside. Out the window, the world slowed down to the pace of an older century. Long, bleached stretches of scrub oak and limestone thistle rolled past under the late-August sun.
Every ten miles or so, an old Datsun or a rusted-out Fiat, held together by wire and grease, would rattle past in the opposite direction, driven by a man with a face like a dried walnut, his elbow propped on the window frame, staring straight ahead into the heat.
on the bus
The bus itself smelled of hot vinyl, diesel exhaust, and the faint, sweet trace of tobacco smoke that had settled into the curtains over decades. We pulled off the road for a pit stop at an 80s-style service station cafe with the stillness of roadside stops where time has lost its meaning—floors of dull, yellowed terrazzo, a humming Coca-Cola cooler from another era, a counterman whose heavy eyelids suggested he had been standing there since the beginning.
Without a word, a snail-shaped spinach spanakopita, heavy and glistening with olive oil through its brown wax paper, was pressed into my hand, and a cold tin of Coke into the other. I was asked for six euros and then ushered back onto the bus. The pastry dough, flaky and bitter with wild greens, the soda sharp enough to burn the dust out of my throat.
By the time the bus began its low-gear groan up the switchbacks of Mount Parnassus, reaching for Delphi, the air changed. It thinned, stripping away the heavy humidity of the lowlands. Cool and sharp with the scent of wild thyme and pine needles—a dry, resinous smell that gets into the back of your teeth.
The Pleistos Valley stretched out below like a green river of olive trees, a million silver leaves turning in the wind all at once, shifting from deep forest green to bright mercury as the mountain breeze catches them. Standing on the flank of Mount Parnassus, where the limestone cliffs rise up grey and scarred like the flanks of old elephants, you understand why the ancients thought this was the centre of the world. It feels like a hinge where the earth meets something else. The earth here doesn’t care about our small, modern lives, our schedules, or our brief, frantic journeys. It hums with a quiet, terrifying permanence. It makes you feel small, like a speck of dust blown against the rock, but it also makes you feel clean.
If Delphi belongs to the gods and the wind, Athens in the last week of August belongs to the ghosts and the blinding, white heat. The city had been abandoned. Every year, when the summer becomes an absolute hammer, the locals simply close their doors, turn their backs on the concrete, and flee to the islands or the hills. It is their holiday, but it feels more like an evacuation.
I stayed in a small studio apartment in Exarcheia, the fiercely independent, self-made neighbourhood that clings to the steep, rocky skirts of Lofos Strefi. On a normal day, this patch of the city breathes fire. It is a labyrinth of concrete apartment blocks covered in layers of angry, beautiful political graffiti, buzzing with students, anarchists, and old men arguing over thick coffee. It is a place that smells of stale beer, wild jasmine, and rebellion.
But this time small hand-written signs were taped to the glass of bakeries, dry cleaners, and independent bookshops: Closed until September. Good Summer. The streets were empty of cars, the asphalt radiating a fierce, shimmering heat wave that made the apartment blocks look like they were melting into the white sky. A lone ginger cat slept under the shade of a parked scooter on Kallidromiou Street, too hot to blink. There is a strange, melancholy beauty to a great city when its human blood has been drained out of it. You see the bones of the place.
2 (important) things:
MUSES is a weekly writing & coworking group for those who want to create & be inspired in company. Learn more here.
DELPHI ~ my favourite taverna in Delphi & the best coffee ~ the two weekly farmers’ markets to stock up on supplies ~ the hike to the Oracle of Delphi & the Temple of Apollo on Mt Parnassos ~ the best empty beaches (even in the height of summer)
ATHENS ~ the best area to stay in ~ my favourite cafes and restaurants (locals approved) ~ places to wander & get lost to avoid the standard tourist experience ~ the Greece-only must-have pharmacy finds
DELPHI
Delphi is a tourist town that most come to for a day, two at most, hit the sights and leave without really taking its essence, which is a shame. It feels like those who live and breathe the daily life here exist apart in another world to those who come and go.
The transient crowds leave their footprints on the main drag, but they don’t leave a mark on the town’s bone-deep reality. If you step six inches off the beaten path, you find the people who belong to the mountain.
FOOD
Melopoleio
The best coffee is only at one place, the one all the old men sit outside of. They sit in the shade, turning strings of beads in their calloused fingers, gossiping about their neighbours, these slow summer days, and the frantic tourists who just came and went.
Do not look for a menu here. Just sit down among the creaking wooden chairs and order a Greek coffee. It comes in a small, heavy cup, dark and sweet, with the muddy residue left at the bottom like river silt. You drink it slow, matching the rhythm of the old men, watching the white mountain light crawl across the stone pavement.
Taverna Vakhos
Real solid mountain food and dreamy prices. The first time I came by accident, escaping the late-afternoon glare. I ordered a quarter-litre of local rosé for €3 and a cold mountain lemonade to quench the dusty August thirst that had collected in my parched mouth.
Before the food arrived, the waiter delivered a basket of bread. A quick warning: bread in Delphi is unrecommendable everywhere—dry, chalky stuff with the life baked out of it, so don’t eat it. Save your appetite for everything else. Then he brought a slab of hard, fresh grilled salty cheese spiked with wild herbs ‘on the house’. It arrived sizzling, caramelised on the edges from the fire. I carved it with a knife and fork, the centre yielding, soft and hot. It was insanely delectable—honest cooking that tastes directly of grease, salt, and the high pasture lands. I went there most days.
MARKETS
Wednesday mornings: Delphi
Right in the wrinkles of the town, the small local market sets up early on Wednesday. It is a quiet affair, mostly for the old women who look like they’ve been carved out of grey limestone. This is where you get your immediate hands on the mountain: wrinkly, bitter black olives that taste of oil and smoke, and tiny, intense bunches of wild mountain oregano dried right on the stalk. The tables hold a scattering of seasonal fruits and crisp vegetables pulled from the steep terraced plots on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, alongside heavy blocks of formaela cheese brought down from the high pastures of nearby Arachova. Go early before the sun hits the stone pavement, and make sure you carry a pocketful of small euro coins. These mountain vendors have no use for plastic cards or digital transactions; they want the hard, blunt weight of metal currency pressed into their palms.
Friday mornings: Laiki Agora, Galaxidi
Every Friday from six in the morning, the real harvest happens just down the mountain in the nearby coastal town of Galaxidi. You have to get up before the sun has finished burning the fog out of the Pleistos Valley. This is the region’s massive produce engine. The tables are piled high with heavy, deep-purple eggplants, mountain figs splitting open with sugar, almonds, stone fruit and colossal Amfissa olives, plump and glossy from the UNESCO-protected groves below. Go early, when the air is still cold, the farmers are shouting over the crates, and the crates are still damp with morning dew. It is cheap, abundant, and unbothered by tourists.
THE ORACLE OF DELPHI
Corycian Cave
The tour buses dump their passengers at the lower ruins where the marble has been polished flat by millions of leather shoes, but the real spirit of the mountain lives higher up, where the road turns to dirt and the earth gets wild.
To find it, you have to leave the village behind and drive out for thirty minutes, pushing your car up the steep, winding mountain roads, through small mountain villages with narrow, cobblestone alleys that pinch the sides of your vehicle. The paved road eventually gives out, giving way to a rough, gravel track. You park the car where the red clay meets the scrubby pines, kill the engine, and let the silence of the high altitude drop over you like a heavy blanket.
From there, you walk. It is a forty-five-minute trek straight up the spine of the mountain. The trail is a narrow, single-track ribbon of loose limestone and sharp gravel that slips out from under your boots if you aren’t paying attention. You walk through dense, ancient forests of Greek fir, the air smelling intensely of dry resin, hot stone, and wild mountain tea. Your breath gets short, and your calves burn as the incline sharpens, the sun beating down on your neck until your shirt is soaked through. Just when you think you’ve lost the trail, the trees break, and you see it: a massive, dark gash hidden in the grey limestone face of the hill.
The Corycian Cave—the Korykeion Antron—is the first true sanctuary of Delphi, a place where people were bowing their heads to the earth long before the first stone of Apollo’s temple was ever quarried.
When you step across the threshold into the main chamber, the temperature drops instantly, a cold, damp breath rising from the belly of the rock. The cave opens up into a vast, terrifyingly large hall, its ceiling soaring fifty meters above you like the roof of a cathedral built by giants. Massive stalactites, formed over thousands of years by the slow, rhythmic dripping of mineral water, hang down like frozen stone drapes. In the centre sits the “Table”—a broad, flat stalagmite where pilgrims leave their offerings to Pan and the mountain nymphs, and where modern travellers still leave silent tokens.
The mysticism here is something that physical space inflicts on you. The cave has a strange, multi-directional acoustic quality. Every footstep on the slick rock, every drop of water hitting the floor, and the low moan of the wind outside bounce off the walls, sounding like a chorus of distant flutes or whispers just behind your shoulder.
Sitting alone in that dark chamber you feel an ancient, shivering awe, a sense that the boundary between the human world and something wilder, older, and deeply holy has grown thin enough to touch.
BEACHES
Itea
Just twenty minutes down the winding asphalt from Delphi, the road drops sharply into the olive groves and hits the coast near Itea. Most people stay on the main harbour beach, but if you push just a few minutes past the town along the coastal fringe, the pavement gives way to a narrow strip of white gravel pressed right against the olive trees. There was not a single soul there. The water was dead calm, completely shielded from the mountain winds, and so transparent it looked like a thick sheet of pale green glass. You could see every single pebble on the bottom, five meters deep, as if it were right under your hand. Entering that water here was like washing away latent layers from your soul. The only sound was the rhythmic, dry click of the cicadas in the trees and the tiny gravel shifting with the lazy roll of the tide.
Arapis
If you keep driving west for about forty-five minutes from Delphi, past the historic town of Galaxidi along the northern rim of the gulf, the coastline grows rugged and wild. The road tracks a stretch of limestone cliffs and ancient olive groves heading toward Erateini and Nafpaktos. Once you pass the main settlement of Agioi Pantes, you hit a terrain where the road forgets itself. We turned down an unmarked dirt track that dissolved into scrubby pines and grey boulders near the hidden coves of Agios Vasileios. At the end of that track, right by the tiny, unpeopled crescent known to locals as Arapis Beach, lay a completely secluded cove hidden entirely from the road. The beach was a mix of coarse grey sand and sun-bleached stones, completely wild. There were no plastic umbrellas, no tavernas, no voices. Just the raw edge of the continent meeting a deep, bruisingly blue sea. The water here was colder, sharper, and held a heavy salinity that made you float effortlessly. We lay under the thin, salt-bitten shade of a solitary tamarisk tree, entirely alone with the stones and the deep blue water, watching a lone fishing boat track the distant horizon while the salt dried white and tight on our skin in the fierce afternoon sun.
ATHENS
Most evenings, I climbed the concrete stairs to the flat concrete rooftop of my apartment building. From up there, the heat of the day was still rising from the tar, but a small, dry breeze would usually drift down from the mountains. I sat with my notebook on my knees, journaling while the sun dipped behind the jagged spine of the city. As the light failed, the sky turned the colour of a bruised plum, and the distant silhouette of the Acropolis would light up, glowing like an old bone against the dark. When the ink dried, I would head down into the dim streets to find my favourite taverna.
Exarcheia
If you want the smooth, sanitised version of Athens, you stay in Plaka or Monastiraki with the postcard vendors. If you want the city’s raw, beating heart, you pitch yourself in Exarcheia.
It is a neighbourhood that clings stubbornly to the steep, rocky skirts of Strefi Hill, positioned just a short, twenty-minute walk north of the central tourist hubs, yet a million miles away in spirit. It is bordered by the grand neoclassical weight of the National Archaeological Museum on one side and the wealthy slopes of Lycabettus Hill on the other, but Exarcheia remains fiercely itself.
It is the bohemian, radical quarter. A labyrinth of concrete apartment blocks covered in layers of angry, beautiful political graffiti, independent bookstores, and old anarchist cafes. On a normal winter day, this patch of the city breathes fire, buzzing with students, poets, and old men arguing over thick coffee. In the dead of August, even with the shutters down, the neighbourhood keeps its grit. It smells of wild jasmine, dry concrete, and a deep, historical refusal to be broken by anyone. It is safe, and it is real.
FOOD
Ama Lachei
I stumbled upon this place entirely by chance, just a few minutes’ walk from where I laid my head, and it is an absolute icon of the neighbourhood. Ama Lachei is set behind a thick, unassuming stone wall that once housed an old schoolyard. Step through the gate, and the roar of the Athens concrete disappears. You are welcomed into a lush, shaded garden so deeply quiet and green you would swear you had been dropped right into the middle of the Greek countryside. Sitting there among the iron chairs, white cloths, and overhanging flowers, you forget the city outside exists. The food here is some of the finest quality I have ever pressed a fork into—a daily, shifting menu that changes entirely based on what the earth yields that morning.
The Black Salami Microbakery
Tucked into the sharp concrete geometry of Exarcheia, The Black Salami is a small, mighty engine of grain and fire. They do not carry a massive inventory; they bake around a hundred loaves a day using honest Italian flour and wild fermentation, and when the bread is gone, the doors close. Do not hesitate: walk in and order the pastrami sandwich. It is served on their signature sourdough, heavy and blistered from the heat, loaded with rich, salt-cured meat that melts like tallow.
Selas
When the August sun turns into a flat iron and the pavement starts to shimmer, you look for Selas. Hidden down a narrow pedestrian alleyway, half-swallowed by overflowing vines and surrounded by old houses from the turn of the century, this little outdoor café is a neighbourhood oasis. It is painted in bright, defiant colours and tucked right into the local street art scene. Go there in the heavy heat of the afternoon for cold drinks, cheap beer, and small plates of snacks. The service is loose, friendly, and entirely unhurried—a place to sit for hours and let your blood cool down.
Bar Ideal
When the sky finally turns dark and the city begins to breathe, head to Bar Ideal on Kiafas Street. It’s a design-forward, retro listening bar that looks like a 1970s cinematic set refreshed for the modern era. They spin strictly vinyl records over a crisp, analogue hi-fi system, and the tables spill out onto the cool pedestrian pavement. It is the perfect spot to get a clean, heavy cocktail, watch the local night owls gather, and lose yourself in the music and the conversation without a single tourist in sight.
Ouzeri Lesvos
If you want seafood that hasn’t been dressed up for a magazine cover, you go where the old men and the neighbourhood families go. Ouzeri Lesvos is an unadorned, brightly lit temple to the sea. The prices are incredibly low, and the quality is fierce. Order a small bottle of ouzo and a plate of grilled octopus or crisp, fried smelts that taste aggressively of salt and the deep Mediterranean.
Makedonikon
This is a tiny, old-world joint run by a crew of famously grumpy old men who have no time for small talk or pleasantries. They deal out traditional spanakopitas and baked dishes from massive metal trays behind a glass counter. The spinach pie here is legendary—the phyllo dough is rolled by hand, thick and crackling like autumn leaves, stuffed with bitter wild greens and sharp, sour feta. Take it to go, bear the old men’s brief glares, and eat it on the curb.
Karamandlika
Located slightly more central but completely worth the short walk out of the quarter, Karamanlidika is part charcuterie, part grocery, and part taverna. The ceiling is hung thick with cured beef legs (pastourma) and loops of spicy sausage. Sit at one of the small marble tables and order the handmade meat dumplings or the pan-fried sausage with eggs. It is heavy, historic Greek food rooted in the old Byzantine traditions—intense, spiced, and deeply satisfying.
EXPLORE
The tourists spend their days in long, sweaty lines waiting to see things that have already been photographed a million times. They move in packs, guided by little flags and digital maps, and they leave the city without ever having touched its true surface. I will not give you a list of monuments or ancient ruins here; if you want the history books, you can find them yourself. Instead, I recommend a different kind of travel. One where you choose a coordinate point on the map, put your phone in your pocket, and let yourself get lost until the city starts to speak to you.
Lofos Strefi
Right above Exarcheia sits Strefi Hill. It is not a manicured park with gravel paths and ice cream vendors; it is a wild, rugged outcrop of rock and pine trees that feels slightly forgotten by the municipality. Find any set of concrete stairs leading upward from Kallidromiou Street and just start climbing. The steps are uneven, cracked by tree roots, and covered in graffiti.
As you go higher, the noise of the city begins to muffle, replaced by the dry, frantic scraping of cicadas. There are hidden stone benches, dirt paths that lead to nowhere, and sudden, dizzying views of the white apartment blocks packed tightly below like rows of teeth. Wander up here in the late afternoon when the shadows stretch out long and blue.
Anafiotika
While everyone else is fighting for space on the main pedestrian loop around the Acropolis, climb higher up the northern slope until the souvenir shops disappear. If you keep moving upward through the narrow alleys, you will stumble into Anafiotika.
It is a tiny, white-washed village clinging directly to the sheer rock face of the citadel, built in the 19th century by workers who came from the island of Anafi. The streets are not streets at all—they are narrow stone ledges barely wide enough for two people to pass, winding between tiny, square houses with blue shutters and pots of blooming geraniums. There are no signs, no shops, and no cars. You will dead-end into someone’s tiny courtyard, or find a set of stone steps that drop into a completely different neighbourhood. Let yourself wander this labyrinth. It smells of laundry soap, woodsmoke, and dry stone, and for an hour, you will forget that a massive, modern metropolis is roaring just a few hundred feet below your boots.
Kypseli
If you want to see how the modern Athenians live, take a long walk north into Kypseli, one of the oldest and most densely populated neighbourhoods in the city. It is a vast grid of Bauhaus and mid-century apartment buildings with grand entrance halls and iron balconies.
Do not look for landmarks. Just drift down Fokionos Negri, a long, wide pedestrian promenade lined with shady trees, old fountains, and rows of small cafes where the neighbourhood people sit for hours over single glasses of iced coffee. Turn off the main strip into the smaller residential side streets. Look up at the canvas awnings flapping in the breeze, listen to the clatter of dishes from open kitchen windows, and watch the older women pulling market carts over the cracked pavement. It is a heavy, human place that doesn’t care about tourism, where the true daily rhythm of Athens unfolds in the heat.
TREASURES
In Greece, the modern pharmacy remains an apothecary of the land. There is something deeply magical about being able to apply and use things that have held a people steadily for thousands of years, as if the ancient landscape and its cures were somehow twisted into our DNA from long ago. When you step off the blinding, sun-baked pavement and into the cool air beneath a flashing green neon cross, skip the global consumer brands. These are the true local secrets you carry home in your suitcase.
Wild Greek Oregano Oil: A fierce, concentrated extraction of the land itself. The locals treat it as a holy grail for the immune system. It is a potent, natural antibacterial and antiviral engine, excellent for knocking out a sudden throat tickle, clearing out sluggish digestion, or wiping out a stubborn bug when travel knocks your defences down. A single drop burns like a drop of liquid mountain sun, but it does the job.
Apivita Toothpaste: The Apivita Oral Care Line is rooted in the hives and the soil. Their formulations rely heavily on propolis—the natural resin bees use to sterilise their nests—blended with wild mastic, fennel, or myrrh, leaving your mouth tasting faintly of pure Chios mastic and lemon oil.
Tretin Gel: In the United States, getting a tube of topical retinoid or high-grade skin texturizer can mean handing over $80 to $300 at the counter. In a Greek pharmacy, you can ask for a 30g tube of TRETIN 0.05% Gel produced by Target Pharma, and they will hand it over for roughly four euros. Travellers prize it for targeting clogged pores, accelerating cell turnover, and erasing the rugged wear and tear of sun and travel. (Note: In Greece, this specific budget-friendly gel is formulated with isotretinoin rather than standard tretinoin, meaning it acts as a powerful topical retinoid with a lighter, fast-absorbing alcohol base).
Chios Mastiha Capsules: For thousands of years, the people of the island of Chios have harvested the crystal tears of the mastic tree resin. These capsules are a foundational Greek remedy for the stomach. If your gut is churning from heavy travel, rich oils, or the simple stress of the road, mastic acts as a soothing, anti-inflammatory balm for the entire digestive tract, settling the stomach with a quiet, ancient efficiency.
Korres Pure Greek Olive 3-in-1 Nourishing Oil: The brand Korres is a staple of Greek pharmacy culture, and their olive oil collection utilises cold-pressed oil from the silver-leafed crests of Crete. This specific 3-in-1 oil is a heavy, golden elixir that restores skin, body, and hair after a brutal day in the Mediterranean glare. It doesn’t leave a greasy film; it absorbs deeply, smelling of real wood and earth.
Korres Skincare & Makeup: Truly, do not leave without looking over their entire colour and care shelf. Their prices are significantly lower in local neighbourhood pharmacies than anywhere else in the world. What I use daily is their dark lip balm in a rich, berry-stained hydration that looks completely effortless, and their creamy concealer that covers the dark circles of sleepless travel nights without caking or cracking under the dry Athenian sun.
You cannot leave a place like Greece without carrying a piece of its dust in your throat and its salt dried hard into your skin. The tourist buys a plastic trinket made in a factory across the world, packs it into a shiny suitcase, and boards a plane unchanged. But if you have walked the high, loose gravel of Parnassus, sat among the old men in the shade of Exarcheia, and let your body sink into a sea that looks like green glass, you leave something of yourself behind on the stone, and you take something older back with you.
The tubes of cream and the bottles of mountain oil sitting in your bag are small anchors. Much later, when you are back in the rush and the noise of your own life, you will open a jar of honey or press a drop of resin into your skin. For a second, the air will turn cool and sharp with the scent of pine needles, the white Athenian sun will hammer down on a flat rooftop, and you will remember what you felt like then.
jumping on the ‘maxxing’ bandwagon, but in an anti- way with life-affirming wellness practices, which is actually just not worrying about 90% of things
SEP 14, 2026
this is wellness
A strange, humming beauty is the vast concrete labyrinth of an airport, where the light falls in long, pale shafts through the glass and the air smells faintly of jet fuel and distant cities. I am wandering the grey corridors toward the short-term parking bay. Then, a sharp, clear fracture in the terminal noise. “Vienda!” There is no sound more holy than your own name when you are lost in a sea of strangeness.
I turn toward the sound. There she stands by her car, a monument of familiar grace under the white Spanish sun. In the back, her young son is strapped into his seat, his small face watching the world with the solemn, wide-eyed patience of the very young. We fall into a hug—the easy, sun-warmed greeting of women, smelling of sea-salt and a breezy welcome. I hoist my heavy luggage into the back like labourers loading a harvest wagon, and then we are flying down the highway, looping away from Valencia, the citrus groves beginning to blur against the horizon.
When we reach the coast. A village folding in on itself for the season. It is the start of summer, and the Spanish locals—and a few quiet Germans—are closing their apartments until next summer. Up the long, eight-block flanks of the buildings, the heavy shutters are being drawn down like tired eyelids. The final, damp loads of laundry hang limp from every line, bright patches of cotton catching the salty breeze.
We surrender to the siesta almost immediately. My own body is mutinous; the full moon has left me in a restless, four-hour sleep, followed by the sharp blue light of a four-o’clock morning flight. We sleep heavily in our shaded rooms, sinking into a cool dreamless rest.
Hours later, the shadows lengthen; we make a late lunch. The shrimp hiss in the pan, and we fold them into warm tacos, eating with the fierce, unselfconscious hunger. Between mouthfuls, we lay out our time together. We both have work to do—the endless tasks of the modern female breadwinner—but beneath that, we share a desperate craving for carelessness. We look at each other across the table and wordlessly make a pact: we will break every commandment of the modern wellness bible.
And so, we do.
We drink claritas—the bitter beer sweetened with lemonade—and wine until the edges of the day soften. We smoke cigarettes; mostly her, and I, in a gesture of solidarity, roll a tiny, neat one and watch the blue smoke drift through my fingers. We eat haphazardly, when the belly demands it, ignoring the clock. We forget rituals of the mirror. We leave our faces unwashed, wear no makeup, and walk out onto the cobblestones in our pajamas, our bare feet slapping against the warm stone. We bake weed brownies, giggling like schoolgirls at the kitchen counter, and one day, we hike up the steep spine of the mountain, looking out over the glittering sea to make our demands on every god that is willing to listen.
This week in this tiny village south of Valencia gives me a nourishment that cannot be measured by teaspoons, counted in calories, or tracked on a screen. I feel the heavy, pulsating throb of life itself. The raw, ancient circulation of joy that only comes when you stop trying to manage the universe.
It occurs to me then, looking at the sea, that we have been sold a monstrous lie. We are bombarded by a relentless machinery of rules—WellnessMAXXXing, optimisation, the endless, agonising chore of biohacking our way into some flawless, synthetic perfection. We are told to worry about every breath, every micronutrient, every cortisol spike. But standing on that mountain, with unwashed skin and a belly full of cheap wine, I know that true wellness is not a metric. It is the willingness to let go of ninety per cent of the things we are told to care about, and to simply occupy the dirt and the sun we were born to inherit.
Here are some of my personally most life-affirming wellness practices:
no ‘morning routine’. I get up and see what feels gooood! (though I love a tongue-scraping moment)(sometimes I don’t even make my bed)
wearing things on repeat because I love them until I’m bored
sighing, moaning and audibly expelling air in public bc it feels good
sloooowing everything right down. the slower I go the more present I am
decentering food. I believe food is medicine, but I feel it’s become such a form of obsession that I need it to take up much less of my mental real estate
eating things on repeat because I love them until I’m bored
still in the shower, shaking off a little and then massaging sweet almond oil or scented olive oil into my wet skin. so soft, so moistured
going to bed earlier than I think I should and not waiting until I’m tired. I’ve noticed I sleep less and less well if I don’t
releasing rigid daily movement goals. I actually just don’t need to maxxx myself out every day ~ it does so much more harm than good for me
understanding what causes my stress and the ways I uncessarily stress myself out. i.e. by exercising too much, taking things personally, not approaching things lighheartedly and generally being hard on myself. when I am stressed my nervous system gets out of balance which creates a whole host of other problems
figuring out my perfect invisible makeup routine: either Avène Hyrdance BB cream in Riche or L’Oréal Paris Lumi Glotion in shade medium ~ essence What a Tint! Lip & Cheek Tint on lips and cheeks ~ curl lashes ~ brush brows, et voila
being outside as often as possible, preferably near trees or large bodies of water
walking everywhere instead of using transport. it’s slower but I factor that into my commute and it serves as integrated exercise
getting rid of underwear and clothes I don’t absolutely love. packing up and moving so often makes this easier, but it means I only wear my best clothes and underwear because that’s all I’ve got
making a rule that my journal must be generative and not pensive or ruminative. sometimes, yes, I need to reflect on something to move through it but I cannot just get stuck there, it has to be used for forward traction. my journal is almost a manifestation tool in that I identify the beliefs, blocks and habits that keep me stuck and then map out plans to change or act differently and focus on a new perspective that moves me closer to being my ideal version of myself
I’ve shared mine, now I want to read your most life-affirming wellness practices!!!!
there’s an old greek story about the muses that i keep thinking about.
before there were nine of them, there was Mnemosyne. the goddess of memory. she gave birth to the muses, who were said to bring poetry, music, dance, history, and astronomy.
i
love that memory comes first. because most of what we make comes from somewhere we’ve already been.
something we saw. something we lost. something we loved. something we couldn’t quite get over. a question that keeps following us around. a feeling we don’t have words for yet.
our lives are full of material.
but the strange thing about making something from it is that you can’t really stay on the surface.
you have to go in. and going in means meeting the parts of yourself you’d probably rather leave alone.
the fear of being seen. the fear that it won’t be good. the fear that nobody will care. the fear that everybody will.
the part of you that would rather keep the beautiful idea safely inside your head than risk discovering what happens when you make it real.
this is the part nobody really tells you about creativity.
you think you’re making the work. but the work is also making you.
it asks you to become braver. more honest. less attached to getting it right. more willing to be changed by what you find.
i think, generally, that we don’t need another idea. we need somewhere to go and meet the one we already have.
somewhereto sit down. to return.to keep going. to be around other people who are also trying to bring something from inside themselves into the light. that’s why i made MUSES. to give your making a place.
you bring whatever is alive for you. the essay. the book. the business. the half-formed idea. the thing you keep saying you’ll get to. we sit together. and we work.
you are your own muse. but you don’t have to make everything alone.
‘pivoting gives the people who love you more of you to love’ is a message that has been landing loud and clear in the past few months.
we treat a pivot like a subtraction. there goes this identity. there goes this audience. there goes this income. there goes everything i’ve built this far.
but what if pivotingisn’t subtraction? what if it’s…. multiplication? what if every time you change, the people who love you don’t lose a version of you— they get to meet another one?
hi! I’m Vienda
and I’m pivoting again…just slightly. you may have been with me from the beginning or landed with me more recently. and either way, you know that the foundation of all my pivots have been anchored in my writing.
and this, this does not change. not now anyway but what has changed is what I am sending where
I’m splitting course: Substack for more storytelling, *herefor more direct invitations into my work
which brings me to MUSES a weekly creative co-working gathering for bringing your visions into reality.
The clock stands at six minutes past six in the evening. Wrapped only in the rough cotton of a bath towel, I lay motionless beneath the steady, mechanical breath of the air conditioner, letting the artificial cold wash over my limbs. My hair remains heavy and damp from the wash, a dark, heavy weight pooling against my back and framing my face. In twenty-five minutes, the world will demand that I dress, prepare my face, and step out. I watch the light shift on the ceiling, trapped in that quiet, vulnerable suspense, waiting to see if my body and hair will dry before the clock runs out.
It is late August in Athens. The heat is driving all living things into the shadows. To walk even a mile under the night sky is to labour against the air itself. Moisture gathers at the nape of my neck, pools along my spine, and runs in slow, deliberate tracks down the small of my back and beneath my breasts, staining the linen of my dress. A deep, sun-drugged silence has fallen over the quarters. The city is having its exodus, the empty streets belonging only to the dust, the heat, and the few stragglers that find themselves here.
I was not meant to be here. By all rights, I should have been up in the mountains, where the air smells of pine needle and summer dew dripping, sharing space with a friend. She had opened her house, a large three-bedroom place, had invited me for a few months, offering shelter and companionship. But the human mind is a fragile, shifting thing, prone to sudden, protective droughts. Five days after my arrival, a text message came, not a spoken word, but cold type on a small screen. She claimed the weight of her own life was too heavy; she was too tired, too crowded by existence to harbour a guest.
The next day, the house a place of ghosts and unspoken shame. My friend could not look me in the eye or face the truth of her own sudden retreat. Instead, she remained barricaded behind her bedroom door through the long morning and into the heat of the afternoon, hiding from the intimacy she had invited. When the time came, I gathered my things and took a slow, rattling bus down from the mountains and back into the concrete basin of Athens. There was no parting embrace, no hand extended in farewell.
I must rise from this bed, cast off the damp towel, and prepare my body to face the world. A new friend waits for me at a nearby restaurant. A small, honest place where I have already dined twice, completely smitten by the simple grace of its local cuisine and the clean, grounding quality of its plates. There is comfort in a kitchen that treats the earth’s yields with respect, a steady anchor in a shifting world.
✿
This morning broke with the heavy, uninvited burden of a thick and restless sleep. I awake late, after a night of my mind twisting itself into knots over the simple, impossible question of where I should go. That familiar ache of being unmoored, of feeling unwelcome and uncertain where to place my feet, tears at me from within, digging its fingernails into an ancient wound.
When the phone rings, its sharp chime breaks the silence. I know I must force my bleary eyes open to the other end of the line. She is calling from Spain, looking to catch up. For an hour, our voices sweep between vast topics, zoom down narrow thought pathways, and ping-pong our latest stories back and forth. We are two women windswept by the same gust of pervading uncertainty. A thick fog hangs over both our futures, refusing to shift; our minds will not reveal a clear action plan, leaving only our bodies to sway to a rhythmic, frustrating dance that says either yes or no to every option offered.
Then. “Why don’t you come here, and we can spend a week together?” she asks.
“Here” is Valencia. Dry, hot and by the seaside, baking under the Spanish sun.
“I’d love to,” I reply. “Let’s sleep on it and decide tomorrow.”
Even as the words leave my mouth, our bodies gush with an enthusiastic, instinctive yes at the mere potential of being together. We hang up. I search for flights. There is only one, and the screen warns that three seats remain. I text her: “Instead of sleeping on it, how about I book the flight?” She comes back joyful. I book the ticket. An hour later, a text flashes on my screen. “I got so excited I just went on a massive food haul, so we have lovely things to eat when you come.”
With a temporary anchor dropped in Spain, I turn to the labour of the day. There are three hours of client calls, followed by an hour of emails and another of administrative tasks. When it is finished, I rise from the small desk in the studio apartment. A temporary sanctuary I have rented for the week since being cast out of the mountains.
It is three in the afternoon. I have not yet eaten and wander out into the thick, unmoving heat and cross the road to a neighbourhood bakery. There, I buy a croissant stuffed with avocado, lettuce, tomato, and ham, along with a cold glass bottle of Coca-Cola. I sit outside at a small round table sheltered by the silver leaves of olive trees, eating half before wrapping it up, placing the remainder in my basket, and getting up carrying the Coke with me.
I walk to a nearby grocery store and buy an organic honeydew melon, a single ripe nectarine, five organic carrots, and half a litre of milk for my morning matcha. With my basket heavy, I return to the studio and place each thing in its respective, orderly place upon the kitchen counter and inside the small refrigerator.
A tiny plan begins to form in my mind—a purposeful errand. I take a long walk and seek out a pharmacy: Tretinoin cream for just four Euros; Mastiha capsules to soothe a troubled stomach; Korres olive body oil; wild oregano oil to ward off winter colds; Apivita toothpaste infused with royal jelly and bee pollen.
An hour and a half later, the errand is done. I return to the quiet apartment, shed the sweltering heat of the Athens streets, and step into the shower.
✿
She texts that she is running five minutes late. I nod to the waiter, ask for a table for two, and settle into the forest-green, French metal seating. This place is a secret—a perfect country garden hidden away behind the towering, sun-baked walls of Athens, a sudden sanctuary of ivy and cool stone.
Soon, she arrives, stepping through the gate. Our initial words are polite, but the conversation slows down, deepens, and steadily builds into a profound mutual understanding. It is always a little surreal to meet a follower from Instagram. The parasocial thread means she already knows about my life, my tastes, the small daily moments I share of my world, while I am only just learning the sound of her voice. I find myself completely at ease with this imbalanced beginning. The strange digital distance evaporates, and I slip into an easy, ancient familiarity. Sitting across from her, watching the way her hands move as she speaks, I begin to feel a genuine, quiet love for the woman opposite me.
She orders the shrimp orzo, its aroma rich with tomato and garlic. I order a pork chop, which arrives at the table so impossibly large it looks to be the size of my head. I eat half, steal a couple of golden fries, and feed the rest to the local cats—lean, beautiful creatures weaving ribbons around our ankles, stroking their soft flanks against our feet in search of a stray bite. I feel a sudden, sharp wave of gratitude to be sitting in this hidden garden, having found a kindred soul in a vast city.
After the violent, silent dismissal from a friendship earlier this week, two beautiful bonds have risen to meet me, restoring balance and harmony to my battered heart.
I am reminded of the incredible, almost fierce power of female friendship. When a woman is cast out, unmoored and wounded, it is almost always other women who quietly reach into the dark to pull her back to solid ground. From thousands of miles away in Spain, filling grocery baskets with treats just to say you are welcome here. Across a small wooden table in an Athens garden, offering a soft gaze and an open heart to a stranger from a screen.
This is the great, enduring currency of our lives: an ecosystem of solidarity that heals its own wounds. We are windswept by the same uncertainties; we suffer the same sudden droughts of the soul, but we also hold the rain for one another. As the night deepens, the pain in my chest begins to quiet, replaced by the warm, steady truth that I am not unwelcome in this world.
✿
Dear reader,
I want to try an experiment. At present, my personal writing here on Substack and the invitations to my professional work are deeply infused, tangled up in the same space.
I want to see what happens if I separate them—if I allow myself to creatively lift off into new, uncharted territories without being bound or defined by my obligations to the work, while still maintaining a clear, open pathway to keep you informed.
~ If you want to keep reading about my work, stay up to date with my projects, or continue receiving practical tips and tools, please sign up for my work newsletter here.
~ Alternatively, if you can spare a brief moment, you can simply reply directly to this email withe a simple “yes pls” or, if you have time, a longer note, letting me know you want to be added to the new list.
I would prefer to hear from you directly—there is something beautiful about that touchpoint—and I will happily add your name to the ledger manually, with deep love and gratitude.
As always, I feel a profound appreciation for your presence in this little slice of the universe, and for the way you participate so wholeheartedly with your own dreams, thoughts, and ideas. This community is everything my younger self once dreamed of finding.
Chronically earnest & typed from the floor of my bedroom,
revealing how I develop my online courses and programmes
I’m currently accepting applications for my two-month live business mentoring program COWORK.
While I am marketing it, I am also seeing private clients, running two other programmes, and working on two new ones in the background while I also attempt to grow. ~ want to have me on your substack/podcast? :)
That’s the way it is when running a business, and I wouldn’t have it any other way because it’s not just a business to me but a way to create a life. I see myself as an artist and my life as the canvas and my work as the extension of both, built into a body of work.
I thought I’d share the behind-the-curtains aspect of creating an offering.
As I mentioned, I am working on two programmes: one is an update and revamp of a money, mindset and manifestation programme called AFFLUENT that I stopped selling because it no longer matched the current landscape.
The other one is a weekly writing and coworking subscription that I have been asked for literal years to set up, but that I just haven’t had the affinity to… that’s the thing with working like this: I need to wait to catch the wave to move and take action on certain things becasue I only create within natural forward movement cycles. I never force creation if the wave that moves something forward isn’t there.
And so this thing, despite being asked for it so often, just hasn’t come to fruition. Until now. Last week, a client asked the same question: if I would be willing to create this kind of container where she could come and be held accountable for showing up to build her body of work. I told her what I am telling you: that I have been meaning to and that I want to, and that maybe now I will finally do it.
So, the steps I take are:
momentum!!! this can come from within you ~ where you just have this really powerful feeling that you need to move towards something and pull it from the ether and turn it into something tangible OR, as in this case ~ you have been asked for something so many times, something that you actually want to create, that it is inevitable…
start exploring the idea. I start with a Note or a Google Doc and start playing with the overarching elements: names, what it is, where/when/how it’s held, who it’s for, how much it will cost.
example:
exploring the concept directly in my Notes app
decide when you are ready to start offering this thing and then reverse-engineer the timeline from then to now
build the information page where all the information about the ‘thing’ will live, including application/sign-up button/payment processing
map out a marketing plan across the time you have starting now until the start date
BEGIN!
AND: look, the truth is there’s no guarantee that the thing you make is successful by conventional standards. it might not sell out, it might not fill up, it might not quite hit, it might not be the right time, etc etc etc. BUT that’s actually a very important and beautiful part of the process!
Because IF IT DOESN’T WORK, you instantly are moved closer to something that does. maybe it needs to be reworked, maybe you need to change the timeline of the wording or the container, maybe you have some inner work to do to get into alignment with it, maybe it’s not really authentic to you, and you need to face that and get to know yourself deeper and commit to being fully expressed and seen in your flawed human imperfection in ways you didn’t really want to be when your ego was trying to protect you, etc etc etc. TRYING IS NEVER WASTED. It is part of the devotional path of the artist who is building a life and a business
I know I make it sound easy, like lalalala these are the steps you take et voila, everything is magic, tralala, and on the surface it IS a bit like that.
It IS magic imo. But underneath there is a murky dark ocean of fear, doubt, resistance and understanding the energetics that lie BEHIND everything you are creating and doing on the surface.
In COWORK I support you not only in making the thing – taking the surface-level steps – but also guide you through the layers underneath that cripple you, freeze you and stop you from moving forward. This container is fun and freeing, as well as deep and excavating.
This is the work!
Applications to join me for the last round of COWORK in 2026 close in a week. Even if you’re not quite sure yet but curious, I suggest completing the application form.
The jet lag doesn’t fade. It breaks like a fever, leaving me suddenly, beautifully awake in the middle of everything. For five days I had been a ghost moving through the white Mediterranean light, but now my skin finally feels attached to my bones again.
Below me, the ancient Olive Valley of Phocis is a giant, shimmering ocean of silver-green silk rolling down to the Gulf of Corinth. The air smells of baked red dirt, wild oregano, and the heavy, intoxicating sweetness of overripe figs splitting open in the heat. Every few minutes, a sudden, cool breeze sweeps up from the gulf, forcing a million olive leaves to turn their silver underbellies to the light all at once, flashing like a school of fish. In the distance, across the blue water, the rugged peaks of the Peloponnese mountains looked so impossibly jagged and violet they almost break your heart.
High above them, pinned to the sky, hangs a pale half-moon, lazy and faded.
I sit in the heavy heat, my linen dress sticking slightly to the hot metal chair, completely mesmerised. In front of me is a glass of the house rosé. The glass is thick, heavy, and coated in thick beads of condensation that pool on the rough wooden table, glueing the base to the wood every time I set it down. It is ice-cold, tart, and tastes like crushed wild strawberries and flint. A cheap, honest wine, exactly like the colour pink I want to be fused with right now.
A young waiter appears, smelling faintly of loose tobacco and cheap cologne, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes and casual grace found only in boys who know they are beautiful. He drops a small ceramic plate onto the table with a flourish, his thumb leaving a damp print on the rim.
“On the house,” he murmurs.
On the plate sits a thick slab of something totally unrecognisable to my eye. It is pale, dense, and gleaming with a slick coat of green olive oil and a heavy dusting of dried mountain herbs. I look at the mystery block, then up at his beautiful, indifferent face.
“What is it?” I ask.
He looks at me like I had just asked him to explain the basic mechanics of the sun.
“Grilled cheese,” he says, flatly.
He turns on his heel and saunters off, leaving me alone with the mountain breeze, the silver trees, and the salty cheese. I turn to my journal and write.
being an entrepreneur demands a mental operating system that most ppl don’t have, but it can be learned if willing!
AUG 15, 2026
Last year I made a business mistake that cost me around $30,000.
Those of you who have been with me for a while know that 2025 was a fuckery of a year for me. So many things blew up and fell apart. In hindsight, all for the best! But this is one that I haven’t shared until now.
Most of the stories I read about entrepreneurship are about someone who had an idea, followed their intuition, took a risk, and, conveniently, the risk paid off. The stories I read less often are the ones where you have the particularly humbling moment when everything you have poured countless hours into falls apart.
I brought someone on board to help me build a specific and fairly innovative arm of my business. They had experience in an area I knew very little about, which was one of the reasons I wanted to work with them. As a person, they were genuinely lovely. They wanted to contribute something positive and held a vision of what we could create if we could bring our skills together.
The mistake I made was that I invested in their potential rather than what they were actually capable of doing. (Ever done that with a man? I have… Never again!)
I gave them extensive business mentoring and resources. I gave them a $2,000 business course to get them up to speed. I shared things I had learned through more than a decade of running my own businesses. I tried to give context, perspective, support, ideas, structure. I thought that if I could give them enough of the information they needed, we could close the gap between where they were and where I could see the business going.
Over the nine months we worked together what became increasingly obvious was that we were operating from two completely different mental operating systems. They were approaching the business with an employee mindset, and I was expecting an entrepreneurial one.
I don’t write that as a criticism. I get it. Almost everything about the way we are educated and socialised to work prepares us to be employees. We learn to complete tasks. We learn to demonstrate effort. We learn that being busy is a sign of importance and that if we work hard enough, somebody else will eventually notice and reward us. There is usually a structure around us, a job description, a boss, a set of expectations, a ladder, a system we can become competent within.
Entrepreneurship is much stranger than that.
There is no job description because you are making the job. No boss is telling you which problem matters most. There is no promotion waiting for you because you have worked hard for three years. There is no one to tell you that the thing you have spent six months building is not actually what anyone wants.
You have to develop a different relationship with uncertainty, money, visibility, responsibility, failure, time, your own ego, and perhaps most importantly, reality.
I learned an enormous amount from that experience, although I would have preferred the education to cost me less. Let me share seven entrepreneurial operating system shifts that make the biggest difference in a business that works vs one that doesn’t.
1. your focus must be on value, not effort
If you are working hard and not making money or making a difference, you have an expensive hobby, not a business.
Towards the end of our nine months together, when the cracks had become too evident to ignore, they sent me a lengthy document attached to an email detailing all the tasks they had completed. It made me laugh because that wasn’t the issue. The problem was that none of their effort had moved the needle forward in any quantifiable way.
This is one of the biggest psychological shifts you have to make when you move from employment into entrepreneurship: effort is not the same thing as value. We have been culturally trained to believe that working hard is inherently virtuous, and most workplaces reward you for being busy, useful and good at completing the things you have been asked to do.
Entrepreneurship is less sentimental: Did someone buy? Did the audience grow? Did the offer get better? Did this make money or create impact?
Some valuable work is slow and invisible, of course, but you need to become ruthlessly interested in the relationship between what you are doing and what it is actually creating. Otherwise you can spend an extraordinary amount of time working very hard on things that don’t matter.
2. you have to develop an expansive relationship with money
I know “abundance mindset” has become one of those internet phrases that can make you want to throw your phone/laptop out of a window, but what I mean is this: you cannot build a spacious business while making every decision from fear.
In one of our weekly calls, I noticed that many of the solutions being offered were coming from scarcity: fear that someone would steal our intellectual property, fear that something would fall into the wrong hands, fear around pricing, fear about giving too much away. They began to criticise things they had never done because they were afraid. I could see that their fear was beginning to shape the business. When you believe there isn’t enough, you protect before you create. You hold things tightly. You undercharge. You overthink. You make access difficult. You wait until you are certain.
Entrepreneurship asks you to do almost the opposite. You have to put something into the world before you know exactly what will come back. You have to risk being seen, risk someone saying no, spend money before you know precisely what it will return, and trust that there will be another idea, another client, another opportunity if this one doesn’t work.
An entrepreneur knows that there is always risk and is generous enough in spirit to participate anyway.
3. everything is information
We had two launches that didn’t work out, and I could see that they were devastated, suffered greatly and took it personally. One of the most expensive mistakes you can make in business is confusing an outcome with identity.
I explained to them that every time something doesn’t work, it’s simply information guiding us towards what does. If only you knew the number of times I have ‘failed’ in my life! But this is part of the fun. It’s not failure in my eyes. It’s redirection. It’s so good because it refines your work and your offerings. Failure grows you as a person, which is welcome. Shrinking from that means shrinking from your own evolution.
Entrepreneurs understand that nothing is personal and there is always room for growth and improvement. This is not a reason to lose momentum and stall because it can destroy the entire thing.
4. authenticity has a way of attracting the right people and opportunities
One of the reasons I brought this person on board was because they had experience in a field I didn’t, and I wanted to enter that world in a disruptive, innovative and culturally aware way. But they didn’t trust themselves or the business enough to do that, and so they kept trying to fit what we were building into a structure that wasn’t made for us. Which meant we kept being excluded because we weren’t actually being ourselves.
You have to have your own back enough to make something that doesn’t quite fit the existing category. You have to tolerate the uncomfortable phase where nobody has confirmed that you are right yet. And you have to trust that the more specific and recognisably you your business becomes, the easier it becomes for the right people to see it.
Entrepreneurs understand that the more authentic you become, the easier it is to find the people you’re meant to connect with. Those connections can open doors that may never have existed otherwise.
5. you need to be okay with having a low-status life to have a high-value one
You have to be okay with having a career that people don’t understand. Get your ego out of the way. The highest-status thing you can do is decide that you don’t care very much about status.
We live in a culture where work is not simply what we do to make money. It is one of the ways we communicate status, intelligence, ambition, education and usefulness. Title, salary, company, credentials and job description can be shorthand for understanding where you sit. Entrepreneurship removes that shorthand, and you have to be willing to let it.
I personally never use the terms “life coach” or “business coach” because neither quite describes what I do. Nor do I say “therapist” even though technically I could because of my psychology background. I say writer, mentor or artist and only elaborate when someone is genuinely interested. I have had to become comfortable with the fact that my work isn’t always immediately legible, because I would rather have a life that is genuinely mine than a career that is impressive to people I don’t know.
6. you have to set your own personal boundaries around what you are available for and when you work
So many people repeat the same systems they are trying to extract themselves from. They leave traditional employment because they want freedom and then recreate the exact same system inside their own business. You don’t have to do that!
It goes back to number 1 in this list, where you have to figure out what actually creates value. I love using the 80/20 Pareto principle here, where you spend time defining what 20% of your efforts create 80% of the results and value.
A big part of that is waking up to the idea that anything that sacrifices your peace, joy and fulfilment isn’t worth it. Instead, choose yourself! Choose what makes life worthwhile. Trust me, it’s enough.
7. your business is a living, breathing entity that you are here to guide, not control
Something has to end whenever we enter a new chapter of life. The biggest thing that needs to die when you become an entrepreneur is the illusion that you are in control.
Businesses are like children. You dream them up, birth them, give them a few steady years of foundations, and then you have to start paying attention to who they actually are rather than trying to make them become what you imagined. Your customers will tell you what they want. Your sales will tell you what is working. Your boredom will tell you what has reached its natural end. The idea you can’t stop thinking about will tell you where you want to go next.
You have to start where you’re at. Build from there. The person I had brought on last year had a big vision she wanted to execute, but didn’t understand it had to be built step by step on a foundation of proven success. They wanted to jump ahead of the game without building on something, and of course it didn’t work.
Your business will show you how it wants to evolve. You generally don’t need more strategy, advice or ideas. You need support to do what you already know you need to do, and enough space to actually do it.
If you see yourself in the points above, are growing your entrepreneur mindset and have something you want to work on, you’ll enjoy participating in my 2-month COWORK live business mentoring program with me. Cowork is designed to help you turn your ideas and raw energy into something tangible in a community of like-minded women building businesses alongside you.
You’re likely facing the normal challenges that are part of doing deep soul work. Together, we work through the energetics and internal resistances that arise across the three practical stages every sustainable business is built on:
COMMIT → MARKET → SELL
Cowork is for you if you have ideas, skills, and something meaningful to offer the world but the gap between what you know you’re capable of and what you’ve created so far feels wider than you’d like.
This is probably the part of entrepreneurship I like most now: not the fantasy of arriving at the perfect business, but the strange, ongoing relationship between the person you are and the thing you are making. The business grows, and you grow, and sometimes you outgrow each other, and sometimes you discover that the things you thought weren’t working are actually trying to lead you somewhere else that is meant to be.
you have to be more afraid of wasting your life than embarrassing yourself
AUG 09, 2026
Every evening after I have closed down the external world — turned off my phone, closed my laptop, locked the front door, showered, washed and moisturised my face, and brushed my teeth — I like to sit in bed with a low light or no light on and let my mind wander. A scaling back of my interaction with the outside world to tend to the one inside me. I listen to the tropical cicadas’ shrill and the geckos’ loud to-kay! to-kay, and the occasional vehicle that grinds past on the dirt road below my balcony. In this tepid mental dusk, there are no intellectual acrobatics, but rather a sort of day-dreaming that brings secret longings into existence.
When I told my friend Helen last week that one of my secret longings was to write a screenplay, direct it and act in it, she urged me to do it. I love your writing! she exclaimed. You’re so enigmatic with people when you want to be! Immediately I began to backpedal. The urge to avoid doing something so monumental and new — the entire contents of my dreams — is always my knee-jerk response to feeling overcome by my fear of total and abysmal failure. And when I reason through how impossible this dream is, I spiral further into all the potential ways I will embarrass myself.
To want, and to dream, risks humiliation. Though I am taking the babiest of baby steps towards it every week, writing it out loud makes me want to bail and pretend the dream is actually something much smaller, more manageable, more achievable.
It is alarming how quickly I can shut down any one of my dreams. It’s not even about this particular dream. It’s about any hope or dream or vision that I hold for myself that pushes me so far beyond a reality I am familiar with that it makes me want to immediately run. Both towards it and away from it. It’s that push-pull that will drive any sane person into a state of delirium.
As I have written before, I love dreaming and wanting. I love the heat of it, the ache, the way it stretches me toward something beyond my current life. Dreams work to not only fuel our creativity but to define our lives. They offer us turning points again and again and again, for any moment that we dare to take hold and ride them out.
Right now, so many of us are at a turning point. But this one is actually about becoming more yourself. And to do that, you need to put your life on the line. You can’t be passive and hope it happens to you. You have to be more afraid of wasting your life than embarrassing yourself.
This inner tension is a universal human tragedy. Rather than convincing ourselves that our dreams and hopes and aspirations and desires aren’t so important and prioritising more practical aspects of our lives, a meaningful life will always entail a certain amount of risk and humiliation. Flourishing is fragile and vulnerable, and in pursuing it we must sacrifice parts of ourselves.
I live a fairly charmed life and still regularly find myself making this process much harder than it needs to be. It’s misguided to assume that embracing humiliation for the sake of fulfilment requires unbridled effort. A rational part of me wants to believe that if I just try harder, my fears of failure and complete embarrassment will disappear and be replaced with everything working out magically because I willed them into place by doing everything perfectly. As if there is some headmistress in the sky measuring every action and dropping a gold star onto my head for every perfectly executed effort. In fact, this isn’t rational at all, but a form of blind hope, delusion even.
This is the detritus of any form of linear thinking. It assumes one step leads straight to the next. Reality is far messier and runs on a trail of unknowns and failures on the path to fulfilled dreams. When I take rational thoughts out of the equation, a more organic approach opens up.
When you deeply care about the things you’re trying to do, and are ready to reach the turning point for your next chapter, you have to stop trying to do everything in your power to reach for your dreams, and instead allow them to float down to meet you. The moment you stop resisting your own dreams, something else becomes possible: your life-force, creativity and capacity to initiate can begin meeting them halfway, in a way that feels intimate and alive.
What I appreciate about the ways that we can go about this process of allowing is that it works in indirect ways. You don’t need to keep up with everyone else to create a turning point for your next chapter this summer. I encourage you to take the time to bask under the sun, eat warm berries fresh from the vine and dip your toes into a cool pool of water. Doing those things is what will get you there faster. It actually helps to accept that the fastest way to your dreams is following the smallest specks of joy and pleasure that are guiding you to your destiny.
8 ways to create your turning point this summer
For when you are faced with the impossible problem of feeling your fears when following your dreams, I’m going to leave you with 8 ways to create your turning point this summer.
1. relax
My Chinese medicine doctor said to me recently that “tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you really are” which changed my brain chemistry. So much of the anxiety that we are walking around with in the outside world comes from not trusting ourselves. We are constantly trying to anticipate what might happen next, trying to get ahead of ourselves, trying to make sure we are doing the right thing and being the right person and making the right decision, as though we can think our way into some kind of guaranteed safety.
2. create a pattern interrupt
We underestimate how much we practice rigidity in tiny, everyday ways, and then wonder why we find ourselves so overwhelmed when life inevitably asks us to show up differently. If every deviation from the plan is experienced as an inconvenience, a disruption, or something to be corrected, we become very good at needing things to be a certain way. By becoming a little less precious about the familiar things, we invite flexibility into our lives. Take a different route to the store. Rearrange your furniture. Work from somewhere you don’t normally work. Join me for COWORK :) Change your plans because you feel like it. When you practice meeting unfamiliar things with curiosity instead of resistance, you begin to build a different relationship with change.
3. anchor yourself inside yourself
In our last call one of my going pro students asked me how I manage to keep showing up to my work when I move, change homes and base myself in different places so often, and I replied that it is because I don’t anchor myself to my environment in the way that most people do. I anchor myself to my creativity and my work, which remain the same and continue on regardless of where I happen to be. There is something incredibly freeing about knowing that you can take yourself with you. Your routines might change, your surroundings might change, your circumstances might change, but the part of you that makes, thinks, dreams and creates is still there. And when you know how to return to that place, you become much harder to knock off course. Watch how much opens up for you when you stop anchoring yourself to what is happening around you and start anchoring yourself to what is happening inside you.
4. stop trying to please your future self
I think we can all become strangely tyrannical towards the person we imagine we will be in the future. We are constantly making decisions for her, trying to make sure she will be proud of us, grateful that we worked harder, grateful that we didn’t waste our time, grateful that we made the sensible choice. But the future version of you is a person you have completely invented, and I am increasingly suspicious of how much authority we give her. She might not want what you think she will want. She might look back at this version of your life and understand perfectly well why you made the choices you did. She might even wish you had relaxed a little more. What feels good now? What are you curious about now? What do you want to experience before you become whoever it is you are going to become? You don’t have to sacrifice the present for your magnificent future.
5. decide what kind of life you want to live
The older I get, the more interested I am in this question. I find myself asking it in the most ordinary moments. Where would I wake up if I could wake up anywhere? How much would I work if I didn’t have to prove anything? What kind of life would actually feel good to live? It is a strange question because the answers are often much less impressive than I expect them to be. There is a life that you have been taught to want, and then there is the one that keeps appearing in your imagination. Maybe it doesn’t make sense on paper but makes something in you soften when you picture it.
6. do it scared
There is no universe in which you are going to break past your old self and become the person your new life requires you to be without feeling uncomfortable. You are going to feel scared and insecure and exposed and ridiculous. You are going to wonder if you are making a terrible mistake. You are going to have moments where the old version of you feels so much safer and more sensible and familiar that you will wonder why on earth you decided to do any of this in the first place. I think we waste an extraordinary amount of time trying to get rid of these feelings before we allow ourselves to move. We think confidence is supposed to arrive first, followed by the brave decision, followed by the new life. But it happens the other way around.
7. do it kindly
Something really shifted for me when I started treating myself like I was four years old. Before that, I had this angry voice telling me to push and force my way through things, as though I could bully myself into becoming the person I wanted to be. It never really worked. Eventually I just started resenting that voice, and the part of myself that was always being shouted at by it. One day I thought, why am I so mean to myself? And then, this isn’t working. I’ve got to find another way. So I decided to try treating myself with the same patience and sweetness I would give a four-year-old. If something feels difficult, I hold my own hand and try to find a way to make the next step easier. When I wasamscared, I stay with myself until it passes. etc.
8. let yourself enjoy your life
I am very good at being the person who is always on her way somewhere. There is always something I could be doing, something I could be figuring out, something I could be improving, some future version of myself I could be working towards. Even pleasure can somehow become part of the project. Rest so I can work better. Take the afternoon off so I can come back refreshed. Go outside because sunlight is good for me. Have fun because it is important for creativity. What if we stop making everything justify its existence. What if I lie in the sun because it feels good? What if I waste an afternoon just becasue I can? What if something can simply be lovely without being useful? What if we don’t rush towards the next chapter simply because we can see it coming. It is already happening and this life right here is enough.
currently under construction + identity thrifting + lions gate birthday incoming 🦁
AUG 02, 2026
my latest kismet book treasure
Unusual winds and relentless rain have settled over Indonesia, the sprawling archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands that stretch across the equator that, for the past six months I have called home. Even here, where the jungle still swallows buildings whole and the ocean dictates the rhythm of each day, the signs of climate change are impossible to ignore.
In thirteen days, this chapter will become part of my past. Another version of my life folded away, another home that will soon exist in memory.
If you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you’ll know that this past year has been defined by one recurring theme: not knowing. I’ve shared about how foggy this season of my life has felt. The path ahead, the next iteration of my work and of myself, has refused to reveal itself in the neat, crystalline way I so often wish it would.
Change has always been a constant in my life. We are all evolving all of the time whether we notice it or not. But I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a prolonged period of standing on the edge of something I can feel so deeply without yet being able to fully see it. It has felt at once incredibly significant and intangible, as though I’m living inside something that is reshaping my entire life while, from the outside, it looks like almost nothing is happening at all.
Judging by the emails you send me and the conversations I find myself having almost daily, I know I’m far from alone in this. So many of you are living inside your own version of this in-between, questioning. Clear, unclear, right, or wrong, trying to make sense of the uncertainty. I keep returning to it because it makes the process of becoming something new a shared experience.
At first, I resisted this season completely. Like most things that arrive uninvited, my instinct was to escape it, to solve it, to move through it as quickly as possible so I could get back to feeling certain again. But somewhere over the past year, the place that once felt so awful has slowly become… not comfortable exactly, but familiar. I’ve spent so long in this underground season that it no longer feels like somewhere I’m trapped, but like I’m being prepared. I have stopped demanding to know exactly when I’ll emerge and where I am going. I (impatiently) trust that I am exactly where I need to be right now.
I can’t help but feel that this is one of the defining invitations of our time. We are being reminded to stop producing packaged versions of ourselves, to stop optimising every part of our lives and to become more deeply ourselves in the actual living of life. To enjoy where we are while we’re still messy, uncertain, changing our minds and becoming. To return to life as it is really is.
Over the years I’ve come to trust that our individual lives are often little microcosms of broader cultural shifts. We don’t all experience the same thing at the same time, but there are seasons where enough of us find ourselves asking the same questions that it begins to feel less like coincidence and more like a real movement taking place beneath the surface.
What I also notice is that so many people are responding to this season by making themselves smaller. As though uncertainty is asking them to quieten down, want less, risk less, become less visible, less ambitious and less expressive until the answers eventually arrive.
While I do think we’re collectively being invited to loosen our grip on consumption, on external validation, on endlessly chasing more things, more status and more proof that we’re doing life correctly, I don’t think that invitation is asking us to become less. If anything, I think it’s asking us to strip away the layers that were never really us in the first place so that more of our essence has room to breathe. There is a difference between consuming less and becoming less. There is a difference between simplifying your life and shrinking yourself to fit inside it.
The universe never stops expanding. Everything in the natural world is in relationship with expansion, not as an endless pursuit of accumulation, but as an expression of life itself. I can’t help but think that we are, too.
Whenever I see people online insisting that you must know exactly where you’re heading, have a crystal clear vision for your future, a five-year plan, and should map out every step between where you are and where you want to be to get anywhere, I shake my head. I don’t think life works quite so neatly. It never has for me, anyway.
The only way we truly create a life that is different from the one we’ve already lived is if we allow it to reveal itself to us as we’re existing in it. Evolution isn’t something we can pre-plan because every experience changes us, and each version of ourselves makes different decisions than the one before. The woman writing this today would make choices that the woman I was three years ago couldn’t imagine making, because she hadn’t lived as much life yet.
I’ve been sitting with a question in my journal for a week now: Who and how am I being when I’m unmistakably myself?
Every time I have attempted to answer it, my words feel strangely incomplete. They skim around the edges of something I cannot capture. I can describe qualities, values and characteristics, but none of them quite reach the essence of what I’m trying to articulate. I realised that, like with many things, ‘who I am’ cannot be designed but rather needs to be lived and breathed into existence day by day. By showing up, by trying on different versions of self, by connecting with my inner child, by destroying old identities that have acted as protection and letting myself be raw and naked and in the void for extended periods, as uncomfortable and unsafe as that feels.
I’ve been reading about this idea recently that we don’t have one fixed identity, but countless identities already living within us, waiting for an invitation to be expressed. Another one of my kismet book finds: “an investigation into the occult, the paranormal and the supernatural” by Colin Wilson.
Not identities that are fabricated but real aspects of ourselves that we’ve either cultivated or neglected over the course of our lives. Somewhere along the way we convince ourselves that we are one thing. The quiet one. The responsible one. The anxious one. The successful one. The creative one. The sexy one. The ugly one. The fit one. The lazy one. They begin as descriptions that then harden into identities. We stop saying, I feel anxious today, and instead begin saying, I am an anxious person.
We stop noticing that we’ve been playing a particular role and begin believing that we are the role itself. We rehearse these identities so many times that we begin to eblieve that is who we are now.
Children don’t have this problem. One moment they’re an explorer, the next they’re a dragon, then a teacher, then a pirate, then they’re drawing in the corner. They move so fluidly between ways of being because they haven’t learnt to choose one version of themselves and remain stuck in it forever. Which makes me think that this internal pivot is less about becoming someone new and more about remembering that I have access to far more of myself than I have allowed.
I’ve started thinking about these identities almost as different levels of expression of ourselves. Some identities keep us operating within the boundaries of who we’ve always believed ourselves to be. Then some identities call us into a fuller expression of ourselves. More courage. More creativity. More openness. More play. More generosity. More leadership. More love.
There are versions of me that keep me small because they were created to keep me safe. They learnt to anticipate disappointment, to seek approval, to stay quiet, to avoid taking up too much space. I don’t judge them because they did exactly what they were created to do. But there are other parts of me too. Parts that feel expansive, creative, generous, deeply trusting of life. I’m learning to let those new parts of myself to lead.
This conversation has been occupying so much of my thinking lately that it has found its way into my journal, into my client sessions, into conversations with friends, and into a new video I filmed. It’s part diary, part Q&A and part exploration of what it really looks like to shift identity from the inside out. A lot of the questions you sent in circled around business, money and creating work that feels deeply aligned.
23:49 My income sources: clients, courses, sponsorships, investments
24:13 Wrapping up — next video will be from Europe
This is particularly timely because applications for the next round of my live group mentorship, COWORK, opened yesterday. We’ll spend two months together not just talking about strategy, marketing and building a business that supports your life, but exploring the identity that is required to build it. Because in my experience, your business can only ever grow to the extent that you’re willing to grow alongside it. The practical and the personal have never felt separate to me, and COWORK has become the place where those two worlds get to meet. Applications are now open for our September cohort.
Next Saturday is my birthday, which makes me a Lion’s Gate1 baby. 🦁 Rawr.
Birthday month has officially commenced, and after spending so much of this past year learning how to receive, rest, soften and celebrate the ordinary moments, I’ve decided to be very, very generous with myself this year. So far I have: made my inner child a crystal necklace, bought myself a sorbet lemon linen mini-dress and a pair of gold-and-pearl heart earrings, and booked myself a 3-hour massage experience.
If you’d like to celebrate with me too, I’d love to invite you to become a paid subscriber. As a little birthday gift from me to you, I’m running my biggest subscription sale ever for the whole of August. Annual memberships are 70% off, which means they drop from $50 to just $15 for the entire year (!!).
If my writing has ever made you feel a little less alone, helped you make sense of a season of your life, or simply become a comforting weekend ritual, becoming a paid subscriber is one of the most meaningful ways you can support my work. You’ll also unlock the full archive of essays, including the more personal, vulnerable pieces that I keep tucked away behind the paywall.
Thank you for reading, for replying, for sharing your own stories with me and for letting me do this strange, beautiful little job of writing letters to the internet.
The Lion’s Gate portal opens as the Earth, the star Sirius, and the Sun move into complete alignment with the pyramids of Giza (Egypt). The powerful peak occurs on August 8 (8/8) and is considered one of the most ideal times of year to harness good luck.
if you, like many others, crave deeper connections and friendships, maybe you can find them here
JUL 27, 2026
friends from 2002
I wish I weren’t such an intense friend. Long expanses of passionate closeness punctuated by vulnerability and depth can be followed by brittle silence. Inside my very small inner circle, my friends find an endless ocean of warmth, empathy and generosity. Until I feel crossed, and then I am sharp, aloof and unreachable.
If you’ve been in and then found yourself out, it’s notable. And if you exist on the outer edges of my circle, there lies a distinct boundary. It’s my nature; I am extremely protective and private in ways anyone outside my circles can’t know, and I think my Leo-sun Scorpio-moon astrology explains a lot about it.
Last year a lot changed for me, including the natural closure of some long-term close friendships. The endings were easy. We had grown in various directions, and instead of nurturing the friendships, we dropped the effort required to maintain any kind of relationship and allowed them to drift apart. New friendships that once had been more distant naturally closed in and created a tight circle around me.
Due to my entirely unplanned nomadic life the past year, my closest friendships have been sustained through long voice notes and even longer phone calls. It thrills me that we can work the phone for hours like we’re still 15. Friendships, in lieu of family, have always been extremely important to me, and making new friendships is something I prioritise and pour my heart and time into.
One of the most common questions readers send in is about having friends and how to make them past college/university years. People love to lament that making friends in your 30’s/40’s etc, is hard.
I disagree.
There’s a lot of chat about how friendships require friction, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. “Friction” has become a catch-all for awareness, intention, contemplation, effort or sacrifice. The distinctions are important. What friendships really need is openness, grace and flexibility.
We need relationships, friends, and all other kinds of connections. Though it sometimes feels that these connections are assigned at random, it is never true; they are always the product of someone’s efforts. Not everyone is meant to be your friend, and not anyone deserves to be in your inner circle. We need to practice discernment. But before we can even do that, we need to put ourselves into situations that reveal us to potential friendships.
I think what is happening is that people are exposing themselves to fewer new experiences, places and people. In our modern lives, many of us are so focused on getting where we need to go and completing the tasks we need to do that we never interact with the people around us along the way. The same happens as we live more of our everyday lives online. We do not get as much exposure to others existing around us and the potential for all these small interactions that can lead to friendship.
Location and environment also play a role. Some places are much more open or contain more like-minded individuals with whom striking up a friendship is easier than others. It took me four months in Bali to make any meaningful friendships. A lot of people here are particularly transient, self-absorbed, and have inflated egos, so they don’t feel genuine to me. Most people I’ve met here are all deeply alone (like the Playboy model) even when they are surrounded by people. When I finally did meet a woman whom I could actually talk to, at the end of our first day at the beach together she giggled nervously, “Thank you for being normal!” and I really understood what she meant. Comparatively, it took me 3 weeks in New York and Paris.
All of my friendships were created through building a sense of familiarity by showing up to the same places, doing similar things, or chatting online over and over again. In this digital age, a lot of my friendships started online. In instagram comments, on substack notes, through dm’s. This is one of the many reasons that I write. Many of the most interesting people that I have come to love I did not first meet in person. I think that the best way to build new relationships of every kind is to do something together. Start a project, join an association, become penpals.
Let me invite you to something.
If you, like many others, crave deeper connections and friendships, maybe you can find them here. Penpal is your invitation to write to a stranger and, in doing so, find your way back to yourself and to closeness with others.
If you’re worried that you’ll be the first to try this, just know that 17 people have already connected through penpal. You can share more of what you are like, what you love, what you want, with a potential new soul-sister/brother. If you have art, or writing, or projects of any kind, you can share them with a stranger across the world.
Who knows who that stranger might become to you or what they might tend or know.
+ a list of things keeping me sane while the world falls apart
JUL 19, 2026
As uncertain, wild, crazy, despicable, confusing, scary and confounding as the world is right now, I am fiercely excited about the future we get to co-create with the mystery of life from this wreckage.
Mother Earth is protesting with environmental extremes, our economies are volatile, the job market is precarious, and nobody seems to know up from down.
Yet, the wildflowers keep growing through cracks in the cement, young artists pursue their craft while the very walls of reality melt before them, more people are investing in their local communities than ever, and the sun rises every morning without hesitation.
𓍯𓂃
Ribbons of rain slick the black tar road, a warm tropical wet that does nothing to deter the morning walkers from their daily routine as I begin to write. From my perch up high, I track the storm’s advance, listening as the next wave rattles the tin-roof shed twenty meters away a few seconds before it reaches me. I cradle a cup of hot hibiscus tea, my legs stretched out to lean on the balcony railing, content to watch my tiny world move below.
I am caught in the bittersweet gravity of missing a place before I have even left it. Knowing my departure is less than a month away acts as a filter, softening every raw imperfection and washing this place in a sweet, doughnut-glazed luminosity.
𓍯𓂃
This past week, flattened by a brutal cold, I spent every hour of the day drifting between heavy sleep and bleary-eyed awareness, a raspy cough rattling my chest. Lying there letting a small death move through my body, I was filled with a strange, deep optimism.
All I can think about is how futile it is to try to optimise or manufacture our way through a life and a world that is simultaneously falling apart and rebuilding itself. We try anyway, driven by a perverse obsession to maintain control because control feels safer than surrender. But letting go is exactly what we need to practice. We cannot effort or self-improve our way through this chaos; we have to be with it, letting life lead us through the dark until the cycle is complete.
The only true antidote to a crumbling world is a tunnel-vision focus on beauty, rest, joy, creativity, and nurturing ~ both myself and those around me. It requires letting things be simple. It demands letting what is be enough. Because I cannot control the macro-chaos, I turn my attention to the micro.
Here is a list of things that currently offer me sanctuary and reprieve.
PRP microneedling: Focusing heavily on my under-eyes to strengthen thinning skin, triggering a rush of collagen and elastin. It is the perfect marriage of nature and science, satisfying my vanity metrics while treating my body with respect to its natural processes.
Somatic and non-linear movement: Obsessively attending every myofascial release, yin yoga, and primal movement class I can find. Learning to move my body in non-linear, unforced, and unformatted ways breaks down the stagnant, clawing, clutching-at-certainty feelings my mind so easily defaults to.
The JSTOR Archive: Seeking refuge from online noise, I recently opened an account to anchor myself in peer-reviewed publications. I find I no longer trust the random, fleeting thoughts people throw online. Stepping into this archive is a quiet revelation, a space where I can lose myself in the brilliant, enduring works people have spent lifetimes creating.
Fiction and film: Devouring novels and watching beautifully filmed series every day. Stepping into these visually stunning, curated stories provides a soft place for my mind to rest. Here is the running log of what I am currently into, or waiting impatiently to dive into, at the moment.
Long walks: I have been, and will forever be, a lover of long walks. My favourite ritual here is to make my way down to the beach and sink my bare feet into the black volcanic sand, letting the foamy ocean lick at my toes. I walk until the heavy confusion of my mind is entirely shaken loose, replaced by a constellation of new ideas, hopes, and dreams, and my legs ache pleasantly from the effort.
Voice notes and solitude: In this season of life, my closest friendships are kept alive through long voice notes sent across time zones and vast oceans. I have mentioned before that I have found Bali to be lonelier than most places, but without bypassing the reality of that isolation, I have also found this quietude deeply nourishing. It is just me with me. In this space, I have stripped away the noise, reconnected with my essence, and tuned back into my own spiritual energy.
Wanting less and needing less: We live in a culture that demands we engorge ourselves on things, metrics, and endless striving, but the soul does not grow by accumulation; it grows by shedding. When I stop lunging at the world to fill me up, I return to my true psychic weight. I am learning the ancient medicine of the empty hand: that when we cease our frantic grasping, we are finally light enough to be carried by the current of life itself.
Current food hyper-fixation: A double-shot iced latte with oat milk in a cup I bring to the pop-up coffee cart up the road and then carry home to drink in bed while I work. A simple 3-egg scramble with a slice of sourdough toast, no butter for lunch. In the afternoon, a young coconut, sucked dry, its wet jelly roughly scraped from the dark hull with a spoon.
My work: Running Practical Dreamer: a live, three-month mentorship for six incredible women ready to birth their own bodies of work, as well as supporting four women building their businesses and guiding three long-term private life-coaching clients. As these women stretch and grow under my care, I find myself stretching and cracking open right alongside them. Standing in the gap between who we were and who we are becoming is a bruising, terrifying labour. Redesigning a life to mirror the soul requires standing naked and raw until things we are creating become tangible.
𓍯𓂃
The wind is howling around the sharp corners of this building, a restless current cutting through the air. From my perch on the balcony, I watch the budding rice stems below get whipped and pushed completely sideways. It is a perfect, grey, dreary Sunday.
a midnight mountain climb, a cheeky motorbike taxi ride, and the kismet timing of your own life
JUL 12, 2026
The summer of 2026 smells entirely of exhaust fumes, salty air, fermented shrimp paste, sewage, and hot americanos. It is a season of sharp, dizzying contrasts. Even though it is summer in my mind, by geographic standards it is winter here in Bali. The tropical warmth remains the same, but the air is crisper, lighter, drier, and the days are just that little bit shorter.
I move into a small cottage on the edge of the rice fields. It sits only six hundred meters away from my last villa, but it feels like a completely different world. On soft-sticky-warm mornings, I wake early to watch the sun rise over a distant mountain, stretching his gold rays across the rice terraces to light up another day.
𓇢𓆸
Not from delight or exhilaration, I weep as we climb to the top, from pure exhaustion and fear. Our guide had suggested we stay low in a sheltered overhang. The wind is so ferocious it feels ready to pluck my body from the rocks I am gripping and fling me into a deadly abyss. But the boys in our group want to press on, determined to make it to the summit like we said we would.
Tears prick my dust-filled eyes as streams of volcanic shale blast against our faces. I cling to the peak of the volcano, repeating, “I chose this,” over and over again like a mantra. Three weeks earlier, when my friend Gabriel mentioned he wanted to organise a group to climb Mt. Agung — an active volcano and Bali’s largest mountain — I immediately agreed to join. I have always wanted to do it, but I am simply not the type to go out of my way to orchestrate an expedition like this myself. Now, after six hours of an almost vertical ascent, mostly in the pitch black, I deeply regret my choice.
Then, out of the dark void, a figure materialises.
He is completely barefoot, his toes gripping the sharp volcanic rock while the gale blasts his thin t-shirt and snaps his sarong like a sail. He carries no torch, no headlamp. Strapped to his spine is a massive woven basket, yet he effortlessly balances a guitar in his arms, strumming and singing Hare Krishna songs straight into the teeth of the wind. Where we are trembling and broken, he is entirely unbound, channelling the divine and moving through the dark with absolute trust and presence.
𓇢𓆸
Weeks before I ever set foot on Mt. Agung, this lesson is already waiting for me in a sun-faded garage. I am hunting for a secondhand bookstore, following a stray pin on Google Maps that leads me deep into an unlikely pocket of urban sprawl, far from any proper town. Two torn sarongs hang like makeshift curtains at the entrance, shading a cavernous garage packed with books whose spines are bleached pale by the Indonesian sun. The shop is run by a tiny, toothless old woman who barters with ferocious energy. Looking at the shelves, I get the distinct impression that these books have been burped up by a hundred different hotels… hastily left behind by departing tourists, only to wash ashore in this strange sanctuary.
My favourite way to choose books is to let them choose me. I treat them like a tarot spread, waiting for a specific spine to pull my hand toward it from the cluster. Without reading their descriptions, I walk out with two: Bitter Chocolate and The Shack.
Back home, I inspect my haul. The Shack intrigues me immediately. A spiritual text charting a man’s direct, shattering experience with God. I inhale it in two days. It leaves me with a whirring, glistening sensation, a profound reminder that when I merge my true Self with the divine and trust in life completely, everything I could ever yearn for is already at my fingertips. The key is, and always will be, in releasing my human-made fears and replacing them with such a deep surrender and trust that my mind no longer feels the need to control every moment of my experience.
Like the man up on the mountain.
𓇢𓆸
On my first morning in my new place, I tumble out of bed at 7:00 am to drag my weary, not-a-morning-person body to an 8:00 am boxing class. By 7:20, I have poured myself into a cute, sage-green organic bamboo athletic set: a prize from a yoga studio raffle some weeks back. Slinging a basket filled with water, keys, and my purse over my shoulder, I sway toward the pop-up coffee cart sitting just twenty meters away on the other side of the road.
The sun is directly in my eyes, reducing a man sitting by the roadside to a sharp silhouette against the newly risen light over the rice fields. Two small dogs are tied to his chair. “You can come say hello to them,” he says as I squint through the glare. “I will right after I order my coffee,” I croak from my not-yet-warm vocal cords.
I turn to the wide smile of the barista. “One flat white, please.” “Regular milk?” “Yes, please.”
I take a seat next to the man and his dogs. I pet them gently and joyfully, immediately forgetting their names the second he says them.
It’s not actually that I’m not a morning person. I love mornings. I love waking up early. It’s just that it takes me about three hours to successfully migrate from the land of dreams to the land of the living. Within that three-hour twilight zone, any form of thinking or communicating is essentially void.
The man introduces himself. He is a hypnotherapist from the Midlands of the UK who has lived here for two years now. He has a funny eye; I think it might be a glass eye because it doesn’t move. I plan on asking him about it one of these days when it no longer seems insensitive or cruel.
“I have to go,” I tell him after drinking my coffee in a few quick sips. “I don’t want to be late.” We exchange numbers and promise to meet again soon. I’ve made a new friend.
𓇢𓆸
I book a motorbike taxi to pick me up at 7:07 AM. Today is immigration day: time to extend my visa. As soon as we pull away and the morning air rushes over my skin, I realise it is chilly. I instantly regret not grabbing a jacket to shield myself from the wind.
My driver strikes up the usual conversational loop: Where are you from? How long have you been here? Do you want to stay? “Austria,” I tell him. “Six months. And yes.”
I throw the same questions right back to him. Java. Two years. Yes.
He weaves through the morning traffic like an expert. Every driver here has a completely different style, but this one I really like. He is smooth and fast and fearless. He turns his head slightly, telling me I am the final passenger of his seventeen-hour shift. “Seventeen hours!!” I gasp. “Is that normal?” Not really, no. He explains that they don’t actually have shifts; they have daily quotas to hit, and because he despises the daytime gridlock, he chooses to hunt for fares all through the night.
“How old are you?” he asks. “Thirty-seven.” He looks incredulous and glances back at me briefly over his shoulder. “I thought you were twenty-four or twenty-five. Are you lying to me?” I laugh. “How old are you?” “Thirty-five,” he says. “Okay,” I reply.
Truthfully, I have no way of knowing. I can see absolutely nothing of his face except the dark glint of his eyes between the layers of protective gear he wears, wrapped up tightly like all the drivers here.
“Do you believe me?” he asks. “Sure. If you say you’re thirty-five, I believe you.” He lets out a loud laugh. “I lied. Because you lied.” I laugh again. “I am not lying!” “I’m twenty-one,” he admits. “You’re a baby!” He chuckles. “Yeah. Want to be my mommy?” “Hard no,” I reply.
We pull up to the immigration office ten minutes before the doors even open. It doesn’t matter; a massive queue is already snaking out past the parking lot and spilling onto the main road. The driver quickly ushers me toward the tail end of the line, waves, and disappears into the traffic.
𓇢𓆸
I take my ticket number and settle in. It takes three-and-a-half hours until the loudspeaker finally chimes “Number 099, please go to counter two”.
I hand over my ticket and my passport. The officer scans the documents into his computer, types a few lines, and then fixes his eyes on me. “Where is your exit flight?”
“I don’t have one yet,” I tell him. “You have to have a flight back to your home country. NOW.”
“New laws,” he adds, harshly. “Since when?” I ask. I’ve been performing this visa extension dance since the start of the year and have never needed one.
“Since last week,” he replies flatly. “Okay. I need a minute,” I say. He motions me away from the desk, steering me back toward the seating rows. “Come back to my counter when done.”
I nod my assent and walk back to the chairs. Only a couple of weeks ago, I started seriously considering making this place a more permanent home. I already knew that to secure a legitimate long-term visa, I would eventually have to leave the country to sort out the logistics. I had even mapped out a loose plan in my head, talking with friends about returning to Europe for a while.
Sitting under the harsh fluorescent light of the waiting area, looking at my phone, I feel a sudden wave of gratitude for my own intuitive foresight. This unexpected redirection doesn’t arrive as a shock. Instead, it feels like divine timing: a gentle, kismet nudge from the universe directing and guiding me exactly where I am supposed to go next.
I sit on the concrete stairs at the back of the building, the screen of my phone glowing as I book a one-way ticket to Athens, Greece. I add thirty kilograms of luggage. The heavy physical weight of dragging my life from one corner of the globe to another. I am going to visit my sister and a few close friends who live there. A part of me feels instantly lighter, knowing that I will soon be wrapped in the comfort of people who love me.
All around me, at least a hundred other expats are visibly spiralling, crushed by the weight of this sudden legal shift that has abruptly left so many of them stranded or effectively homeless.
I walk back inside to counter two. I wait for the officer to catch my eye, and when he waves me over, I slide into the seat and hand over my passport alongside my phone displaying the confirmed ticket.
His demeanour instantly softens. I realise he has probably been ordered to play the role of the harsh, grumpy bureaucrat to enforce this abrupt policy change. He clicks through the final screens on his computer, logs the paperwork, and tells me my visa extension will hit my inbox sometime next week.
Just like that, the clock begins ticking. I have exactly five weeks left on this island: this beautiful, chaotic sanctuary that has helped me completely rebuild my life.
Overflowing with gratitude for every single moment I’ve been gifted here, I head straight to the coast to celebrate with a swim at my favourite turquoise-blue beach. I might return to Bali one day, but for now, I am doubling down on every single thing I love about this place while I still can.
“I used to wake up at 4:30 am to start work at 5 when I worked in a gold mine”, he said, combing my hair. “What?!!” I replied, outraged and surprised. “You worked in a gold mine?!!” I was getting my hair trimmed by Gorga, my favourite hairdresser on the entire planet, and complaining about waking up at 5:30 am every morning for the past week, for reasons unknown.
We were comparing notes on the non-linear paths that life takes. He studied to be a lawyer, then decided he couldn’t work in such a corrupt system, went on to become a creative director at a theatre, worked in a bar, ran a marketing studio, and now designs perfume and hair products for men.
life is your curriculum
I think it’s crazy that whatever it is that you feel called to do and that you desire to work on in this life whatever art form, business, family, creative life, everything and anything is the exact thing that is going to stretch you and teach you what your soul actually needs.
For example, my soul has really needed just self-acceptance separate from achievement and productivity and worth and all the things, and to give that to me, it made me want to pursue writing, photography, and filmmaking just for the sake of the process.
And through the very difficult process of pursuing those things and showing up and being bad at them at first and trying for the first time and trying it again I am starting to get that lesson.
Self-acceptance is really not about the thing that you make; it’s about the person that you become in the process and the way that that process changes you.
That’s why you have to listen to those desires. Because they are wiser than you and there’s a greater reason.
I am feeling very honest about complicated feelings today and decided to record you a voice note talking about that and the weird, strange, uncomfortable inner process I am inwith all that right now, plus I am answering some questions.
thequestions I answered
Ways/how to figure out your purpose (I don’t know what my thing is?!!)
How to harness your creativity
How to make decisions and take action on those decisions in an aligned way
How to bridge the gap between fears and creating /taking action
Bringing ideas to life (& then completing them)
How to be yourself without hurting others
How to know when to leave a situation
Releasing negative toxic habits (clear)
Meeting like-minded people/friends
my final note
The real flex is taking the parts yourself if you don’t like, or even love, and transforming them into the parts that you cherish and adore because of how you they are.
