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.
this morning, a practice, and ten years of writing myself into a life
JUN 27, 2026
The first sound I hear as I slowly become conscious is a single, long, clear, high-pitched whistle. My sleep-filled eyes are still firmly shut beneath the silk eye mask I am addicted to. I listen for another whistle, which comes after a few moments, and try to decide whether to urge myself back to sleep. Too quickly, my mind whirrs into action — it’s chatty this morning — and I slip my mask up on my forehead. I blink my eyes open and see that it is still dark. Too early, it’s too early, I think to myself, but it’s too late, the bird already woke me. I close my eyes again and pull my mask back down to lull myself into a half-sleep, and immediately the muezzin begin their melodic, flowing adhan for Fajr, the dawn prayer. It is 5 am.
I let my thoughts play out for a little while, letting them conclude their twisted, menacing patterns from yesterday, when I had resolved to start telling a new story about something I had been irritating myself with lately. This is something I return to often: the understanding that stories are not just the way we describe our lives, but the way we experience them.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
In many of the oldest traditions, before the written word, before the self-help industry, before the modern understanding of the psyche, stories were understood to be living things. Not passive containers for information, but active forces. They shaped the people who carried them. They determined what was seen and what was missed, what was possible and what was invisible, who a woman understood herself to be and what she understood herself to be capable of.
Those who held this knowledge — the storytellers, the healers, the ones who tended the old ways in community — understood that one of the most powerful things you could do for another person was help her examine the stories she was living inside. Help her hold them up to the light. Turn them around in her hands. See them as stories, as constructions, as inherited shapes, rather than as the unquestionable fabric of reality.
Because once you can see a story as a story, it loses its totalising power. It becomes something you are carrying rather than something you are. And anything you are carrying, you can choose to put down.
I have been putting stories down and picking up new ones my whole adult life. Writing is how I do it.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
As the mercurial sky changes from black to grey, I pull myself to the edge of the bed and swing my sleepy feet to touch the floor. A fluid rush of morning movements follows: pull the heavy curtain back, pad to the bathroom, use the toilet, scrape my tongue. A little more awake, I go to the kitchen, pour spring water into the kettle, turn it on, put some loose dried hibiscus in a cup, and fill it with steaming water. Bringing my cup back to bed, I shake out ashwagandha, multivitamins and mineral tablets, while the flowers infuse, releasing their tart, floral scent.
I need to get one more thing before I can settle back under the warm covers. My laptop. I had promised myself a writing day today. It is Saturday morning.
The first time I started writing was as a child. I was a dreamer, a skinny little thing, not athletic or strong, always curled up in some chair or corner deep inside my imagination, courtesy of a book. So captivated by stories, I tried to write my own. Tiny storybooks that never quite matched my ambitions.
Later, when I was 7 or 8, I was gifted my first journal with a lock and key from my stepfather. Suspicious of his incentives, a man who never gave much from his heart, I wrote the most banal details of my days in it: what I did, what I ate. One night, when he thought I was asleep, I spied him reading it by the light of the moon through the window. It was then that I understood words could hold power. Power that had to be wielded with care.
After that, for many years, my writing was mostly performative: school projects, letters to my grandparents, whatever was required. It wasn’t until I was 17 and had moved out of home that I started writing for myself again.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
writing to process
The first kind of writing I did consistently was journaling. Not as a self-improvement practice, but as a way to discharge emotional stress from my body, through words, without filtering myself. Over the years, I have often shared my love for it, and I get so many questions about how to do it “right.”
Because it is such a private and individual practice, I thought it might be helpful to show you what it looks like for me. When you trust the process, it takes you exactly where you need to go.
I usually begin by describing the texture of my day. How do I feel, right now, in this moment? What themes have been present, or cycling around my mind? Then I move toward whatever has felt activated or uncomfortable. Lately, a frustration at not feeling seen or recognised for my writing and creativity as much as I’d like to be. I write about what that feels like in my body, and often end up somewhere in childhood: I was small, shy, soft-spoken, and I often felt steamrolled when I shared an idea. Like there just wasn’t room for me. Then I ask myself whether that is still true, and why I feel activated now.
There is obviously a childhood wound there. But the adult version of me has some agency over it. So perhaps I am not even fully recognising myself.
Which leads me to what I actually need: to value my own work, my own time, my writing and creativity, more completely. The moment I decide my work is valuable and act accordingly is the moment other people begin to recognise it too.
That is how you move from complaining about your day to finding a root and working through the emotions that are keeping you stuck. Not every journaling session flows like this. Sometimes I write “I don’t know!!!” over and over again, which is sometimes exactly what I need.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
rewriting reality
The other writing I did for myself was to rewrite my story.
To move forward with a real foundation, you have to be able to stand and deliver the story of your own life. Not just know it, but tell it with self-respect and accountability. Tell it with the self-forgiveness you deserve as an inherently innocent and valuable person. And also with honesty about the role you played in your own pain and suffering, and sometimes in that of others. The story has to feel accurate enough to land as a truth in your body.
Until you can do all of that, something keeps snagging. You will keep being called back to the same material, gently or not so gently, until you have moved through it. It is a lot of work. Some people have far more of it to do because their lives have been objectively harder. That is just the reality. But the steps are the same.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
My hibiscus tea has run dry, and the sun is glinting between the bamboo fencing and the palm fronds outside. I get up, roll out my yoga mat with every intention to stretch on it and go to the kitchen to heat more water. There’s a single drip coffee filter filled with local Arabica grounds waiting in the drawer, one I’d been saving for this morning. I hook the arms over my mug, bloom the grounds for twenty seconds, then pour three slow rounds of hot water through until the cup is full. I taste it and add a splash of milk. The coffee, my laptop, and I pile back into bed together. The yoga mat forgotten and ignored.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
from private to public
The first public writing I did was an unglamorous but surprisingly popular version of a newsletter sent from a Hotmail account in the early 2010s. I wrote about that here:
everything I know about writing I learned from other writers and from writing for hundreds of hours. Here are 10 tips that have helped me become a better writer.
Those emails became a blog. I spent a year writing truly awful posts that I’m fairly certain no one read before I started to find my voice and style. Then the blog began to be found. By strangers around the world who left comments and sent emails in response to what I had written. Without fully understanding what was happening, my writing was compounding into a personal brand, which became a business, which started generating money.
Writing is not just expression when it is done consistently in public. It becomes something others can orient around. A lighthouse that draws attention, slowly builds an audience, and opens into opportunity. Something that I built a life on.
The first line, when you get it right, immediately sets the tone. It tells the reader not just what they are reading, but what kind of world they are entering, what kind of attention is being asked of them, what kind of relationship is being formed. People don’t just follow information. They follow energy, honesty, taste, tone, and a sense that there is someone out there like them.
When I started, I was trying to make sense of my own thoughts, in public. I was trying to find ways to think and connect that felt true to me. That honesty, repeated over time, became something other people could recognise themselves in. Writing turned from private practice into a shared space, and eventually, into a body of work.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
writing as a tool for life
going pro is a writing course for women who want to use a newsletter or Substack as a marketing tool, for those who already have something to say and want to learn how to say it in a way that builds an audience and brings in clients.
It grew out of The Art of Noticing, a live creative writing course I ran four times across two years. What I kept noticing in each cohort was that many of the women didn’t just want to write. They wanted their writing to do something. They were building businesses, developing a body of work, and becoming known for something.
going pro is the next step: writing that builds a brand, an audience, and a business.
The rumbling in my stomach reminds me it is now noon. Somewhere behind the bamboo fence, a neighbour has started up a saw blade, the sound needling through the wood and into my ears. I can’t tell if he just began or if I was too deep in the writing to hear it. My body has that sticky, heavy feeling that comes from too much time in the same position. The laptop is warm. I close it and get on with the rest of my day.
This week I was planning to write about how the goal is not a life without friction, that life has edges, that we get to choose which ones we’re happy to run up against — raising children, braving the elements of the natural world, etc — after climbing the tallest mountain in Bali, an active volcano, last weekend. Which was so hard, particularly when an unprecedented1 wind appeared, threatening to tear our tiny human bodies off the summit and fling us unceremoniously into the sky.
I started writing it at the start of last week when all the details were still fresh in my mind: the smell of wildflowers on the path, the golden light of the afternoon sun dappling the leaves as we hiked up above the clouds, the satisfying ache of my thighs from the steep climb, the tears that sprang from my eyes when I thought I was going to die. I’m still going to write about it because I think it’s an interesting idea and something we all grapple with, consciously or not. But today I want to write about something else.
I’m on a visa run2: Bali, Singapore, Bali. The man at check-in warns me there’s a 50% chance they won’t let me into either Singapore nor Bali because they don’t like it when people do it in a 12-hour round trip, but I’ve taken the risk because my neighbour said it would be fine and I trust her. Plus, I got my lucky seat number: 8A, which I’m taking as a good omen. (My birthday is 8/8, plus it’s my numerology number, so 8 really is my number.)
The flight attendants with their perfectly manicured bobs and straight Asian hair are pushing a trolley, a wheel squeaking down the aisle, handing out tiny bottles of water and meals on trays to those who ordered them. Not me. I’m a strictly fasting-when-flying type, though I’ve found choosing the fruitarian option on long-haul works well too, because you just get a fruit platter, which aids digestion perfectly for when you land.
I’m wearing a long backless organic cotton Christy Dawn summer dress procured from Poshmark when I lived in NYC last summer, no bra, my comfiest tencel Uniqlo panties with a cherry on them, an Italian soft brown cashmere knit sweater bought on Vinted when I was in Paris, and dark brown soft suede loafers found at a Parisian market for €20. An outfit assembled for the full array of today: a motorbike ride to the airport before 7 am, an international flight that is inevitably too cold, and six hours in an airport. Then the same again in reverse. I hope to be showered and in bed by 11 pm.
Over the past three or four days, a new sweetness has blown into my day-to-day. This sweetness is difficult to describe because it’s so ordinary. The absence of a hardness running underneath my life, a subtle bracing against the world. A vigilance. Some part of me has always been scanning the horizon for the next disappointment, the next upheaval, the next thing that would require me to gather my strength and begin again. I am desperately clinging to this sweetness, hoping it won’t dissolve into nothingness.
That’s what I want to write about. The end of a truly harsh 8-year cycle. The death of an 8-year-long lesson. I read Leah Vanderveldt and Otherworldy on the astonishing astrology right now, and it spoke to me so deeply that I wanted to reflect on my own experience with it.
For the past eight years I’ve been circling a wound: where is my home, where do I belong, who are my people, where can I safely root and with whom? It has been all about relationships, self-worth, and security. Testing and exploring the right to simply exist and be sustained. Searching for possible answers from a million different vantage points, gathering experiences and evidence that might point me forward to the truth.
It was 2018 when this started, which feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t even recognise the woman I was then.
8 years ago I made the decision to remain estranged from my mother, after a lifetime of repetition compulsion: the unconscious drive to stay inside a painful dynamic, hoping each next time it resolves differently.
8 years ago I ended my tendency towards perpetual monogamy, drifting from one relationship to the next with barely a breath between them. I had been proposed to three times by then, but it was clear to me that it was not in my best interest to get married to any of those people. While some of them were genuinely great, we weren’t a fit. Since then, there were some situations that I got out of that were extractive, and I am grateful those chapters are over and for the lessons. People say we date our opposite-gender parent. I don’t think that’s quite right. We date the parent with whom we have the most unfinished business.
8 years ago, I moved into a house and lived on my own for the first time in my life and tried to learn how to stop outsourcing my needs for safety and security to others and instead learn the delicate way of trusting myself to become sovereign in my ability to care for myself.
8 years ago I started to grow from the confrontation of the parts of myself that had not matured or taken responsibility for my life.
2018 was the year I finally chose myself and my path in a way that I didn’t know was possible until then. But with it came the harsh realities of seeing the world in the stark, bright light of adulthood, no longer softened by adolescent ignorance.
I spent those 8 years reparenting myself, mothering and fathering myself, filling the gaps of care I hadn’t received in childhood, all whilst being entirely afloat.
I studied psychology for this reason and have spent years becoming fluent in family dynamics, reparenting, corrective experiences, the slow archaeology of inherited patterns. I have done all of this work on myself first. It is also, not coincidentally, one of the central reasons my clients seek me out.
In the last year I saw the last of my old familial patterns dissolve. Relationships I had been faithfully resourcing for years, smoothing over difficult moments, absorbing tension before it became conflict, from which I withdrew my energy, gently, without drama. Other relationships that genuinely sustain me grew stronger, as though they had been waiting for the space.
A short break for self-promotion: If you would like to learn how to use your writing as a functional brand-building tool, join me forGoing Prothis July. Learn more here.
So far so good.
I have landed in Singapore, through immigration, ate the most delicious dumpling soup, sat in a Starbucks for a few hours editing the above while sipping soya milk tea, checked back in, passed through immigration again, and am now waiting to board my flight home. May all the angels and gods be with me upon landing, and may the exit and journey to my bed be quick and smooth.
I am sitting cross-legged on an airport waiting chair opposite my gate. Boarding is in 45 minutes. I didn’t get my lucky seat this time. I’ve been placed in the middle, 15E, so there had better be someone fascinating or hot next to me.
The point I have been trying to get to, circling this whole essay, is that since 2018 I have been living inside my personal survival story. Eight years of repairing foundations. And now I am done. So, so done with this story. I can feel the completion in my bones.
That sweetness I’ve been feeling is the sign: my reality is rewriting itself.
The solstice was yesterday. I celebrated with yoga, then breathwork, then a sound healing, and cried through all three, releasing whatever remnants of grief and shame were still lodged somewhere in my body from the past eight years.
Afterwards, I won a $200 voucher for my favourite organic clothing store, Luna Indigo. Two days before that, a kind stranger bought me breakfast at my favourite café simply because I let him share my table. Small things that to me are all pointing in the same direction: I am moving into a new chapter.
Alongside that, something else is shifting. The desire to keep working at the level of excavation and repair — trauma, the long shadow of the past, the dissolution of inherited patterns — is receding. I notice I am more drawn now to making things. Art, beauty, structures in the actual world built with my own two hands.
I have spent eight years becoming very, very good at the interior work. I have earned a kind of mastery there that I am genuinely proud of, and that will always be woven into everything I do. But I no longer want it to be the primary story I am living. I want to be fluent in the outer world now. In creating and building and being fully, unguardedly alive in it.
The flight is delayed by an hour. I’m sitting between two cute women who are going on their first trip together in their 15-year friendship. I ask if they want to sit beside each other, gesturing that I’m willing to move into either seat, but they say ‘no’ giggling, and we chat a little. Someone sitting nearby is dropping some really foul-smelling farts. Everyone is tired. It is getting late, the mood is restless and impatient among the passengers.
I am in a good mood because I believe this is divine timing for whatever lies ahead. I’m resting my chin on my knees, bare feet on the chair, shoes kicked under the seat. I’m tired and dream about being back home and in bed, and think about what it means to put roots down and how to make that decision.
Something I think about a lot is the access to spiritual qualities implicit in pain, grief and unhappiness. Often my darkest moments ~ heartbreak, loss or rupture in the fabric of my life ~ impose a sort of presence that melts down the world around me.
The moments that bring me to my knees are also the moments that bring me closer to my faith. They crack me open in ways that innocent happiness and joy rarely do.
During a particularly difficult breakup in 2018, I sat on the living room floor of the Italian-style bungalow we had bought together. It had a peach tree and plums, raspberries and wild roses in the garden that I still think of fondly. I loved this man so thoroughly but love it rarely enough. I knew I had to leave to give us both a chance at the lives we dreamed of and deserved. The grief was all-consuming that afternoon.
As I wept, my face pressed down on the antique rug I had imported from Morocco, I decided to go all-in with feeling the pain. It was either repress or feel, and we all know what happens when we do the former. The latter chases us until we let ourselves be vulnerable enough to go there. So I let myself feel the pain at the deepest level of my aching heart until I was one with it. And then something beautiful happened.
I found joy. I found joy inside the pain, so generous and broad and soothing, it made the pain worth it. I found clarity and comfort and understanding for the human experience and our internal technicoloured emotional worlds. There is poeticism to our suffering.
Right now so many people are aching deeply for a life that is yet unknown. So many people I know are renegotiating the terms of their existence. They are pivoting and choosing a new path even though it is painful and uncomfortable. These moments tether us to the truth, and in their greatest intensity, can feel more intimate than anything else in the world, bringing us closer to our faith.
Faith in life, in god(dess), in the universe, in ourselves, in the good of others… whatever speaks truly to you. Built into the other side is some kind of transformation. We are in that transformative process right now.
When I was trying to summarise what I was saying in this video, what came through and landed for me really clearly was the following:
We have faith in a future that resembles us more accurately than the past has. It is the only thing that carries us through. It is an initiation. We feel the pain and fear and confusion and still move towards it knowing that this is the only way.
Pragmatically, the ways that we relate to one another, the ways that we make money, the value of things, the things that we call our work, our relationship to our homes, to our lands, to our earth, are all changing, and rapidly now. We have long known the need to. As I say in the video, it’s an exciting time.
𓂃 𓈒𓏸 𓇼
VIDEO TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Almost full moon — new bangs, sunset walk
0:14 So many people are going through big life transformations right now
1:08 It’s a weird and destabilising time — but also really exciting
2:42 Sunday morning beach day
3:22 Monday — construction chaos, escaping to a secondhand bookstore
3:46 Finished Alias Grace and The Luminaries — thoughts
4:06 What this video is actually about: pivots, dreams, aligned goals
5:23 My story — the dream I had 13 years ago
5:32 Psychology degree, music festivals, starting a blog
6:22 How the blog became a business and the traveling began
7:26 Back when travel was still inconvenient — and I loved it
8:28 The dream came true — and then I had no idea what came next
8:51 The global panini and everything that changed
9:21 Years of feeling unanchored and disconnected
10:11 This is happening collectively — so many people are pivoting
10:34 Busy work vs real impact — what are we devoting our lives to
11:25 Three questions to ask yourself right now
11:31 Question 1: How do I want my life to feel?
11:41 Question 2: Who am I becoming?
11:54 Question 3: What is the next aligned step?
12:57 The old way vs the new way of setting goals
13:25 It’s about our becoming — not where we arrive
P.S. This one has a slow and gentle start. I like to think I’m helping you stretch your attention span. (You’re welcome.) I am still very much a beginner at making videos, and spent this week inside the very sharp (and frustrating) learning curve of editing with DaVinci Resolve, so thank you for your patience with me as I master this particular form of expression.
A live six-week writing course for women who want to use a newsletter or substack as a functional brand-building tool.
After years of working with and watching women build businesses online, I’ve noticed it comes down to this:
1. build something with your name on it
A product, a project, a body of work. This forces you to persuade people to care, which means learning rhetoric. It forces you to understand what others actually want, not what you think they should want, which means practical psychology. It forces you to act without permission and iterate based on what reality gives back, which means real agency. You learn by making something and putting it in front of people.
2. write publicly. consistently
Writing compresses your thinking into something others can hold. It builds an audience, a reputation, and proof of work, all three of which compound over time. A newsletter is where both of these things happen at once: you are building something, and you are writing about it, and the writing itself becomes part of what people buy.
I found a way to make my life so much more interesting
JUN 06, 2026
sleepy morning face
I am getting ready to go to the birthday dinner of the Playboy model who is my neighbour. I’ve neatly wrapped a set of three handprinted cosmetic bags in various sizes in brown paper tied with cotton string, decorated with fresh flowers. Far too organic for her tastes, I’m sure, but she wants me there and I feel obliged due to the proximity of our unlikely friendship. The dinner starts at 8 which my Californian habit to stop eating before 7 baulks at yet here I am.
The evening is warm, but on the back of the taxi-bike later it will be cool so I put a light grey velvet jacket to the side and look at my bare face and the new bangs I cut on the full moon in Sagittarius as some kind of sign to myself that I was ready for something. Exactly what I don’t know, but there’s a feeling in my chest that at any moment my life is about to take a brand new trajectory, unknown even to myself. There’s a taste of sweet grass meadows, wildflowers on cliffs overlooking a wild ocean, ylang ylang in my mouth whenever I get this sense that my world is about to shift on its axis. Maybe tonight needs something more on my face to face the parallel universe I am about to enter.
Inside a small pouch, I find a brown felt-tip eyeliner and sweep it from the side of my right eye out into a tiny wing. I look back, pleased with the effect and repeat on the other eye. I curl my eyelashes but leave them bare and glide a thick coat of raspberry-coloured lipstick onto my lips that I press my fingers into to blend. I wipe the residue onto my cheeks. It’s funny how makeup instantly gives you that “I’ve just had hot sex’ look. Maybe that’s the point of it. I slip into a soft black silk mini slip that I thrifted in NYC last summer and slide on black leather sandals that are handmade in Bali and feel like a cloud on my feet. My small brown grass-woven handbag from South Africa fits my purse phone and keys.
Bali is weird because there’s an entire fake world being built up alongside a very natural organic world and the contrast is so extreme that it feels like living in parallel worlds. I slip in and out between the two, though mostly am in one more than the other because by nature I’m more naturally oriented. The stronger the AI maxxing superficial plastic universe grows the more I want to retreat from it because it makes me feel unwell. Everything is transactional and has lost its authenticity and creativity, everyone speaks the same, looks the same, thinks the same and there are no individual ideas left in that universe. It seems like a compressed way to live, to have to fit into these tiny boxes. I feels dangerous and scary.
But it makes me so happy because I know where I belong. I know how to participate in the world. The only way to participate in the world is to opt out of everything that destroys the essence of life. You might be wondering what all this has to do with the title: how I get psychological relief from being addicted to my phone.
I’m getting there now, I promise. Being on my phone feels like the plastic world. Being off my phone feels like the natural world I want to participate in. All this is to illustrate the great divide that is happening and the choices we get to make every day. We know by now what being chronically online is doing to our brains. It’s not good.
Study after study links excessive phone use with poorer attention, disrupted sleep, higher levels of anxiety, depression and stress, increased feelings of loneliness, and a reduced capacity to tolerate boredom or focus deeply on a single task. Researchers have found that the more compulsively we reach for our phones, the more fragmented our attention becomes, the more difficult it is to enter states of flow, and the harder it becomes to distinguish genuine desire from algorithmically engineered distraction.
We are becoming accustomed to living in a state of perpetual interruption. Our minds rarely get the opportunity to wander, reflect, synthesise, imagine, or simply be. Our phones offer a constant escape hatch from discomfort, uncertainty, loneliness, grief, boredom, confusion, anticipation, and waiting. Every feeling can be immediately soothed with a scroll.
The problem is that many of the capacities required for a meaningful life are built in exactly those spaces we are now avoiding. Creativity requires boredom. Intuition requires silence. Self-awareness requires reflection. Original thought requires enough distance from the crowd to hear yourself think.
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If I am going to be completely honest then I have to consider myself a phone addict. I grew up alongside the digital age and ended up embracing it. I have worked online my entire career, I use my phone to do most things that are life-admin and work-related. I have, at times, deleted all social media from my phone only to log on in Safari or be trapped by YouTube’s shorts. It’s clinical.
I have tried so many ways to set a clear distinction between myself and my phone, but it exists almost like an invisible limb that I miss when it is not close by. I’ve always had all the notifications off except for phone calls and messages. I limit the apps on my phone to the bare minimum; the screen is set to grey-scale to make it less enticing and more boring. I have done everything on this list of ways to break up with your phone. Some of which work. Generally, my daily phone use hangs around the four-to-five-hour mark, which includes me using it for work, but it still feels like too much.
To exercise this muscle as often as I can, I go without my phone. Going out without your phone is like not wearing underwear under your clothes. No one knows your secret. Unless you want them to. I have taken to going for walks without technology at the cost of beautiful moments that will never be shared.
A few weeks ago I did exactly that but the truth is I wished I had my phone. A half moon and a rainbow hung in the sky on my sunset walk. Existing in the rare rectangular airspace that a camera could capture, I regretted not being able to steal that moment from the sky. I wept at the natural beauty of it. This one’s just for me, I whispered to myself.
I love taking beautiful pictures of things that I find beautiful. Is that I inherently bad? I don’t think so. It’s art. It’s presence. It’s being in the moment of beauty. It’s appreciation. So it’s less about the phone and more about the hold I let it have over me. It’s about how conscious I am with it, and with everything in my life.
Am I living in a sleep state or am I awake to it? Turns out it’s not really about the phone at all. It’s about me being present to my life. Every second of it. On and off screen. I notice that when I am truly present and on my phone, I can’t take it for long. It loses its draw when I’m not inside the dream-like hypnotic state with it. Consciousness amplifies the phone’s ugliness.
We have been taught to approach addiction like a war. We try to remove the thing. Restrict it. Discipline ourselves into better behaviour. We create rules and boundaries and systems and then feel ashamed when we break them. I have never found shame to be particularly transformative.
What I have found transformative is becoming genuinely interested in my own life again. There’s a concept in nutrition psychology termed ‘crowding out’ where you crowd out the bad eating habits with good habits. It’s the same in life. When life is so full of good things, the lifeless things lose meaning. What works is making my life more interesting than the addiction.
The times when I forget my phone even exists are not the times when I have the most discipline. They are when life has completely captured my attention. When I am surrounded by people I adore. When I am learning something new, building something meaningful, falling in love, travelling, creating, hosting, rearranging my home, and reading books that alter my mind.
In other words, when I am fully participating in my life.
I think this is why the conversation around phones often feels incomplete. We spend so much time talking about what we need less of and almost no time talking about what we need more of. More beauty. More friendships. More creativity. More purpose. More embodiment. More connection. More meaning. More moments that remind us we are alive.
Our phones are incredibly effective because they offer a diluted version of all of these things at once. Connection without vulnerability. Entertainment without effort. Novelty without risk. Validation without intimacy. But no amount of scrolling has ever left anyone feeling nourished. Only temporarily distracted.
There are two apps (lol, I know, but they actually work for me!) that have helped me get back into my life more fully.
One helps me practise holding more spaciousness in my mind so the phone slowly becomes less interesting by comparison, like it is no longer the most textured thing available to me in a given moment. The other interrupts the automatic reach, the muscle memory of picking it up and drifting into the same familiar loops of checking and refreshing and disappearing into apps I didn’t consciously choose to open.
My point here is that it’s not about taking a binary approach to addiction. The part of us that is always looking for an escape doesn’t disappear, it just needs somewhere else to go, something else to work with, something more alive to connect to.
The first is a meditation app called Waking Up. I used to meditate a lot and then last year, when my nervous system became too dysregulated to sustain it in the way I was used to, I gave myself a break and then needed something to help me find my way back. That’s when I discovered the Waking Up app, which is the most intelligent and non-performative introduction to meditation I have come across in over twenty years of practice. They were kind enough to offer me a free 30-day trial to share with you, so you can explore it for yourself if you want to. The daily meditations don’t “fix” anything as such, but they do create a kind of spaciousness in my mind that makes the pull of my phone noticeably weaker, because being with myself is something that I enjoy.
The second is an app-blocking tool calledFoqos. It’s free, and I have two simple settings that I’ve named “day” and “night”. I am literal when it comes to self-management. During the day, Substack and Instagram are blocked from 8am to 8pm, with two short ten-minute windows where I’m allowed to check in. At night, from 8pm to 8am, everything social, browsing, and work-related is blocked, which essentially turns my phone into something close to a dumb phone, except for clock, calls and messages.
I try to keep a no-screens-after-8pm rule most nights, which I only really break it if I am watching a really good film, which is rare. Those evening hours have become some of the most important of my day, where I read, journal, and return to myself without interruption.
That’s it. That is how I get psychological relief from being addicted to my phone. Not through force. Not through purity. Not through becoming someone who never reaches for it. Through small structures that make it easier to choose something else when I can feel myself drifting. Through practices that give my attention somewhere else to land. And through a fairly gentle acceptance that I am, and always will be, very human.
Some mornings, the angsty compression in my chest seems unbearable. It feels like there is only so long I can stave off my own insanity about what the future holds. We stumble forward into a world that is changing both too fast and too slowly to make sense of anything. What does it all mean? No one really knows.
Then the little details of daily life take over, and the existential questions are forgotten for some time. I answer emails, make a cup of tea, reply “haha yes totally” to a friend’s message.
Outside, the puppies are tumbling over each other again. Both had found homes and then came back. Their potential families realised that raising a puppy is inconvenient and exhausting. I worry about them more than I should. I had happily agreed to foster them temporarily, but now it feels as if they’ve been forgotten about.
Human beings do this constantly, I think. We fall in love with the idea of something and then realise it’s not as easy in reality.
This morning, as I type these words to you from my bed, I am thinking about the different layers through which we experience life. How they relate to flirting with life. How we can cultivate abundance through playful awareness.
There is the human layer.
The layer of personality, memory, conditioning, ego, fear, longing. The part of us constantly reacting to life and trying to make sense of it through story. The part of us that spirals at 3 am, that wants certainty, reassurance, answers. It narrates everything. “Why did they say that? What does this mean? Am I behind? Am I safe?” It interprets reality intellectually to feel some sense of control over it.
A lot of people live almost entirely from here, mistaking the narration of life for life itself.
There is the soul layer.
The deeper layer underneath the performance of the self. The layer that seems far less interested in comfort or social approval and far more interested in growth, truth, expansion, evolution. The soul does not experience events in the same way the human self does. The human self says, this is painful, unfair, humiliating. The soul understands life as a curriculum. It asks, ” What is this trying to teach me? Where is this trying to lead me?” It sees meaning in the challenges of life.
The cyclical bodily layer (for women).
The hormonal landscape that alters perception, sensitivity, intuition, emotion, desire, energy, openness, grief, creativity, sexuality, tolerance. Women underestimate how much wisdom lives here because we’ve been taught to distrust the body and worship output instead. But the body knows things long before the mind catches up. Truths become unbearable at particular points in the cycle. Desires surface. The female body metabolises reality differently depending on where we are within ourselves.
The observing consciousness layer.
The awareness capable of noticing the story without completely becoming it. The part of you that can witness your fear without obeying it. Witness your heartbreak without turning it into your identity. Witness the hormonal wave without assuming it is permanent reality.
This layer is where free will begins. Maybe not total free will. But the capacity to choose how you meet the moment.
This is the layer that understands that the quality of your life is not determined entirely by external conditions, but by your relationship to them. The part that knows happiness is not something handed to you by circumstance, but something cultivated through attention, perspective, meaning, devotion, openness.
Depending on how developed this observing awareness is, it changes your entire experience of the other layers.
A person fully consumed by the human layer experiences life as something happening to them. A person connected to awareness experiences life as something they are participating in consciously.
This is why flirting with life matters so much.
Flirting with life is the practice of consciously bringing your openness, curiosity, playfulness, sensuality, attention, warmth, and aliveness into your experience instead of waiting for the world to hand those feelings to you first.
It is a way of participating in your reality.
The more conscious you become, the more you start noticing how your inner state shapes your reality. How openness creates more openness. How warmth invites warmth. How attention reveals beauty that was always there. How curiosity creates connection. How playfulness creates possibility. And how abundance, in all its forms, tends to flow toward people who are fully participating in their lives instead of defensively withdrawing from them.
Flirting with life is really just conscious participation in your own existence.
my actual palm, circa 2016, rubbed in a cold fireplace of a 6-bedroom dilapidated mansion in NZ, painted with eyeshadow
When someone asks my five-year plan, it’s like… why don’t we get our palms read? Why don’t we shake an 8-ball? You want me to tell you the future?? You want me to lie to you and act like I know what’s going to happen??
I had no idea all the things that happened in the past five years were even possible, and you want my projection for the next five years? No.
I am dizzy from the sheer number of things I’ve had and done and want. My life is bursting at the seams and there is very little order to it all. And I want and I want and I want.
I want to fall in love again, I want to grow a garden, I want my hair to grow past the soft curve of my under breast, I want to live near the ocean (I already live near the ocean but wherever I live I want to live near the ocean), I want a collection of friends and their tiny humans (and maybe my tiny humans) swinging and out of my doors, I want to write and write and write, I want to drive acoss North America in a 4WD or a convertible from the West Coast to the East stopping in New Orleans to see some friends, I want to see Olivia Dean perform at Lollapalooza this summer, I want my home made messy from love, I want all my days filled with creative projects the make the world a more beautiful place, I want to be tired of doing load after load of laundry because it means that I am caring for others, I want to bake naughty-made-healthy things that dissappear into crumbs within minutes, I want to go to Farmers Markets every weekend even when it rains and to know the farmers by name and the produce by season, I want to go on road-trips to places without wifi and drink in the stillness and wrap my arms around my man and lay my face against his back and smile while he measures out where to set up for the night, I want to go back to New York and do it better this time.
My five year plan is for life to be an extension of me and since I am always always always growing and changing and evolving so is the plan. And the plan is less a plan and more a thread of desires and wants and needs and hopes and dreams woven together around me and my life and body of work.
I want to have finally answered the question “what do you do?” with something simple that doesn’t need explaining. I want to sing more, I want to forgive everyone who hurt me and be forgiven too, I want to know more people who are living in ways that I admire because they are so authentically themselves, I want to feel at peace in new social circumstances instead of tightly wound up (I don’t know if anyone else has figured this out, but if you have, please lmk), I want to think less about my body, I want to think less about myself, I want to go on girls trips with girlfriends I’ve had for a decade and drink wine and laugh at all the things we used to do and worry about, I want to make everyone’s birthday cakes and decorate them with flowers, I want to go through the painful learning curve of renovating my home by hand, I want to foster animals that need a home. I want to savour the slow seasons, to surrender to their stillness, to their illusiory unmooredness.
One of the things that makes any of this meaningful is to fully experience it. Every moment. To be present with life. I don’t want to miss any of it, not one second. I want to be excited about my 40s and 50s and 60s and beyond. I want to be delighted by how well not having a five-year plan works out. I want to enjoy the ride.
Wanting is the easy part. The harder part is surviving the uncomfortable, uncertain space while waiting and hoping and doubting (dear god, the doubting) whether any of it is ever actually going to come to life. The part where you look around and don’t see anything yet and you have to keep going anyway. How do you maintain that essential and nearly delusional belief and trust? Where you can’t explain to anyone, least of all yourself, how this is going to work.
You just do. Even without a plan. You refuse to give up.
the difference between being 33 and 44 is that it takes so much longer for my face to wake up in the morning (see video)
MAY 15, 2026
Clouds have blown over our ferns, frangipani and bromeliads in the garden. I have woken up and moved through my morning rituals: take retainers out, scrape tongue, drink water, meditate, make myself a matcha, drink it on the old wicker sofa on the balcony and think about what to have for breakfast while letting sunlight stream into my eyes. I order a breakfast bagel on my phone, return to the twilight of my room, get back into bed and pull my laptop onto my legs. They are stretched out in front of me while I lean against the soft pillows, thinking about what to write, how to begin, today.
Writing, when it’s not boring, is dangerous. Writing is exposing ourselves. Our lives, our loves, our relationships, our despairs, worries and hopes. Good writing is dropping the wall in front of the heart and peeling back the scars, leaving the reader nodding, “me too”. More on that, soon, here.
My writing has evolved and grown and changed in recent years, but one format I like coming back to is a simple email. That’s where I want to stay today.
I make my life transparent in these letters to you. Often with more ease than one would expect, but not always. I write candidly about the way I try to meet the gaps in my care as a child, I reveal aspects of my lifestyle that are often unmoored, and I wear my heart on my sleeve when it comes to my romances. I’m also particularly interested in the fascinating tension between destiny and free will, investigating how much of our lives and future we can consciously design. Somehow, all these topics weave together.
Oh! It’s started raining! Perfect. Perfect start to the day, which I had planned to spend the first half of in bed writing. Nothing makes me happier than the sound of rain onto the terracotta clay tile roof above me while I write.
The rain lightens and a notification lights up my phone signalling that my breakfast bagel is here. I jump out of bed in my striped cotton hot pants and old Urban Outfitters t-shirt that I slept in and go to the front door, letting the drizzle softly cover me. The foster puppies are nipping at my ankles, and just as I open the garden door, the delivery guy pulls up on his scooter and hands me a cardboard box, before wizzing off again. The puppies have run off towards the kitchen willing me to give them breakfast but it’s not time yet.
I make my way back into bed with my hot bagel of eggs, melted cheese, soggy tomato, lettuce and crispy bacon, and eat half before returning to these words. The other half can be saved for lunchtime. The rain starts to press down harder again. I am dry and warm and happy.
build your body of work with me
Sometimes people ask what it takes to live the way I do, and beyond consistent courage and trying again and again and again, and trust in self and life, it’s something I’ve only been able to name recently: building a body of work. A way of moving through the world and giving back to it that is mine and only mine.
My friend Anne recently texted me, writing, “I loved what you wrote about adaptability and how we can flourish moving forward in ’futureproof your life’. I have journals full of concepts and connections, and I can finally see how they all weave together, and there’s a certain direction.” This is true for so many women. All our lives, unwittingly, there is a pull towards building this body of work. The niche is you. The audience is the people you love.
I first tested out Practical Dreamer as a 1:1 experience for my private clients late last year, and when it sold out twice in a row, it was clear that this process was needed. I spent the first few months of this year refining it into a group programme:
practical dreamer: a three month mentorship for women ready to build their body of work: click here to learn more
Over twelve weeks you will excavate what you know, clarify what you want to build, and make something real: a body of work that is owned entirely by you and offered generously to the world. You will leave with something to say and something to give.
Human beings have been dying into new identities for as long as human beings have existed. The difference now is that many people have built almost their entire sense of self around institutions that may not exist in the same way ten years from now. If the structures most people have built their identities around start disappearing, whether that’s because of AI, redundancy, motherhood, illness, divorce, burnout, heartbreak, relocation…
The rain has stopped since I started writing an hour ago. The sun is spilling in from between the leaves that shade the entry to my chamber. Last week, the weather started becoming a little cooler, a little drier. I don’t have to shelter in the stale air-conditioning of my room in the middle of the day quite so much anymore.
Even here, the seasons tell of change, of untold stories and unknown futures that lie ahead. I think about the question again. “What does it take to build a life that is truly, honestly who we are?” It takes love. Love for yourself, for your potential, for your desires.
One of the most painfully devastating things I see women do is pour their love into the potential of someone else, where it is taken for granted and wasted and squandered away because they do not love themselves. I’ve done it too. That’s how I know. Ultimately, the only person we owe that kind of investment into is ourselves.
It takes delusional dreaming and trying and failing and letting yourself be seen in process in public. It takes patience and presence and hope. It takes letting yourself be seen. Letting yourself be perceived and judged. And since we are doing it anyway, why not put on a show?
living in this way is rebellious because it makes you unmanipulable
MAY 10, 2026
It’s Sunday morning. Our foster puppy is scratching at my bedroom door, whining to come in. Scooters are whirring by on the road outside. There’s a half-eaten breakfast bagel crumpled in foil on the bed next to me, and an empty mug that I used for my morning “healthy hot chocolate” — raw cacao powder stirred into hot water, topped with raw milk, a sprinkle of sea salt, and a heaped teaspoon of raw honey.
Oh no. She’s found someone’s shoe that she’s now enthusiastically destroying.
I am writing in bed — my favourite way to start a day — and a recent rarity. Who would have thought that I’d move to a tropical island and life would get busier and fuller than ever?! Not me.
Two and a half months ago I arrived here having only just scrambled the edges of my existence together into a coherent heap of a human after the f*&ckery of a year 2025 was for me, and now it feels like that version of myself is dead and gone.
I am someone completely new. Braver. Clearer. Happier. More myself than I have been in years. Which means I’m remembering what I’m actually about, now that I’ve been freed from the clutches of survival in a social ecosystem that was so foreign to me.
I think and live and write a lot about living as close to the nexus of your soul as possible. A life that feels, in the deepest and most cellular sense, like an extension of your own heart, your own rhythm, your own soul. And while I often focus on what you do with your life — your work, your purpose, your gifts, the way you spend your mornings, the people you choose, the risks you take, the dreams you refuse to abandon — it also includes how you live your life. The little details of beauty and luxury and lifestyle that align with who you are.
One thing I find so fascinating is that when you live close to the nexus of your soul, the innermost, truest point of yourself, you tend to do less. Need less. Want less.
All your beauty rituals become so much more meaningful and also so much less expensive.
Living in this way is rebellious because it makes you unmanipulable.
Uninterested in the trends and forces that charge our modern consumer world, because you’re whole. You don’t experience a gap between who you are and who you should be. So you see things for what they are.
True beauty is so much more accessible than we’ve been led to believe, and not only because it starts within. I mean that structurally, not sentimentally. Beauty is relational. It’s energy before it’s aesthetics. It’s why we can look at someone who is, by every conventional measure, physically attractive, and feel nothing — or worse, feel a low-grade repulsion — because something in their presence doesn’t match. Because the exterior and the interior are running different programmes. And it’s why a face that contains none of the features we’ve been culturally trained to identify as beautiful can be so magnetic, so endlessly interesting to look at, so alive. Because whatever is happening inside that person is leaking out through their eyes, their expression, the way they hold themselves in the world.
Beauty, at its most real, is the coherence between inner and outer.
So, what makes you feel most you? Most beautiful? Most enigmatic? What beauty rituals reflect the nexus of your soul? There are no right or wrong answers here, which is what makes it so unique!
the more uncertain the world becomes, the more essential it becomes to become unmistakably yourself
MAY 06, 2026
I went on a date last night1. He was not my type, but the conversation was interesting enough. At one point, while explaining his startup, he leaned forward and said:
“It’s 2031. Imagine a woman. She’s thirty five. She’s a lawyer who worked her way up to junior partner at a top firm. She has a beautiful house in Sydney, a second holiday property somewhere else, a life that looks exactly like what people say it’s supposed to look like. She did everything right. And then AI becomes so good that it can do her job better than she can.”
He paused.
“She loses the job. The income. The partnership. The status. She spends six months trying to find something equivalent but nothing exists anymore. She gets two thousand dollars a month in universal basic income, has to sell the house, give up the second property, downsize her life. But more than that, she loses her identity. She doesn’t know who she is without any of it. She becomes angry. Aggressive. Unstable. She needs help.”
Then he smiled.
“That’s where my startup comes in.”
I took a sip of wine.
“What a beautiful opportunity to create a more meaningful life.”
He looked at me like I hadn’t understood.
“She’s suffering,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Obviously.”
I told him he was making her sound one dimensional.
“She is not her job. Her career might be an expression of her, for a season, but it is not the entirety of who she is. She’s a human being. She has instincts, contradictions, private curiosities, old dreams, unfinished parts of herself, talents that never made it onto a résumé, desires she may not even have admitted to herself yet. She is an ecosystem. Not a title.”
He looked at me for a moment and said, completely seriously:
“So… she has hobbies?”
I stared at him.
“No,” I said. “Don’t belittle her.”
And suddenly I could feel myself getting fired up.
“I mean that she is a living ecosystem. A psyche. A body. A nervous system. A soul. A woman with instincts and contradictions and unfinished parts of herself. A woman with ideas she hasn’t followed yet, gifts she hasn’t fully developed, parts of her that have never had the chance to come all the way alive because she’s been too busy being useful, successful, productive, good.”
He stayed quiet.
“Her career might have been one expression of who she is for a season. But it was never all of her. It was never supposed to be.”
I thought about how many women I know who have already lived some version of this.
Women who became mothers and realised the identity they had built no longer fit.
Women who left marriages.
Women who moved countries.
Women who got sick.
Women who burned out.
Women who fell in and out of love.
This isn’t new.
Human beings have been dying into new identities for as long as human beings have existed. The difference now is that many people have built almost their entire sense of self around institutions that may not exist in the same way ten years from now.
If the structures most people have built their identities around start disappearing, whether that’s because of AI, redundancy, motherhood, illness, divorce, burnout, heartbreak, relocation, grief, or simply waking up one morning and realising you can’t keep pretending your life fits when it clearly doesn’t… then the people who will suffer the most won’t necessarily be the least intelligent, or the least educated, or even the least prepared.
It will be the people who got very good at becoming who the world rewarded, but never got particularly curious about who they actually were. The people who built careers, networks, reputations, maybe even entire lifestyles, without ever developing the self-awareness, individuality, or courage required to discover what was genuinely theirs.
The more uncertain the world becomes, the more essential it becomes to become unmistakably yourself.
Let’s say, for a moment, that his version of the future is real. Let’s say that in the next five or ten years entire industries begin disappearing. Fewer people sitting in offices pretending to work while answering emails that no one really needed to send in the first place. Let’s say that the careers our parents and grandparents once built entire identities around become increasingly unstable, increasingly automated, increasingly… optional. Let’s say that the pace of change really is that fast.
Then there are, as far as I can tell, two things you can do now to prepare.
To stop treating the unknown like a threat, or a punishment, or evidence that you’ve made a wrong turn, and begin relating to it for what it so often is: the place where your next identity is quietly forming. The people who are going to navigate the next decade with the most grace will not necessarily be the smartest, the richest, or the most technically skilled. They will be the ones who have already spent enough time in the void to know that losing one version of yourself does not mean losing yourself altogether. The ones who have sat in enough silence, enough heartbreak, enough reinvention, enough endings, enough in-between spaces, to know that identity is not something fixed, but something living.
The other is that you become more than the bare minimum.
You stop building a life around being employable.
And you start building a body of work.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because maybe you’re not actually meant to build a “business.” Maybe that word is too small, too transactional, too loaded with internet bro energy and passive income fantasies and funnels and logos and launch strategies and all the other things that have made so many deeply intelligent, creative, sensitive people decide that entrepreneurship isn’t for them.
Maybe what you’re actually here to build is a body of work. Something that doesn’t begin with market research or niche positioning or “what problem do I solve?” but with curiosity. With obsession. With the kinds of questions that keep following you from city to city, relationship to relationship, season to season. The kinds of ideas that wake you up at three in the morning, not because they are commercially viable, but because they feel alive. Because they feel like yours.
A body of work, as I’ve come to understand it, is the accumulated evidence of what happens when you take your curiosity seriously for long enough.
It is what begins to emerge when you stop asking what people want from you and start paying much closer attention to what life keeps trying to draw out of you. It is the trail of essays, conversations, experiments, offerings, questions, photographs, frameworks, teachings, retreats, communities, products, philosophies, and perspectives that begin to form when you stop trying to fit yourself into existing categories and start allowing your own way of seeing the world to become visible.
And from what I can tell, after more than a decade of writing online, building businesses, burning out, reinventing myself, moving countries, changing identities, falling apart, starting over, and paying very close attention to the women who seem most alive… a body of work tends to grow from three things.
1. Depth.
And by depth, I don’t mean expertise in the traditional sense. I don’t mean certificates or credentials or another weekend course you can add to your website. I mean the depth that comes from paying attention to your own life with enough honesty to notice the patterns that keep repeating. The conversations people always seem to have with you. The themes that have followed you since childhood. The books you can’t stop buying. The problems you’ve had to solve the hard way. The pain you survived that, over time, became wisdom. The questions that won’t leave you alone no matter how practical you try to be. Depth begins the moment you stop consuming other people’s ideas compulsively and start observing your own life as if it might actually contain the raw material for something important.
2. Difference.
Which sounds obvious, until you realise how much of adult life is spent trying not to stand out. Trying to sound more professional, more polished, more digestible, more hireable, more marketable, more… normal. And yet the irony is that the very things most people spend years trying to tone down are often the exact things that make them unforgettable. Your intensity. Your sensitivity. Your strange combinations of interests. Your contradictory opinions. Your way of connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. Your obsession with human behaviour, or design, or healing, or language, or food, or systems, or beauty, or whatever it is that lights up your particular nervous system. The parts of yourself you’ve been trying to smooth out are not the problem, but the point. Your weirdness is not something to overcome, but something to study.
3. Devotion.
Because a body of work is rarely built in public at first. It’s built introspectively. In notebooks. In half-finished drafts. In long walks. In voice notes to yourself. In years where, from the outside, it looks like nothing much is happening. It’s built while other people are waiting for permission, waiting to feel ready, waiting to know exactly how it all turns out before they begin. It’s built when nobody is clapping, nobody is paying, nobody fully understands what you’re doing yet, and you keep showing up anyway, not because it makes sense on paper, but because something in you knows that this… whatever this is… matters.
I suspect that in a future that becomes increasingly automated, increasingly optimised, increasingly efficient, the people who thrive will not necessarily be the people who can do what everyone else can do, only faster.
They will be the people who took the time to become themselves unmistakably.
practical dreamer: a three month mentorship for women ready to build their body of work
~ using Stanford’s Life Design framework,
you go on a journey to build something meaningful ~
If you’re serious about building a body of work, not just a career, not just a personal brand, but something living, something that could hold your identity through seasons of reinvention, loss, growth, motherhood, relocation, heartbreak, abundance, obscurity, success, and all the versions of you still waiting to emerge… then this is where I would begin.
Not with a business plan. Not with a niche. Not with a logo, a website, a strategy, or an Instagram bio.
I would begin by getting radically honest about who you actually are beneath all the roles, all the conditioning, all the places you learned how to belong by becoming more convenient, more agreeable, more impressive, more useful.
Take a notebook. Go for a long walk. Sit somewhere quiet. Pour a wine / kombucha / cacao. Light a candle. Turn your phone off for an hour. And sit with these.
— your relationship to belonging.
How much of your identity has been built around a group, a community, an industry, a friendship circle, a family system, a culture, a profession, a political ideology, a version of womanhood, a place?
And more importantly… does it still fit?
Does the life you’ve built around belonging actually reflect who you are now, or who you had to become in order to be accepted there?
— your belief systems.
What do you actually believe about how the world works?
About money.
About love.
About ambition.
About beauty.
About freedom.
About what a good life looks like.
About how people should treat each other.
About what success is.
About what is worth your precious life force.
And how much of that did you arrive at through lived experience, hard-won wisdom, and deep reflection… versus quietly absorbing it because it helped you fit somewhere?
— your relationship to being different.
Not performatively different. Not “quirky.” Not aesthetically unconventional.
Actually different.
Outgrowing people.
Being misunderstood.
Being underestimated.
Being judged.
Being ahead of your time.
Being too much for some people and exactly enough for the right ones.
How have you learned to exist as an individual within the collective?
Have you been paying the cost of being fully yourself…
Or finding increasingly sophisticated ways around it?
Because, in my experience, your body of work begins the moment you start becoming unmistakably yourself.
1I find dating to be a bit of a social experiment these days. It’s fun! I’m enjoying it. I also notice how much sharper my senses have become, how quickly my body tells me what my mind hasn’t caught up to yet. After everything that happened last year, I trust that intelligence more than ever. We meet at my favourite sunset spot. This man was perfectly nice, interesting even, but he touched me too often, too casually, assumed intimacy rather than earning it, and when I subtly moved my body away, leaned back, created space, he didn’t notice. Or perhaps he noticed and didn’t know what to do with the information. And when he asked me if I was a physical touch person, and I said I am, once I feel comfortable with someone, he replied: “How long does that take?” I looked at him incredulously. Some men live almost entirely from the neck up. The conversation we had tracks because the mistake that these kinds of men often make is that they believe they can predict and control the future by outsmarting it. Really, they’re just very afraid.
Whenever they get a chance, the mosquitoes swarm, attacking my exposed legs. In the morning I slip out of the air-conditioning in a t-shirt and panties, into the outdoor kitchen to make a matcha or cacao, braving the hungry creatures of the tropics. I stand there in the half-dark, waiting for the water to boil, watching the garden breathe.
It is raining. When the monsoon season ended, weeks of sunshine followed, and I became complacent about sunny days. People think monsoon season means constant rain and dry weather means none, but neither is true. The downpours are sudden and daily during the monsoon, but enough gaps exist to go about everyday life. Now, in the dry season, sunshine is steadier, but the thunderstorms roll in every few days and cover everything in a moist drizzle that smells like soil and something green and alive.
For the last week, it has rained every day.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
I write about the weather because it influences place. I think about place a lot. I think about it the way other people think about money or love, with a low-grade obsession, a need to understand something that keeps slipping out of reach. And when I think about place, I also think about belonging, and home, and whether those two things are the same.
Bali has been home for two months now. A place that acts as a liminal hinge for me. A place that holds multiple futures in suspension.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
The last time I was in Bali I was in a relationship with a man I loved completely. We had been together for three years by then, the kind of shared life mostly on the road that compresses time and manufactures intimacy, makes you believe you know someone because you have navigated bus stations and food poisoning and beautiful sunsets together. I remember the particular quality of the light. The way the rice paddies held the dusk. I remember being in a restaurant with cheap plastic chairs and somewhere in that evening a decision getting made, the way decisions sometimes happen.
We moved to Canada. He had grown up there, in a small town a few hours east of Vancouver, in the beautiful province of British Columbia, where the winters are brutal and the summers short-lived and often filled with smoke from the wildfires. I believed I could make any place work. I had already lived in so many places by then — Salzburg, Florence, Cairns, Barcelona, London, Abu Dhabi, San Francisco, LA, Chiang Mai, Byron Bay, Nelson — and I had found the magic and the beauty of any place so easily. I believed this was a skill I possessed. A kind of portable contentment.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
Within weeks of arriving in Canada, I started waking at night with unexplainable panic attacks. I would cry and shake, and my man would patiently hold me until they subsided and we fell back to sleep. I dismissed it. Blamed the transition, the cold, the adjustment. I had the optimistic perspective that all it takes is time and grunt and magical thinking.
Then came headaches. Ever present. Then the exhaustion that was eventually diagnosed as adrenal fatigue. I would spontaneously begin to cry. Unloading the dishwasher. Driving to yoga. Picking flowers in the garden. Ordinary, beautiful moments coloured by what felt like a psychic rejection happening inside my body.
I noted that every time I left this place — a trip to Vancouver, a weekend away, anything — every physical ailment disappeared. And as soon as I returned, they came back with full force.
I gave that place everything in my being for thirteen months.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
I left the place and the relationship and moved to Mexico to counteract the cold and grey. In Mexico I healed, blossomed, thrived. I didn’t fully understand why. I still don’t, entirely. But I knew it in my body the moment I arrived, that particular sensation of a place receiving you, of the air fitting your skin like it was made for it.
In hindsight, the relationship was also not for me. I loved this man deeply, but I was blind to all the ways I twisted and contorted myself to fit what he wanted, completely abandoning myself in the process. In hindsight I wonder: how much of the rejection was the place, and how much of it was my soul saying, quietly and then louder and then in full-body revolt — no. Not this.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
Since Canada and then Mexico, I have lived in more places than I can list without boring you. The UK, which I have used as a base for most of my adult life because it is easy — I moved there at nineteen, it is the only place I have ever done any official paperwork, paid tax — despite the endless cold and wet and the culture’s general cheerful pessimism. The UK is a neutral place for me. Neutral places make me soft and lazy and bored. I hold an extra two or three kilograms there, some kind of padding I don’t fully understand, as though my body is insulating itself against something. I don’t thrive there. But I feel safe there, like some comforting ancestral memory knows this island as home.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
Mid-pandemic I drove through France and Spain with my cat to Mallorca, which I had heard many nice things about. Mallorca was the second lesson that not every place is for everyone.
Once we got off the ferry and I settled into the hotel I had booked for three weeks while apartment hunting, I walked outside and let the air touch my skin and looked at the hibiscus grazing the sidewalk and felt… nothing. I could cognitively see that I was surrounded by beauty. But instead of feeling moved, all I felt was anxiety.
It was a weird time in the world, we all had a myriad of reasons to feel anxious, a cross-continental trip during a pandemic is no small feat, so I dismissed the feeling and focused on the practical efforts of making a new place home.
I was lucky. I quickly found a beautiful apartment with Mediterranean views at a great price. I made friends. I was generously invited into new circles. On paper everything was perfect.
But inside myself, a war was waging.
No part of my body wanted to be here. Despite the beauty, the perfection, the luck, the friendships, the Mediterranean, the safety, the abundance and goodness. My body could not find peace. I started getting sciatic pains pulsing through my back so debilitating that sometimes I couldn’t move.
No amount of practitioners or exercises or adjusted belief systems improved it. There was an ever-present purring anxiety that made every moment and interaction feel tense and precarious, and I could find no logical reason for it. The beauty was right there. Everything was perfect and I was so lucky: the friendships, the Mediterranean, the abundance and goodness. My body could not find peace.
Again, relief arrived the moment I left the island. Every time. In disbelief I couldn’t accept that this was true. That a place could have such a total, encompassing negative impact on me. That no amount of trying could alter it.
I had a terrible time in Canada and remember being in Bali, where I decided to move there as a sliding doors moment, where every decision I made contained a multitude of futures. Now, as if time has folded in on itself, I am back a decade later.
Bali is unrecognisable and so am I.
I consult my astrocartography chart, which affirms what I am feeling to a startling degree. It points at this island as a place of deep homecoming. I find this useful as one small piece of the map, not the whole answer. The whole answer, I suspect, does not exist in any single framework. It lives somewhere between the body and the sky, between biology and mystery.
What I know is what I feel.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
This place is far from perfect. Away from the sanctuary of my home it is overstimulating. So much traffic, the beaches sometimes covered in washed-up rubbish, the relentless commercial sprawl of what Bali has become in the decade since I was last here.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
What makes a place right for a body? I have been asking this question for years, have offered myself as both researcher and subject, have moved enough times to start to see patterns, if not yet fully understand them.
Some places I feel the signal clearly: yes. Some I feel it clearly: no. Others are neutral, which is its own information.
What I notice is that the body knows before the mind catches up. In Mallorca I felt the no within hours of arrival and spent almost two years arguing with it. In Canada I felt it too, and spent thirteen months trying to override it through sheer optimism. The body, it turns out, is not interested in optimism. It is interested in truth.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
What I know about place is also what I know about self: that there is very little separation between them. The places I have not been able to stay in are also the times I have not been able to stay in myself. Canada was the first lesson that there are some shapes I will not fit into, no matter how desperately I try. The question I could not ask then, but can ask now, a decade later, is whether the place was wrong, or whether the life I was building inside it was wrong, or whether those two things were always and inevitably the same.
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃
Here, again, at this particular hinge of my life, in this place that holds multiple futures in suspension, I feel the most alive, regulated, supported, safe and happy that I have probably felt since I left it a decade ago.
The mosquitoes still find me every morning. I still stand in the half-dark waiting for the water to boil. It rains, and then it stops, and the air smells like something I cannot name but recognise. Like the inside of a memory. Like somewhere I was always going to come back to.
I don’t fully know why this place and not the others. I’m not sure knowing would add anything. And that is enough. Right now, this place, here and right now, is enough.
notes from my office
COWORK applications closed on Monday; our first cohort starts next week. To be informed for the next round, get on the waitlist here.
Applications for PRACTICAL DREAMER: a three-month mentorship starting in June, for women ready to build their body of work, are now open. More here.
we are all aware of mysterious forces at play that we have no control over
APR 24, 2026
there are some parts of the human experience. unnamable supernatural things. that can only be experienced and felt. they can not be explained. we’ve all had them.
they’re so subtle and piercing and whole-making and inconceivable that we don’t speak of them. spiritual in nature but not fitting into the spiritual paradigms that we have created to make sense of them. they happen in slow ordinary moments. they happen in nature. they happen when we are still enough to experience what is. they exist only as an inward expansion.
in a sense these are moments of ecstasy. moments we yield to and yearn for even though we cannot make sense of them or explain them to ourselves or others. they exist as a secret, a mystery, a private encounter with the trifecta of living, life and the cosmic cosmos.
we are all aware of mysterious forces at play that we have no control over. in fact, the incessant clamouring for control is probably the major thing that stands in the way of our lives naturally unfolding
there is a part of us that wants this experience all the time. but we cannot exist in this heightened presence all the time. life pulls and tugs at us, and we sweep in and out.
there are ways to prolong it. movement, meditation, and music are some of them.
A final reminder:Applications for COWORK starting in May close this weekend. you don’t need more strategy, advice or ideas. you need support to do what you need to do and space to do it in. More here.
I’m sitting on an airport floor next to a charging point, simultaneously charging my laptop, phone and writing these words to you. it smells bad here. there is nowhere else to sit and I wish I didn’t have to sit here but the need for electricity coursing through my gadgets is higher than olfactory pleasantry.
I didn’t bring my adaptor, not realising the plugs would be different and stubbornly resisted buying yet another technical item I would eventually have to carry around, so I made the power in my laptop and phone stretch across two days of work and life until I made it here.
there are stains on the blue and green 80s-zigzag-patterned carpet that has been stretched hastily, leaving bumps along it. and people’s hair and bits of, idk, food, and threads falling loose from clothing. I’m grateful my clothes exist between me and it. I’m on my way home. I can’t wait to return to my little green villa and tiny puppies and daily rituals.
receipt
I think a lot about how any decision you make at any time can change your life. it’s a game of roulette. you make hundreds of thousands of decisions every day, and every now and then, you make one very similar or even the same decision you’ve made before and everything changes.
you talk to a stranger. maybe you’ve spoken to dozens of strangers over the past week but this one stranger changes everything. you get on a bus. in a plane. you eat at a specific restaurant. you stop and linger someplace just a little bit longer. decision roulette.
what makes one decision different from another? not much, really. we can’t control these things. it’s another one of those unnamable supernatural things. but I do think that you can increase your surface area of luck through the quality of your decisions.
a decision made in a moment of total presence takes on an entirely different life and quality than a decision made in autopilot. it becomes a living entity that has a will of its own.
this form of devotional presence, where half my attention is inside my soul looking out at the world observing the lived experience, and half of it outside my body responding to my current moment-to-moment environment, is the closest I can get to living in the mystery of the human experience.
and when I make decisions from that place: intuitive, illogical, kismet, they lead me to moments that can only be explained by there being some kind of unknown mysterious forces at play.
that’s the high I keep chasing. the human experience as half mystical, half physical.
