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.
my 6 habits as a type-b business owner // how uncertainty reveals the path
hey, hello
— this first part is an invitation into my 6-week business cohort COWORK. Applications close on April 27 (in a week), and you’ll hear from me next Monday.
— the second part is for paid subscribers. as someone who models uncertainty, I want to say: protect your ‘uncertainty’. protect your boundaries. protect your path. protect your decisions. you’ll never regret staying in uncertainty longer. it’s literally what reveals the path.
— p.s. I almost broke my brain learning HTML coding (yes, I am that nerd 🤓) to improve your user experience for finding your PENPAL after a lot of helpful feedback. The people who have signed up already are SO interesting! I can’t wait to read about the new best friends you make across the world. And even if you don’t have time for a PENPAL right now, please applaud my efforts (haha) and share it with friends who might be interested. thank you
“I am the most low-key type-b business owner… apart from that being my default personality… It’s because I value ‘living’ over ‘working’ ~ I believe work is an extension of life and my contribution to life, but it’s not everything. It’s not my whole life. Nor do I want it to be! So I thought I’d share with you the key habits that I have as a type-b business owner.”
7:21 Habit 4: Choose the most fun and easy thing first
7:52 About Cowork — my six-week program
8:34 Habit 5: Know your effective hours
9:07 The future of work & getting paid to be yourself
10:15 Habit 6: Rest, play, and pleasure as nutrients
11:22 How these habits keep me relaxed as a type-b business owner
music: Can’t Swim by Noah
More and more women are going to lean into business and entrepreneurship as the world changes because the need for conventional work will disappear, and what will be needed is people sharing their unique gifts and experiences. The vehicle for self-expression and contribution is business. Getting paid to be who you are at both a practical and essential level.
If you want to work on your business and bring it forward in a meaningful way and with support, this will be helpful: COWORK with me this May & June
If you’re not quite there yet, my lovechild, Practical Dreamer, will help you get there. I’m softly accepting applications for this June, July & August.
“I’m tired of trying so hard” is a sentiment I’ve explored before in half-assed. But something that we all seem to struggle with is this tension between ambition and surrender. We all have desires. Sometimes even enormous ones. Desire is good.
Sitting under the shade of a gazebo, my best friend from university (college for my American friends) asks me if I remember how we used to talk about uncertainty. About how we didn’t know what we wanted to do after we finished… My mind blank, I don’t remember, but I believe her. There are seasons in life that return us to this place over and over again. We have to decide who we are now and how to change direction.
I weep when I first see her, the tears welling behind my eyelids threatening to submerge me in a combination of joy and grief. We haven’t seen each other in 12 years and only loosely kept in touch, our lives taking on very different trajectories. Quickly, though, we fall into a familiar rhythm, and I find myself grateful for the easy intimacy that comes from sharing some of the most formative years of our lives.
Last night, on my return home while watching the sun set in bright yellow hues across the sky, I think to myself about what we had said.
It takes a great deal of strength and self-trust to say to yourself, “I have not been living life in a way that is my truth and aligned to who I really am. Who I really am is [ ].” The dreaded response may come back, “How do you know?” And, of course, you cannot absolutely know until you’ve changed direction and tried it, lived it. There is just this dream, this feeling, this urge, this desire.
I want to defy the idea that you have to know what it is that you want, who you are and what your gifts are at any given moment.
You can reinvent yourself over and over again. You can change direction and choose a new version of yourself, a new pathway, a new way of existing and engaging in the world as many times as you need or want. Perhaps every form of your soul’s expression is just one piece of the journey. And when one part completes itself a new one can begin.
Not knowing and making moves anyway is the only real way to change direction. You have to just do things.
But first comes the sense that something is wrong. That you’ve somehow fallen down a path that is not actually yours and you don’t even remember having chosen it or how you got here. The desire to change direction comes from the feeling that you and your soul have outgrown the container your life has become.
It’s a restlessness that I am very familiar with. A sense that you’ve been living slightly outside yourself for too long. A sense that the life you’re living doesn’t quite belong to you. According to Jungian psychology, these moments, where life doesn’t quite fit, are pointing quietly and insistently toward the life that would.
So the first thing to do isn’t to find direction. It is to acknowledge the discomfort, the in-the-wrong-skin feeling that is humming in the background. And then, once you’ve acknowledged it: don’t wait.
When something has genuinely caught light in you is the moment to act. It inspires you to act differently. There’s an enthusiasm to it, an aliveness. Being able to take advantage of that feeling when it arrives — to respond to it rather than file it away for later — is one of the most satisfying things you can do for yourself.
You will never be fully ready. There will never be a perfect time. The version of you who has it all figured out before she begins doesn’t exist, and waiting for her means the thing never gets made, never gets started, never gets tried. It’s not about the right time. It’s about doing things before you’re ready just to have them exist.
Again and again, when something has worked in my life, it came down to this: I just did it. Imperfectly. Without certainty. I just prioritised getting the thing done over getting it right.
Small steps have a way of setting off chains of events you couldn’t have predicted or planned. One tiny thing done today can be the beginning of something that looks, from further down the road, like it was inevitable.
If you’re in this place right now — feeling the hum, sensing the edges of a change in direction — I’d love for you to come and do things alongside me.
2 things:
Cowork is a six-week program for people who are building something and need the structure, the company, and the gentle pressure of actually showing up to do it.
Penpal is a brand new free letter-writing community, a place to think out loud, to track your own becoming in writing, to have honest conversations with yourself and others who are doing the same.
alt title: how I let myself be seen in my process, when all I want to do is hide
APR 05, 2026
On Wednesday, I moved into my new home and immediately fostered two puppies. I don’t know why I did this. That’s not true. I know exactly why. I have a deep and apparently unshakeable belief that the right time to do something is simply when you want to do it, and I wanted to cuddle cute baby animals for a little while.
Moving house and taking care of puppies is all-consuming in a way that temporarily dissolves every other problem you have, which might also be why I did it.
Plumbing issues meant I couldn’t flush the toilet for two days. The plumber had to wait to get the parts that needed replacing. Dust and debris from the previous tenant irked me spiritually. The cleaner couldn’t come until Friday. Puppies are a full-time job. I forgot about how needy they are.
It feels comforting to have a place to call home for the foreseeable. As I rebuild my life this year, there are a few key things I am focusing on: relationships, work and home. In that order.
Right now I’m exploring my new local area as much as I can. The idea is to filter out everything I don’t like so I can build my daily routine around the things I do like. So far, I’ve found the dreamiest yoga studio, a pilates class, three cafes I like working from, a favourite supermarket, a favourite farmers market, and I’ve made friends with two of my neighbours. On my left, an Australian guy who is far too flirty but strong and has helped me lift heavy things around, and on my right, a German-Vietnamese girl who has generously invited me to three local events.
These are the granular, unsexy parts of rebuilding. Finding out which coffee shop has the right vibe. Introducing yourself to the person next door. Getting the number for the best local plumber and learning which days the rubbish collectors come to your street.
After taking a few days off during the week (one of my favourite parts of working for myself), it is now the weekend. I’m sitting in a co-working cafe called ‘Gathering Space’. There are a group speaking French, Croatian and English in hushed conversation behind me. We all have laptops propped up in front of our faces.
Back when I started working for myself, which was over a decade ago now, I had no savings and no experience. I had a lofty dream. A vision that there was a way to contribute to the world in positive ways, and absolutely not at the expense of my values, beliefs and soul. It was scary, but I had nothing to lose. I had already failed by refusing to get a ‘normal’ job. I did fail, many, many times. I tried things that didn’t work and worried that I’d never make enough money to support myself. Two years in, and every year after that, I did. But the fear of failure never went away. It just shapeshifts into bigger and grander things.
More recently, my fear of failure is manifesting as a desire to hide. If no one can see me, then they won’t witness when I fall flat on my face, which I invariably will because failure is literally part of the process, and my fragile ego just can’t handle that kind of self-inflicted humiliation right now.
I know that we all fail; the people I most admire are evidence of it, even if I don’t see it publicly. Yet there’s this voice in my mind that says not having immediate, obvious, measurable success at everything I do means that there is something wrong with me.
Who decided it’s a bad thing to fail? Who decided that we have to always present as perfect, cohesive, flawless?
The more I think about it, the more I realise fear of failure is just a way to protect ourselves. No magic in the world will protect us from getting hurt. To do anything meaningful in life means we willingly let our most tender parts be fragile, visible, vulnerable. It means we let our lives fall apart over and over again. The nature of having a creative, authentic, alive experience is to let ourselves be reshaped by the things we do.
As I rebuild my public identity to match the major life shifts that I have experienced within me, I am going through the discomfort of being seen in the messy process and trying things I’ve not done before and letting what lands inform the way I move forward. It means that I keep showing up even though I’m afraid to fail.
The correct response to the fear of failure is to just do things.
I am evidence that you do not need a strategy or a plan to have a successful business. Success in a relaxed, fulfilled, and gentle way that I aspire towards. But you do need to be willing to be seen. There are a few things that help me.
a letter from me to, you, like we used to do it. remember that? remember then? very 2020-esque (which feels like a century ago now)…
MAR 19, 2026
hello ོ☼𓂃
It is nyepi today, for those who observe: the national day of silence. Which means the whole island has shut down and nothing is open and everything is silent and it’s literally the loveliest thing. It’s also new moon and the start of the astrological new year (the real new year imo), which all feels some kind of dialled-up level kismet.
Life has been so… everything lately, that I don’t even know where to start. Maybe the best start is: we are here, and we are living, and that is enough.
Since being fully revived from the depths of despair after the frickin’ snakebite of a year that was 2025, I am rekindling my mojo. Mojo! A word I scorn!
The only time I didn’t work for myself was when I worked for a public speaker and author while I seceretly built on my business on company time who fancied himself Australia’s Seth Godin, which to be fair, he kind of was, bald egg-head and all (and, might I add, a very kind employer, probably as good as they come) who loved to talk about losing and finding one’s mojo which he obviously must have had plenty of experience with since he wrote an entire book about it.
Anyway, I digress,here I am using the word because I can’t think of a better one.
Other words might be: my enthusiasm, charm, joie de vivre, appeal for life. Anyway, I feel more alive now than I have in a very, very long time, and I am grateful. So damn grateful. Even grateful for the shitshow that went down. All of it is just so good and fine and perfect.
Amongst it all, I was reminded why I have devoted my entire life to learn about applying psychology, epigenetics, and the power of our consciousness to our everyday. We literally can change the entire trajectory of our lives by changing our minds. It’s wild. It’s so beautiful. What a gift.
I spent the past 6 months doing exactly that. Lots of unpeeling, facing uncomfortable truths and discipline were involved. I was hard and I did not enjoy it particularly, but it worked, and that’s all that matters.
Back when I used to send these newsletters more like personal letters, I felt freer to include all of my invitations to my work more unprohibitively, but the last couple of years, that’s changed, and it’s… I don’t know… just felt different. But you know what? I am taking my power back.
TWO INVITATIONS FOR YOU
ONE
If you’ve been feeling the pull to go deeper, to have someone genuinely in your corner as you navigate what’s next, April is a good time to work together.
I’m offering a limited number of 1:1 mentoring packages this month at a special price. If we’ve worked together before, think of this as your next chapter. If we haven’t, this is a beautiful place to begin.
The April Mentoring Package 4 weekly 1:1 sessions Email support between calls A clear, focused approach to wherever you’re ready to move €550, for April only
A few words from people I’ve had the privilege of working with:
“At 59, I discovered it’s never too late to transform.” — Annelie
“For the first time in a long time I felt the true potential of my business — and all of a sudden it felt EASY.” — Kate
“After just one session, I felt a deep shift. Right after our call, I got an email from what turned out to be one of my biggest clients.” — Gina Marie
“She helped me strip back the noise so I can see my essence more clearly. Before we started I felt drained, scattered and stretched thin. Now I feel so excited.” — Stephanie
These spaces fill quickly. If you feel the yes, reply to this email and we’ll take it from there.
The Free 6-Day Clarity Challenge Thursday 26 — Tuesday 31 March
This is the third time I’ve run this challenge, and each time it surprises me how much can shift in just six days. If you’ve been sitting with indecision, feeling like you’re at a crossroads, or simply craving a clearer sense of what you actually want, this was made for that.
Each day you’ll receive a short audio lesson and a reflection exercise, delivered straight to your phone via Telegram. The community that forms around it is, genuinely, one of the best parts. Last time, 100 people joined us.
What past participants have said:
‘Vienda’s reflections on stuckness were immediately helpful and deeply inspiring. The journaling exercises brought so much clarity, I’m already seeing things differently.”
“I loved the first audio note so much I shared it with my partner straight away. The whole experience felt thoughtful, generous, and genuinely impactful.”
“My biggest breakthrough was realising the new identity that’s been calling me. Through the journaling, it became so clear—and it felt really, really good.”
“This challenge helped me see a limiting belief I didn’t even realise I was holding: that I have to do things like everyone else. Choosing a different story feels incredibly freeing.”
It’s free. It starts in six days. It goes for six days. And it might be exactly what this season is asking for.
Girls (and guys, yes, I need you too, especially you!) I went on a date last night! Then I accidentally friend-zoned him! I need input!Wait, this is where we paywall because we are not spilling secrets to the public anymore. Nope. No, we are not.
“When the sun rose the next day, people in the village found her naked, half alive and half scorched outside her home. After what must have been a terrible fight, she had been doused in kerosene and set alight by her husband. They came to fetch me, and I took her to the hospital, where I was told that there was nothing they could do. She would not survive. But the baby, I begged, save the baby. Please save the baby. What I did not know is that if you burn a woman on the outside, it burns the baby on the inside. That was the day I devoted myself to my work.”
Our small group drew ragged breaths over empty metal plates from our wooden tables and chairs in the communal dining hall, the air thick with stunned silence from the story. It was the seventh of fourteen days at the ayurveda centre, where I had come to soothe the delicate electricity of my mind.
She was a Catholic nun in her 70s who came every year for a week to recharge and have a little holiday. With her was a small entourage of elderly German women1, donors to the 72 orphanages the nun founded across India.
Ok, wait, I started at a particular point of the story arc, so let me quickly give you some context. For ease, let’s call the nun Sister.
In her early twenties she was living in a convent in South India when a young pregnant woman came to the door late one evening, begging for somewhere to stay. But the nunnery did not allow visitors, however much she pleaded. She had to turn the woman away.
The next morning the villagers found her.
After that day she made a private vow to herself that she would never again turn someone away when they asked for help. It was a decision that did not go down particularly well with the rest of the sisters, who were her only family. She had taken vows of obedience. There was no structure, no funding, no plan for what helping people would actually look like. But her devotion ran so deep that she was willing to be ostracised to follow it.
She began asking for help. She told the story to anyone who would listen. Slowly, with the generosity of strangers and the support of a few brave allies, she managed to buy a small piece of land and build the first structure on it. Over time her fellow sisters began to support her. Donations grew. The work expanded. Five decades later, that ramshackle beginning has helped thousands of women get off the streets and out of bad marriages, and their children to be educated across the country.
Listening to her recount the story, there were plenty of moments of self-doubt, fear, desperation, and uncertainty. There were obstacles and disagreements and years where progress felt impossible. But underneath all of it was one thing: devotion.
Years ago someone suggested to me that it might be more useful to think in terms of devotion rather than discipline, and the idea lodged itself into my life where it has remained ever since.
my most viral post ever, find it here, the comments underneath are gold
Discipline is one of those virtues modern culture practically worships. It conjures images of control, grit, people forcing themselves through routines with a kind of stoic determination. The language around it has a specific tone and feeling. Discipline your body. Discipline your mind. Do the thing whether you feel like it or not. It belongs to athletes and soldiers and productivity systems and the entire industry built around optimisation and self-mastery.
NB: I do use discipline from time to time. For example, sometimes I need discipline to integrate a new habit, but once the habit settles into my life it often softens into devotion, an act of care for myself or for others. More on that soon.
Devotion lives in an entirely different part of the emotional vocabulary. It belongs to religion and art and care. We speak of devotion in the context of prayer, or lovers, or the quiet fidelity someone has to a craft they have practised for decades. A devoted person returns to something not because they are forcing themselves but because they feel drawn back to it. There is a softness to the word, but also a kind of gravity. You don’t white-knuckle devotion. You move toward it gently, with care.
What makes the distinction interesting is that from the outside the behaviour often looks identical. The disciplined writer writes every day. The devoted writer also writes every day. The disciplined person wakes early, takes the walk, practices the craft, repeats the ritual with impressive consistency. The devoted person does exactly the same thing.
The difference is almost entirely internal. One experience feels like compliance, with the faint threat of punishment. The other feels more like participation in something you love.
Discipline does have its place. There are moments when you need a little structure to introduce something unfamiliar into your life, the way you might gently guide a plant in the direction you hope it will grow. But once the habit settles in, once it becomes part of your days and life, the effort often softens into devotion. What began as discipline slowly becomes an act of care, something you return to not because you must but because it matters to you.
Which might also explain why discipline works beautifully for a while and then, for many people, begins to collapse under its own weight. Force is an effective motivator in short bursts. You can push yourself through a surprising amount of resistance when the stakes feel high or the reward feels close enough to touch. But force inevitably creates friction, until the thing you’re doing starts to feel strangely heavy.
Devotion behaves a little differently because it isn’t really about force at all. It’s about relationship. A gardener doesn’t return to the garden each morning because they have mastered the discipline of gardening. They return because tending the soil feels like participating in something alive. We feed ourselves and the people we love not out of discipline but because we want to nurture something. The act already holds its own meaning, which makes returning to it feel less like effort and more like a natural continuation.
Seen this way, devotion quietly reframes the entire idea of consistency. Consistency in the language of discipline often sounds mechanical, almost industrial. Maintain the streak. Don’t break the chain. Do the thing every day. The energy behind it is urgent, tense, as if one missed day might undo the entire effort. Devotion feels different. Less like maintaining a system and more like tending a living thing. You come back to it not out of fear that something will break, but because the relationship itself is still alive.
Discipline asks how do I make myself do this. Devotion asks what do I care about enough to keep returning to?
Thinking back on that meal in the dining hall, the thing that moves me most is that Sister never once spoke about discipline. She didn’t talk about perseverance or resilience or the endless challenges it took to build all those orphanages across a country. She told the story of a single moment she could not forget, and the vow she made to herself afterwards.
Everything that followed has grown from there. Not from force. From devotion. Which is perhaps the simplest way to understand devotion. Not forcing yourself to do something every day. It’s finding the thing you care about enough that you keep coming back and facing whatever it takes.
As a complete aside, most mornings these women would line up at my breakfast table asking for help with whatever small thing had mysteriously stopped working on their phones. Being the youngest person there by at least a decade, often more, I somehow became the resident tech support. This mostly involved being handed a phone with great seriousness and quietly reversing a setting that had been accidentally tapped at some point the day before.
a rescue from the damaged film roll, taken in Mallorca last October
This is a perfect moment. I got out of bed, turned on the kettle, pulled back the curtains and opened the sliding door to hear the monsoon rains fall outside, poured the hot water onto a green tea bag inside a small hotel-room cup, and pulled both my laptop and the cup back into bed with me. I could not want more than this, right now, I thought this morning.
I love wanting. I love the heat of it, the ache, the way it stretches you toward something just beyond your current life. Desire works to not only fuel our creative practice, but to define our lives. It is the engine. It is the reason you rearrange the furniture of your days. It is the reason you leave and the reason you stay. It is the pulse beneath every decision that later gets dressed up as logic.
To want is to risk humiliation. To want is to expose the soft underbelly and say, here, this is where I am tender. Which is why so many of us, particularly women who have been trained to be palatable and self-sufficient and chill about everything, learn to dim our wanting. We pretend we are above it. We call it being realistic. We say we are protecting ourselves from disappointment.
But when you distance yourself from your desires, you do not become safer. You become flatter. You begin to live in a narrow corridor of what is acceptable, reasonable, likely. And there is a particular suffering in that, the suffering of being cut off from your own aliveness.
The real work is not in wanting1 more. The real work is in discerning which desires are actually yours. Which ones rose up from your own body and which ones were installed there by a culture that confuses sameness with success. It takes time to tell the difference. It takes sitting still long enough to feel the flicker of envy and ask whether it is pointing toward something true or merely something popular. It takes a willingness to disappoint the imaginary panel of judges who have been scoring your life from the sidelines.
We are living in an era of terrifying homogeneity, where everyone wants the same morning routine and the same apartment aesthetic and the same calibrated ambition. Desire has been flattened into algorithms. And when everything looks the same, it becomes harder to remember that you are allowed to be specific.
Do you know what you want? Not what would look good. Not what would make sense on paper. What you want. Let’s talk about that.
If you are feeling your way through it, if you are scattered and sensitive and a little tired of your own overthinking, that does not mean you are failing. It means you are in the first, awkward, necessary stage of coming back into contact with yourself. Clarity is rarely sharp at the beginning. It is fog that slowly thins. It is learning to trust that the quiet tug in your chest is worth following.
I began writing this morning with the earnest intention of tying together a series of private and unfinished thoughts, only to realise that they refuse to line up. They arrive as fragments, like shells washed up at different hours of the tide, so I am letting them remain fragments. There is a kind of integrity in not forcing coherence where there is none yet.
This morning, I yearn for connection. I want to make small talk with you, while being honest about the complicated feelings that life brings.
Oh, yes, the grass is lovely. Have you talked to the trees lately? Have you lain on the ground and felt your atoms vibrate? When you listen to music, do you ever feel as though you are remembering a self that predates this particular body?
I want to talk about the weather and whether you have tried the new café, while also admitting that sometimes I wake up with a strange ache in my chest that feels like homesickness for a place I want to call home.
This morning, I want to ask you a sincere question. Across the past 4 months, I’ve loved introducing you to the most beautiful and creative women I know, love and admire the most in a series called ‘on the list’ (read them all here). I find myself genuinely curious whether you want more of those glimpses into other women’s worlds or more of my own interior wanderings. Please let me know.
When I was in Hampi, my film camera was damaged in the crush of moving suitcases. Yesterday I carried its small, wounded body into a repair shop.. Nothing could be done except to force it open and retrieve the film. Twenty three grainy, imperfect photographs emerged, small dark windows into the past six months.
also recued, taken in Colomb Bay, India
After my first 10 days in India, more than a month ago, I moved myself into a rustic cottage for a few days, complete with half falling down sink, a padlock to close the door and the two most uncomfortable pillows I’ve ever slept on and no wifi that steps out onto the sandy shore with the ocean lapping against it 10 metres away. It was uncomfortable. It was heaven. It was exactly what I needed.
I mostly just think and feel and be and walk and lie in the sun and dip in the sea and listen to audiobooks. East of Eden, There Are Rivers In The Sky, and Brooklyn play in my ears. I eat masala dosas for lunch, smoothie bowls for breakfast and salty tamarind cardamom ice cream for dinner during my sunset walk.
On the second night, I go sit on my porch to watch the sunset. The boy (man?) in the hut next to mine sits on his porch. Can’t tell how old he is because I find it hard to guess ages, and also because I am myopic and can’t see him clearly enough to know. He gives me late 20s vibes.
We speak in the tentative, curious way strangers do when there is nowhere else to be. He tells me he is coming down from the high of a 10-day silent meditation retreat he just did. I tell him that I remember that fragile clarity that makes everything feel both significant and meaningless. I am a little envious, but can’t find the 10 days to do one between my client and commitments.
Someone walks past with a spliff, and I smell it and wish I were inclined to get high another way, but I don’t like smoking much. He tells me he’s 30, and when his brother calls, he says he has to answer. On the phone, he tells his brother in German that he’s with a beautiful woman and cannot talk but misses him dearly. I hide a secret smile at that and realise how often I’ve mistaken my desire for human connection for romantic potential. We go for dinner, exchange life stories and build a firm yet fleeting friendship.
I decided on this next step, made the plan, and booked the flight while I was mid-stream in Ayurvedic treatment, lying on a hard wooden table slick with warm sesame oil, staring up at a ceiling fan that has seen many women arrive unravelling and leave rearranged. There is something deliciously unhinged about making life decisions when I am horizontal and slightly cracked open.
The two weeks of panchakarma2 shifted something tectonic in me. Emotionally and spiritually, yes, but also in the granular. I came to realise that my own self-judgement was my biggest block, but so deeply sutured into my cells that I couldn’t access it from the mind. I had to dig deep into my body to remove it. The physical cleanse pulled the poisons of my own mind to the surface and allowed me to finally own and release the ways I was causing havoc to my own system.
This has resurrected my passion for epigenetics and why I got into this line of work. Our consciousness is so powerful. It can decide how bogged down we are with events, memories and trauma. And it can decide to let it all go and be free in the now moment.
The stories we tell about what has happened to us are not inert. They are biochemical instructions. Consciousness is directive. It informs inflammation. It influences repair. We can choose to rehearse injury or we can choose to reorient toward possibility. That choice does not erase history, but it does alter how history lives inside us. The body is listening all the time. We are so flexible and pliable, able to receive life’s greatest gifts if we choose to. What a responsibility. What a miracle.
And yes, aesthetically too, because I refuse to pretend that the surface does not matter. My skin, normally dry, has softened into something almost unfamiliar from the twice-daily sesame oil massages. Even my stomach, where time and stress had etched their quiet signatures, has firmed and grown supple. Time has not reversed so much as been renegotiated.
I promised myself I would continue the ritual and have already broken that promise because I have yet to locate sesame oil. There is something very human and humbling about being transformed by a practice and immediately failing to continue it. Still, I will find the oil. I will return to the altar of my own skin.
While I was undergoing treatment, suspended between purging and replenishing, two desires stood plainly in front of me:
The desire to root and build community. The desire to contribute to the world in meaningful ways.
I went to India to heal… & there’s only one reason why I could
Small things: a decision made under duress, a flight to another continent, the balmy heat that slows everything down, a train that carries a woman through the night, bitter herbs mixed into hot water, a spiritual teacher that guides towards true liberation, a purgation of everything that can’t be carried forward into the future, daily drenching in sesame oil, a living made from creativity and adaptability. It is always the small twists that alter our lives the most profoundly. The beckoning of another way. A prompt from a stranger. An unexpected email. Try as we might to convince ourselves that we control our lives, we make choices on the paths, and we take and harvest the outcomes in the endless stumble towards ourselves.
I open the wooden door to the darkness and step into cool air that feels like silk against my skin. Birds are in full chorus. From somewhere to my left a flute threads through the dawn from the temple down the road. The sky is turning a milky grey that makes everything look suspended between worlds. It’s 5:48 am in Kerala, South India. I am on the 10th day of my Ayurveda retreat.
True to form, I did very little research before arriving. I did not know I would be drinking increasing amounts of ghee on an empty stomach for mornings in a row and mostly fasting with just a little rice porridge to sustain me. I did not know this would be followed by a full day of purging from every angle. I did not know how disorienting it would feel. Nor how holy and good. The containment is medicine. Every day is structured. Wake. Drink. Rest. Treatment. Eat. Walk. Yoga. Philosophy. Silence. My only task is to release what my body has been carrying and allow them else to hold the perimeter.
Something begins to soften. I feel joy, ease and humour flicker again in small, steady ways. I came here to heal. To restore the severe depletion and imbalances caused by the last few years of living in a world that I no longer recognised or felt held by.
It’s working. It’s working!
I go outside and sit in the dark on the wicker chair on my porch, watching the sky lighten. My early morning “medicine” — a concoction of herbs to help with stress, sleep, and hormone balancing, mixed into hot water — will be arrive soon. Through the silvery dawn, I watch a figure walk from room to room delivering each person’s morning elixir. When mine comes, I wait until he leaves and then hold my nose so I don’t gag from the smell and gulp it down in two parts.
We are in the season of imagination. Of letting your dreams reveal themselves to you so that you can put plans and actions in place. If you let yourself lean into the stillness, enough quiet to touch into truth, to dream up what big life you have yet to live.
I love this dreaming phase. It’s hazy and romantic. Not yet rooted, it floats, so I go up to meet it and see which ones I can pull down to myself. Some dissolve. Some thicken. My dreams are not made of things I want to have, but ways I want to feel. I love the dreams that ripen with time, with warmth, with love. Letting something flower from within me, my most private corners, honeyed ideas trickle from my heart into the mind. Eventually, some of them make it past that imagination, to drip from my fingers and into the world.
In between sesame oil massages, herbal treatments, yoga, meditation, philosophy lessons, and simple meals, I find a gentle rhythm. I take a few client calls. I work lightly on what needs attention. I read with focus I haven’t felt in months. I walk through the rice fields and watch water lilies move in the wind. I gather fallen frangipanis and place them in a bowl of water beside my bed. Space brings imagination back online.
None of what I am doing now would be possible without the business that I have built to hold me. Even though I’ve pulled back and am working less for the first two months of 2026, I’ve maintained my income due to the systems I have in place. As I shared recently in running a business as a type-b woman I learned how to do this when I first started through Marie Forleo’s BSchool.
Enrolments open for BSchool today, as of right now, and I’d love you to join me. More information on what that looks like and means (including a $1,427 worth of gifts):
I am in the imagination stage of my life. Both in my inward-facing life (personal) and outward-facing life (business). The business side is where I tend to need the most structured systems to hold the flexibility of the work that I do, which is where BSchool comes in. As I reimagine the ways I moved forward, I pair my dreams with practical actions that I continue to source from this course 10 years later. Learn more here.
If you have questions about running an online business that you want answered plainly and well, reply to this email, and I’ll fold my best responses into the next essay.
Most of my energy right now is in my private practice, and I have a few spaces opening in March. I tend to work with women at inflexion points, the kind where something looks fine on paper but feels misaligned in the body, or where a life or business is ready for its next iteration, and you can sense it asking more of you. The work is intimate, strategic, psychological, practical, often all at once. The nature of our sessions is customised for each individual. If you would like to have a call to explore the possibility of working together, get in touch: studio@viendamaria.com
My final vlog of 2025: the last month in Paris, in all its unglamorous glory. Slow brunches and busy workdays, ethical fashion chats, pre-Christmas errands, a cold that took me out, and the quiet work of not turning difficulty into a victim story. I talk therapy (again), breakups, why we date our unresolved parental wounds, and what it actually takes to take responsibility for your life as a new year approaches. Also: three big losses, one major perspective shift, and the decision to leave Paris in search of sunlight.
My apartment is set to a tropical 24°C, a decision I stand by morally. My weather app is teasing me with numbers between -1°C and 6°C, as if any of those are meaningfully different. The solstice slipped by quietly a few days ago, and with it, winter has officially arrived. I am hibernating through the final week of 2025, emerging only for strategic walks in glimpses of sunlight and friendship gatherings.
It’s Christmas Eve. I’m in bed with my laptop balanced on my thighs. A fragile truce between closing the final loops and rest, peppermint tea stationed to my right as both beverage and emotional support. Outside, the last remaining leaves clinging to the final undecided tree outside my window have turned a dark, rain-soaked brown and are rustling in the wind.
The past two months have been a slightly feral mix of redesigning, rebuilding and upgrading The Mentor Training. The kind of work that makes you forget what day it is, question your life choices, and then suddenly remember exactly why you started.
This training was born in 2022, not from a slick business plan, but from something I couldn’t ignore. Client after client arrived in my world carrying quiet damage from experiences with people who called themselves coaches or mentors and had deep emotional influence without the responsibility or rigour to match it.
Now entering our fourth year, the training has matured. The curriculum is stronger, the standards clearer, and the focus remains on ethical, relational, embodied mentoring — not performance, not charisma, not “personal brand,” but trust.
Thank you for being here with me and reading, watching, commenting and sharing your journey as we bumped along side each other through this year. This was my last note to you from me in 2025.
I am taking January off from outward-facing work and this newsletter to replenish and rebuild after a year that took everything. If you’re a private client, you’ll see me in our video calls as usual.
If you’re a free subscriber, starting next week you’ll meet one of my inspirations every Wednesday: on the list. In November, I started this gentle, playful interview series about what women I admire are tending to, dreaming of, and prioritising, one list at a time. It’s been such a joy introducing you to women who show that anything really is possible when you choose to trust yourself.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll continue to receive my most vulnerable writing: unfiltered, raw, honest stories and updates, as always. Essays I’m working on in my drafts include Bad Sex with Nice People, Inside My Notes App, and My Year of Magical Thinking.
If you’ve been thinking about becoming a paying subscriber, I’d be so grateful for your support. And there’s a little extra nudge: through the end of the year, I’m offering 25% off an annual subscription:
a gentle Paris vlog, plus words and thoughts on the challenges of this year
NOV 26, 2025
A slow, tender glimpse into a couple of my weeks in Paris…
Come with me to a meeting in the centre of the city, witness an unexpected rainbow, and join me for a handful of honest chats about life lately. I share my approach to wrinkle prevention and my boundaries around phone use, why I started my business in the first place, and how it’s evolving in ways I never expected. I also discuss what it’s really like navigating female friendships as an introverted adult.
I also open up about the season I’m in: intentionally reshaping my social circle, letting certain relationships go, and sitting in that in-between space where things haven’t yet fallen into place. It can feel lonely and disorienting… but also deeply beautiful, empowering, and necessary. This is the heart of taking responsibility for our lives… the exact work I teach inside CLEAR.
If you’re in a similar chapter, or simply curious about the behind-the-scenes of my days, I hope this vlog feels grounding, comforting, and human.
Hey love,
I will share more soon as I continue to emerge from the shell of this year.
For those of you, who are also starting to dust off the ashes and rise from them… this is the literal tail end of it, an extremely difficult 2025.
I am so confident in our collective grace, changeability, softness and flexible resilience. We have passed through so much. The gift lives in the pain.
Here is to our rising. To a new season of life ahead.
A few notes:
PRACTICAL DREAMER has been unexpectedly popular and almost sold out, with one spot left. Let me know if you want it by replying to this email.
An 8-step journey through The Repattern Process: a method for rewiring subconscious patterns, dissolving inherited conditioning, and returning to your most authentic self. When you clear what no longer serves you, life naturally rearranges itself to match who you’ve become.
This is not about “manifesting” in the trendy sense but about energetic precision and alignment. When your beliefs, emotions, and actions align, reality responds. Effortlessly.
I point at the two empty stools by the bar and ask if I can have them. The maître d’ asks if I am a guest, and I shake my head. She winks at me and leads me to the bar, pulling a chair out for me. The front bar at The Ritz is full. I am meeting a woman I have never met. A blind date for friendship.
The bartender smiles at me in a boyish, charming way and asks me what I’d like to drink. I slowly read through the menu to fill time and settle on the pinot noir. A soft, smooth and easy wine to keep me company while I wait.
It’s the first time that I am out at night in Paris since I arrived two weeks ago. It is getting cold, but I want to feel good and am wearing my favourite silk and lace mini dress that I thrifted in NYC in the summer and a dusty pink cashmere sweater that I bought the day before I left.
New York is still etched into my heart with pangs of nostalgia that I’ve never experienced before. But here I am in Paris instead and actually happier about it than I had imagined. My new friend arrives, dispelling my thoughts of the past few months, tiny and elegant, dressed in all black from bottom to top.
Black heels, a long black pencil skirt, a black cami, and a black sweater wrapped around her shoulders. She apologises for being late, orders the same wine, and we begin to exchange stories. She’s from Texas and, after a career in the oil and gas industry, has moved to Paris to be with her fiancé and embark on her ‘soft woman’ era. She shares some sentiments about learning to purposely drop some balls in her life to find true happiness. It was a slightly different argument than saying “you can’t have it all,” and it has stayed with me until this morning.
It was this summer, right after my breakup, that I declared to my friend, “From now on, I’m half-assing everything!”. I had poured so much of myself into the relationship, into the move to New York, into the life that I thought I had been building with someone that I loved.
All my life, I have given the things that I love maximum commitment and effort, but it has not made me happy. I decided that perhaps what I needed to do instead was to start half-assing everything and deciding that that is enough.
‘Enough’ has become a mantra these past few months when I consider aspects of my current lifestyle that feel messy or half-assed but are otherwise contributing to my day-to-day functioning. My lack of food in the fridge or of proper mealtimes. My haphazard attempt to consistently produce work that results in income. My uncertainty about where I am supposed to live. My attempts at staying in touch with the people I love, which had been discriminatingly narrowed down to only those who can meet me at a level of self-awareness and maturity that matches where I am headed. My insufficient sleep patterns as I slowly return my nervous system to homeostasis after the most activating few months of my life.
Whatever it is, my effort, care, patience, limitations, love, appreciation, hope… is enough. It has to be. Because I have realised that just because something could technically be better or done better or more efficient or more perfect doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be. That better doesn’t make me happier. But that accepting an imperfect, messy life and letting that be enough does.
This morning, sitting in my bed looking out this window, writing these words to you, I appreciate how completely letting go and letting myself do things in this more lax and half-assed way has led me here. Living in the fifth arrondissement in central Paris in a beautiful two-bedroom apartment with high ceilings that I have sublet until the New Year, hopefully giving myself enough time for parts of my life to settle and replenish in ways I need them to before I have to make any further decisions about what is next.
It is writing and the art of noticing that have offered me the calming ability to see the agency I do have in my life. Writing has held a thread of self-respect for me in a time when it felt like everything I had had fallen apart. It has shown me that what is really happening is that my life is finally falling together.
a small correction, a little favor, some life updates, and win a 90-min session with me valued at $250
OCT 03, 2025
Hi love,
First, a correction. In my last letter, I invited you to TheArt of Noticing and told you it begins in November. That was wrong. It begins in October. OCTOBER. In two-and-a-half weeks from now.
For reasons that are unclear to me but consistent, apparently, since they’ve plagued me my entire adult life, I cannot seem to keep October and November straight. They’re distinct but too similar, and my brain collapses them into one long stretch of autumn/fall, indistinguishable but lovely. Every year, I make this mistake.
Second: I need your help. I want to shape what comes next with you in mind, not in the way marketers mean when they say “know your audience,” but in the way I mean when I say I want this work to matter. So I made this survey. If you complete it, you’ll be entered to win one of three 90-minute 1:1 sessions with me (worth $250 each).
There is a tiny, little catch: to enter, you also share my Substack or Instagram with five friends. Then, in the form, tell me their first names and what you said to them about my work. I know it’s a bit extra, but I want to see how this community spreads: through whispers, trust, the intimacy of one person telling another, not ads or algorithms.
The competition closes on Sunday, October 19th, and I’ll draw and email the winners the next day. If you don’t want to enter the competition but just want to give me feedback, you can skip the part where you share my work and just leave me your thoughts instead. Your voice and thoughts are valuable to me. Thank you.
Third: we’re in the middle of the 8-part her way club “how to change your life” series. (Thank you so much for all the incredible email responses I get from you on this! It’s deeply meaningful to learn how this series is resonating.) And yes, I keep interrupting it. I tell myself I shouldn’t, that people like consistency, but the truth is: I have too many things moving at the same time that I want to share with you. I would rather risk over-communicating and leaving enough space between each note to you than leave something unsaid that might be useful to you or follow some arbitrary rule.
This year has been like a holy fire. Things I thought were permanent: systems, identities, relationships, ambitions, have collapsed into ash. And while it was frightening, it was also clarifying. What survived is what matters.
None of this was on my 2025 mood board. The mood board had other plans: more travel, maybe a new home, some whimsical goals that looked like self-portraits painted in soft light. Instead, what I got was a lesson in self-worth, in boundaries, in recognising where I’ve been overspending: emotionally, energetically, physically.
So here’s what’s changed in ways that impact you:
I’ve put a paywall on all of my memoir-style writing. Because writing at that level of exposure costs me something real. Metabolising in public requires energy, courage, and recovery time. It feels important to honour that.
What I keep free is the writing that’s more directly of service, the kind that teaches or inspires, and points you back to my work itself. It felt like an important recalibration: a quiet reclaiming of value.
I used to think I had to build an empire.
But conventional business empires are expensive, time-consuming and frankly, exhausting. The truth is, I’m tired. Not of my work itself. I love what I create. I love the people I serve. I’m tired of the way I’ve been made to believe I have to show up to be successful.
All I want is a simple, profitable business with minimal expenses, helping people and doing what I love.
There are times when my business doesn’t run perfectly, but I find that even on the challenging days, I am grateful. Because I am still waking up without an alarm, writing in my bed, working from a cafe, and able to fit my work around my life instead of the other way around. And that is such a gift.
I quit coffee again because of this, and turned to black tea instead
People like to tell you that a successful business is fully automated, and certainly, some automation helps, but I’ve found this works too:
Wake up Write Create and publish one piece of content Go for a walk Lunch See clients Workout Dinner + friends Sleep
It’s not glamorous, but it’s beautiful, it’s effective, and it’s enough. And my body and internal system and nervous system and heart thrive in this way.
As long as I can:
make money helping others be creative in the ways that pour out of me have minimal overheads and expenses set aside a good percentage for savings invest in experiences that I value have space and time to contemplate daily live in a beautiful environment with sun and water
I am a content, calm and fulfilled woman.
Success to me is:
consistent income living within my means low overheads and expenses financial and time freedom saving money for the future spending time with people I love doing things that I love daily nature, sunshine and movement a beautiful home and external environments work that supports me and my lifestyle helping people through my creativity a mutable, fluid daily schedule
Every Monday, I have a little dreaming and planning day. Corporate types call it a ‘CEO Day’, but for me, it’s a check-in date with myself:
I look into how I am feeling (what do I want and need) I check my accounts, income and expenses I make sure I put money in my savings I dream into what I want to create more of I lean away from what I want less of I organise my week ahead
I do this every week, no matter what. I know that whatever I pour my love and attention into is what will grow. I choose to be intentional with that. This is how I nurture my relationship with my resources.
I don’t have all the answers. But I do have a framework I’ve been returning to as I rebuild my life right now. It’s become my quiet compass in this transition. Thank you for being with me during this transformative time in my life.
I hope something wonderful happens for you this weekend.
An invitation: The Art of Noticing (AoN Fall/Autumn edition) ~ we begin on Tuesday, October 21, with the New Moon 🌚
OCT 01, 2025
Your energy is contagious. Your emotions are contagious. Your dreams are contagious.
The way we show up, in a room, on the page, or in our lives ripples outward, touching others in ways we rarely see.
It’s why I believe writing is more than just words. Writing is noticing. Writing is tending your inner garden. Writing is how we share our light.
I’ve been thinking about how people are not drawn to us by our perfect plans, or our tidy timelines, or even by the things we say we’ll do.
People are drawn by the feeling we carry. By the glow of possibility in our eyes. By the way our dreams make them imagine something more for themselves, too.
I feel lighter and have given myself permission to write simply because I want to. The AoN gave me the final gentle push I needed, without pressure, but through many small, inspiring nudges. ~ Franziska
This fall/autumn, I’m gathering a small circle of writers, dreamers, and noticers for six weeks of writing together.
It’s called The Art of Noticing It begins on October 21, with the New Moon 🌚
And it’s for anyone who wants to write more: not perfectly, not necessarily professionally (though a lot of business owners take The AoN) but more honestly.
We’ll explore:
How to build a writing practice that fits your real life
How to write with trust, rather than self-doubt
How to share your words with confidence
And most of all, how to find beauty and meaning in the details you might otherwise overlook.
Since participating in The AoN, my style of writing has evolved, and I hope to keep carrying this forward. I secretly wish it could go on a bit longer :) xx ~ Dee
This is what I return to, again and again, in my own writing: the art of noticing.
Noticing how the light hits the side of a building. Noticing how a conversation lingers in your chest. Noticing what feels alive, even when it doesn’t make sense.
Because when I notice, I connect. I soften. I remember that life is not a list to check off but a story to live, and to tell.
I specifically liked hearing about your process for writing. I have taken lots of writing classes before, and it sounds like other participants have, too – and my favourite part was you sharing with us YOUR style. :) ~ Solveig
If you’ve been feeling the pull to write again… If you want your voice to feel alive in your own mouth… If you’re ready to notice the world with more tenderness, and write from there…
Since taking The AoN, I feel expansive, like an enormous seed has been planted and everything’s building in energy. I need to be patient, create the space and allow it all to come through in the divine timing in which it was meant. ~ Amy
That’s the thing about noticing. It changes everything.
It reminds us that life is not lived in the big milestones, but in the small, fleeting glimmers: the golden edge of a cloud, the warmth in someone’s laugh, the courage it takes to share a piece of yourself on the page.
Thank you, Vienda! I’ve really enjoyed this space. The daily voice notes.. all of it. It has me excited about the next phase of my writing journey. ~ Ashleigh
Some previous essays that might inspire you to join us for The Art of Noticing:
3/8 — the third rule of her way club (aka: how to change your life in 6-12 months)
SEP 12, 2025
Continuing our 8 rules of her way club series. If you’re just joining, begin here:
1/8— deciding to play by your own rules 2/8 — subtracting what doesn’t belong 3/8 — the natural consequence: uncertainty
Without inherited structures, you’re floating.
If the first rule of her way club is making the choice to play by your own rules, and the second rule is subtracting everything that doesn’t belong to your life, then, if you’re doing it right, ultimately you will be led to the third rule as a natural consequence: uncertainty.
Uncertainty acts as a doorway.
You’re supposed to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing.
The moment you stop living by borrowed rules and strip away everything false, you feel lost. The familiar timelines and “shoulds” vanish. And in their absence, uncertainty arrives.
This is an initiation.
It might feel like failure or danger. But it’s not. It’s the proof you’re on the right track.
This is the part where you lean in and learn what is actually meant for you on a moment-to-moment basis. This is what being truly alive feels like.
Your potential is determined by the amount of uncertainty you’re willing to embrace.
If you’ve been journeying alongside me for a while, you will know that I spend extraordinary amounts of time in uncertainty, which I call by various names: the unknown, the void or the magic dark.
Here are some examples:
Career/Work
I figured out pretty early on, in my early twenties, that the status quo career path was not going to be able to offer me the kind of life that I wanted. I had concluded that school was never meant to teach us how to learn effectively. It was to train us to be obedient.
Apropos nothing, but a side note I want to venture down briefly: Now, with the rise of AI, this truth is becoming impossible to ignore. The stable, predictable career paths of our parents and grandparents that promised safety and security are dissolving. The world now demands agility, responsiveness, and creativity. It’s an exciting opportunity. It means we get to consciously and deliberately choose (in true her way club vibes) how we spend our time, how we create value, how we resource our lives. The cost is that it requires a willingness to linger in the discomfort of uncertainty, sometimes for long stretches of time.
I had to carve out a path of my own.
At the time, I didn’t know what direction I wanted to go in. I had a psychology degree, a love for writing and a personality. Those were the three things I had available to me.
It was 2012.
I used my writing hobby to start a blog. I used my psychology knowledge to provide a lens. I used my personality to build connections and relationships.
Over time, I learned how to trust my own rhythm, built a successful personal brand and saw how clients, ideas, and opportunities began to appear because I was willing to hold steady in the uncertainty.
The journey of uncertainty often looks like:
Letting go of control
Trusting your intuition
Embracing failure as a learning opportunity
Discovering your true passions and strengths
In 2022, ten years later, I became complacent.
I lost my drive, my direction was diluted, I forgot what I stood for, and I burned out.
After many mini cycles of uncertainty throughout my career up to that point, I entered one large period of uncertainty that lasted almost two years. Until recently, I spent a lot of time in confusion, feeling lost and being on the verge of giving up.
This is where the magic dark comes into play.
I had to spend enough time in uncertainty for the right amount of vision to form, for clarity to arrive, to be able to launch myself into a new way of life.
I have been promising you that I will share what this journey is all about, and I will. I already have an essay drafted, but keep editing, adding to it, and rewriting it because there’s a lot to say. And today, here in this space, is not the place.
Home/Travel
If there’s one area of life where I seem to have an unusually high risk tolerance, it’s where I place my feet and call home.
In the past decade alone, I’ve packed my life into a suitcase or two and moved to a small town in Canada, a village in Mexico, a coastal city in the UK, then Mallorca, and most recently, New York City, each one chosen without ever having visited before.
Sometimes these moves worked out beautifully, sometimes not. One thing has become abundantly clear:
There is no perfect place.
Every place will offer you something. A piece of yourself you hadn’t yet met, a lesson you didn’t know you needed, a relationship that will shape you.
If you can choose a place that supports the season of life you are in and leave it when it no longer does, you are doing it right.
Landing in a new place with no safety net, no mapped-out plan, just a suitcase and the decision to trust your instincts offers a peculiar kind of initiation. There is a mix of thrill and terror as you wander strange streets, question if you belong, and feel the weightlessness of having no context.
But there is also something else: a sharpening of your senses.
Living without inherited structures forces you into presence. You notice what food you crave, which streets feel friendly, who looks you in the eye, and the natural rhythm of your creativity and agency. Belonging drips in slowly, one kind stranger, one favourite café, one new friendship at a time.
Each place I’ve lived has stripped me bare and handed me back to myself with greater clarity. They’ve offered me relationships I never could have imagined and moments of beauty that would never have happened if I had stayed still.
It’s not that relocating is easy. It is often lonely. It is unmooring. But if you can stay with that discomfort long enough to let the edges soften, if you can learn to resource yourself from within while waiting for the puzzle pieces to fall into place (or don’t, and then you get to choose again), what comes from that space is unmatched.
My career, friendships, and creativity all have roots in the decision to keep moving until I found places that matched my internal world. Without those leaps into the unknown, I suspect my life would be much, much smaller.
Personal Connections
If you’ve been with me a while, you know that I just went through the most brutal breakup of my life, so I am keeping this section brief. And… I am glad it happened.
(If you want to catch up, the whole story is tucked inside the archives; a breadcrumb trail from the day we met a year ago to the day it ended two months ago.)
In truth, there isn’t a single romantic relationship or friendship I regret releasing. Because what has grown in the fertile soil of those endings has always been worth it: deeper intimacy, clearer boundaries, a closer relationship with myself and others.
It is never easy.
There is always a deep and terrifying ache right after an ending. The kind that empties your chest, keeps you up at night, and makes you question every decision you’ve made in your life. The mind spins a million scenarios about how this is the end of love, the end of goodness, the end of belonging.
But on the other side of that ache, there is something else, waiting. Usually, exactly the kinds of personal connections you have been yearning for. The ones that needed you to be ready for them.
You can’t skip this stage. You can’t think your way through it. You can only live it. Floating in the unknown until the ground reappears beneath you. You can never arrive here without being in the uncertain in-between.
Creativity
Creativity is your unique contribution to the collective. But letting yourself be seen in your creative expressions can feel life-ending.
Many of you reading this are here right now: standing in that moment of decision. Should I start a Substack? Should I release the thing I’ve been dreaming about? Should I show myself more fully online, or dare to call myself an artist, a writer, a maker, a founder?
This year, my biggest leap of uncertainty was finally admitting to myself that I am a creator and giving myself permission to share what I create in a way that feels aligned, meaningful, and honest.
For more than a decade, I’ve been publishing writing for mostly free. I had it drummed into me that content marketing was a single file path and that I couldn’t deviate from it. I couldn’t bring myself to put a paywall around the tender, personal parts until just a few months ago.
And then, the moment I did, when I went all in, in valuing my writing and my memoir-style expositions, everything shifted. The work deepened. The readers who stayed became more engaged. As of today, I am only ten subscriptions away from becoming a Substack bestseller.
There are other projects: courses, offerings, collabs that I sometimes sit on for months because I am scared no one will value them, that they won’t be well-received, that they’re not good enough, that they will vanish into the void.
But I’ve learned that if I can stay in that liminal space, uncomfortable as it is, something happens. The edges of the idea sharpen. The delivery deepens. The work becomes more potent.
And the things that don’t work out feed into things that do, which, as a counter-effect, become better than anything I have created before.
Uncertainty is a creative pressure. It forces me to listen more closely, to refine, to make sure what I’m bringing into the world is the truest version I can offer.
And with every round of staying with that discomfort, my capacity grows. I get better at holding myself in the unknown. Better at waiting for clarity to arrive. Better at trusting that what emerges from that space will have more depth, more resonance, more impact than if I had rushed to get it out just to soothe my own anxiety.
The act of creating while uncertain is the transformation. It is what gives the work its aliveness, its resonance. When I let myself create from that place of risk, readers feel it. Clients feel it. I feel it.
You’re supposed to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing.
But when it comes to living an extraordinary life, which is the only way to live a life that is truly your own (and what her way club is all about), most people interpret “feeling uncertain” as a sign they have taken a wrong turn. So they give up. They run back to the familiar and comfortable life that was planned for them. The one the system approves of, even if it’s the very life they were trying to escape.
And maybe that’s why you’re here, reading this.
Because deep down, you know you want more for yourself than the version of life you were handed. And to enjoy your life. Not just one day, but now, and into the future.
To enjoy your life, you have to keep learning, growing, evolving, and changing. And there is no way to change your life without spending time at the edge of the unknown.
Uncertainty is the doorway.
It’s the signal that you are in the exact place where transformation can happen.
If the first rule of her way club is deciding to live by your own rules, and the second rule is subtracting everything false, then this… this floating, this disorientation, this not-knowing, is where the magic happens.
Stay here. Stay with it. Stay long enough for your new life to appear.
I’m sitting in Brighton’s Artist Residence looking out at the English Channel, frothy white foam on the tips of waves sparkling between mist and bursts of sun, and hot chocolate to accompany me on th…
