All Posts

There is a particular kind of grief nobody warns you about, the grief that shows up after you have finally done the right thing. You leave the pattern, hold the boundary, walk away from what was hurting you, and somewhere underneath the relief, quietly, unexpectedly, there is a loss you were not prepared to feel. Not for what was taken from you. For what you had to let go of yourself. We are not given language for this. We are told that growth is a straightforward gain, more

Someone once asked me, fairly early in our work together, how to make her anxiety go away. Not why it was there. Not what it might be pointing toward. Just how to make it stop, the way you might ask how to silence an alarm that keeps interrupting a meeting. I understood the request completely. Anxiety is exhausting in a way that makes the question feel urgent rather than curious. But I remember sitting with it and thinking, quietly, that the question itself was where the real

So you have seen the pattern clearly. You know its shape now, maybe even the shape of the fire you keep mistaking for the sun. The harder question is what you do next, and that is really the difference between coping and understanding, one keeps you circling the same pattern, endlessly familiar with it, and the other finally lets you see past it. Picture someone standing at the edge of a lake, trying to see their own reflection. At first, the surface is full of ripples, restl

There is a particular kind of dread that comes with recognising a pattern mid-repeat. I felt it again recently, watching myself get quietly pulled toward something I already sensed, somewhere underneath, would not be good for me. There was no dramatic moment to point to, just a small, sinking recognition, the sense of standing at a beginning I had stood at before. I remember thinking, almost outside myself, oh, this again. Not the person. The shape. I have been here before, i

There is a version of me that used to sit in rooms nodding along to opinions I did not hold, laughing at things I did not find funny, agreeing to plans that made my chest tighten the moment I said yes. Nobody in that room would have called it self-abandonment. It looked, from the outside, like being easy going. Like being a good sport. It is only from a distance, looking back, that I can see it for what it was, a small betrayal I committed against myself, over and over, in th

I watched the news the day the resignation was announced, the way I imagine most of the country did, and felt something I was not fully prepared for. Not relief exactly, though there was relief in it. Something closer to the quiet that comes after a long, held breath. The kind of quiet that does not feel peaceful so much as unfamiliar. We are trained, as a culture and as individuals, to understand conflict in terms of its climax. The march, the crackdown, the resignation, the

This article was born last week when I said yes to something that I did not want to say yes to. I knew it the moment the word left my mouth; that small, familiar drop in the stomach, the one that shows up whenever I have just signed away an evening, an energy, a piece of myself, to keep someone else comfortable. I sat with the phone in my hand for a long minute afterward, irritated not at the person who asked, but at myself, for knowing better and doing it anyway. If you are