Kat’s Musings

Tag: Healing

Are we resting or just numbing?!

Sometimes I think it is my five-year plan to just chill and have fun while patiently waiting on a miracle to come in my life. Not in the dramatic, lottery-ticket sense of a miracle, though I would definitely not turn one down. More like the kind that arrives when the conditions have arranged themselves—when the right person, the right work, the right season finally shows up without having been dragged into existence by force of will. I do not work hard in the conventional sense. I do not believe in forcing anything. If it is meant to be, it will happen. So I sincerely believe that following my urges will bring me closer to my desired goals than any carefully reverse-engineered five-year strategy ever could.

This is not the same as saying I have no goals. It is closer to saying I have stopped treating goals as problems that can only be solved by sustained pressure. The culture around me still treats effort as a kind of moral currency: the more friction you generate, the more serious you must be about your life. I keep finding that the opposite is often true. The things that have mattered most have arrived when I was least clenched. A conversation that changed the shape of a year. A stretch of days that clarified what I actually wanted to make. An unexpected invitation that rearranged the calendar. None of these felt like rewards for grinding. They felt like the natural result of remaining available.

Following urges, then, is less about pure impulse and more about paying attention to the small, directional pulls that do not require me to override myself. The urge to walk farther than planned. The urge to stay longer at the table. The urge to open the notebook even though no one is waiting for the pages. The urge to say yes to the slightly inconvenient plan because something in it feels alive. These are not random. They are information. When I ignore them in favor of what I “should” be doing, I usually end up both less productive and more resentful. When I follow them, the work that does get done tends to have more coherence, even if it looks, from the outside, like dilly-dallying.

You have to be careful, though. Preferring to live in the whimsy is easy to misread as avoidance, and the line between the two is thinner than it looks. There is a version of this philosophy that is simply a sophisticated way of staying small: calling every difficult thing “not meant to be,” treating every urge to disappear as wisdom. That version numbs. It turns the day into a series of soft escapes and then wonders why nothing ever arrives. The version I am after is different. It still requires presence. It still asks me to notice when an urge is actually a retreat from something I have the capacity to meet.

Even though I prefer to dilly-dally and live in the whimsy, I still end the day completely tired and sore. The tiredness is the proof that the approach is not pure drift. When I follow what actually interests me, I tend to give it everything. A long walk becomes a longer one because the light keeps changing. A conversation keeps unfolding because neither person is watching the clock. Hours disappear into making something simply because the making feels like the point. The body registers the expenditure. Muscles are used. Attention is spent. There is no leftover energy for performing busyness on top of it.

This is the distinction I keep returning to: resting is not the same as numbing. Resting is what happens when you stop pushing against the grain of the day and instead occupy the activities that already have some charge in them. Numbing is what happens when you use distraction, substances, or endless low-grade scrolling to avoid both the difficulty and the aliveness. One leaves you tired in a clean way; the other leaves you depleted and still vaguely restless. I make sure, as best I can, that I am not numbing myself to life. The tiredness at the end of the day is usually the result of having been fully in whatever I chose to do, not the result of having forced myself through a list of obligations I never wanted.

None of this is a guarantee. Waiting on a miracle while following urges can look, for long stretches, like nothing is happening. There are seasons when the urges themselves feel thin and the waiting feels longer than it should. In those periods the temptation is to reintroduce force just to have something to show for the time. Sometimes that force is necessary—deadlines exist, bodies need care, relationships require maintenance. But I have noticed that the force works better when it is applied to the small, concrete next thing rather than to the entire shape of a life. The large shape still seems to prefer being discovered rather than designed.

So the plan, such as it is, remains deliberately underspecified. Chill. Have fun. Stay close enough to my own attention that I can tell the difference between an urge that wants to be followed and one that wants to be examined. Give full effort to the things that actually hold my interest. End the day tired from use rather than from self-override. And keep enough openness that a miracle, if it is coming, can find the door unlocked.

It is not an ambitious plan. It is not even especially practical on paper. But it has the advantage of being livable, and so far the living of it has produced more clarity, and more genuine tiredness, than the years I spent trying to force the future into arriving on schedule.

October 15, 2026
Beyond Survival: On Near‑Death, Recovery, and Feeling Truly Alive

What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?

Surviving my own near-death experience should have been the moment I felt most alive. That is what the stories promise, is it not? The white light, the sudden clarity, the gratitude that crashes over you like a second heartbeat. Instead, I woke up the way people wake from anesthesia—disoriented, heavy, bargaining with a body that no longer trusted me. It took years before I understood that survival and living are not the same verb.

A person walks barefoot through the shallows of a misty lake at dawn.

I have been addicted to losing weight since I was eleven. Not in the tidy, magazine-friendly way that gets turned into before-and-after slides. Addicted to the high of control when everything else felt unmanageable. Now for sixteen years I lived inside the sentence “when I can walk around again.” It was both promise and postponement. Walking was the future tense I kept conjugating so I would not have to inhabit the present one. Hospitals, mobility devices, the particular ache of a body that has been asked to carry too much for too long—those were the actual days. The walking was always later.

Later has not arrived yet, Only in Physical therapy. The first steps that felt less like triumph and more like negotiation. Muscles relearning their jobs. The strange, ordinary miracle of carrying my own weight from one room to another without a plan for how I would rest. And still, even then, a part of me keeps scanning the horizon for the real beginning.

An inviting reading nook opens onto a lush garden through wide windows filled with morning light.

Now add the fact that I am not physically with the person I love. Not in the abstract, not in the “we will figure it out” sense, but in the same space, the same bed, the same domestic gravity. His hand on the small of my back when I stand up. The way he notices when my breathing changes before I do. It should feel like arrival. Some days it does. Most days it feels like I have stepped into a room I spent decades decorating in my head and am waiting to check whether the furniture is real.

So I have to wonder—have I ever actually felt alive before?

The question sits with me the way certain aches do: not constant, but reliable when I stop moving. Alive, I suspect, is not the same as busy, or productive, or even happy. It might be closer to the sensation of being inside a body that is no longer primarily a project. For so long the body was the obstacle and the assignment. Every meal, every step, every number on a scale or a chart was data in service of a future self who would finally be allowed to start. Even after the near-death, the old script kept running underneath the new one: survive, then optimize, then live.

Being with someone who wants the version of me that already exists—not the lighter one, not the more mobile one, not the one who has finished recovering—keeps interrupting that script. He does not wait for me to become more alive before he treats me as if I already am. That is both a gift and a kind of vertigo. It forces the question into the open: if life is no longer waiting on weight, or on perfect walking, or on some final medical clearance, then what is it waiting on now?

A sunlit garden path winds through blooming flowers, twisting vines, and whimsical brass clockwork.

I still catch myself postponing. I make plans for when energy is better, when the residual pain is quieter, when I feel more like the person I was rehearsing to become. The difference is that the postponement is shorter now, and I can usually see myself doing it. Some afternoons I sit on the edge of the bed longer than necessary, yearning to listen to the ordinary sounds of another person moving through the same rooms, while I practice the small, unspectacular choice to stand up and join him before I feel ready.

Maybe aliveness is less a peak than a practice. Maybe it is the gradual refusal to keep treating the present as a waiting room. The near-death experience did not hand me that practice fully formed. Neither did the walking, or the love. They only removed some of the more obvious reasons I had for staying in the hallway. The rest—the decision to stop narrating my own life in the future tense—is still being learned, one ordinary morning at a time.

I am not sure I have ever felt fully alive. I am more certain than I used to be that I am willing to find out what it feels like when I stop waiting for the feeling to arrive first.

October 13, 2026
I feel at home in his arms.

What’s a place you visited that felt like home?

My Red Sox lost in the Wild Card series—on the road to the World Series so let me focus on something else…

I feel at home in his arms.

Not the kind of home with the walls all scratched up via my wheelchair or the kind you decorate for the holidays. The kind that arrives after years of being in doorways that never quite opened. When he holds me, the rest of the world does not disappear so much as it loses its sharpness. The noise thins. My shoulders drop. My breath remembers how to land instead of hover. I actually smile. I am not performing calm. I am not bracing for the next disappointment. I am simply there, against him, and that is enough.

For a long time I dreamt of a love like this without knowing its shape. I only knew the absence of it. I knew the particular ache of lying awake and feeling too much and not enough at the same time. Anxiety has a way of making a person feel both crowded and abandoned. Loneliness does the same. I spent years searching for someone who could ease that double weight, not by fixing me, but by staying close enough that I no longer had to carry it alone.

I looked in the usual places and in the desperate ones. I learned how to hope carefully, which is another way of saying I learned how to protect myself with hope. There were nights I cried until my body felt wrung out, not because one particular person had failed me, but because I could not shake the suspicion that I was the problem. That I was too much. That I was not enough. That the kind of love I wanted existed only in stories written for other women.

Then we met online. I was not searching for anything. Neither was he.

It did not arrive like fireworks. It arrived like recognition. Conversation after conversation, something in me unclenched. He did not rush to complete me, and I did not have to shrink to be understood. I could tell him about the trembling parts of myself without watching him look for the exit. For the first time in years, the old story began to loosen: the story that said my loneliness was proof of my unworthiness, that my anxiety made me unlovable, that I would always be waiting just outside the warmth.

I started to believe, slowly and almost against my will, that the long season of crying might actually have an ending.

When we finally met in person, the body confirmed what the heart had already begun to trust. There is a difference between imagining a person and standing close enough to feel the heat of them. There is a difference between written affection and the moment a hand finds the small of your back and stays there. I had wanted this for so long that part of me expected to freeze, to second-guess it, to ruin it with my own fear. Instead I felt something simpler and more startling: relief.

Eventually he held me.

Not as a gesture. Not as a performance. He held me as if he had been waiting for the same thing, as if my body was not a question he needed to solve but a place he already knew how to inhabit. I melted. That is the only honest word for it. The tightness I had worn for years softened. The girl who used to apologize for needing comfort stopped apologizing. In his arms I was not a collection of old wounds trying to look presentable. I was a woman being received.

He feels like a cozy home.

Unfortunately, I still know what loneliness feels like. I still know the old reflex of bracing. But now I also know this: there is a kind of love that does not ask you to earn rest. There is a kind of holding that tells the nervous system, at last, you can come down from the watchtower. I dreamt of that love for years. Then I met him. Then he put his arms around me, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had arrived.

September 30, 2026
Boston Sports, Delusion, and Why I’m Still All‑In on Drake Maye

Sometimes I get frustrated with my future and the rate it will get here.

The kind that sits in your chest on a Monday afternoon when you realize another week has passed and the version of your life you keep picturing still has not shown up. The apartment is not here. The recovery is not quite the there. The relationship, the city, the sense that things are finally lining up—none of it is arriving on the schedule you invented for it when you thought time was something you could negotiate with.

So I do what a lot of us do when the personal timeline feels stalled: I disappear into Boston sports.

It used to be the Red Sox. For months this year I lived inside the delusion that they were this close. That one more streak, one more midseason acquisition, one more month would finally deliver the thing I needed from them. I treated this 87-win season like a moral victory and last season’s early playoff exit like a personal betrayal I had somehow earned. That particular brand of hope is exhausting. It requires you to keep rewriting the story every game.

Lately that same energy has migrated, almost without my permission, to the Patriots.

Everyone is jumping ship on Drake Maye.

I see it everywhere. After the 35-6 loss in Jacksonville, the takes arrived: He is broken. The honeymoon is over. Last year’s Super Bowl run was a fluke. The confidence is gone. Bring in someone else. Trade him. Sit him. The usual New England speed-run from “franchise quarterback” to “we’ve seen this movie before.”

I refuse.

I watched the same game everyone else watched. I saw the interceptions, the fumbles, the way he stood on the sideline with his hands on his pads looking like he wanted to be anywhere else. I know the numbers this season are ugly. I know A.J. Brown is hurt and the offensive line is banged up and Buffalo is next. I know last year’s version of him—the one who completed 72 percent of his passes and finished second in MVP voting—feels very far away right now.

None of that changes the fact that I am not getting off the boat.

This is not sophisticated analysis. This is not a film-study argument about footwork or processing speed. This is just the stubborn part of me that has already invested too much to leave (similar to other parts of my life that I refuse to leave). The same part that used to convince itself the Red Sox were one bounce away. The part that treats sports as a place where loyalty is still allowed to be irrational.

The crying blotches on my face point to my frustrations.

They show up at strange times. After a bad loss, yes, but also on ordinary nights when the future I keep waiting for still has not materialized. Sports is supposed to be the escape hatch, the thing that lets you feel something clean and simple for three hours. Instead it has started to feel like another version of the same problem: something you believed in is taking longer than you thought it would, and the people around you are already writing the obituary.

My heart points toward my unwillingness to let go.

I do not know if Drake Maye is going to be the guy. I do not know if this season is a slump or a reveal. I do not know if the Patriots are building something durable or just living off last year’s fumes. I only know that I am not ready to treat him the way so many people treated the last few quarterbacks who came through here. I am not ready to perform the public ritual of disappointment on schedule.

A solitary figure stands at midfield as stadium lights glow beneath a dramatic evening sky.

Maybe that is just another delusion. The Red Sox kind. The kind that keeps you coming back even when the evidence is mixed and the wait is longer than advertised.

But right now, with the future still arriving too slowly and the scoreboard in Jacksonville still ugly, that delusion is the only thing that feels like mine. I am staying. Not because I have a clever argument. Because walking away would feel like giving up on more than a quarterback.

A football, warm coffee, and folded blanket create a cozy rainy-day retreat by the window.

September 28, 2026
Beyond Karma: Ego, Suffering, and What the Universe Really Tests

Do you believe in karma?

The idea of karma has always sat uneasily with me. On the surface it feels simple, almost tidy. Be decent. Do not be cruel for sport. Do not treat people like they are disposable. The universe will eventually even the score. If you are rude, selfish, or vicious, something will come back around and collect the debt. That version of karma is easy to repeat because it sounds moral and useful. It also flatters us a little. It suggests the world is keeping score, that character is not wasted, that meanness is not free.

Then the obvious objection arrives and the whole neat story starts to buckle. What about children? What about babies who die of disease before they have had a chance to form a lasting thought, let alone a pattern of action? If karma is personal payback aimed at the child, the idea becomes grotesque. A three-month-old does not have a ledger of cruelty. A toddler with leukemia is not being taught a lesson about last year’s gossip. I do not believe the sick child is the one being sentenced. That picture is too small and too cruel. It turns a baby into a moral invoice.

A winding mountain trail leads through lush hills toward a glowing sunset beneath stormy clouds.

What I do believe is harder, and I know how it sounds. I think the test is aimed at the parents. I think the punishment, if that is the word, is meant for them. Not because every grieving mother or father is secretly a monster. I am not saying that. I am saying the blow does not land on the child as a completed person with a history of choices. The child is the point of impact. The parents are the ones left standing in the blast. They are the ones who have to keep living inside a world that just proved it can take the one thing they would have died to protect. That is a test of a different order. It does not ask what a baby deserved. It asks what the adults become when the worst thing they can imagine stops being imaginary.

I hold that view loosely because I cannot prove it, and because it is ugly enough that I would rather be wrong. But the popular story — that disease is the child’s karma — has never made sense to me. The child’s body is too new to be the courtroom. The parents’ lives are where the sentence continues. Sleep, marriage, faith, work, the sound of a quiet house, the question of whether they still believe anything is watching. That is where the weight stays.

A rustic woodland balance scale contrasts natural treasures with scattered broken mirrors.

The same cheap version of karma gets applied to ego. A lot of people talk as if walking around with an inflated sense of yourself is a spiritual crime, something the universe will eventually tax. Be humble. Shrink. Remember you are nothing special. I have heard that sermon my whole life, and I do not buy it. I personally believe ego is good. Not the kind that needs to crush other people to feel tall, but the kind that looks in the mirror and decides, without apology, that you are the greatest. That belief has helped me more than being “humbled” ever did. Being told I was a piece of shit never made me kinder, stronger, or more useful. It just made me smaller. Believing I was exceptional gave me a reason to act like the work mattered.

I think the universe tests us. Not always individually, and not always fairly in the way a courtroom is fair. Sometimes the test is private: loss, illness, humiliation, a long season of being unseen. Sometimes it is public and collective. A flood, an earthquake, a plague, a famine. Those events do not look to me like the universe picking out the guilty children and smashing them. They look like pressure applied to the people who have to answer for what happens next. Pressure builds diamonds. Who runs toward the wreckage. Who hoards. Who lies. Who builds again. Who uses the disaster as an excuse to become smaller. In the case of a sick child, the wreckage is a crib, a hospital hallway, a diagnosis. The test is not the infant’s character. The test is whether the parents collapse into bitterness, vanish into numbness, turn on each other, or somehow remain capable of love in a world that just showed them it does not negotiate.

Rough stones and brilliant diamonds illustrate how pressure can create lasting value.

That is not the same as saying the suffering is good. It is not. The point is not that a dying child is a gift wrapped in pain. The point is that the event exposes the real architecture of the people left behind. Comfort hides it. This kind of grief does not.

There is an old line that keeps coming back to me: the toughest soldiers always have the heaviest cross to bear. It mixes two languages, military and religious, but the meaning is plain enough. Capacity and burden often travel together. The person who can carry more is often given more to carry. Not because the universe is sadistic for sport, but because weight reveals strength that lighter loads never would. I will not pretend that makes a child’s death just. It does not turn a nursery into a proving ground for the baby. If there is a soldier in that picture, it is the parent. The heaviest cross is not laid on the one who never got to live long enough to understand the metaphor. It is laid on the ones who have to carry the body of the story afterward.

Ego belongs in that picture too. A crushed self does not carry a heavy cross well. A person who has been trained to think they are worthless will fold under pressure and call the folding humility. I would rather go into the test believing I am built for it. That does not mean I think the universe owes me a soft life. It means I refuse to enter difficulty already defeated. If I ever had to stand where those parents stand, I would rather meet it as someone who still believes he is capable of greatness than as someone who spent years practicing self-erasure and then called that wisdom.

Maybe that is why karma never quite settled in my mind in its popular form. The slogan wants a clean moral physics. Do wrong, get hit. Do right, get shielded. Get proud, get slapped down. The child gets sick because the child earned it. Life does not behave that way. Good people drown. Vicious people die rich and admired. Infants get sick. Whole towns vanish in weather. And sometimes the blow that looks aimed at the smallest person in the room is actually aimed at the adults who have to outlive it.

If there is any pattern at all, it seems slower, wider, and less personal than the slogan — except in this one terrible sense, which feels personal to the bone. The child is not being punished for thoughts they never had. The parents are the ones inside the trial. The universe, if it is doing anything, is not grading a baby. It is asking what kind of people remain when the thing they loved most is placed on the altar and not given back.

I still think we should be better. Not because a cosmic clerk is watching the receipt printer, but because cruelty adds weight to a world that already has more than enough. Kindness does not guarantee safety. It does not buy immunity for your children. An honest ego does not guarantee safety either. Nothing does. What remains is the manner of the response. And if the universe is testing anyone in the death of a sick child, I do not think it is the child. I think it is the parents — and, after them, everyone who watches and decides whether to look away, explain it too quickly, or admit that some tests are not meant to make us humble. They are meant to show us whether we can still stand.

September 26, 2026
Wake Me Up When September Ends.

I miss him in a way that settles into the bones. It is not a passing ache or a fleeting thought that comes and goes with the weather. It is the kind of missing that lives in the quiet hours, in the space between one day and the next, in the moment just after I close my eyes and just before I open them again. I wish more people understood how much it hurts every time I have to kiss him goodbye. Those goodbyes are never casual. They are small ruptures. Each one feels like tearing something tender that has only just begun to knit itself back together. The kiss is soft, familiar, full of everything we cannot say out loud in the time we have, and then it is over, and I am left in the aftermath of it, carrying the weight of the next stretch of distance.

For many years I lived with an extremely lonely and broken heart. That is not poetry. It is simply what it was. I was miserable in a deep, unshowy way that does not photograph well and does not invite easy comfort. The kind of misery that makes ordinary mornings feel like work. Everyone abandoned me when I got sick. I do not say that for drama. I say it because it happened. People I thought were permanent grew distant, then silent, then gone. Some left because they did not know what to do with illness. Some left because my world became smaller and less convenient. Some left because I changed.

Yes, I formed my own opinions. I stopped performing the version of myself that made other people comfortable. I became sharper in places, quieter in others, less willing to pretend that everything was fine when it was not. That may have alienated people. I accept that now with less bitterness than I used to. At the time I did not have the purpose or the desire to heal and get better. Healing requires a reason to stay in the fight, and I did not have one. Everything seemed worthless. The future felt like a hallway with no doors. Effort felt pointless. Getting out of bed felt like an argument I kept losing.

Until now.

It has been nearly four years since my man and I physically met. Three years before that were full of screens and voices and the strange intimacy of people who know each other’s silences before ever even touching. That number still surprises me when I say it out loud. We have not had the ordinary accumulation of shared rooms, shared meals, shared weather. What we have had instead is his constant support and his steady encouragement. He did not arrive with grand speeches or easy fixes. He stayed. He listened when I had nothing graceful to offer. He reminded me, again and again, that I was not as finished as I believed I was.

That kind of presence does not transform a life overnight. It works incrementally. A little more willingness to try. A little more belief that effort might not be wasted. A slightly firmer sense that my status in life is not fixed in the place where illness and loneliness left it. I am not writing this from a mountaintop. I am writing it from the middle of the climb, still missing him, still feeling the sting of every goodbye, still carrying the old loneliness in certain rooms of myself. But I am no longer living as if everything is worthless. That shift matters more than I once thought it would.

I miss him. I will keep missing him until the next time we can close the distance, however briefly. And when that time comes, I will kiss him knowing exactly what it costs to let go afterward. I will do it anyway. Some things are worth the ache.

September 16, 2026
The Year I Would Relive Has Not Happened Yet

If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?

The year I would relive has not happened yet.

An open window reveals a moonlit valley while a cozy chair invites quiet reading.

I keep turning that sentence over in my hand like a stone I found on the beach. Smooth. Heavy. A little warm from being held too long. Most people, when asked which year they would live again, reach backward. The summer they were twenty-two. The winter everything still felt possible. The year before the diagnosis, or the accident, or the slow unfolding of whatever it was that rearranged their life. I understand the impulse. I have my own catalog of almosts and if-onlys. There always seems to be something I would like to change.

I would never do it though.

Glowing coral and gold lines converge across a moody blue textured background, evoking movement and inspiration.

I say that with the same half-superstitious firmness I use when I knock on wood. Everything happens for a reason. I have repeated the phrase so many times it has worn a groove in me. Some days it feels like wisdom. Other days it feels like a lullaby I repeat so I will not scream. Both can be true at once. The body learns to live with contradictions the way it learns to live with weather.

Still, I froth at the mouth when I envision my future.

A vintage chair rests beside an open window as sheer curtains drift in the sunlight.

Not the glittering, cinematic future. Not the one with applause or sudden wealth or a body that has never known limitation. Just a simple little life. Ordinary in the way sunlight on a kitchen table is ordinary, which is to say: almost unbearable in its tenderness if you look at it long enough.

With him.

The sentence does not need embroidery. With him. The two words sit in the center of the picture like a house with the lights already on. I see the unremarkable days first: grocery lists, the sound of an espresso machine, the particular way someone who loves you says your name when they are only half awake. I see the quieter victories. Getting through a morning without bargaining with pain. Walking a little farther than last month. Laughing at something stupid and not having to pay for it later with exhaustion. A life that does not constantly announce itself as a project of endurance.

And without disability.

A luminous winding path flows through a dreamlike blue landscape toward the rising sun.

I write that last part carefully, because I know how it can sound. I mean the specific, private longing for a version of days that do not require so much translation. Days in which my body is not a burden Days in which the body is not the first negotiation. Days in which “simple” is actually simple.

I froth at the mouth thinking about it. The phrase is ugly and exact. Anticipation that is almost feral. Hope that has teeth. I am not serene about the future. I am hungry for it.

An open journal and fresh coffee create a peaceful, sunlit writing retreat.

The paradox is that I would not go back and unscrew the past to get there. I would not trade the particular chain of hours that led me to this exact now, even the hours that hurt. Everything happens for a reason is, in my mouth, less a philosophy than a truce. I will not pretend the suffering was decorative. I will also not pretend it was meaningless. Meaning is something we make afterward, with whatever materials we have left.

So the year I would relive is still ahead of me. It has no date yet. It might look, from the outside, almost dull. A rented apartment or a small house. A person I already know how to love. Mornings that do not begin with inventory. Evenings that end without calculation. The ordinary miracle of a body that cooperates more often than it argues.

I want that year so badly I can taste metal.

A winding path leads through a flower-filled meadow toward a glowing sunrise.

And if it arrives, I will not spend it wishing I were somewhere else. I will try to live it the first time the way people live the years they later want back: imperfectly, gratefully, with both hands.

The year I would relive has not happened yet.

I am still walking toward it.

September 6, 2026
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DADDY

Happy Birthday to the Man Who Taught Me How to Believe Again

Happy birthday to my man.

I met you in a season of my life when I no longer believed in love. Not the kind people write about. Not the kind that lasts. Not even the kind that felt safe enough to hope for. I had already decided that some parts of a person stay locked away forever, that certain armor is worn for a reason, and that loneliness, once it settles in, is simply the new normal.

Then there was you.

You did not arrive with grand speeches or instant certainty. You arrived with time. With persistence. With a patience so steady it felt almost unbelievable at first. Little by little, you taught me how to believe in love again. More than that, you taught me how to believe in myself. I am forever grateful for your pure heart and for the quiet, consistent way you made space for me to grow into someone I had only ever pretended to be.

When we first met online, I did not know myself. Not really. I portrayed the version of me I wanted to become. Fake it till you make it, I told myself. I showed up as someone lighter, more open, more possible than I felt on the inside. Most people would have grown impatient with the gap between the performance and the person. You did not. You were kind enough, and patient enough, to wait while I slowly eased out of my shell. You let me become more feminine. You let me set down the armor I had been wearing for years. You never treated my caution like a flaw. You treated it like something that could, with enough safety, finally rest.

By the time we met in person, I had already dedicated my life to you. That dedication did not happen in a single dramatic moment. It happened in the months and years of messages, of waiting, of watching each other become more ourselves. I had a front-row seat as you grew into the incredible man who stood in front of me in November 2022. I saw the becoming. I still see it.

Our lives intertwined when we were in completely different places. Different cities. Different time zones. Different realities. Different versions of what we thought the future would look like. None of that mattered as much as the fact that we kept choosing each other. Now I am completely addicted. I only want more. Not more noise or more spectacle. A simple little life entirely dedicated to you. That is the life I want.

There was a time I wanted life to end. After I became disabled, after the loneliness became so complete it felt like the air itself had thinned, I could not imagine excitement ever returning. Days ticked forward without purpose. Hope felt like a luxury I could no longer afford.

And then you.

You made me feel excited for life again. Not in a vague, inspirational way. In a specific, daily, breathtaking way. I wake up wanting the next day because you are in it. I look forward to ordinary hours because they belong to us. I cannot wait to start this new life with you. The one we have already been building in pieces, across distance and difficulty, until it finally becomes the only life I want.

Happy birthday to the kindest, most loving man who has ever come into my life.

Thank you for seeing me before I knew how to be seen. Thank you for staying. Thank you for making a future feel possible again.

I love you. I am yours. And I cannot wait for everything that comes next.

September 1, 2026
September: A Month for Routines and New Beginnings

September is here. The calendar has flipped, the light is shifting, and the year has entered its most transitional stretch: still warm in many places, already carrying the first hints of autumn in others.

A new month is a clean page. It is also a reminder that most of what we actually do with time is continue the conversations we were already having. If we have been talking about routines, projects, travel, food, or how to start something again, September is a useful month to pick those threads back up instead of pretending we are starting from zero.

Labor Day weekend in the United States and Canada marks the unofficial close of summer. Schools reopen. The autumnal equinox arrives around the 22nd or 23rd, when day and night briefly balance. Around the world there are observances for literacy, peace, the ozone layer, and tourism. None of these dates require you to reinvent yourself. They simply give the month a rhythm.

A sunlit stone path winds through lush grasses, flowers, and colorful autumn foliage.

The useful move is usually modest. Finish the half-done thing you mentioned last time you asked how to get unstuck. Try the recipe or the itinerary you were weighing. Adjust the schedule you were already trying to make work. September rewards continuation more than spectacle.

The days are still long enough to use. The evenings are starting to feel different as now when I get outside to write, my body covers itself in goose pimples. That is enough of a reason to treat the month as an invitation rather than a demand.

Welcome to September. Let’s keep going with whatever we were already working on.

September 1, 2026
Dinner with F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Allure of Literary Luxury

Which author would you love to have dinner with?

If I were to have dinner with an author, it would be F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not because of the obvious masterpiece everyone names first—The Great Gatsby—but because he understood luxury as a temperature, a texture, a way of moving through a room. He did not merely describe wealth. He lived inside its shimmer and its hangover, and he wrote as if both were equally sacred.

A richly appointed library lounge invites quiet reading beneath a glowing chandelier and tall arched windows.

I have never been especially moved by stories that ask me to stay where I already am. Many people prefer fantasy worlds they can visit and leave, or novels that feel “relatable,” which often means ordinary kitchens, ordinary disappointments, ordinary weather. I have always been drawn the other way: toward silk, late hours, expensive mistakes, and the particular loneliness that arrives when the party is still going and you realize you are the only one who notices the light has changed. Fitzgerald paints that picture better than almost anyone. He makes luxury look not like a shopping list but like a climate.

The Great Gatsby is the public cathedral. It is the book of the green light, the orchestra, the rumor. It is magnificent. But The Beautiful and Damned is the private room. Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert are not striving toward a dream so much as they are already inside one and slowly ruining the furniture. They are beautiful, idle, certain the future will keep paying their bills because it always has. They drink, they quarrel, they buy a second house they cannot afford because the idea of a gray country house is prettier than the math. They treat inheritance like weather: something that will arrive if you wait long enough in the right clothes. I recognize that hunger. Not the poverty of wanting more, but the more dangerous appetite of people who already have enough to be ruined by taste.

Dried roses, scattered letters, and golden dust create a hauntingly romantic still life.

Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda lived the same plot in public. Newly famous, they took over hotel lobbies as if the city were a set built for them. They spun in revolving doors, slid down banisters, jumped into fountains, arrived at parties on all fours, locked a jazz band in a bedroom and made it play until morning. They crossed the Atlantic with too much luggage and rented villas above the Mediterranean because New York had become too loud and too expensive for the kind of living they refused to scale back. He wrote about living on practically nothing a year while still ordering champagne. The contradiction is the point. Luxury, in Fitzgerald, is never only possession. It is performance, mood, and the brief conviction that beauty can postpone consequence.

A warmly lit fireside table is prepared with champagne, flowers, and handwritten invitations.

That is why I want dinner with him rather than a seminar on his most famous novel. I do not want the monument. I want the man who knew that parties are intimate precisely because they are large, that the very rich are different because they possess early and grow soft and cynical in places the rest of us stay hard, that “eat, drink, and be merry” is both a philosophy and a slow form of suicide. I want the writer who could make a cloth-of-gold dress and a platinum ring feel like plot. Zelda once advertised The Beautiful and Damned by listing the clothes she could buy if enough people purchased the book. That is not a joke to me. That is the aesthetic I live toward: art that funds the next beautiful object, beauty that funds the next sentence.

Dinner would not be modest. I imagine a table that looks casually expensive and is, in fact, carefully so: low light, heavy silver, something cold and gold in the glass, a room that smells of perfume, cigarette smoke, and citrus from a bowl no one will eat. He would talk too much and then go quiet in a way that makes you lean in. He would notice the cut of a jacket before the content of a confession. He would be funny about money and then suddenly exact about it. He would understand, without needing it explained, why some of us do not want stories that return us to the life we already know how to survive. We want stories we can project onto the life we are trying to inhabit: the late dinner, the borrowed glamour, the risk that beauty is both the prize and the damage.

The Beautiful and Damned is that projection. It is not a cautionary tale I read in order to become more responsible. It is a mirror I hold up when I want to see the version of myself that still believes atmosphere is a moral category. Anthony and Gloria fail, of course. They waste time, money, youth, and each other. Fitzgerald knew the bill always comes. He just refused to pretend the evening was not worth it while the candles were still lit.

More stories about that, please. Not more worlds of dragons or more kitchens of quiet endurance. More rooms where the lighting is unforgivable, the clothes are too fine for the bank balance, the conversation is half seduction and half autopsy, and someone at the table still believes that if you live beautifully enough, the universe might keep the lights on a little longer. Fitzgerald made that belief look like literature. I would like to sit across from him and see whether, for one night, it still looks like a plan.

August 30, 2026