Kat’s Musings

Tag: mental-health

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
Why The Gentlemen’s Chaos Works: Class, Crime and Control

My boyfriend and I just finished The Gentlemen on Netflix, and I owe the show an apology. For the first couple of episodes I was ready to check out. It felt too loud, too messy, and too in love with its own chaos. Drugs moved through country estates like inventory. People got shot, stabbed, or simply erased because someone needed a problem to disappear. I kept waiting for the story to settle, and it refused.

What changed my mind was not a more subtle plot. It was realizing the noise was the point, and underneath it the show is really about who gets to decide what happens next.

Eddie Horniman does not want the life he inherits. He wants the title, the land, and a version of family duty that stays polite. Instead he walks into a cannabis operation that has been running under the estate for years, and into Susie Glass, who already knows how the money, the routes, and the threats actually work. The tension is not just aristocrat versus criminal. It is two people who both think they should be in charge, and who keep discovering that control is something you negotiate every time the room changes.

That is what hooked me. The killings stop feeling random once you watch who benefits from them. A death can be a message, a cleanup, or a way to move someone else one step closer to the top. Loyalty gets tested the same way. Family, staff, old friends, and business partners all claim a share of Eddie’s attention, and the show is sharpest when it shows how those claims collide. Susie does not simply tempt him into crime. She treats him like a partner who still has to earn the right to speak. His brother wants status without the work. The people already inside the operation want the new duke to stay useful and stay scared.

Class sits under all of it. The estate looks like old money and old rules. The business looks like cash, containers, and people who will not wait for a gentleman’s agreement. Eddie keeps trying to translate one world into the other. Sometimes the manners help. Sometimes they are exactly what gets someone killed. I started watching for the set pieces and stayed for the arguments about who owns the risk, who owns the profit, and who gets to walk away clean.

By the end I was less interested in the body count and more interested in the bargains. Power in this show is not a single throne. It is a set of levers, and the characters who last are the ones who notice when a lever has moved. Chaotic at the start, yes. Once the power struggles lock into place, it is hard to look away.

October 6, 2026
Just Do It

What’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?

I believe in spontaneity—flying by the seat of your pants. You feel it. Then you do as Nike says and just do it.

There is a particular electricity in deciding before the mind has time to assemble a committee. Before you can overthink. The body knows first. A sudden urge to love someone, take a different road home, to say yes to a last-minute invitation, to start the thing you have been circling for months. Spontaneity is not chaos for its own sake. It is trust that the present moment contains more information than the spreadsheet you made last Tuesday.

Over-planning has its place. Maps are useful. Budgets matter. But when every decision is pre-approved by fear of looking foolish or wasting time, life flattens into a sequence of safe rehearsals. You end up living a well-organized version of someone else’s idea of a good life. The seat of the pants is less dignified and far more honest. It is the part of you that still remembers how to move before it has justified the movement.

Nike’s slogan works because it is almost insultingly simple. “Just Do It” does not promise a perfect outcome. It does not require a five-year vision board (although I make one every year) or a mood board or a detailed risk assessment. It assumes the feeling is already there and that hesitation is the only remaining obstacle. The phrase is a permission slip to act while the spark is still hot.

That spark is fragile. Wait long enough and the inner critic arrives with questions: Is this practical? What will people think? What if it fails? By the time those questions are answered, the original impulse has usually cooled into a memory of something you almost did. Spontaneity is a race against that cooling.

This does not mean every whim deserves obedience. Some impulses are hunger, boredom, or avoidance wearing a costume. The useful distinction is between the cheap thrill and the deeper yes—the one that arrives with certainty rather than a loud craving. You learn the difference by acting often enough to notice the aftermath. Some spontaneous choices leave you lighter. Others teach you what not to do next time. Both are data.

People who live this way collect stories instead of regrets about missed chances. They remember the night they stayed online and met someone who changed their trajectory. They remember booking the ticket before the price went up and before they talked themselves out of it. They remember starting the project on a Tuesday afternoon because the idea would not leave them alone. The planned life can be admirable. The improvised one tends to be more alive.

There is also a humility in it. Flying by the seat of your pants admits you do not have the full picture and that you are willing to find out by moving. Perfectionism pretends otherwise. It waits for certainty that never quite arrives. Spontaneity accepts that some of the best decisions look reckless from the outside and inevitable from the inside.

So when the feeling comes—clear, uninvited, a little inconvenient sometimes —treat it as information rather than an interruption. You do not need a manifesto. You need a small act of follow-through. Feel it. Then just do it. The rest of your life writes itself after you start moving.

October 1, 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
Make Time for Self‑Care: Rest Without Apology

How do you make time for self-care?

It is so important—vital, even—to make time for self-care. Not as an afterthought squeezed between everyone else’s needs, and not as a luxury reserved for the rare day when nothing is demanded of you. Self-care is the necessary act of remaining whole.

Do not pour yourself out completely into someone else. Love generously if you choose to, show up fully, give your time and tenderness without keeping a ledger. But do not empty the well so thoroughly that there is nothing left when you turn back toward yourself. A person who never refills cannot keep giving without eventually resenting, fracturing, or disappearing. The most sustainable kindness you can offer others begins with the kindness you first offer yourself.

Self-care does not have to be extravagant. It can be a long soak in the tub while the water cools around you and the day’s noise finally recedes. It can be getting your nails done, not because anyone else will notice, but because the small ritual of being tended to reminds you that you are worth tending. It can be an hour spent watching something pleasant that asks nothing of you except your presence. It can be returning to a hobby you once loved and then quietly set aside—painting, reading, walking without destination, cooking something only you will eat, sitting with a podcast that belongs only to you.

A steaming cappuccino, open journal, and fresh flowers create a peaceful bedroom reading nook.

These moments are not selfish. They are maintenance. They restore the part of you that gets worn thin by caring, by housework, by the constant low-level negotiation of other people’s feelings and expectations. When you regularly take time to relax and enjoy yourself, you return to your life with more patience, more clarity, and more genuine warmth. You become harder to exhaust and easier to love—including by yourself.

A serene watercolor landscape pairs smooth river stones and greenery with flowing blue water beneath a glowing sun.

Make the appointment with yourself the way you would make one for anyone else you refuse to disappoint. Protect the hour. Close the door. Put the phone face down. Let the world wait. You are not abandoning anyone by doing so. You are simply refusing to abandon yourself.

Take the time. Spoil yourself a little. Rest without apology. The version of you that emerges on the other side of that rest is the one who can keep showing up—not emptied, but replenished.

A charming garden bench invites quiet relaxation among blooming flowers and lush greenery.

September 29, 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
My First Paycheck at 36: Turning a Quiet Hobby into Real Work

I just got my first paycheck today.

I’m 36.

That sentence still feels strange to write. For most of my adult life I assumed a “first paycheck” was something that happened in your early twenties—something you celebrated with cheap champagne and a slightly embarrassing Instagram caption before life moved on. Mine arrived later, after years of personal work that never came with a stub, a deposit, or the quiet little thrill of seeing your name next to a number that someone else decided your time was worth.

For a time that work was my mother’s spa. I grew up in that space. I learned how to fold towels the exact way she liked them, how to greet a regular by name before they even sat down, how to mix oils so the scent lingered just long enough after a client left. I learned the business side too—inventory, bookings, the particular diplomacy required when someone is unhappy with their facial but does not quite know how to say it. I was good at it. I was useful. And for years that felt like enough.

It was also, if I am honest, a kind of postponement. Helping her was not just love and duty; it was a way of staying inside a story that already made sense. I had time to achieve my goals (aka perfection). The spa had its own rhythm. My days had a shape. I did not have to answer the question of what I wanted to build.

The thing I wanted to build started was not a career or a legacy. As a younger woman all I wanted was a beautiful body and excellent grades. I only started writing as a hobby. A place to grieve during my lonely university years. Something I did because it made my brain quiet. I did not treat it like a career. I treated it like oxygen. I practiced. I got better. I shared a little of it with friends. One of those friends runs her sister’s business. During a coffee date, she asked if I could help with the website. I said yes before I had time to talk myself out of it.

That yes turned into freelance work. The work turned into invoices. And today one of those invoices turned into a paycheck with my name on it.

It is not a fortune. It does not rewrite the last decade. It does not erase the years I spent pouring energy into someone else’s dream because it was also, in many ways, the family dream. But it is mine. It is proof that the thing I kept doing in the margins—the thing I almost dismissed as “just a hobby”—had weight. That it could travel outside the house. That someone would pay for it.

I keep thinking about how late this feels and how on time it also feels. Thirty-six is not old. It is also not the age the culture usually hands you a first-paycheck story. I have always been a late bloomer, just look at my first [and only] relationship. There is a particular tenderness in arriving here after you have already learned how to be responsible, how to keep running even when you are tired. The version of me who is cashing this check is not the same person who might have received one at twenty-two. She knows more about endurance. She also knows more about what she is unwilling to abandon.

I am proud of the years at the spa. I am proud of my mother. I am proud of the part of me that showed up there. And I am proud, in a quieter, newer way, of the part that kept the hobby alive long enough for it to become work.

Tonight the paycheck is just a number in an account. Tomorrow it will start becoming something else—a little more room to keep going. Mostly it is a marker. A first one. Proof that a passion practiced in the leftover hours can eventually walk out of the leftover hours and stand on its own.

I’m late, I guess.

I’m also exactly here.

A flower-lined woodland path winds through lush trees toward a warm, sunlit meadow.

September 18, 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