There’s a beauty to this waiting.
Not a beauty I asked for, and certainly not one I wanted,
but still, it’s here, wrapped tenderly around the ache.

At 34, I find myself surrounded by joyous announcements:
friends, acquaintances, and strangers in cafe lines
proudly displaying their blossoming bellies, their fresh-faced newborns,
their luminous joy.

With each one, my heart splits wide open
both swelling with happiness for their blessing,
and shattering with longing and a bitter-tasting envy.

There’s a beauty to this waiting.

The grief is there in seeing another ultrasound photo,
in the forced smile at yet another baby shower,
in the sighs breathed into purchasing another baby gift
when it really feels like someone should be buying me some slippers and a blanket at this stage of life.

Yet, even amid the hunger in my belly,
there’s a peace I can sometimes reach.
(not always, but sometimes).

I believe fiercely in divine timing.
I believe that motherhood, when it comes, will arrive precisely when it should
not a moment too soon or too late.
This belief doesn’t ease the longing,
but gives it meaning.
My future children are being lovingly crafted by hands greater than mine.

I often dream at night of a little girl,
sleeping in tall grass under a full moon.
Splashing in a river and bringing me smooth rocks.
I daydream of of the moment she flutters to life,
tiny kicks nudging me awake from my dream of her
to the reality of her.

I imagine the day I’ll tell my partner,
overcome with disbelief and joy,
both of our hearts filled with wonder and fear,
our entire future shifting forever in a single moment.

I dream for all of it.

In some ways, I feel grateful for this season of waiting.
It’s teaching me the patience I know my future daughter will need from me.
It’s teaching me to enjoy the simplicity and selfishness of my life as just me.

When my moment comes,
I know it will taste sweeter, deeper, and richer for the waiting.
I’ll hold that tiny life in my arms with a reverence born of these years of longing.
A deeper gratitude that blooms fiercely from the roots of this preparing.

But today, right now, in the day to day of breathing,
it’s hard.
It’s hard to wait quietly while the world moves forward around me,
seemingly oblivious to the preciousness of what they hold.
To them, it’s normal, perhaps easy, even mundane.
To me, it’s everything.

So I let myself feel it all:
joy for others, sorrow for myself, and beneath it all,
when I can successfu;ly reach it,
a profound trust.

Someday soon, when God says yes,
this waiting will turn from ache into celebration,
and I will hold the life I’ve dreamed of,
knowing deeply, finally, that the wait was worth it.

On this day, the unimaginable was about to happen.

A man was about to apologize to me.
And he was going to do it well.

None of the stories specify that the day pigs fly
will be a Tuesday.

We ran into each other, physically,
followed by a “hey, we should talk”.
Which, in most instances is not a great sentence to hear,
especially from an ex.

I have a cabinet of files
for the conversions that started with
“can we talk?”
I’m sorry if…
I’m sorry but…
I’m sorry you took it that way…

But this apology had bones,
And sat up straight in its folding chair.
This one was directed to my government name,
with a Dear You, and Sincerely, Me.
It wanted nothing back, shockingly.
No forgiveness or redemption points or pat on the back
for doing the bare minimum of decency.

It all happened a decade ago
we “dated”, though the term is generous,
as it generally was back then.
Our frontal lobes in late-stage formation,
mentally undercooked
and emotionally under-qualified for romantic dalliances.

It was the blind leading the blind
in a masterclass of reenacting childhood wounds,
mommy and daddy issues center stage.
Both trying to get the other to meet us where we needed to be met
only to be dragged through the mud of misunderstanding
with every late night text.

We weren’t terrible, exactly.
The mess was messy in a mutually fun and disastrous way,
two people confusing intensity for intimacy.
It was all I knew, and he knew it.

Then a decade of drift in a million-person city
that keeps introducing you
to the same five ghosts of situationships-past.

That day, bracing for nostalgia,
or a my therapist told me to tie up loose ends,
so here I am, holding a little knot.
I got pigs with wings.
and a truly believable “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry for how I treated you.
I’m sorry for how I showed up, and for when I didn’t.
I’m sorry I couldn’t communicate.
I’m sorry that what I did communicate was painful.
I’m sorry that my ego was loud
and my humility was silent.

He said: my patterns were driving,
and you were in the passenger seat,
and it hurt you,
and I see it now.
I knew you were vulnerable.

He is in recovery.
Long-term.
Measured in years and not days.
Accumulated days
of dollar coffee and accountability.

And so am I, however brief, so I know a tenth step
when it looks me in the eyes and apologizes
even ten years after the wound was inflicted.

The tenth step means the counting never stops.
That the books stay open.
That honesty is a barber shop you sweep every night,
not just when the state is coming in the morning.

The wound was no longer fresh when the apology happened
But the promptly of Step Ten
starts whenever you finally see it.
Inventory runs on the timeline of your seeing,
and this thing took a decade of Tuesdays
to come into focus.

The step only asks
that when the light hits it,
you don’t shove it back into the shadows.

There is a gap.
A gap between the woman you are
and the woman you perform to the world.

The performance being:
I’m fine.
This doesn’t hurt me.
I don’t care what you said, did, didn’t do, and how you didn’t care.
I’m okay to be forgotten.
It’s alright that you moved on.

The unadmitted harm
lives in that gap,
the inch of story
where you come off okay,
where it was complicated,
where you were both so young.

He walked ten years
back into that inch of story
and apologized for all the things unsaid
and asked for the same in return.

So that I could feel the gap close
the way you feel a plane land:
in your bones,
before you believe you’re back on solid ground again.

I wish I could tell you
I drove home grateful.
But I drove home grieving.
Thirty-three years old,
counting every man who was careless with my heart,
counting every apology that never came,
counting every heartbreak with no resolution.

And then the grief turned around
and pointed me to where I have been in his shoes.

I keep an inventory too.
A little black book of bad behavior and apologies never said.
A list of people who met the version of me
with her communication signals down
and her ego blown up.
People who got nothing,
when they were owed my amends.

I have been Mostly Honest
about that era of my life, and all the eras since,
which means the last inch
is still held close to my chest,
and some of it belongs
in conversations
I have not yet had.

I will not perform them here.
They belong to the people
who are owed them.

Recovery, whether you are in it or on the curious side of the fence,
is the confession, the testimony, the Mostly Honest-ness of:
Be seen.
Survive it.
Repeat.
Forever.
And stay sober.

Somebody always has to go first.
He went first, and it did not kill him.
Now I am telling you, and it is not killing me.
And somewhere down the line of dominoes
there is a junk drawer in your house
with a conversation in it, waiting to be had.

The step does not ask you to be finished.
It asks you to keep counting,
and to say the true thing
the moment you can see it.

Ten years counts as promptly.
So does tomorrow.

So to that man, who will probably never read this,
thank you for keeping your books current.

Thank you for being the first.

I hope you’re not the last.

He has always had some animal superpower for knowing when I needed him closest, and this morning his small, frail, very much warm and alive body is pressed against me as though he could crawl inside my skin if he just tried hard enough. Maybe he is trying.

I’m feeling his ribcage go up and down. I am trying to etch it somewhere permanent in my memory, the unique rhythm of him that has hypnotized us both to sleep so many nights. He has a heart murmur now, and I can feel it fluttering. I’m doing what I did the very first night I had him: lying awake in the dark of early morning, terrified, feeling him breathe like a new mother who can’t believe she is in charge of something this important and this small. What if it spontaneously disappears?

Right now the tip of his tongue is hanging slightly out of the front of his mouth because he only has about eight teeth left, and the front ones are mostly gone. The faint wheeze on his exhale hums like the sound of the fridge that you just stop noticing after a while because it’s just the sound of being home; but today I’m trying to memorize that too because I need to remember the sound for the rest of my life.

He has no idea what is going to happen today. Today, for him, is just another perfect day with me; another sunrise, another few minutes of breathing on my face until we get up for coffee and breakfast; another dog day of almost-summer without a care in the world. He’s happy, and warm, and here.

And I’m heartbroken.

I’m heartbroken because I know that in a few hours my best friend of over twelve years is going to die. Which makes me, as of this morning, a sort of genie in a bottle, granted the worst wish ever…the power to decide when a life ends. I’ve made the most impossible decision to end his too-short-for-my-comfort, precious little life; a life I’d give anything to keep.

And yet, here we are, laying together for one last morning. Tomorrow I’ll wake up without him. I’d give anything to shove the cork back in the genie bottle and it just wont go back in.

We talk about “quality of life” and “doing the humane thing” and “you’ll know when it’s time,” which are all true, but also just wildly insufficient ways of explaining what is happening today. He is going to die, and I can do everything to make that sound more palatable, but the reality is that I’m staring directly at the unbearable, looking it in the puppy-dog eyes and I know exactly what’s coming.

The unbearable is here anyway.

Choosing death for someone you love is a terrible kind of playing God. I know all the reasons it’s actually a mercy. I know his little body has been working so hard for so long just to stay here with me, which both the most heartbreaking thing and the most loving, and I cannot decide which it is more of. Maybe both. I think this kin of love is both.

Scottie is fifteen years old. I’m not entirely sure of his exact birthday, but my mom and I decided years ago that he shared one with my late Nana because she hated sharing her birthday with a dog, which made us all laugh, which was exactly the point.

His name is officially Lil Scottie Pippen. Mostly just “Scottie”.

Also: Scottie P, Scottie Pip, Pip, Pipsqueak, Scooter, Scoots, ScootieBoots, Bookie, Lil SP, Scott, Scotland, and roughly one thousand improvised renditions of the above, because naming him only once was never going to be enough for the gigantic personality inside his little potato body.

Despite being fifteen, he’s a Jack Russell Terrier, which means that for the better part of a decade he had the energy of a bouncy ball thrown hard at a tile floor: straight up, straight down, off every wall, never still for a second. His vertical jump, relative to his body height, was easily three times that of the actual Scottie Pippen which is factual data if you look it up on the interwebs.

On every hike we ever took, he ran at least three miles for my one, sprinting ahead and then doubling back to check on me, then sprinting ahead again, then doubling back, making absolutely sure his slow human hadn’t wandered off and gotten lost.

He came into my life when I was twenty-two. My mom found him at a horse farm, where he was living in the barn at six months old. She went to test-ride a horse and came home with The Dog Formerly Known as “Remmington”, the most absurd name for a dog who was clearly always supposed to be called Lil Scottie Pippen. She quickly determined he was a Tazmanian Devil in dog-form and spent the next three years trying to give him to literally anyone who would listen. Then I came to visit her, and the bond was quite literally immediate and absolute. I fell in love with him. He fell in love with me. A year later, once I’d gotten settled in Austin, he came to live with me. Everything after that is just… the rest of my life.

When I first got to Austin I had no job, no real prospects, not much money, and absolutely no business having a dog. So naturally, I got the dog. He has been here for my entire adult life; every version of me I’ve tried on and grown out of, every season of reinvention and wreckage and rebuilding, he was there. Happy to be included and in the crook of my arm each night.

He slept under my feet in cubicles (and sometimes on top of the desk), smuggled into more than one office because I couldn’t bear to leave him at home. He has seen me through more jobs than I can count and a few stretches of unemployment. He came on cross-country road trips and has, at this point, seen more of America than most Americans ever will. He met every man I ever brought home, most of them, in retrospect, deeply unworthy of the energy I spent on them, but he never once judged my taste. If I loved them, he loved them. As far as Scottie was concerned, the second I let someone in the door, we were a pack of three. He fell hard for some of them right along with me, and we grieved them together when they left.

He was also the only one in the room for the worst nights. The breakups. The seasons so dark I genuinely did not know how I would get to morning. Or night. Or morning yet again. He would lay his whole tiny body across my chest like a weighted blanket. That sixth sense of knowing when I needed him closest, his heartbeat fluttery like a butterfly right next to mine. He never, not once, cared that I was using him as a tissue for my snot and my tears.

In my twenties, when I was being what my friend Kimberly calls “a dirty stay-out,” leaving him home while I went and did regrettable things until two (or five) in the morning, he never held it against me. His grudges expired with the first snuggle. He always forgave me before I’d even finished apologizing. I think about that sometimes, what it would be like to move through the world with that kind of radical forgiveness. To let go of the score that fast. He made it look effortless, which I suspect it actually was, for him.

He forgave me for things I have still not forgiven myself for.

In a few hours, a team of two vets will come to the front porch of the Farnhouse, where the wildflowers are starting to open in the field, the sun still low in the morning sky. Scottie will have been in my arms for the better part of 24 hours by then, rocking, gently singing, and crying into his fur.

We have spent something like four thousand days curled into each other on couches and in beds. We have logged well over ten thousand miles on sidewalks and trails, busy streets and city parks. He has humped, conservatively, several hundred large male dogs, and chased several thousand squirrels; catching exactly zero. A perfect record; undefeated in failure.

He has barked his head off at countless mailmen and has even more personally and viciously tried to eat more than one FedEx guy and Man in Brown. He has, against all veterinary odds, consumed roughly ten times the amount of chocolate that should be lethal for a dog his size, and lived, every time, out of what I can only assume was pure, magnificent spite. I spent the last few years genuinely unsure whether his heart disease or my own cute aggression would take him first, me, holding his little head in my hands announcing to the empty room: Oh my GOD, I could squeeze you until your head pops off.

It never did pop.

In the end, he lost almost all his teeth. This did not stop him. With what few he had left, he somehow managed to chew his own paws nearly clean off, and I will go to my grave not understanding the physics of it; a fifteen-year-old dog with maybe eight teeth, still finding a way to be an absolute menace. That was Scottie. His body kept failing but his spirit was alive and well. That was Scottie. Right up until the end, he was Scottie.

He came into my life at twenty-two, when I had nothing. He is leaving it at thirty-four, and because of him I have everything that matters. I know unconditional love like never before and perhaps never again. A girl never finds her first best-friend twice. The love we shared was beyond what words here can capture.

By every external metric, this is a deeply inconvenient time to have my heart broken into small pieces — a precarious year, tight on money, physically and emotionally in the middle of a long and difficult healing process. Losing him is the toothpick through a shit sandwich, and I say that with full awareness of how insufficient the metaphor is. There would never have been a good time. That was always going to be I’mpossible.

But I guess that’s the point of it all. Dogs aren’t meant to live forever, (though I’d like to file an appeal with the Big Man upstairs on that one), they are meant to come into our lives and be radiant balls of endless love and affection to teach us what it is like to be happy. I’ve spend my happiest hours, days, and years with this little creature, and I would happily change hundreds more doggie diapers if it meant I could have just one more day with him.

He has been my life’s greatest teacher, and today he has raeched the point of having taught me everything he needed to teach me. I loved him so hard right up until the end that he knows it’s okay to leave. Despite my current life situation, he knows that I’ll be okay without him. He knows because he has taught me to love unconditionally, to get outside everyday no matter the weather, and to smell as many flowers as you want, no matter how long it makes the walk. He taught me to love deeply, forgive quickly, snuggle hard, become wide-eyed at the glorious world in front of you, especially if that whole world is one person.

This little dog - this 15lb., gummy-mouthed, chocolate-immune, mom-obsessed lunatic taught me how to love another living being with the entire contents of my heart. All of it. Enough that losing him is going to break me in a way I’m not sure I’ll ever fully recover from, and somehow that is the proof of our love. You don’t get the kind of grief that levels you without first having had the kind of love that builds you. He gave me both. The entire curriculum of his teaching was: love like this. Forgive like this. Come back to the person you love over and over and over, all the way to the end of the trail.

So this morning, I’ll be the genie. I’ll hold the terrible wish in my hands and I’ll use it to spare him from, any more pain, even though it guts me. I’ll lay my body across his this time. I’ll let him feel my heartbeat for once. And I will not care, not even a little, about the snot or the tears.

Thank you, Scottie P. For the four thousand days. For the ten thousand miles. For loving every unworthy man and forgiving every dirty stay-out. For never catching the squirrel, because the joy was always in the chase. For teaching me that a heart is only ever as breakable as it is capable of loving, and that this kind of love is a deal worth making every single time.

Go get the squirrel, buddy. Run three times as far as you need to. I’ll catch up.

Thank you for four thousand sunrises and
four thousand sunsets.
For ten thousand miles,
and a hundred thousand kisses.
I love you entirely, immeasurably, and endlessly.

April 2011 to April 23, 2026

I sat in pews built by men who were certain of things,
The only thing I was certain about was that I wasn’t certain.
but I waited to be certain too.

Nothing.

So I decided God was a story
people told themselves
to make the dark less dark,
and I went back to my own methods
of making the dark less dark.

Distraction, destruction, addiction, and affliction
from all the things that are fleetingly bright
only to give way to more darkness.

The Wanting is a prayer.
Backwards, maybe. Aimed at the altar of desparation
But the posture is the same,
knees down,
hands open,
whole body begging
please,just make me feel different than I feel.

I was praying for years.
I just didn’t know who I was talking to.

The first room had folding chairs.
The coffee tasted like tar and cigarettes.
or maybe that was me that tasted like cigarettes.
The carpet was the sad beige color of giving up.
Fluorescent light that flatters no one,
that shows you exactly what you look like,
which it turns out
is exactly what everyone else looks like:
Tired.

And then a man read something out loud,
and a woman cried without apologizing for it,
and somebody laughed at the most horrifying part of their own true story,
and I sat there with my arms crossed,
guarding the last little kingdom of my pride,
thinking, this is not for me.

And yet.

I kept coming back.
Which is the burning bush.
I kept coming back,
and somewhere between the third small room and the thirtieth,
the room stopped closing in on me
and started opening me.

Nobody converted me.
Nobody handed me a God of their understanding
they just waited for me to find a God of my understanding.

And I kept showing up,
to see everyone broken in the same places I was broken,
but mended by the threads of each others stories.
One night I looked around at all those faces
under that unforgiving light
and I thought,

oh.

There you are. Here we are.

After all the meetings and the meditation cushions,
after the Big Book and the Buddha and my body
slowly learning it is safe to live in…

I learned that God was never hiding.

God is whatever held you
on the night you couldn’t hold yourself.
God is on the phone at 2am
saying stay on the line, I’m not going anywhere.
God is the chair that was empty until you sat in it.
God is the deep breath you took
instead of the drink you almost picked up.

The Buddhists in my Tuesday meeting don’t say God.
They say refuge.
The old-timers say Higher Power,
And my friends say Universe.
My church group says Jesus,
and my instinct says God.

But I’m not here to argue the name.

It doesn’t matter what the lifeboat calls itself.
It simply matters that it’s there; floating.

While I was searching for holiness in a building,
I happened upon it in a circle.
Of folding chairs. With shitty coffee.
With people brave enough to reveal the messiest bits
and fellows who nod and confirm and accept and encourage.

Because being seen won’t kill you,
but staying hidden might.
And finding God in these small rooms
is what will save you, even when you don’t want to save yourself.

If you’re in a small room somewhere, in a folding chair, wondering if it’s worth the fight: it is. These rooms are our cathedral.

The voice got louder.

You shushed it with a job that trapped you with golden handcuffs.
The free drugs and the travel and the best friends that felt like family all egging each other on in our habitually bad behavior.
You covered it with relationships you knew you shouldn’t be in because the men were as bad as you allowed them to be.
You camouflaged it with a very impressive collection of wellness content and spiritual fuckery…
A morning routine you abandoned every February and picked back up in Virgo Season.

The voice, being nothing if not endlessly patient, kept pestering you with it’s backhanded whispers about who you should be dating,
and at what point you claim “good enough”.
It’s the voice that says asking for more is greedy
even at $0.85 to every dollar the boys take home.

You know the voice I mean.

The voice is the one that follows you into the stable career with the Roth IRA and the 401K
and maybe those are the same thing but you didn’t listen to your momma.

The whisper though, that’s the one that comes at 2am one when you’re rubbing your feet like a grasshopper under the covers
and you have the best idea you’ve ever had.
And forget it in the morning.
Or maybe your sleep paralysis demon has come to sit on your chest
while you lie next to someone perfectly lovely, in a life that looks, on paper, completely reasonable, but all you can hear is
this is not it, this is not it, THIS IS NOT IT.
sneak out like a cat who only came here to be fed on a cold dark night.

Hard to decipher which one at which time, see?

The whisper is harder to hear but more important to listen to.
It’s what tugs at you in other people’s art,
and in the novels and poems that make you cry.
It beckons to you from the pulpit at church when the preacher was really doing his thing it hits you right in the feels.
The whisper that came from the trees you hugged in Hawaii
While you were on mushrooms and you were 110% communing with the their spindly roots.

That was your muse.

For so long you’ve told her to
hold on for a second - I need to clean the kitchen and watch 147 reels, can you come back tomorrow?
But tomorrow the rent is still due and you still haven’t payed those toll bills or gotten your windshield replaced and I think there’s a parking ticket lost somewhere under the driver’s seat.

And the muse is still waiting.

There I go, distracted again thinking of all the worldly things when my muse is knocking, whispering on the other side of the door for me to let her in, to look at her and let her inspire and delight and frankly see that she’s the only thing that matters.

The muse is the whisper that when ignored you start to believe that parking tickets and trips to the post office are all that life is really about. that buying another pair of shoes will release you from the white knuckled grips of desperation to stay sober and sane.

The voice is the enemy of the muse.
And it is very convincing, speaking to you in your own voice which is an unusually cruel reality built to keep you from hearing the muse.

The enemy said you were not good enough.
It said you were too much and also somehow not enough, simultaneously, which is extremely efficient as far as psychological damage goes.
It said someone else already did the thing and did it better,
which is technically true of everything that has ever been made and also completely irrelevant.
It said:
who are you to write,
to speak,
to perform,
to build the thing,
to say the thing,
to be the thing,
as if the answer to that question is supposed to be someone else’s name.

The enemy said wait until you’re ready.
And you waited, like a good girl.
It said wait until you have more money, more time, the credentials, the car,
a nicer apartment, a better sense of self, a therapist who finally fixes you.
Wait until the planet in your 10th house is out of retrograde or into it, or whatever it is…
Wait for one more year of healing, and a feeling of readiness that I can promise you, from personal experience, does not come.

It simply does not come.

Readiness is not a feeling.
Readiness is a story the enemy tells you so you stay small and undeserving of welcoming the muse into your heart.

And so you helped other people do the things you wanted to do,
which let you stay close to your inspiration without having to risk anything,
which is a very sophisticated form of self-abandonment and I say that with love because I have done it, I do it, I am doing it in some corner of my life right now even as I say this.

You became very good at recognizing the thing in other people.
You became a generous, insightful, thoughtful witness to other people’s courage.
You cried at their performances and bought their books and told them they were extraordinary.
Because they are.

And somewhere in the back of your throat, a lump was forming and usually it was tears but its also poetry in the same breath.

“If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.”

As in: the uninhabited life will eat itself from the inside.
As in: the thing that loves you enough to torment you will keep tormenting you,
because it loves you that much,
because it has no other way to shake you and wake you,
because it would rather you hate it and create something than love it and disappear into a okay life.

When was the last time you got so deep into something that you looked up and four hours had passed and you forgot to check your phone?

When was the last time something happened, a song, a conversation, a stranger saying exactly the thing, a wrong turn that led exactly right, and you stood there with this stupid smile on your face and thought: okay, Muse, I’m listening.

Those are God winks. The tracks laid out fot you that you can follow (or not.)
Those are the footprints your inspiration leaves in the snow so you can find your way back when you get lost,
which you will,
which is part of it.

The enemy as I’ve been writing about is not really your enemy.

I know that is annoying to hear.
It feels better to identify the villain and give it a name.
To locate the problem in your childhood or your culture or the algorithm or the particular flavor of capitalism that has eaten our creativity and ability to dream.

This friction, though, is the muse.
And friction is not evil.
Friction is how you know you’re moving.

The river doesn’t resent the rocks.
The river forges it’s way to the ocean.

Call Nana.

I can’t bring myself to turn it off because when it goes off now I just say a little prayer instead, and I tell her about my week, and if I have any travel coming up, and how work is going, the same way I always did,
and she would listen, and say “oh, that’s lovely, as long as you’re…

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This isn’t a story about falling out of love. It’s about something far less clear and far more confusing: falling into it, only to realize that love may not be enough to make it last. Or at least,…

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We don’t always recognize we’re in a sacred space until we’re standing in it - half-hopeful, half-heartbroken - waiting for someone to decide if they’re ready.

This isn’t a story about falling out of love. It’s about something far less clear and far more confusing: falling into it, only to realize that love may not be enough to make it last. Or at least,…

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To arrive at faith is to arrive in the depths of the unknown.
To remember you are never alone.
To embrace her and tell her:
I’m here. I’ve got you.
Rest, darling.

I wrote these lines a few years ago, and they still tend to float back to me whenever I’m feeling uncertain, restless, and just a little bit lost. A quiet prayer from me, to me…(and may…

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There’s an old saying that jealousy is the thief of joy, but let’s be honest, it’s more like a nosy neighbor who peeks through the blinds, comparing their life to yours, stewing in a cocktail of resentment and self-doubt.

Jealousy, that sharp little pang in your gut, is a universal human experience. It sneaks in like an uninvited house guest who doesn’t …

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I used to think being single was like sitting in the DMV: a dull, fluorescent-lit waiting room where you sit, uncomfortable and impatient, clutching a ticket and waiting your turn for love. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been left out of an exclusive club - standing outside in the cold, nose pressed against the frosty window of Coupledom, watching the wa…

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On the morning of writing this (August 18th) I stumbled upon a blog post I wrote in 2017 while digging through my notes app for something else. In true God-wink fashion, it was dated exactly seven years ago to this day. One of the gifts I’ve given myself since I started journaling and writing is that I’ve given myself access to moments like this one - i…

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