• I dyed my hair blue. A few weeks later I found myself wondering whether that meant I should be buying blue yarn too. An essay about masking, identity, neurodivergent rule-making, and learning that not every preference needs to become a personality.

  • A reflective essay on magpies, folklore, loneliness, and the quiet discovery that companionship keeps appearing anyway. On inherited pessimism, avian goblins, and learning not to stop the count too early.

  • A reflective essay about hypervigilance, conscious choice, and the exhausting habit of constantly checking whether your feelings, routines, and relationships still genuinely belong to you. On drift, devotion, and learning to trust your own instruments again.

  • It wasn’t even a big comment. That’s part of the problem.Not an argument. Not a confrontation. Just a sentence, dropped into conversation, the kind of thing that should have passed through me without leaving much of a mark. Except it didn’t.It caught, somewhere inconvenient, and now it’s here. Again.This happens more often than I’d like…

  • I don’t have a great track record for getting attributions right, but I think it’s Tai Chi that has the idea that humans have a finite amount of energy. That if you slow your movements down enough, you extend that energy, and by extension, your life.Please don’t fact-check me. It will ruin my train of…

  • Notes on stubborn pleasure in difficult times A Tactic, Not a Philosophy At the beginning of 2025, I started using the phrase aggressive joy like a life raft. It wasn’t aspirational. It wasn’t curated. It definitely wasn’t gentle. It was something I grabbed onto at the start of the year as a way to get…

  • Or: how my brain keeps shouting “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE” during perfectly normal interactions. There’s a part of my brain that is deeply committed to my survival.Unfortunately, it is also extremely dramatic, wildly overconfident, and deeply uninterested in nuance. This is the amygdala. Its job is to notice danger and react fast. It does…

  • I’m 150 days sober. I didn’t mark it on purpose.I didn’t have a countdown or an app or a plan to announce anything. I only checked because people kept bumping into the edge of it, and it turned out to be one of those milestone numbers humans seem to agree are important. Or at least…

  • A study in moderation, misquotes, and why I still prefer coffee. It went like this: “Moderation? It’s mediocrity, fear and confusion in disguise. It’s the devil’s dilemma. It’s neither doing nor not doing. It’s the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world…