• 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.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Tonight I am, against all odds, relaxed.* Not “scrolling while pretending to unwind.” Not “strategically multitasking rest.” Just… sitting. Knitting. Listening to music. Existing. And because my brain can’t leave well enough alone, I went to find a better word for how I’m feeling.** Something more poetic, more dramatic, more me. I opened a thesaurus….

  • Adventures are thrilling, but they’re also loud. For now, I’m choosing the softer kind of noise: kettles boiling, washing machines humming, toast crunching… The Highs August was incredible. Big trips, bright moments, the kind of days that deserve capital letters: The Fringe. The Theme Park. The New Head Office. There were late nights and loud…

  • Author’s Note:This post was inspired by Maya Angelou’s poem “When I Think About Myself.” Her words come from a history and an experience that aren’t mine, but what resonated with me was her use of laughter as both armor and confession. What follows is my own reflection, a much smaller, messier version of that rhythm….

  • There’s a pile of them on my shelves: passion planners, diaries, bullet journals, colour-coded agendas, Italian leather ones, Japanese ones from before they changed the paper. A graveyard of productivity promises. I used to believe that if I just found the right one, the perfect notebook, I’d finally unlock my life. I’d become the kind…

  • I didn’t realise at the time, but I was starting my last marathon attempt. It was not my first long run. It was not my first marathon. But it was the last time I purposefully went running. My previous marathon had been through my birth town. There were crowds, familiar scenery, and reasonable weather despite…