• 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…

  • On music as memory, misdirection, and rescue In another life I would have been a rock star. All ego and wild wardrobe choices, making an artistic choice to stain my fingers black à la Michèle Lamy, and crying at the end of every concert. But the closest I ever got was being a radio producer,…

  • 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…

  • On growing up, letting go of coolness, and finding yourself in the wrong Addams The Dream When I was younger, I wanted to be cool and mysterious.I wanted to be Wednesday. Specifically: Christina Ricci’s Wednesday. Deadpan. Central. Still. A child who never flinched and never explained herself. She didn’t need to perform charm or softness….

  • 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…

  • 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….

  • This week marks six months of living alone… well not exactly, but also kinda.I share a house with five other people. We cross paths in the kitchen, politely ignore each other’s laundry, and share an unspoken agreement that we don’t discuss the quality of bathroom singing. It’s not solitude exactly, more like a soft coexistence….

  • 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…