• 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…

  • On favourite cafes, small rituals and the quests that begin with a cup in hand. The Nearest Cup My favourite coffee shop isn’t just the closest, though that helps. It’s genuinely good. It sits a few minutes from my front door, right by the train station, perfectly placed between home and the town centre. I…

  • 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…