the secret ingredient to creating a life you don’t want to escape

hello.

i haven’t posted anything for the past couple of days because they were, in all honesty, some of the hardest days i’ve had in a long while. my cousin passed away from cancer — the kind of news that folds the air in your chest into something heavy and unbreathable. it was devastating for the whole family. at the same time, my husband was hospitalized for kidney stones. i had to be there with him, but i also had a toddler and a dog at home. and somehow, through a coincidence of timing or maybe just life’s cruel humor, there was no one who could help me — no friends who could step in, no family who could make it to give me a hand in time.

i couldn’t go to my cousin’s funeral. i was alone, running the house, managing my child, checking on my husband in the hospital, and trying not to unravel. i have severe anxiety, paired with a little bit of OCD — a combination that turns already hard days into something close to unbearable. mentally, i wasn’t in a good place. and out of respect for what had happened, and out of an inability to summon words that didn’t feel shallow or misplaced, i stayed silent here.

but after days of marinating in that silence, i realized it wasn’t helping me. grief and stress are strange — they ask for rest, but sometimes the kind that makes you feel worse if you stay in it too long. so, i decided i had to come back to my life, not in a way that pretends nothing happened, but in a way that lets me live with what happened. to keep showing up. to keep writing. to keep going, even if the going feels heavy.

and so, here we go.

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sometimes life doesn’t offer us the luxury of waiting for the perfect moment. the kind of moment where you feel rested, hopeful, and ready to take on the world. sometimes life insists on happening all at once — grief, pain, chaos, and all — and if you’re like me, it’s less about making a grand plan to fix it and more about figuring out how to survive the mess without losing yourself. the secret to building a life that doesn’t feel like something you need to run away from isn’t found in the bright, curated highlights or in the promises of reinvention. it’s nestled in the way you learn to hold the ordinary, the hard, and the unexpected without pretending they don’t exist.