The problem is that I already know what works - it’s not complicated; it just doesn’t always happen. So, in case you need it, here’s a little guide for a better day.

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1. Mind

This is the quiet part of the day - the one that sets everything else slightly off or slightly right. I know it works when I don’t rush into it. When I don’t immediately reach for my phone and let everything external take over before I’ve even had a thought of my own. So, concrete things that actually help:

• write a page (by hand, always better)

• read a few pages of a book before anything else

• sit with coffee without doing anything else for five minutes

• avoid your phone for the first 20 minutes (even if you fail, try again tomorrow)

None of this is ambitious. That’s the point. It’s just enough to feel like the day started with you, not around you.

2. Body

This is the one that should be simple, and somehow isn’t.

I know I feel better when I move - not in a dramatic way, just enough to shift something internally. The mistake is turning it into a task, something to complete or optimise. For me, these actually work:

• go to the gym, but don’t overthink it

• do a pilates class (or a short one at home)

• go for a walk without a destination

• take the longer route home, even if it makes no sense

It doesn’t need to be intense. It just needs to happen. The difference is always there afterwards, even if I forget that beforehand.

3. Space

This is the one I ignore the most and feel the fastest. The space around you quietly dictates how the day feels. Not in a dramatic, aesthetic way; just in whether things feel slightly easier or slightly harder than they need to be.

Small things that change more than they should:

• make your bed (or at least fix it a bit)

• clear your desk before sitting down to work

• buy fresh flowers (unnecessary, but effective)

• light a candle in the evening, even if you’re just at home

• open the windows, even if it’s still a bit cold

None of it is essential. But it all accumulates into something that feels… better.

So, for today: I’m not trying to perfect this. Just trying to remember that a good day isn’t something abstract - it’s built out of small, obvious things I already know, and choose (or don’t choose) to do.

Which sounds like a long time, until I tell you what that actually looks like: around 75 handwritten pages. Not typed, not formatted, not even fully legible in parts - just pages in a notebook, written slowly, crossed out, continued, abandoned, returned to. Only then, typed into a simple Word document, Times New Roman 11, simple spacing, down to 55 pages in two years.

There’s a version of this where that feels like failure. Or at least like something adjacent to it. Because the expectation - spoken or not - is that progress should be visible, measurable, consistent. That if you care about something enough, it should move.

And it does move. Just not in the way I imagined it would.

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Part of it is practical; I mean, I only really feel the novel when I write it by hand. It’s not a romantic preference, it’s just how it works. The sentences come differently. Slower, yes, but also more deliberately. There’s less room to escape them, less temptation to edit too quickly or skip ahead. It forces me to stay inside the writing in a way typing never quite does.

But that also means everything takes longer. A paragraph isn’t just a paragraph - it’s time, physical time, spent writing it out, sitting with it, letting it take the shape it’s going to take without rushing it into something more efficient. Hand hurting at times. There’s no acceleration built into the process.

And then there’s everything else: A full-time job that stretches, realistically, from 9am to 7pm. The gym, pilates, the small routines that are meant to keep everything balanced, functional, “together.” The sense that you are, broadly speaking, doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

Which leaves the novel living in tthe margins. What I love is kicked to “whatever is left” at the end of the day. Not neglected, exactly, but not central either. Something you return to when you can, rather than something your life is structured around. And that “when you can” becomes inconsistent. Uneven. Sometimes weeks pass without touching it, and then suddenly there’s a day where something opens and you write three pages in one go, and it feels like you’ve remembered how to do it.

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And then it closes again. So what’s difficult is not the slowness itself, but what it does to your perception of the work.

Because when progress is this gradual, it’s hard to hold onto a sense of momentum. The novel doesn’t feel like something that’s unfolding - it feels like something that exists in fragments, loosely connected, waiting for a version of you that has more time, more clarity, more… something.

It’s very easy, in those moments, to start measuring it against an imagined pace, and doing a “habit tracker” to push yourself harder. The version where you wake up early and write every day. Where weekends are structured around it. Where the novel moves forward in a way that is visible, trackable, reassuring. The version where, after two years, you have something closer to a draft than a collection of pages.

That version exists, but not here.

And I’m starting to think that might be the point, as hard as it is to admit it. Not that slowness is inherently better, or more meaningful, or more “authentic.” But that this is the version of writing that fits into the life I actually have, not the one I imagine I should have. A life where time is limited, where energy is uneven, where creativity has to exist alongside everything else rather than in place of it.

Which makes the process less clean, but also more real. Because the truth is, I am writing it - yes, slowly and inconsistently. In a way that doesn’t always feel like progress. But those fifty-five pages do exist. They weren’t there before. They hold something that didn’t exist before. And even if the movement between them is barely perceptible from one week to the next, it’s still movement; just not the kind that translates easily.

So, I guess I’m trying to accept that some things take longer not because you’re doing them wrong, but because they require a different kind of time. Not the efficient, optimised kind, but the kind that stretches, pauses, returns. The kind that doesn’t align neatly with schedules or expectations.

The novel might take years (please don’t). More than I expected. More than feels comfortable to admit. It might remain, for a long time, something that exists in notebooks rather than as a finished object.

And still, I think it’s worth continuing.

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Not because of the end result, which feels distant and abstract, but because of the act itself. The sitting down, the writing by hand, the small, stubborn insistence on returning to it even when it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere.

Because maybe progress, in this context, isn’t about speed or volume. Maybe it’s about staying. About not letting the slowness turn into abandonment. About allowing something to take the time it needs, even if that time doesn’t fit neatly into the rest of your life.

Fifty-five pages in two years - it’s not nothing, but it doesn’t feel like enough either. And that tension, between knowing you’re doing it, and still feeling like you’re falling short, is where the whole thing seems to live.

It’s not always explicit, and it doesn’t come from one place. It’s ambient. You absorb it without noticing. It lives somewhere between what you see online, what people around you are doing, and what you quietly assume your life should start to look like.

You should be trying new restaurants. You should be travelling more. You should be trying on that brand. You should be saying yes. There is always somewhere to go, something to buy, something to experience before it feels like you’re falling behind.

And none of it is unreasonable, on its own - the problem is the accumulation.

Because at some point, it stops feeling like choice and starts feeling like expectation. Not necessarily imposed by others, but internalised so thoroughly that it becomes difficult to separate what you actually want from what you think you should want.

Frugality, in that context, feels almost out of place.

Not in the obvious sense of saving money - that part is easy to justify - but in the quieter, less visible sense of opting out. Of not participating in everything that is presented as desirable. Of saying no not because you can’t, but because you don’t want to structure your life that way.

And that’s where it becomes complicated: because frugality, done intentionally, is not just about restriction. It’s about attention - it asks you to look more closely at how you spend your time and your money, and to decide - deliberately - what is actually worth it.

Frugality is often framed as either necessity or virtue - something you do because you have to, or because you’re particularly disciplined. But there’s another version of it, quieter and less defined, that has nothing to do with either. A version that is closer to tailoring your life to suit you better. It’s constantly editing and ripping out pieces of yourself that no longer serve you.

Not cutting everything out, not rejecting pleasure, but being more selective about it. Choosing fewer things, but choosing them properly. Allowing space in your days that isn’t immediately filled. Letting your life feel a little less dense, a little less optimised for visibility. Because that’s part of it, too.

So much of what we’re encouraged to do is not just about experience, but about how that experience looks. Where you go, what you order, how often you travel - it all becomes part of a kind of informal narrative you’re expected to build. Something that signals that you’re living well, that you’re making the most of your time.

Frugality disrupts that narrative.

It’s harder to present. Harder to explain. It doesn’t always translate into something visible or easily shared. A quiet day at home, a meal you cooked yourself, an afternoon that wasn’t spent anywhere in particular - these don’t carry the same weight in that system.

And yet, they often feel better. Or at least, more aligned. Because what frugality offers, at its best, is not deprivation, but control. Not over everything, but over enough. Enough to shape your days in a way that reflects what you actually need, rather than what is constantly suggested to you.

Not as a statement, not as a rejection of everything around you, but as a way of creating a life that feels intentional rather than reactive: a sense that your time is yours in a way that it wasn’t before. Not all gaps need to be filled.

Not drafts, not notes, not even the beginnings of ideas that might eventually end up somewhere digital. Everything starts the same way: pen, paper, a notebook that already knows what it’s for.

It’s not a rule I set deliberately. It’s just the only way writing ever feels real to me. The slowness of it, the physicality, the inability to edit too quickly - it forces a kind of attention that typing doesn’t. When I write by hand, I stay longer. I think in sentences instead of fragments. I commit, even when I’m not entirely sure where something is going.

Over time, this turned into something more structured than I expected: I have three notebooks. Always Leuchtturm1917 B5 notebook. Always the same format. The system isn’t complicated, but it’s precise enough that each one has its place.

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The first is the most consistent: daily reflections.

This is where everything goes that doesn’t need to become anything else. Thoughts that are half-formed, observations that might not matter tomorrow, things I’m trying to understand but haven’t yet. It’s not curated - it’s just how I untangle my brain and find some sense on what I feel. It’s not written with an audience in mind. If anything, it’s where writing is at its least performative.

Some days it’s a few lines. Other days it stretches longer. Most of it will never be revisited, which is part of the point. It exists to be written, not to be refined.

The second notebook is more… patient.

This is where the novel lives. Or, more accurately, where it has been living for the past year and a half. It’s slower, more deliberate, and significantly more inconsistent. I’m not proud, but it comes in waves. It goes, it comes, it goes - yet it always comes back. There are long stretches where nothing gets added (usually when my 9-5 is getting intense), followed by days where everything seems to move at once.

Writing a novel by hand feels slightly impractical, maybe even unnecessary. But it also removes something that can get in the way - the temptation to fix things too early, to rewrite before the idea has had time to fully form, or (worse) to let random things get in the way by opening “just a tab or two”. On paper, you move forward because going back is inconvenient. You allow imperfection to stay visible, you allow it to be raw - and there’s something about that that feels honest.

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The third notebook is the most fluid.

This is where short stories begin, where fragments collect, where ideas that feel too shaped for the daily notebook but not quite ready for anything larger end up. It’s also where most of my Substack posts often start - not as finished thoughts, but as sentences, images, small observations that eventually connect into something more coherent.

And then, occasionally, it turns into something else entirely: children’s stories.

Which feels like a different kind of writing altogether - simpler on the surface, but strangely precise. It asks for clarity without losing imagination, for structure without overcomplicating it. It’s probably the most instinctive of the three, even if it takes time to get right. And trust me, a 2 or 3-page story can take a long time.

What I like about this system is not its efficiency (as it isn’t…), but its separation.

Each notebook holds a different version of writing. A different pace, a different expectation, a different level of intention. Nothing competes with anything else. The novel doesn’t interrupt the daily reflections. The short stories don’t have to justify themselves against something larger. Everything has space to exist on its own terms.

And because it all happens by hand, there’s a kind of continuity between them.

The same pen (always a blue uniball, FYI). The same movement across the page. The same slight hesitation before starting something new.

It makes writing feel less like output and more like practice. Something you return to, rather than something you produce.

Eventually, some of it moves elsewhere. The Substack posts get typed, edited, shaped into something more finished. The fragments become stories, or don’t. The novel, at some point, will have to leave the notebook and become something else entirely (I hope).

But the beginning is always the same: a blank page, a pen, and the quiet assumption that whatever comes next doesn’t have to be perfect - just written.

The problem is that I don’t recognise myself in that.

Reading has never been something I’ve had to manage. It’s been the constant - the thing that continues regardless of everything else. Even when I’m busy, distracted, sad, slightly off, I can still sit down with a book and disappear into it. There’s no friction to it, no negotiation. It just happens.

Or it did.

Because this doesn’t feel like a classic reading slump. It feels more like something has quietly shifted in the mechanics of it. I still read, technically. I pick up books, I start them, I move through a few pages, sometimes even a chapter or two. But the absorption isn’t there. The ease is gone. I’m aware of myself reading in a way that feels almost intrusive, as if there’s a layer between me and the text that didn’t exist before.

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It’s not dramatic enough to call a break, but it’s persistent enough to notice.

And what makes it worse is that the books themselves aren’t the problem. If anything, that would be easier to deal with. A bad book can be abandoned without much thought. But this is happening with books I should like, books I chose carefully, books that, under any other circumstances, would have worked.

Instead, they just… don’t hold.

I find myself checking how many pages are left in a chapter, putting the book down without intending to, reaching for it again out of habit rather than desire. The whole thing feels slightly performative, like I’m going through the motions of reading rather than actually being inside it.

Which is new, and not particularly welcome.

Because when something has always come naturally, you don’t develop strategies for when it doesn’t. There’s no fallback plan. You can’t troubleshoot it in any meaningful way, because you’ve never had to think about how it works in the first place.

So the instinct is to try to correct it. To switch books, switch genres, return to things that feel safe or familiar. To find something that will break the pattern and pull you back into that old rhythm.

But that approach assumes that the problem is external; that the right book will fix it. However, I’m not convinced that’s true.

If anything, the more I try to force my way out of it, the more resistant it becomes. The awareness intensifies. Reading stops being something I fall into and becomes something I’m actively trying to make happen, which is almost the opposite of how it’s supposed to work.

And underneath all of that is a quieter, slightly uncomfortable thought: maybe nothing is actually wrong.

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Maybe this isn’t a failure of attention or discipline, but simply a pause. We tend to treat reading as a stable habit, something that should remain constant regardless of everything else. But it isn’t. It moves. It contracts. It disappears and returns in ways that don’t always make sense in the moment.

The difference, this time, is that I’m noticing it. And noticing it makes it feel bigger than it probably is.

Because the desire to read hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, it’s still very much there. I still want that experience of being absorbed, of losing track of time inside a book, of finishing something and immediately reaching for the next. That version of reading still feels like mine.

It’s just slightly out of reach.

So for now, I’m trying to leave it alone. Not fix it, not optimise it, not turn it into something that needs to be solved. Just let it exist as it is, without attaching too much meaning to it.

Because if reading has always been something that comes naturally, then it will probably return in the same way - quietly, without announcement, without effort. One day, a few pages will turn into more.

Until then, I’m still here. Just reading a little differently than I’m used to.

The light changes.

Jacarandás in Lisbon

It lingers a little longer in the late afternoon, stretches itself across walls and tables as if it has nowhere urgent to be. You start opening windows again, not because you have to, but because you want to. Then, it hesitates. It tests the air. It gives you one good afternoon and then takes it back the next day, as if unsure whether you’re ready for it. You don’t mark its beginning - you notice it retroactively, somewhere in between leaving a window open and not closing it again.

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And with that comes the quiet urge to begin again, in small, almost unserious ways.

I always think of Mrs. Dalloway this time of year - not for its plot (which barely insists on itself), but for that opening gesture: Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. There is something about that sentence that feels inherently spring-like. Not because it is grand or transformative, but because it isn’t. It is a decision rooted in the everyday, in the idea that you might step outside, walk through the city, choose something living and bring it home.

Spring rarely arrives as a revelation. It arrives as permission, I think.

Permission to care again about small things. About the way a room looks in the morning. About what you cook, what you wear, what you listen to while doing absolutely nothing important. Even music starts to feel different. You notice yourself reaching, almost instinctively, for The Four Seasons, by Vivaldi - not to sit and analyse it, but to let it fill the background of an afternoon that doesn’t need explaining.

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Winter, in its own way, justifies withdrawal. You stay in, you postpone, you accept a certain heaviness as inevitable. Spring does something more subtle: it doesn’t demand that you become a new person, but it makes it slightly harder to remain entirely unchanged. You find yourself tidying without planning to. Buying flowers without a reason. Walking a longer route home just because the air allows for it.

It doesn’t erase the heaviness of the months before, nor does it promise permanence. It simply interrupts. It offers, briefly, the possibility of ease - of inhabiting your life a little more lightly, without needing to justify it.

Which is why the smallest rituals start to matter.

Opening the windows in the morning. Letting music play without skipping through it. Rearranging a space for no practical reason. Buying flowers, even if you don’t usually. Especially if you don’t usually.

None of it changes anything, and yet it does.

Because maybe what shifts in spring is not your life, but your attention. You begin to notice what is already there: the way light moves, the way air feels, the way a day can unfold without urgency if you allow it to.

And that, in itself, is enough.

It felt almost scripted - like a low-budget, late-twenties version of Sex and the City. Four women, one table, too many shared plates, and enough “So… I have something to tell you” to power an entire season.

One had a new job - she spoke about it carefully, as if it might evaporate if she sounded too confident. We reassured her aggressively, as good friends do; Another had a new boyfriend - the early-stage kind, where everything feels slightly cinematic, insisting it’s “nothing serious,” which is universally recognised as a lie; The third had a new house and became suddenly aware that adulthood is not abstract: it is mortgage-shaped, it requires choosing a sofa and it is (very) expensive; And then there was an engagement: a ring passed around the table like a sacred object. The collective inhale. The delight. The half-jokes about dress codes and open bars that barely disguise the deeper realization: we are old enough now for this to be real.

Between bites of pasta and refilled glasses, it hit me - this is what our late twenties look like. Not tidy, linear and synchronised.

There’s something disorienting about this stage of life. In your early twenties, everyone is roughly in the same place - studying, figuring it out, drifting in parallel. But suddenly, without warning, the paths diverge. The milestones scatter. Life accelerates in different directions.

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Comparison becomes tempting. At dinner, though, it didn’t exist. There was no competition, no quiet measurement of who was “ahead.” Only curiosity. Questions. Laughter. The shared understanding that every beginning carries both excitement and terror.

Because here’s the unglamorous truth about new beginnings: they are messy. A new job means impostor syndrome; a new relationship means vulnerability; a new house means unexpected repairs; and an engagement means redefining yourself as part of something larger.

Even the happiest news contains uncertainty. But perhaps that’s what made the dinner feel so charged. We weren’t celebrating arrival. We were celebrating movement. The courage to say yes to something unformed. The willingness to disrupt comfort.

There was a moment - somewhere between dessert and a second bottle of wine - where I looked around the table and felt something rare: pride without envy. A recognition that we are all becoming different versions of ourselves, and somehow still managing to meet in the middle - just four women navigating the strange elasticity of their late twenties stretching into futures that don’t match but still make sense.

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We toasted to everything new - and maybe, quietly, to the fact that even as life pulls us in different directions, we still choose the same table.

I expected it to be elegant: controlled movements, soft lighting, quiet music. At least that’s what the pilates girl aesthetic made me believe.

It was nothing like that: the first class felt like a private confrontation. The machine looks gentle - springs, straps, a sliding carriage - almost architectural in its restraint. But within minutes, my muscles were trembling in ways that felt both alarming and humbling. Movements that seemed small demanded an almost surgical level of attention. There is nowhere to hide on a reformer. If you disengage mentally, your body exposes you immediately. So what surprised me most wasn’t the difficulty: it was the precision.

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Reformer pilates doesn’t reward speed or spectacle. It asks for alignment. For control. For patience. It demands that you slow down enough to notice where you compensate, where you collapse, where you avoid effort. The adjustments are subtle - a shoulder lowered, a rib tucked, a breath deepened - but they change everything.

It’s strength without noise. There’s no music loud enough to distract you from your own instability. No dramatic choreography. Just repetition and resistance. And in that repetition, something quietly shifts: I’ve started to look forward to the shaking.

Not because I enjoy discomfort, but because it feels honest. The trembling isn’t failure; it’s engagement. It’s the body learning something new. The moment just before collapse, when you decide to stay.

There’s also something deeply grounding about working against springs. Resistance that pushes back proportionally. The more intention you bring, the more the machine responds. It feels like a conversation: measured, contained, deliberate.

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In a life that often feels fast and abstract, reformer Pilates pulls me back into something physical and exact. It reminds me that strength is built slowly. That alignment is a practice, not a posture. That control isn’t rigidity - it’s awareness. And perhaps that’s what I’ve been loving most.

It’s not about becoming smaller, or leaner, or more aesthetic - although I do hope the mirror to reward the effort. It’s about feeling capable and balanced, as there is a quiet confidence that comes from realising you can hold a position a little longer than you thought. From discovering that stability is not static, but active.

Two months in, I still shake (a lot…), I still misalign and I still underestimate the springs. But I leave each class feeling much better. So I guess sometimes hobbies don’t need to become identities, they don’t need to greatly change us. Sometimes, as basic as this may sound, they just need to make us feel good.

And yet I keep coming back to it. Not because I believe life should look like a film, but because sometimes it needs to feel like one.

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If there is a patron saint of this instinct, it might be Nancy Meyers. Her films are famous for their kitchens - expansive, sunlit, improbably beautiful - but what they really offer is permission to believe that small rituals matter. That setting the table nicely, choosing flowers, cooking slowly, or arranging a room with care is not frivolous, but meaningful.

In a Nancy Meyers world, life is still complicated. People are divorced. They’re lonely. They’re disappointed. They’re starting over later than they planned. But the pain is cushioned by attention. By the belief that beauty can coexist with difficulty - not as denial, but as support. So that’s the version of “romanticizing life” that interests me - the real one.

Not pretending everything is perfect, not aestheticising hardship. But choosing to frame your days with intention rather than rush. Letting certain moments feel larger than they technically are - lighting a candle on a random Tuesday; buying flowers just because; using the good plates when no one is coming over; sitting down to read without multitasking.

None of this changes the structure of your life. It doesn’t fix anything. But it shifts the texture.

In a world that rewards efficiency, romanticizing life is a small rebellion. It says: this moment deserves care even if no one is watching. It insists that pleasure doesn’t need to be earned through productivity. That beauty doesn’t have to justify itself.

There’s also something quietly adult about it. Nancy Meyers films are rarely about beginnings - they’re about continuations. About choosing softness after disappointment and about building a life that feels good to inhabit, not impressive to display.

Romanticizing life, in that sense, is not about illusion. It’s about authorship. About deciding how you want your days to feel, even when circumstances aren’t ideal. About understanding that mood is shaped not just by events, but by attention.

I don’t want every day to feel cinematic. That would be exhausting. But I do want some days to feel considered, and held gently.

After all, life is happening anyway. We might as well choose how we look at it.

By tomorrow, the world will divide itself neatly into categories: people pretending not to care, people caring too much, people insisting they “don’t really do Valentine’s Day,” (me) and people who absolutely do - just discreetly, in a way that suggests effort without desperation.

It’s a day that manages to feel both overdetermined and strangely vague. Everyone knows it’s coming. No one is quite sure what they’re supposed to do with it.

I’ve been on all sides of it. Single, situation-shipy, partnered, deeply in love, quietly drifting, ambivalent, optimistic, mildly suspicious. And the truth is: Valentine’s Day is less about love itself and more about the expectations we attach to it. Which is impressive, considering love already carries quite enough weight on its own.

If you’re in a relationship, Valentine’s Day can feel like a test you didn’t sign up for. Will there be flowers? Should there be flowers? Are flowers too much? Is no flowers a statement?

What counts as thoughtful, and what crosses into performative? At what point does effort become pressure? Suddenly, affection is negotiated through logistics, timing, and restaurant availability. Kid you not, I have a friend who books dozens of tables weeks in advance in cool places, makes it full and then sells the reservations. We have reached the point in which there is a side economy for dinner reservations on Valentine’s. That has a name, and it’s genius rock bottom.

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If you’re single, it’s a different kind of choreography. You either lean into independence (“self-love, actually”), irony (“anti-Valentine’s plans”), or radical nonchalance (“just another day”). Or you do all three at once, depending on the hour.

There’s also the subtle pressure to prove that being single is not a temporary malfunction. That you’re fulfilled. That you’re fine. That you’re not secretly waiting for tomorrow to be over.

And yet - both sides are circling the same thing. The desire to feel chosen, seen, considered. Preferably without having to explain why. What we rarely admit is that love doesn’t really operate on a calendar (ta-da!). It doesn’t arrive neatly packaged or reliably punctual. It shows up on random Tuesdays. In shared silences. In inside jokes no one else would understand. In texts sent without occasion. In remembering how someone takes their coffee.

Valentine’s Day, for all its awkwardness, is really just a concentrated version of that longing. A slightly theatrical reminder that connection matters, even if the execution is clumsy.

So whether tomorrow involves a carefully planned dinner (or multiple, if you’re my friend and you secretly read my posts), a last-minute takeaway, a night alone with a book, a “Galentine’s” or a group chat full of jokes about capitalism … none of it disqualifies you from love. Or romance. Or meaning.

If anything, the most relatable Valentine’s Day feeling might be this: wanting closeness without pressure, and love without having to caption it.

Which, honestly, feels like a pretty good ambition - for February 14th, and for the rest of the year too.

They interrupt time just enough to make you notice it passing - just enough to remind you that another year has unfolded, largely without permission or commentary. Life, as always, has been happening while you were busy living it - super cliché, I know.

So, the truth is birthdays don’t demand transformation. They don’t insist on reinvention, and they don’t promise clarity. If anything, they expose how little changes all at once - and how much shifts gradually, almost invisibly. You wake up the same person you were the day before, only slightly more aware of the accumulation behind you.

I used to think birthdays were about counting forward. Now they feel more like glancing sideways. Remembering who you were when you last stood here. They invite a particular kind of reckoning - not the loud kind, but more like a private inventory. What do I still want? What no longer matters as much as I once thought? What am I carrying that I could, perhaps, set down?

There’s also a gentleness to birthdays that often goes unnoticed: they give you permission to be reflective without justification. As the years go by, birthdays seem less interested in spectacle and more interested in alignment. In whether the life you’re living still resembles the one you recognise. In whether you’re paying attention - not to achievements, but to presence.

I don’t expect birthdays to give me answers anymore. I’m content if they give me a brief awareness of where I am, who I am becoming, and how much of that journey has been quiet rather than visible.

Perhaps that’s their real meaning - not celebration, but acknowledgment. But anyways… (some days late) happy birthday to me, I guess.

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Now, healthy habits feel less like ambition and more like care. Less about optimisation (thank God), and more about staying with myself when things get busy, noisy, or uncertain. Staying present in small, repeatable ways.

Most of the habits I’ve kept didn’t arrive with fanfare (this is SUCH a word). They weren’t announced on a Monday, or tied to a resolution. They appeared quietly, often out of necessity. Reading before bed because scrolling made me restless. Walking without headphones because I needed to hear my own thoughts again. Writing a few lines in a notebook, even if it wasn’t much, just to stay connected with my own writing every day - whether it is my (ongoing, never-ending) novel, my (occasional) children’s fiction, or my substack. Because 8-year-old me already loved to write, and I owe it to her to push through.

None of this looks impressive from the outside… and maybe that’s the point.

For a long time, I believed habits had to be transformative (performative?) to count. That if they weren’t visible, measurable, or slightly painful, they weren’t doing enough. But the habits that have lasted are the ones that ask very little of me - and give something back in return.

Healthy habits, I’m learning, are not about control. They’re about permission. Permission to slow down. To repeat what works. To stop chasing novelty for its own sake. To accept that some days will be messy, interrupted, imperfect; and that the habit doesn’t disappear just because I missed it once. There’s also a kind of honesty required. You have to notice what actually helps, not what looks good on paper. For me, that meant admitting that strict routines make me anxious, that silence sometimes feels safer than motivation, that consistency matters more than intensity.

Good habits, it turns out, just offer a small structure when everything else feels loose. They create a sense of continuity when time feels fractured. To remind you - gently, repeatedly - that you can return to yourself without ceremony.

Some habits I’ll keep forever. Others will fade when they’re no longer needed. That doesn’t make them failures: it just makes them responsive. Perhaps that’s what healthy really means: not aspirational, but attentive. A way of listening to what you need now, rather than who you think you should become.

And maybe the quietest habit of all - the one I’m still learning - is allowing that inner growth to happen.

1. When you pick up a book, what are you most hoping it will give you?

• A. A feeling of being understood, quietly and without effort

• B. Insight into human behaviour - especially the uncomfortable parts

• C. Language that slows me down and makes me pay attention

• D. A mirror for my own questions about who I am or who I’m becoming

• E. Intensity - something that grips me emotionally and doesn’t let go

2. A book stays with you longest when:

• A. It feels like it knew something about you without naming it

• B. It leaves you morally unsettled, unsure who was right - or if anyone was

• C. The sentences themselves linger, independent of plot

• D. It reframes your ideas about identity, ambition, or belonging

• E. Its atmosphere follows you for days, like a mood you can’t shake

3. Your relationship with rereading is best described as:

• A. I return to the same books when I need comfort or recognition

• B. I reread to catch motives, silences, and ethical fault lines I missed

• C. Rereading is essential - it’s where the real book lives

• D. I reread at turning points, when I feel unsure of myself

• E. I reread obsessively, especially books that hurt a little

4. You’re most drawn to stories that explore:

• A. Quiet lives, inner worlds, and unspoken longing

• B. Guilt, responsibility, and irreversible mistakes

• C. Consciousness, perception, and the limits of language

• D. The tension between who someone is and who they’re expected to be

• E. Passion, memory, obsession, and the past refusing to stay buried

5. A book disappoints you when:

• A. It feels emotionally hollow or evasive

• B. It simplifies something that should have remained complex

• C. It doesn’t trust the reader enough

• D. It avoids the hardest questions

• E. It lacks emotional or atmospheric intensity

Your results are right here…

• Mostly A: You read to feel less alone

You’re drawn to interior lives, quiet sadness, and books that sit beside you rather than perform for you. You value recognition over resolution, and you don’t need urgency to feel moved. Read next: Stoner, The bell jar, The book of disquiet or, last, anything by António Lobo Antunes (seriously)

• Mostly B: You read to understand how people work

You’re interested in moral ambiguity, secrets, and the way choices ripple outward. You enjoy being unsettled - as long as the discomfort is intelligent. Read next: Atonement, The informers, or a Heart so white (by Javier Marías; although not particularly about this book, I wrote an issue on his work)

• Mostly C: You read for shape, or language itself

Style matters. Form matters. You’re patient, attentive, and suspicious of easy clarity. You don’t mind not understanding everything - immediately, or ever. Read next: Mrs Dalloway, Fictions, Ulisses (by James Joyce; if curious about his work, you can check my issue on A portrait of the artist as a young man) or, last, anything by António Lobo Antunes (seriously)

• Mostly D: You read to become yourself

You’re drawn to identity, ambition, art, and belonging - like coming-of-age and coming-into-consciousness. You like books that ask uncomfortable, formative questions. Read next: A portrait of the artist as a young man, My brilliant friend, or The waves (if curious about Virginia Woolf’s work, you can check my issues on her diaries or Mrs. Dalloway)

• Mostly E: You read for intensity!

You care about atmosphere, obsession, memory, and emotional extremes. You like books that linger, disturb, and refuse to resolve cleanly. Read next: Wuthering heights, The great Gatsby, or One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (love this one)

Note: Most of us won’t fit neatly into one letter; we shift. Still, the book you’re drawn to now often says something about what you’re ready to feel. If you feel like sharing, tell me your letter!

Somewhere along the way, that belief quietly collapsed. There were fewer urges to say yes; less curiosity about what everyone else was doing; just a growing fondness for evenings that remained blank, untouched by expectation.

Enter JOMO - the joy of missing out - a concept that sounds smug until you actually experience it. Then it feels less like a trend and more like a mild miracle. The realization that not only is it acceptable to stay in, it can be actively pleasurable. That nothing bad happens when you don’t attend everything. That the world, astonishingly, continues without you.

There is something deeply comforting about folding inward as time passes. About choosing privacy without apology. About discovering that your own company is not a consolation prize but a perfectly valid plan. I’ve come to enjoy the small, quiet rituals: reading without interruption, cooking slowly, walking without tracking my steps, letting thoughts wander without trying to turn them into something useful.

I still like people, I promise. I enjoy conversation, dinners that stretch late, laughter that catches you off guard. This isn’t about becoming a hermit or pretending I’ve transcended social life. It’s about understanding that energy is not infinite, and that spreading it thinly rarely leads to anything memorable.

There’s also an unexpected humor in it all. The relief of declining an invitation and realizing - moments later - that you’re genuinely happy about it. That you won’t have to come up with an excuse to cancel a few days later. The pleasure of pajamas that come on early. The quiet thrill of knowing you’ll wake up rested. These are not glamorous joys, but they are reliable ones.

What surprises me most is how protective I’ve become of my inner life. How unwilling I am now to surrender it to constant availability. Not everything needs to be shared. Not every thought needs an audience. Some moments lose their shape when exposed too quickly.

Privacy, it turns out, is not isolation. It’s a form of care.

As time passes, I feel less interested in being everywhere and more interested in being somewhere, but fully. In choosing depth over breadth. In allowing certain days to be unremarkable, undocumented, entirely my own. A quieter life, I’ve learned, is not a smaller one. It’s often a more spacious one.

JOMO isn’t about missing out at all. It’s about opting in - to rest, to presence, to yourself.

The moment I enter the water, the world dulls. Sound collapses into a low, distant hush. Movement becomes slower, heavier, deliberate. Even thought seems to soften around the edges. Whatever urgency I carried with me to the pool stays on the tiled floor, folded into my clothes, waiting.

I don’t swim to arrive anywhere: I swim just to repeat. Again and again, ever since I was 6 years old and my mom signed me up for swimming lessons. Everyone hated it, and I remember I just didn’t understand why.

There is something deeply reassuring about the narrowness of it: one lane, back and forth, the same few metres measured again and again. The body learns the pattern quickly. Arms extend, pull, release. Breath turns into rhythm rather than effort. Counting replaces thinking. Or perhaps thinking replaces itself with something quieter.

In the water, I am no longer impressive or efficient or productive. I am simply present. I am reduced to sensation: the cool shock at the start, the ache in the shoulders, the faint burn in the lungs when I hold my breath just a little too long. Time dissolves into laps. The mind, unburdened, wanders without direction.

Swimming feels like permission to be unfinished.

Unlike walking or running, there is no forward motion in the ordinary sense. You return to the same wall again and again. Progress isn’t measured by distance but by endurance, by attention, by the willingness to stay. It’s strangely humbling. No matter how many laps you’ve swum before, the water doesn’t remember you.

And maybe that’s the gift.

In a life that constantly asks for articulation - opinions, decisions, explanations - swimming offers a rare refusal. You can’t talk in the water. You can’t multitask. You can’t scroll. You are held, briefly, in a medium that demands your full presence but nothing else.

Sometimes I come out calmer. Sometimes strangely emotional, as if the water has loosened something I wasn’t ready to name. But I always come out clearer - closer to the body I so often ignore in favour of the mind.

I think swimming has taught me that stillness doesn’t always look like stopping. Sometimes it looks like repetition. Sometimes it looks like moving in place until the noise inside you loses its grip.

In the water, I am not building anything. I am not proving anything. I am not becoming a better version of myself. I am just breathing, moving, floating - and for a little while, that is enough.

I had no revelations that rearranged my life overnight. No sudden clarity, no cinematic before-and-after. What I learned arrived slowly, unevenly, in fragments - the kind of learning you only notice when you look back and realise you are no longer standing where you once were.

This year taught me, above all, to be more self-assured. Not loudly, but steadily - the kind of assurance that grows when you stop needing permission. So, here are seven things that stayed with me:

1. People will always have opinions about your choices - especially at work. If you slow down, you’re not ambitious enough. If you care too much, you’re naïve. If you set boundaries, you’re difficult. There is no version of yourself that will satisfy everyone. So I learned to stop trying.

2. Work expands to fill the space you give it. Not because it’s evil, but because it’s hungry. If you don’t decide where it ends, it won’t. I can be competent, reliable, dedicated - and still not want my job to be my entire identity. This took me longer than I care to admit - and I only stopped when my therapist told me I was borderline burned-out.

3. Protecting your hobbies is not indulgence - it’s survival. The things that don’t earn money but make you feel like yourself are not extras. They are anchors. When I neglect them, everything else becomes heavier.

4. Rest is not something you earn. I spent years believing rest had to be justified. This year, I learned that rest is preventative, not indulgent.

5. You don’t have to explain your balance to people who benefit from you being unbalanced. This one hurt - after X or Y person at work making me feel bad for not working 24/7, or for leaving slightly earlier for a medical appointment literally once. F-you, btw.

I know most of these learnings revolve around work, or work-life balance (whatever that means). However, that was always the part that consumed me and, consequently, validated me. Good grades, good jobs, etc: something I wanted and feared at the same time; so, as surprising as it can be, I decided to stop revolving around it. Returning to what I love will always feel inconvenient - but so, so necessary. I feel grounded for the first time in years.

Writing doesn’t fit neatly into my days. That’s precisely why it matters.

As for resolutions, I don’t want grand ones. I don’t want reinvention. I want continuity with myself. So, in 2026, I just want to:

1. Keep choosing depth over speed.

2. Defend my time with the same seriousness I defend my work.

3. Stay close to my hobbies, even when I’m tired. Especially then.

4. Trust my own pace and worth - and stop comparing.

5. Believe that my way of doing things doesn’t need validation.

Mostly, I want to remain self-assured in a world that quietly encourages doubt - doubt about pace, priorities, and limits. New me is calling!

I remember that Christmas not by the gifts or the food or the lights, but by the absence. Everything felt muted, as though someone had turned the colour down on the world. The house was full, yet somehow empty. Even the air felt different - heavier, slower, stunned by the sudden reshaping of what had always been a familiar season.

And the years that followed repeated the pattern.

You would think grief softens itself, but it doesn’t. Not really. Each December returned with its own ache, its own reminder of what had happened and when. While other families slipped back into celebration, ours hovered somewhere between ritual and memory, unsure how to inhabit a holiday that now felt like a wound.

It took five or six years for tradition to begin returning in small ways - cautious, tentative, like a shy guest approaching the door. A dessert reintroduced. A song hummed quietly. A familiar decoration brought out of a box and placed on the table. But even then, even as the holiday slowly regained its shape, it was never what it had been.

There was still an empty seat at the table. Or three, if I count my grandfathers. Three absences that never fully learned how to sit quietly.

People talk about grief as if it is something you move through, cross over, finish. I’ve never found that to be true. It doesn’t disappear; it rearranges things and it comes in waves. Some days it makes you dive deep, other days the cold water just touches your feet. For my family, grief became part of the architecture of the season - invisible to others, unmistakable to us.

Every December 23rd, I feel that old heaviness again - not as sharply as in 2008, but enough to remember that our lives were marked by this day. Enough to know that something ended then, and something else - quieter, more fragile - began.

I no longer expect Christmas to be what it once was. But I’ve come to accept the version it became: holiday shaped by loss, softened by time, held together by the people who remain.

I know now that, while some traditions return slowly, others never return at all. And perhaps that’s its own kind of truth - that love continues, but differently. So every year on this date, I pause and remember her. Not just the loss, but the years before it: the warmth she brought, the steadiness she embodied, the way she made Christmas feel like something whole.

Now, it is not the same. It will never be the same.

But it is still ours.

For me, that part was writing.

I have loved it for as long as I can remember. I was seven or eight when I wrote my first short stories, the kind of tiny narratives children invent without overthinking: uneven, imaginative, utterly sincere. As soon as I could form letters, I wanted to tell stories. That instinct felt natural, effortless, mine.

And then, gradually, other expectations arrived: law school, business school, X school. Degrees, good grades and good jobs. Something better - whatever better meant. People weren’t trying to suppress me; they were trying to protect me. They wanted what they believed would be best. But best is slippery. It changes shape depending on who is defining it.

I wanted to keep writing - I also wanted to please. So eventually, inevitably, I caved.

I found myself doing the sensible thing: following the crowd, building a stable path, making a career in a demanding, high-pressure world. A world I am competent in - maybe even good at - but not a world I love. Not in the way some people talk about loving their work, glowing with purpose. I admire that feeling in them. Some days, I envy it. Some days, I wish I could borrow it just long enough to stop questioning myself.

Still, I delivered. Still, I worked. Not a 9–5, but a 9–8 or 9–whenever, which becomes its own kind of gravity. And the longer I stayed in that rhythm, the more distant the person I once was began to feel - like someone I used to know but couldn’t quite remember how to speak to anymore.

Something shifted last year - late 2023, or 2024, more or less. Not dramatically, not all at once, but enough. A slow loosening. Breathing deep. I realised I deserved to choose myself again. After years of looking outward, I turned inward, almost shyly. A small peek. A glance. And there it was: that voice I’d been ignoring, the one that never really stopped speaking, even when I pretended not to hear it.

Your calling doesn’t disappear just because you walk away from it.

It waits, it insists.

So I came back to writing - awkwardly at first, nervously, like someone returning to a childhood home after a long absence, unsure whether their key still fits. I created this Substack not to publish my deepest work (that still goes in a notebook, like it always did when I was little) but to ground myself. To force a rhythm. To practice showing up again.

And strangely, beautifully, it’s working. Experimenting, trying things, feeling my way through books and columns and ideas - all of it feels like returning to myself after years of speaking in someone else’s voice.

I’m writing a novel. I’m also exploring children’s literature (which I love). I’m letting myself try whatever calls to me.

Balancing it all is hard, as I am still working all the time - but forgetting who I am is much harder.

I don’t know if it’s too late now; I hope it isn’t. But even if it is, it feels good to be home.

A friend of mine lost his grandmother. Another, older friend, lost his grandson in a car crash. Two families grieving at two ends of the human timeline, and yet the weight of it - the interruption, the quiet after the news - felt strangely similar.

Grief rearranges the air in a room long before it rearranges anything else.

What I keep thinking about, in the quiet moments between these conversations, is how unremarkable ordinary days seem until they suddenly aren’t. One phone call, one knock on the door, one sentence said too slowly - and the world tilts just enough that nothing quite rests where it used to.

There is no right way to respond. People say the usual things, flowers arrive, food is delivered. And yet nothing really touches the wound. It’s not that the gestures don’t matter; they do. But they fall gently against something too raw to absorb them.

I went to the hospital to visit one of them and was struck again by the strange holiness of those corridors. The hushed movements. The breath-held waiting. The thin curtains that never quite close. I believe, now, that hospitals have heard more prayers than churches. Not the formal ones - not the ones with structure and rhythm - but the whispered, desperate kind that people only speak when they’ve run out of everything else.

Grief is not symmetrical. A grandmother and a grandson are not the same kind of loss. One closes a chapter; the other tears a page out mid-sentence. But pain doesn’t follow logic. It spreads according to its own map, touching everything nearby.

What connects these two families, I think, is not the size of their grief but the suddenness of the absence. That shock - the mind trying to understand that someone who was vividly present only days ago has slipped into a space where presence no longer applies. And perhaps what connects all of us is this: no matter how old we become, or how prepared we think we are, death always feels like an interruption. A misplacement. A sentence cut short without punctuation.

I found myself remembering small things about the people who are gone - gestures, phrases, the way they touched a shoulder or laughed at the end of a story. It’s strange, isn’t it, how memory chooses its details? It’s never the important moments it preserves, but the quiet, almost forgettable ones. In that way, grief is a kind of editing; it highlights what we didn’t realise mattered.

I don’t pretend to understand loss better just because it surrounded me this week - unfortunately, I think I began to understand it quite early in my life. But I’m beginning to see that mourning is not only the act of missing someone - it’s the slow work of rebuilding the world around the shape of their absence.

People carry on, of course. The world doesn’t offer them another option - life demands continuation. But somewhere beneath all that movement, a small part of us stays still for a while, as if holding vigil.

And maybe that stillness is its own kind of prayer.

Lately, I’ve been feeling the pull of that scene more than ever. I’ve found myself slipping into the habit of buying fresh flowers, almost without meaning to - as though some soft part of my life has been asking for them long before I realized it.

Peonies, especially. There is something about their extravagance, their refusal to bloom politely. The way they arrive tight as fists and then unfurl into full, decadent softness, as if performing a slow-motion exhale. They are flowers that take up space unapologetically, flowers that remind you that beauty doesn’t have to be measured or modest. Sometimes it can be unabashed, excessive, a little dramatic.

And maybe that’s what I’ve needed. A bit of softness that isn’t afraid of itself. A quiet, lovely insistence on blooming anyway.

When I bring them home - wrapped in paper, petals brushing against my wrist like a secret - the apartment feels different: mornings are gentler and evenings settle more easily. They create a kind of interior weather, one that has nothing to do with the outside world: a pocket of calm, a miniature season of my own making.

I don’t think we talk enough about how small rituals anchor us. Not the big, life-defining ones, but the tiny, almost invisible gestures - the ones that signal care, attention, and desire. Buying fresh flowers has become that for me. A way of saying: I am here, paying attention to my own life. A reminder that I don’t need a reason to bring something beautiful into my home.

And perhaps that’s why Clarissa Dalloway resonates so much. She didn’t need an occasion. The party was an excuse; the flowers were the point. A moment of choosing beauty, of choosing herself.

So yes - fresh flowers, please. Not for the guests, not for the weeks when everything feels composed, but for the in-between days. For the pleasure of watching peonies remember what they were meant to become - and, a bit more poetically, for the reminder that I can do the same.