About with love, sm

I've been signing my journal entries "with love, sm" for as long as I can remember. Like I was writing to someone, even when it was for my eyes only.

It didn't matter what I'd written that day. Sad, angry, happy, ten pages long and barely legible, half a page long and boring, whatever version of me showed up on the page, signing off that way was how I grounded myself again and again. It felt like moving forward. Like this is all written now, it's out of my head and onto the page, and what I do with it from here is up to me. Those four words that sealed every entry have always held a strange amount of power to me.

2022 was the first time they left my journal, closing out the lengthy captions on an Instagram account I made for close friends and family. It became a place for pieces of my journals, half formed thoughts, poetry, whatever I was working through as I started this whole soul searching journey. The thought crossed my mind a few times to grow the page, but it always felt a bit too personal, too vulnerable to hand over to strangers. Around the same time, I started signing my art, notes, and letters to friends the same way. "with love, sm" slowly became my signature, and wherever I used it, it held that same energy I felt sealing my journal entries.

Somewhere in there I started wondering if the version of me my friends knew, the endlessly curious one who loves a deep convo and a good metaphor, might be worth sharing with people who didn't know me.

This project is me deciding it is worth it. This project will be the first time "with love, sm" is closing something meant for whoever happens to find it, not just the people who already know me.

Since you might not know me yet, I probably have some convincing to do. Why should you care what I have to say or believe any of it? If I'm being honest, that's part of why I kept putting this off. I'm not interested in performing certainty I don't have. For a long time, I didn't feel like I belonged as a voice in this space at all. In a world of oversaturated wellness and self-improvement content, I don't come to this with any kind of expertise. I'm not showing up with letters after my name, I'm not positive all the time or perfectly put together, I'm not healed and preaching from the other side of it. I'm just in it, same as anyone else. The articles, journal entries, moodboards, playlists, writing prompts, meditations, whatever you find here... they're all coming from a place of learning, unlearning, and staying curious, not from a place of already knowing anything.

There aren't titles when you scroll, and that's on purpose. I didn't want people clicking based on a clever headline or deciding something isn't worth their time before they've even seen it. I wanted this to feel more like flipping through something, letting whatever you're drawn to pull you in, without knowing exactly what you're about to read. Sometimes that ends up being exactly what you needed. Sometimes it's just a collage of images. Either way, I like that it stays a little bit of a surprise.

I used to write these words for no one but me. So if they reach you and mean something, that's more than I ever expected them to do. If anything here makes you pause, see things a little differently, or feel small in a way that makes you more connected, not less, that's the whole point. I'm not here to tell you to just be grateful, or that happiness is a choice, or that everything is fixable if you think about it right. From personal experience, I'd guess a lot of us live a little too in our heads, carrying more than we let on, and forgetting how much say we actually have in how we move through it all. I want this to be a place that says the quiet parts out loud, and interrupts the loop, even for a minute.

with love, sm