Welcome

I've been signing my journal entries "with love, sm" for as long as I can remember. Even though it's always been just for me, for nobody else to read.

It never matters what's actually on the page that day. Sad, angry, happy, barely legible, doesn't matter. Signing off that way is how I ground myself after writing it. Like okay, it's all out of my head now, it's on the page, and what I do with it from here is up to me. Those four words have always held more power for me than they probably should, but they do.

For a long time that felt like enough. The signing off part was mine, it didn't need anyone else attached to it. But I think I always knew, somewhere in the back of my head, that I wanted this to be more than pages in a notebook eventually. I just didn't feel like I had any right to make that happen yet.

That's the real reason this took so long to start.

I didn't feel like I belonged as a voice in this space (now I feel maybe 10% like I do so we're getting somewhere). Wellness and self improvement content is so saturated right now, and a lot of it comes from people who sound like they've already arrived somewhere. Like they have the certificate, the framework, the years of hindsight, the neat little lesson at the end of the story. I don't really have any of that. I'm not healed and preaching from the other side of it.

I've read the books. I've studied the strategies, the routines, the things that are supposed to fix you. I've curated the "perfect" environments to heal in. I've had the aha moments where I genuinely thought I cracked the code forever. I've built a life that looks good and feels good, aesthetically, intentionally, all of it. And still nothing stays fixed. Nothing lasts the way I think it's supposed to. Life doesn't hold still long enough to let it. It's always changing, so I'm always adjusting. Which is funny, because probably more so than anything out of my control, I think I'm the lead cause of that. I'm goal oriented to a fault, chasing one thing and then the second I hit it, already onto the next. I struggle to just sit in something long enough to notice what happened.

And the basic things I know make me feel good somehow still end up being the hardest things to actually do. I'm trying to understand why that is. Why knowing something is good for you isn't the same as being able to do it. That's a lot of what I actually want to get into here, not just what works, but why it's so hard to stick with even when you know.

So yeah I don't have answers for you and I let that be the reason to wait. I really thought I needed to get somewhere first, feel more finished, more qualified, before I was allowed to say anything out loud. But I think that idea was never actually true for anyone. I think most people who sound like they've figured it all out are either performing certainty they don't really have, or they're describing one good week and calling it permanent (I've done both).

What I actually have is a lot of practice writing my way through things while I'm still inside of them. That's what this is gonna be too. Not me looking back on something I've already worked out, but me making sense of it as it's happening, in real time, out loud.

The articles, the moodboards, the playlists, the prompts, whatever ends up here, they're all coming from a place of learning and unlearning and staying curious, while I'm actually in it, not after I've figured it out and can look back at it safely. Not from a place of overediting my writing and changing the lessons to sound more life changing. Most posts on here will literally be my personal, handwritten journals, typed out. It's gonna be hard not to cringe and edit stuff out, but I'm holding myself to that because it's real, and it's telling a whole story rather than a pretty little one where I'm so woke and strong and solved all my problems effortlessly.

I'm not interested in telling you to just be grateful, or that happiness is a choice, or that everything sorts itself out if you think about it the right way. I don't think you need to hear it from one more person pretending it is.

I will say the quiet parts out loud. Those sentences that have forever stayed in my head or in my journal, I'll say em here. Maybe there will be something that resonates with you. But I've gotta warn you, some days I feel like the most grounded version of myself I've ever been. Other days I'm right back in old patterns, wondering how I ended up here again. My writing reflects that. It'll probably feel like there are 10 different authors over here. But I'm trying to convince myself it's still worth sharing.

Long story short I've wanted to build this for years. And I kept putting it off because I was waiting to feel ready in a way I know was never going to happen. So this is me not waiting anymore. Just creating, and sharing it while I'm in it. Same as you probably are too.

with love, sm