I have a tendency to want to move on.
Not necessarily because I don’t feel things deeply. Quite the opposite, actually. I can feel something very deeply and then almost immediately start looking for the way out.
What’s the lesson here?
What am I supposed to do next?
How do I make this useful?
How do I stop feeling like this?
There is a certain appeal to those questions. They give us something to do.
And sometimes doing something is exactly what we need.
But sometimes something has happened and the appropriate response is simply:
That really sucked.
You failed the exam.
Someone broke your heart.
You didn’t get the job.
A friendship ended.
You were treated unfairly.
Something you wanted didn’t happen.
Someone you trusted hurt you.
Sometimes there isn’t a silver lining.
Sometimes there isn’t a lesson yet.
Sometimes you’re just sad.
Or angry.
Or disappointed.
And I think we’re often much less comfortable with that than we pretend to be.
We’re very good at talking about feelings as though they’re problems waiting for solutions.
Anger needs to be processed.
Sadness needs to be worked through.
Grief needs to be moved past.
Disappointment needs perspective.
And certainly, there are times when those things need attention. Feelings can tell us something important. They can change the way we understand ourselves, other people, and what has happened to us.
But I don’t think every feeling needs to immediately become productive.
Sometimes you need to wallow.
I mean that affectionately.
If someone breaks your heart, maybe you need a few days of terrible music, ugly crying, and telling your friend the same story for the sixth time.
If you didn’t get something you worked incredibly hard for, maybe you need to be disappointed before you start figuring out what’s next.
If someone has hurt you, maybe you need to be angry before you can decide what you want to do about it.
I don’t think wallowing means giving up.
I think sometimes it’s the opposite.
It’s acknowledging that something mattered enough to hurt.
There is a difference between feeling something and letting it run your life indefinitely.
The first is human.
The second is where we can become stuck.
And I don’t think anyone else gets to decide exactly where that line is for you.
There isn’t a universal number of days you’re allowed to be heartbroken.
There isn’t a socially acceptable amount of time to grieve a friendship.
There isn’t a deadline where disappointment is supposed to have become wisdom.
Some things take longer than others.
Some things seem finished until a completely ordinary Tuesday reminds you that they aren’t.
And that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gone backwards.
It might simply mean there’s something there you haven’t finished feeling.
This is where I think about meditation.
For years, I thought meditation was about keeping my mind focused for twenty minutes. My mind would wander, I’d notice it, and then I’d berate myself for having wandered in the first place.
Which was particularly unhelpful once I understood that I was living with untreated ADHD.
Then someone explained it differently to me.
Your mind wanders.
You notice.
You bring it back.
And then it wanders again.
The return is part of the practice.
That was a genuinely cool revelation for me.
I hadn’t been failing at meditation. I’d misunderstood what I was supposed to be practising.
And I think feelings can work a little like that.
You can spend an afternoon feeling miserable about something and then laugh at a stupid video.
You can have a good day and still be grieving.
You can think you’re finally over it and then find yourself crying in the shower three weeks later.
You can decide you need a break from thinking about it and then come back when you have the capacity.
None of those things erase the others.
You don’t have to stay inside a feeling all day for it to be real.
You don’t have to keep yourself miserable to prove that something mattered.
And you don’t have to force yourself to feel better just because you think you should be.
Maybe moving forward isn’t always a clean line from feeling bad to feeling better.
Maybe sometimes it’s more like:
Feel it.
Step away.
Come back.
Keep going.
And then, when you need to, come back again.
The danger of ignoring difficult feelings isn’t that they’ll somehow punish you for being insufficiently emotionally aware.
It’s that they don’t necessarily disappear just because you’ve stopped looking at them.
They can turn into irritability.
Resentment.
Anxiety.
Numbness.
A vague sense that something is wrong without knowing what.
Sometimes they show up in places that have nothing obvious to do with where they began.
I’m not suggesting that every difficult emotion needs to be excavated until you’ve found its deepest possible meaning.
That sounds exhausting.
Sometimes you really are just having a bad day.
Sometimes you’re sad because you’re sad.
Sometimes you’re angry because someone was cruel.
Sometimes you’re disappointed because you wanted something and didn’t get it.
That can be enough.
And then you can decide what comes next.
Maybe you need to cry.
Maybe you need to complain.
Maybe you need to take a walk.
Maybe you need to watch something ridiculous.
Maybe you need to talk to someone who loves you.
Maybe you need to do absolutely nothing useful for a while.
And maybe tomorrow you’ll feel a little different.
Or maybe you won’t.
That’s okay too.
I don’t want wallowing to become another thing we can fail at.
There’s no gold star for processing your emotions efficiently.
There’s no achievement badge for turning pain into wisdom before anyone else.
And there certainly isn’t a little green owl waiting to shame you because you missed your emotional-growth streak.
Sometimes the next step is very small.
Sometimes it is simply admitting:
This hurts.
Then you make dinner.
You answer an email.
You watch something funny.
You go to bed.
And maybe tomorrow you come back to it.
That’s not standing still.
Sometimes feeling the thing is part of moving forward.
Tag: Feminism
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The Quietest Things Have Changed Me the Most
Sometimes I look back at the moments that changed my life and realise they weren’t dramatic at all.
They weren’t the big decisions or the milestones people celebrate.
They were quieter than that.
A question I couldn’t stop thinking about.
A sentence that stayed with me long after I’d finished reading a book.
The moment I noticed I was speaking to myself more harshly than I would ever speak to someone I loved.
Choosing, just once, to respond differently.
At the time, none of those moments felt significant.
They certainly didn’t feel like transformation.
But when I look back now, I can see they changed the direction of my life in small, almost invisible ways.
I think we often expect growth to announce itself.
We imagine we’ll know exactly when we’ve become more confident, more self-trusting, more at peace.
In reality, I don’t think that’s how it happens.
I think growth is often so quiet that we only recognise it in hindsight.
It’s the conversation you stop rehearsing.
The apology you realise you didn’t need to make.
The moment you notice your own needs without immediately explaining them away.
The question you ask yourself instead of rushing to find someone else’s answer.
None of those moments look particularly impressive from the outside.
But they change something on the inside.
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about many of these ideas.
Trusting what we notice.
Staying in conversation with ourselves.
Learning not to treat ourselves like problems to solve.
Again and again, I found myself returning to the same kind of questions.
Not because I was searching for perfect answers.
Because I was practising a different relationship with myself.
Somewhere along the way, I realised I wasn’t simply writing blog posts.
I was documenting a way of paying attention.
That realisation slowly became Within.
When I first imagined it, I thought I was creating a journal.
A place to write.
A place to reflect.
But the more I worked on it, the more it changed.
Or maybe I changed.
I stopped thinking about prompts and pages.
I started thinking about companionship.
About the books we return to.
The conversations that continue long after we’ve closed the cover.
The symbols that help us understand ourselves in new ways.
Within became less about recording thoughts and more about creating space to meet them.
Not as problems to solve.
As invitations to understand ourselves more honestly.
I don’t believe one journal changes a life.
I don’t think one blog post does either.
But I do believe quiet practices shape us.
A question written in the margin.
A few minutes of reflection before the day begins.
A sentence we carry with us because it reminds us who we’re trying to become.
Those are the things that have changed me.
Quietly.
Patiently.
Almost without me noticing.
Maybe that’s why I’ve stopped looking for dramatic transformations.
I’m learning to trust the quieter ones instead.
I am ready to begin. -
The Questions That Changed Me Didn’t Have Immediate Answers
There are a few questions that seem to return to me every year.
Not because I haven’t answered them.
Because I’m not the same person who asked them the year before.
For a long time, I thought a good question was one that eventually disappeared.
I assumed that if I reflected long enough, read enough books, or understood myself well enough, I would finally arrive at the answer—and the question would quietly leave.
But that hasn’t been my experience.
The most meaningful questions in my life haven’t vanished.
They’ve evolved.
Sometimes they’ve softened.
Sometimes they’ve become more complicated.
Sometimes they’ve stopped asking what I thought they were asking in the first place.
And I’ve started to wonder if that isn’t the point.
We often treat reflection like a problem-solving exercise.
We search for the correct answer.
The perfect insight.
The breakthrough that finally explains everything.
There’s comfort in believing that enough understanding will eventually bring certainty.
Sometimes it does.
But more often, I think reflection asks something else of us.
Not certainty.
Presence.
The questions that have changed me most are the ones I couldn’t answer all at once.
Questions like:
Why do I keep apologizing for things that aren’t mine to apologize for?
Why does rest still feel like something I have to earn?
What does it actually mean to trust myself?
None of those questions had a single answer.
They became conversations.
Each time I returned to them, I noticed something different.
A new memory.
A different pattern.
A little more compassion than I had the last time.
The question didn’t disappear.
I changed.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to finish the conversation.
Instead, I started paying attention to how it was changing me.
That shift has quietly transformed the way I think about reflection.
I no longer believe its purpose is to produce perfect answers.
I think its purpose is to deepen our relationship with ourselves.
To notice.
To return.
To listen again.
That’s the kind of conversation I’m interested in now.
One that leaves room for uncertainty.
One that allows us to outgrow old answers without feeling like we’ve failed.
One that reminds us we are allowed to become someone new without abandoning who we’ve already been.
If you’ve been following my writing for a while, you’ve probably noticed this shift too.
Over the past few months, I’ve written about permission, self-trust, belonging, and curiosity.
Slowly, those ideas began gathering around a single question:
What happens when we stop trying to solve ourselves and start listening instead?
That question became the foundation for something I’ve been quietly creating.
It’s called Within.
Not because it contains the answers.
Because it’s an invitation to begin a different kind of conversation.
One that doesn’t end when you close the journal.
One that continues every time you choose curiosity over judgment, presence over performance, and relationship over perfection.
I think those are the conversations that change us.
Not all at once.
But one honest return at a time.
🌟 I can stay in conversation with myself. -
What Happens When You Don’t Rush the Answer?
I have a habit of wanting answers before I’ve really understood the question.
Sometimes it looks like researching something for hours.
Sometimes it looks like replaying the same conversation in my head, hoping I’ll finally arrive at the one perfect interpretation.
Sometimes it looks like trying to solve a feeling before I’ve allowed myself to experience it.
I think many of us mistake speed for clarity.
We assume that if we think hard enough, search long enough, or analyze carefully enough, certainty will eventually appear.
And when it doesn’t, we often conclude that we’re doing something wrong.
But I’ve been wondering if certainty isn’t always what we’re looking for.
Sometimes what we’re looking for is simply relief.
Relief from not knowing.
Relief from uncertainty.
Relief from sitting with a question that refuses to resolve on our timeline.
That relief can be tempting.
It can make us reach for the first answer that sounds convincing.
It can make us dismiss our own experience because someone else seems more certain.
It can make us mistake movement for progress.
But clarity has its own timing.
Some things become clearer because we solve them.
Others become clearer because we stop interrupting them.
I’ve noticed this in my own life more often lately.
When something feels unsettled, my instinct is still to push for resolution.
To figure it out.
To make sense of it.
To tie it into a neat conclusion before I move on.
I’m practicing something different now.
When I notice that urgency, I try to ask myself another question instead.
“What happens if I stay here a little longer?”
Not forever.
Not endlessly circling the same thoughts.
Just long enough to hear what I might have missed while I was rushing toward an answer.
Sometimes nothing happens.
Sometimes the question simply becomes quieter.
Sometimes the answer arrives in a completely different form than I expected.
And sometimes I realize I wasn’t actually looking for an answer at all.
I was looking for permission to trust what I already knew.
The older I get, the less interested I am in collecting perfect answers.
I’m becoming much more interested in asking honest questions.
Questions that don’t corner me.
Questions that don’t demand immediate certainty.
Questions that leave room for curiosity, contradiction, and change.
That’s part of what I’ve been building over these past few months.
Not a system for figuring yourself out.
A practice of staying in conversation with yourself.
It’s a quiet shift, but it has changed the way I relate to almost everything.
Instead of asking,
“How do I solve this?”
I’m learning to ask,
“What is this asking me to notice?”
Those two questions lead to very different places.
One assumes I am a problem to fix.
The other assumes I am a person worth listening to.
I know which one I’m trying to practice.
Slowly.
Imperfectly.
One honest question at a time.
I do not have to rush my own becoming. -
What If You Stopped Waiting for Permission to Exist?
Some of us spend years waiting.
Waiting until we feel more confident.
Waiting until we feel more certain.
Waiting until we have everything figured out.
Waiting until we become the version of ourselves we imagine we are supposed to be.
Only then, we tell ourselves, will we begin.
Only then will we take up space.
Only then will we trust ourselves.
Only then will we allow ourselves to fully inhabit our lives.
The waiting often feels responsible.
Reasonable, even.
After all, shouldn’t we prepare first?
Shouldn’t we be sure?
Shouldn’t we become better before we ask more from life?
The problem is that the finish line keeps moving.
There is always another goal.
Another improvement.
Another obstacle.
Another reason to postpone your own existence.
Many of us have spent so much time trying to become acceptable versions of ourselves that we have forgotten to ask whether we are actually living.
We tell ourselves that life will begin after the next achievement.
After the next breakthrough.
After the next season of healing.
After the next version of ourselves arrives.
But life has a way of happening while we’re waiting.
It unfolds in ordinary moments.
Quiet mornings.
Conversations with people we love.
Books left open on the nightstand.
The sunlight through the kitchen window.
The walk we almost skipped because we were too busy trying to become someone else.
There is nothing wrong with growth.
There is nothing wrong with healing.
There is nothing wrong with wanting change.
But growth becomes exhausting when it turns into a prerequisite for belonging.
When we begin to believe that we have to earn our place in our own lives.
That we have to become enough before we are allowed to participate.
For many people, this belief begins early.
We learn to perform competence.
To minimize mistakes.
To become useful.
To stay agreeable.
To work toward an invisible standard that promises acceptance just beyond the horizon.
And because the standard is always moving, we never arrive.
We become experts at self-improvement and strangers to ourselves.
We spend years asking:
“What should I become?”
instead of asking:
“Who am I, right now?”
The second question is harder.
It asks for presence instead of perfection.
It asks us to really see ourselves as we are.
Not as a future project.
Not as a potential outcome.
Not as a list of things still needing correction.
But as a living, changing person worthy of attention in this moment.
That kind of presence can feel uncomfortable.
Especially if you’ve spent years believing that visibility has to be earned.
Especially if you learned that taking up less space was safer.
Especially if you became skilled at waiting your turn.
But there’s a difference between growth and postponement.
Growth expands your life.
Postponement delays it.
One invites you deeper into yourself.
The other asks you to remain at the threshold indefinitely.
And maybe that’s the question worth considering:
How much of your life have you spent waiting for permission to exist?
Waiting to be ready.
Waiting to be certain.
Waiting to become enough.
What if you stopped waiting?
What if you allowed yourself to be here now?
Not finished.
Not perfected.
Not fully healed.
Just here.
Because your life is not something that begins after you become someone else.
It’s already happening.
And maybe the permission you’ve been searching for is not permission to become.
Maybe it is permission to be.
I am allowed to take up space in my own life.