I picked up Into Thin Air a few years back because I wanted to understand something that didn’t make much sense to me. Why would anyone choose to climb a mountain that kills so many people? Everest especially. There are hundreds of other peaks, safer, quieter, maybe just as beautiful, and I couldn’t figure out what people were chasing up there; I turned over the usual explanations—thrill, ego, some private calling—but none of them felt large enough to justify the risk, so I assumed the book would clear that up. It didn’t. A …
The Currency of Discomfort – Lessons from Take It Outside
Some stories stay on the page. This one seeps into your bloodstream.Elise Rose Richmond’s Take It Outside isn’t polished inspiration or a highlight reel—it’s raw, unfiltered proof that a life well-lived often looks messy up close. She moves through her adventures like a washing machine of emotions—spinning through fear, awe, fatigue, and elation, often in the same afternoon. No vocabulary feels big enough to hold what she describes, but she manages to let you feel it: the blisters, the bone-deep cold, the split-second decisions between …
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What Remains After the Summit
There are two kinds of people who go to the mountains. Those who chase peaks. And those who let the mountains undo them. Steve House belongs unapologetically to the second category. You won’t find Instagram reels of him posing atop a summit with dramatic music. His story reads more like a quiet undoing—of ambition, ego, identity. In Beyond the Mountain, he writes not about triumph but disintegration. His greatest climbs are the ones where the summit dissolved the moment he reached it. Where the descent became the story. Where success, as …
The Day the Voice Went Missing (And Took the Ego With It)
There’s this old story Joel ben Izzy tells, right near the middle of the book. A man walks into a tailor’s shop and orders a suit. The next week, he returns to try it on. It’s awful. The left sleeve is too long, the right one too short, the trousers sag and pinch in all the wrong places. “This is unwearable,” the man complains. “It’s perfect,” the tailor insists. “Just tilt your head like this, drag one foot a bit, hunch your shoulder—see? Now it fits beautifully.” The man limps out of the store, contorted and ridiculous. Two women pass by. …
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Why Andre Agassi’s ‘Open’ Makes You Forget It’s About Tennis
I didn't pick up Andre Agassi’s Open expecting to fall headfirst into an existential whirlpool. Honestly, I anticipated pages filled with sweat-drenched match points and polished trophies. Instead, I was instantly captivated by the brutal honesty of a man who despises tennis—a man whose entire identity hinges upon the very thing he resents. From that unexpected collision, I couldn’t look away. Agassi opens his memoir candidly: “I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion.” Right there, …
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Wild Enough to Let It Be
There’s a strange kind of relief in realizing you don’t have to wrestle every answer to the ground. That not every moment needs to be neatly filed under ‘this is why it happened’ or ‘this is what it means.’ Some things just are. Some people just come and go. Some paths lead exactly where they were meant to, even if you had no idea at the start. Understanding always seemed like a prerequisite for moving forward. That if every chain reaction of events—who did what, what led to what, where the cracks began—could be untangled, peace would …
Loving Someone Who’s Gone and Still Here
Safe, Wanted, and Loved is a story of resilience, love, and the quiet, brutal battle of living alongside mental illness. It doesn’t preach, it doesn’t dramatize—it simply lays bare what happens when the mind of someone you love turns into a stranger’s. One morning, everything in their home was normal. By the end of the day, nothing was. That’s how fast life turned for this family. What follows is not just a story of a woman battling psychosis but of a husband trying to hold onto the woman he knew while the illness ripped through her mind, of …
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How Wild Taught Me That Strength Is a Choice
I didn’t know women could do this. Hell, I didn’t know people could do this. When I first picked up Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I had no real concept of long-distance hiking. I thought of nature as something you visited for a few hours, maybe a weekend if you were adventurous. The idea of walking for months through the wilderness, alone, carrying everything you needed on your back? That was the stuff of movies or, at best, something rugged men did in the 1800s. But here was this woman—Cheryl—who had never even gone on a hike before deciding to …
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