There’s a voice that never shuts up in my head. It doesn’t yell—it whispers. Constantly. It critiques the way I sit, the way I speak, the way I live. It judges my detours, mocks my slowness, compares me to everyone who's ever sprinted ahead while I chose to walk. And it gets especially loud when I’m alone. But something strange happens when I go off-grid—especially in the mountains. The voice quiets. Not because it’s gone, but because the landscape is louder. Everything out there—the hush of wind through pines, the crunch of gravel …
What a Frozen Tent Taught Me About Staying
I didn’t expect a winter trek to become a mirror. But it did. Somewhere between the wind slicing through my gloves and the nights where sleep simply refused to show up, something quietly shifted. It wasn’t an epiphany. It was the slow-burning kind of knowing that creeps in when your distractions freeze along with your toes. On the first night, while everyone else tucked themselves into borrowed warmth, I stared at the tent ceiling wondering what kind of fool signs up for this kind of discomfort. But there was no running. Just the scratch of …
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Work-Life Balance Is a Myth. Build a Rhythm Instead.
We don’t need better schedules. We need better systems. Work-life balance sounds reasonable—like a goal any responsible adult should aim for. A neat line down the middle, separating the “work” you do for a paycheck from the “life” you live for meaning. It’s tidy. Logical. Easy to say on a webinar panel. But in practice? It’s fiction. Your life doesn’t divide neatly into blocks. A sick child doesn’t care about your strategy meeting. Your deadlines don’t pause because your body needs rest. You can set your Slack to “Do Not Disturb,” but …
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Losing Is Not an Art. It’s a Fight Club Nobody Signs Up For.
I thought I had become good at losing.Keys. Mugs. Tiffin boxes. Emails I meant to reply to. Friendships I thought were solid until they weren’t. A version of my life that existed only in my head but still left behind a ghost when it dissolved. The little losses added up until it started to feel like muscle memory—like I was supposed to take it all with a quiet smile and an overused quote about letting go. People seemed to admire the calm. “You’re so strong,” they’d say. Which really just meant: “You’re not making us uncomfortable with your …
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Stop Chasing Beauty: How to Actually Glow Up
My worst breakup wasn’t with a person. It was with my own reflection. Not in a poetic way. In a painfully literal, forehead-to-mirror, skin-scabbing, “how did we get here?” kind of way. I broke up with my reflection the day I caught myself leaning inches from the mirror, under that harsh yellow bathroom light at 6:47 a.m., layering concealer on a fresh breakout like it was spackle. The skin was raw, already inflamed, and the more I covered it, the more it screamed back. I wasn’t getting ready—I was unraveling. It crept in gradually—the …
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Climbing Past the Summit: What Nimsdai Taught Me About Being Human
He climbed into the death zone with a hangover, no sleep, and a man dying in his arms—and still kept going. Not to summit. But to save. The mountain was never the hardest part. Being human was. I’ve never stood on top of a Himalayan peak. Not one of the giants, at least. But I have walked paths where the air is thin, the fatigue is real, and you start to meet the quieter voices inside your own head—the ones that ask, "Why the hell are you doing this?" Which is why Nimsdai Purja’s story didn’t just move me. It rearranged something …
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