There’s a quiet kind of grief that builds when you realize someone likes you just enough to keep you close, but not enough to let you in. It doesn’t arrive dramatically. It drips. It seeps in slowly, washing away your clarity until you can no longer tell the difference between affection and ambivalence. They don’t harm you outright. They just don’t feed you emotionally. And so you wither while convincing yourself that you’re full. We are so skilled at rationalizing absence. Especially when the idea of someone—the version we’ve created in our …
I Didn’t Trek to Heal. I Trekked Because I Was Done Disappearing.
Some mornings, I’d wake up and sit on the edge of the bed, toothbrush in hand, wondering if I had it in me to pretend I was fine again. The pretending was heavier than the silence. It didn’t look like a breakdown. I still showed up. Smiled when expected. Hit deadlines. But under the surface, it felt like something essential had slipped through a crack and I didn’t know how to ask for it back. So I started walking. First out of habit. Then out of restlessness. And then—without knowing why—I signed up for a trek that scared me. Not …
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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 Small Life, Fully Lived
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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