Month: August 2025

  • The Joy of Not Rushing Anymore

    On the spiderweb of life. Everything is connected, and change is inevitable.

    There it was. The simple sentence mumbled under my breath as I was walking into the bathroom to escape a long-winded misunderstanding. The kind of circular conversation that solves nothing, the kind only two people-pleasers can have because neither of them wants to face the consequences of actually saying what they mean.

    “I hope I never turn into someone like you.”

    Fast forward through a few intense middle-of-the-night soul surgeries (you know, the kind where you feel like the universe is performing open-heart energy work on you while you’re wide awake). The metamorphosis began.

    Now apparently I am the last person to board the plane, when once upon a time, I’d be queuing anxiously twenty minutes before they even called my row. I thought being first in line meant I was efficient, responsible, likable. But really, it just meant I was volunteering for extra stress, breathing recycled airplane air longer than anyone needed to, and giving my energy away like free peanuts.

    These days, I don’t audition for stress anymore. I don’t even show up to the casting call. If something is stressing me out, I don’t rise to the challenge. I just say, “Not for me,” and move on. And if it’s a responsibility I am obligated to deal with, I know how to regulate myself.

    I reply to texts when I want, not on the old “five-minutes-or-less” timer I used to guilt myself into. Sometimes it takes a week. Sometimes longer. And I used to hate him for doing that. Now? I get it. And somewhere deep down, my old self feels guilty for all the times she made such a big deal out of it.

    I stopped making other people’s problems my problems. I stopped drowning myself in sympathy just because my empath wiring told me to. Turns out, you can opt out. Who knew?

    And on top of everything, which was something I had to learn for myself, I learned to be independent. I learned how to manage and regulate my nervous system and emotions without escaping them. To sit with them. To let them flow. To not hand them to someone else and hope they’d fix it for me.

    And honestly? It feels amazing. My peace, my zen mode, my sanity… All intact.

    Turns out some of the things I resisted in him were the things I actually needed to learn for myself… not because I turned into him, but because I turned into the real me after life peeled off the layers until I was back to the core, and funny enough, some of those traits I once criticized in him were actually part of the unbothered, self-honoring version of me all this time.

    I called him selfish at the time, maybe even to his face, though I don’t quite remember. Now I get it. And I’m not going to let myself feel guilty about that. I didn’t know any better then. But now I have resonance, and that resonance changes everything. It makes it easy to make peace with the past.

    So here I am. The last one to board the plane. Calm. Collected. Feeling my emotions instead of them letting them control me. Carrying only what’s mine. And for the first time in a long time, I like where this flight is going, middle seat or not.

  • Terms & Conditions of a Daydream

    on daring to dream when reality doesn’t match our expectations (yet).

    Every day we hit accept.

    Cookies on websites. That it’s raining when we wore a summer skirt. That our hair will frizz, no matter how much serum we convinced ourselves to buy. That the night we’re supposed to look our best, the universe hands us drizzle, bad lighting, and an unplanned walk to dinner without an umbrella.

    We accept reality as it is. That’s grown-up life.

    But here’s the paradox: while we’re practicing all this day-to-day acceptance, we’re also daring. Daring to dream of the sunny apartment with hanging house plants and the terrace with a view. Of turning thirty on a Friday with a rooftop day-dance in the city we want to live. Of “window-shopping” motorcycles we don’t own yet, secretly knowing one day we’ll be taking switchback mountain roads like it’s second nature. Of surfing the waves while practicing on the balance board. Of one day cruising along the beach paths, surrounded by palm trees on the surfskate.

    We stroll through streets we feel like we’ve spent lifetimes wandering, dare to learn a new language, and discover new places in hopes that one day we’ll be dining there with the people we love. We spend hours “day-dreaming” aka. visualising the life we want.

    So, where’s the line? When does acceptance stop being surrender, and start becoming complacency? When does intuition-fueled dreaming turn into actual action?

    The truth is: we’ll never feel fully “figured out.” There’s no email that lands in your inbox saying, Congratulations! You now know exactly what you want, please proceed to checkout.

    What happens is this: the dream keeps circling back. It shows up in different forms; through songs, people you meet, places that tug at you, the bike engines you hear before you see them. And at some point, dreaming stops feeling like fantasy and starts feeling like oxygen. That’s when you know it’s not just “a nice idea.” It’s a pull.

    And the only thing left to do is accept that too. Accept that you’re never going to be 100% sure. Accept that intuition doesn’t come with guarantees. Accept that action always feels a little premature: until you take it, and realize the leap was the point all along.

    So maybe the real question isn’t how long until we take action? Maybe it’s how long do we want to keep pretending we’re not ready?

  • Congratulations, you raised your vibration. But how do you keep it?

    In the spiritual world, “raising your vibration” sounds like a permanent prize; like once you’ve done the yoga, the therapy, the shadow work, and maybe bought the overpriced sage, you get to live in eternal bliss. Birds wake you up. Candles glow just right. Everyone smells like bergamot.

    Except in reality? You wake up not to birdsong, but to a jackhammer outside your bedroom window. Your zen is blasted away by your neighbor’s LED floodlights, or the teenager upstairs practicing his nightly setlist of Italian R&B. Suddenly, your highly-tuned “spiritual gifts” (like being sensitive to smell) feel less like a blessing and more like a superpower no one asked for, especially on a sweaty, un-air-conditioned metro.

    And just when you think you’ve found a way to cope, every song, every TV show, every random conversation reminds you of that person. The one you do not want to remember. The universe seems to have gotten the memo wrong, and instead of delivering signs from your soulmate, it’s recycling reminders from someone you’d rather delete from your memory. 8 months in a row now. Seriously? I thought I did all my processing, healing and purging universe, what more do you want from me?

    They say you can’t control situations, only your reactions. Which sounds easy in theory, until your “reaction” involves getting annoyed out of your zen mode into your noise-canceling earplugs at 2 a.m.

    So what do you do? You adapt. You buy the eye mask. You turn up the music. You learn that keeping your vibration high doesn’t mean floating above it all like some celestial goddess – which by the way, I did at some point. Floaty had become my middle name, until even that reached its expiration date as I found out one cannot chill at the spiritual lounge forever. It doesn’t mean grounding yourself right in the mess of it either. It means balancing it all out and meeting in the middle; the heart. 

    And how do you live from your heart, when you just cannot – for the love of all that’s good – like the city you live in? Do you buy more house plants and surround yourself with the things you love? 

    Because even if you ran away to your favorite city, where you’d see almost everything you love daily, eventually the honeymoon phase would end, and you’d still find something to complain about: the rent, the taxes, the neighbors, the bills, the weather…

    And maybe that’s the point. Raising your vibration isn’t about avoiding the noise, the smells, the ghost of a person who is still haunting you, or the construction workers with no mercy at 7 a.m. It’s about holding your frequency in spite of them.

    And as I lay in bed, wrapped in earplugs, eye mask, with my calcite under my pillow and possibly mild resentment, I couldn’t help but wonder…

    Isn’t maintaining our vibration less about chasing peace, and more about choosing it, even when life gets loud?

  • De-Virgoing: Learning to Flow Like the Aare

    on learning how to go with the flow

    Last year, I saw all the parts of myself that weren’t working. The parts that planned too much, controlled too tightly, and tried to bend life to a neatly written to-do list. I hated them. And honestly, I hated myself for them.

    I met someone who embodied all the qualities I wished I had. Not in a “he’s perfect, I’m broken” kind of way, more like a mirror showing me the rigidity I’d been living in. And slowly, I realized: my obsession with control, my relentless need to plan outcomes, was suffocating me. I’d find things to stress me out. I thought that was living. No, it was being on “survival mode.” 

    I saw how he put himself first, do things on his timing (if he could), and how he wouldn’t get too bothered about things, unless it was work related I guess. It was annoying at first. But the more I grew, the more I realized how beautiful and amazing that way of living was. I saw he didn’t create problems out of the blue by thinking himself into knots, which I had spent my early twenties doing.

    Later, the more the “person” disappeared, but the louder the “energy” got… I realized how magnetizing and attractive that energy was to me, because it was still reflecting something back to me; something I was always meant to embody. I wasn’t born to overthink, stress myself out… I hadn’t always been that way. There was something undeniably familiar about him, and it took me quite a bit to figure out what it finally was to close that chapter out for good.

    So I started to let go. Now stress has become something I offer solutions to, not something I create out of the blue. 

    Solo trips became my laboratory. I booked the dates based on my intuition, and then… nothing. No itineraries. No agendas. Just me, a city, and whatever the universe decided to throw my way. Each trip had a theme; sometimes healing, sometimes curiosity, sometimes surrender. I adapted. I flowed. I learned to trust that the world wouldn’t collapse if I didn’t micromanage every step. I learned to trust the flow.

    And slowly, I noticed something strange and wonderful. I felt relief. I felt light. My rigid, controlling self… died. And from that, a new me was born.

    I call it my “de-virgoing”; shedding the old armor, stepping into spontaneity, learning that life doesn’t need to be perfected to be lived beautifully. The to-do lists? Gone. The endless plans? Out the window. And in their place? Flow. Freedom. The joy of trusting my own instinct, my own pace, my own rhythm.

    Sometimes I wonder why it took me so long to realize that control was just a comfort blanket, and surrender… is the real luxury.

    “Take it easy, chill, life’s good, no stress, no need to hurry” became my motto. 

    Because if life is a river (and oh, the Aare has taught me this) you don’t swim against the current. You let yourself glide. You let yourself be carried. And sometimes, you leave your overthinking and worries in the current, letting them drift away. Mine probably floated all the way to the Rhine… and out into the North Sea by now.

    And suddenly, you’re not just surviving. You’re living.

  • The Frequency of Love

    Last year, a song got blissfully stuck in my head. I hummed the melody, enjoyed it, and didn’t think twice about the words.

    Fast forward a year, I play it again. And suddenly, the lyrics hit me in a way I didn’t even know I was ready for. The words I skimmed over before, the ones that once felt like background noise, turned out to be a blueprint for my journey.

    “The frequency of love. Feels like rivers to the seas, I’m trying not to drown, feel those currents over me, keep both feet on the ground, feels like electricity, this is the frequency of love. Can you feel it, you gotta feel it, you feel it all around, it’s in your heart, in your soul.”

    Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a frequency. A pulse that runs through everything; in the way rivers meet the seas, in the charge that tingles through your body, in the quiet grounding of two feet on the earth, how the sun feels on your skin, floating on water…

    In a world where chaos seems constant, where comparison is the default mode and perfection is demanded in one form or another, love becomes the rarest skill. Not just romantic love, but love for yourself, for the messy humanity, for the mirrors you meet along the way.

    I’ve seen it in my past relationships with imperfect people. They were all imperfect, yet perfectly imperfect. Some mirrored pieces of me. Some mirrored all of me. In family, friends, work, I’ve met reflections of myself, and in showing them compassion, I learned to show it to myself.

    The frequency of love is unity. So above, so below. It’s patience, forgiveness, joy, stillness, electricity, surrender, and fire… all at once. It’s the pulse that reminds you that even when life feels heavy, even when the world feels cruel, your heart can still beat in alignment with everything beautiful.

    And maybe, just maybe, that frequency isn’t something you find. It’s something you carry, something you radiate, something you become with a little help along the way.

  • “Maybe this part of your healing is about facing yourself.”

    Someone told me that in a dream.

    He looked happy. Enlightened.

    That effortless kind of peace people write books about.

    He looked like he believed in me.

    And in that surreal, slippery space between sleep and truth, the words echoed like something I already knew, and didn’t want to admit.

    Maybe this part of my healing was about facing myself.

    The parts I’d been expertly avoiding.

    The parts I wrapped in distractions, in plans, in motion.

    But sometimes life – in its brutal brilliance – removes the exit signs.

    You stop running, not because you’re done, but because you can’t.

    I couldn’t even walk without pain.

    So what was left?

    Just me.

    And the uncomfortable realization that maybe I wasn’t escaping anything, except myself.

    That’s when surrender knocked.

    Not softly, more like a SWAT team breaking down the door.

    Surrender is funny that way.

    It doesn’t arrive with incense and affirmations.

    It drags you by the hair out of your old identity, while you’re still screaming “Wait, I wasn’t ready yet!”

    And somewhere in the mess, in the ache, in the disillusionment, I stopped screaming.

    I started listening.

    To my body.

    To my shadows.

    To the version of me that wasn’t performing for anyone.

    And I started talking to her.

    She was scared, yes, but she was trying to protect me.

    From being wrong again. From being hurt again.

    But healing isn’t about being “right.”

    It’s about remembering the path you were always meant to be on.

    A path that, ironically, requires you to stop walking for a while.

    And sit.

    And reflect.

    Not just in the mirror, but in your life.

    In your choices.

    In the version of you who got buried under ambition, validation, and fear.

    So I asked myself:

    What do I want to see when I look at my life?

    Who do I want to be when I can finally run again?

    And maybe, just maybe…

    This part of my healing was about not becoming someone new,

    but finally seeing who’s been there all along.

    And maybe, just maybe…

    this part of my healing wasn’t about chasing, or even changing, 

    but about learning how to stay.

    To show up.

    To hold myself steady when everything else shakes.

    Because for the first time, I wasn’t waiting for someone to come hold my hand. 

    I was already here.

    And I wasn’t going anywhere.

  • Life is Full of Mirrored Moments

    There I was, Saturday night on my balcony, taking a break from watching Gilmore Girls because nothing soothes an overthinking mind quite like the fast-talking women of Stars Hollow.

    And then… from just one floor below, I hear it. The same theme song. The same Lorelai and Rory banter. I lean slightly over the railing and there she is, my downstairs neighbor, smoking, also watching Gilmore Girls. Two women, two apartments, one show, same scene, same night.

    I’ve lived in this apartment for 7 years. She’s just moved in.

    We didn’t say a word to each other. We didn’t need to. The universe already delivered the message loud and clear:

    Some nights aren’t about fate or romance or breakthroughs.

    They’re about mirrored lives, stacked on top of each other like chapters in a book we all think we’re writing alone.

    And it made me wonder…

    If our lives are all little reruns of each other’s heartbreaks, habits, and healing, maybe connection isn’t something we chase. Maybe it’s already happening, just one floor below, one rerun at a time.

  • When exactly did we stop playing like children?

    Was it after our first heartbreak? Our first tax return? The moment we decided swings were “embarrassing” and seesaws were “unsafe for the lower back”?

    Because somewhere between learning how to spell “mortgage” and forgetting how to skip without pulling a hamstring, we lost something. Something soft. Something simple.

    We traded jungle gyms for gyms.

    Trampolines for treadmills.

    Sandboxes for deadlines.

    We started amping up our dopamine instead of just feeling joy.

    “More, faster, better,” became the new fun.

    Amusement parks on steroids. Screaming rollercoasters and overpriced food. All engineered thrills.

    But joy? Real, no-filter joy? That’s harder to come by.

    Sometimes, when the city’s asleep, I go to the children’s park to swing.

    Just me and the stars. Sometimes with my girlfriends. Grown women, hip pain and all, giggling like we’re six and school just let out. That kind of joy is raw. Untouched. Uncomplicated.

    One time, on a mountain trail, we found this giant wooden seesaw, made for four people. We took turns like kids at recess. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t “Instagrammable.” It was just fun. The kind of fun that forgets to check the time. That reminds you your soul still has a playground inside, even if your knees say otherwise.

    Then there was that time I told a local guy (during one of my travels) that I love visiting the zoo and petting the wild goats. He smiled like he had just remembered a long-forgotten memory.

    “Isn’t that for kids? We’ve done that before, so we don’t think of doing it again.”

    Why does something only count if it’s new, impressive, and expensive?

    Why can’t naming a wild goat Sao-Feng and imagining you’re soul-bonded be enough?

    I think it is enough.

    In fact, I think it’s everything.

    We’ve overcomplicated joy. We turned it into a performance instead of a feeling.

    Maybe if we let our inner children run barefoot again, pick daisies, jump in puddles, and squeal when we see a sleepy bear nibbling on grass mid-hibernation, we’d actually feel alive again.

    Because maybe, just maybe, growing up doesn’t mean growing out of the things that made our hearts light up.

    Maybe it means protecting them even harder.