Tag: growth

  • Bending the Spoon of Love 

    We wildly underestimate love. We treat it like it’s either a Hallmark commercial or a biohazard.

    Somewhere along the way, we decided that love is either a glitter-covered cliché or a liability. We drenched it in slow-motion movie kisses, auto-tuned it into oblivion, slapped a price tag on it every February, and then collectively rolled our eyes and called it cringe. Valentine’s Day became less about devotion and more about dinner reservations and panic-buying roses that die in four days. Romantic? Sure. Embodied? Not even close.

    And historically? Let’s not pretend we’ve always been these emotionally available poets. For centuries, marriage was a merger. Political strategy. Land management. Religious compliance. You didn’t marry for butterflies; you married for alliances and livestock. Children weren’t always conceived in love, they were conceived in duty.

    We built an entire system – call it the Matrix, call it late-stage capitalism, call it swipe culture – where love became diluted into dopamine hits and commitment became a liability clause.

    So when we talk about love today, we’re not just untangling personal trauma. We’re untangling centuries of conditioning.

    Here’s the part that might make people uncomfortable: I believe it matters how life begins. Consciousness can expand, stretch, awaken. Absolutely. But essence? That’s the frequency you arrive with. And I don’t think it’s random that we now live in a world of swiping, ghosting, and “let’s not define this.” A world where connection became optional and vulnerability became suspicious. Where people have been hurt enough that trust feels like a gamble and commitment feels like signing a liability waiver.

    Children born out of love are the ones who raise the frequency. Who stretch out consciousness of the world. We need more children born out of love. And they are more difficult to control. That’s why marriage started looking less like devotion and more like paperwork, taxes, and worst-case-scenario exit plans in this modern day and age. Of course people hesitate. Of course men side-eye the contract. Of course women build empires alone. We’ve turned love into either fantasy or threat. No wonder everyone’s tired.

    But here’s the inconvenient truth: real love is powerful. Not cute. Not convenient. Powerful.

    It bends your internal reality first. Life starts glitching around it. Patterns repeat until you see them. Ego structures crack. You get humbled. You get shown your shadow. You get shown your capacity. It’s not lust. It’s not delusion. It’s a state of consciousness that requires you to shed layers you were very attached to.

    And yes, it feels suspiciously like bending the spoon in The Matrix. The spoon doesn’t bend. Your perception does.

    Love in its purest form exists. Period. It’s our limited consciousness that resists it. The mind wants control. The ego wants guarantees. Love asks for surrender without self-abandonment. It asks you to stretch, and consciousness can stretch. It can open. It can let go.

    “Make Love Not War.” The Flower Children weren’t entirely wrong. They actually touched something real. The problem wasn’t the message, it was the lack of grounding. So much openness, so little containment. So much transcendence, so little integration. Woodstock turned into a costume party in hindsight. “Hippie” became an aesthetic. Fringe jackets. Peace signs. A vibe. It got flattened into fashion instead of lived as discipline. Love without structure just drifts. And society doesn’t respect what it can’t anchor.

    But we’re not doing escapism disguised as enlightenment anymore. We’re not floating three inches above the earth calling it awakening. We’re grounded now. We lift weights and meditate. We regulate our nervous systems. We go to therapy. We build businesses. We take care of our bodies and our minds. We understand that passion without stability burns out, and spirituality without embodiment becomes delusion.

    Wellness, devotion, desire, and truth get to exist in the same room now. Love isn’t a psychedelic fog. It’s rooted. It’s chosen. It’s integrated.

    Love creates. Not just babies: worlds. Art. Movements. New identities. Entire timelines shift because someone decided to love courageously instead of defensively.

    So if life keeps nudging you somewhere – toward someone, toward a place, toward a calling – maybe it’s not destiny. Maybe it’s resonance. Maybe love is simply the most powerful signal you have. If it keeps nudging you toward growth, keeps humbling you, keeps strengthening you, keeps teaching you how to hold your own fire without burning the village down, maybe it’s not punishment. Maybe it’s preparation for what is about to come. 

    I don’t believe in passive fate anymore. I believe in conscious choice.

    And no, I don’t want to reduce love to “just a lesson” anymore. I’m done spiritualizing connection into a classroom. When I choose to love a man, I’m not choosing homework. I’m choosing him. In his body. In his humanity. In his flaws. In his scars. With the sparks in his eyes, with the lines in the corner of his mouth when he smiles. Standing beside me. Not completing me, not saving me but co-creating with me.

    Creation isn’t always a child. Sometimes it’s a shared vision. A shared city. A shared chapter. And sometimes life separates you because you’re not yet stable enough to create without combusting.

    Which brings me back to fire.

    Fire held in a container becomes power. Fire chased becomes chaos. Fire suppressed becomes obsession.

    I’ve had the chaos. I’ve had the suppression. Now I’m learning containment. Strength. Holding my own energy without leaking it everywhere.

    I turn the page. I trust the flow. Not blindly. Not naively. But consciously. With love.

    And with Venus in Pisces, love stops being an aesthetic and becomes an embodied choice. Not spiritual bypassing. Not “it’s all divine timing” while you avoid real intimacy. Pisces teaches devotion. Reverence. How to hold love gently but firmly. How to celebrate it without dissolving into it.

    I’ve had enough over-spiritualizing. Enough endless lessons. Enough doing it alone in the name of growth.

    I don’t choose isolation dressed up as enlightenment. I choose union with what is actually for me.

  • 2025 Ramblings (aka: The Year I Shed My Skin Like a Dramatic Lizard)

    If 2025 had a résumé, it would list intense transformation under “core competencies.” This was the year many of us finally looked at our patterns straight in the face, gained enough emotional XP to level up, unlocked new stages we didn’t ask for, and shed so much metaphorical skin we could’ve built an entirely new person out of it. Honestly, a craft project.

    The fire didn’t just warm us, it burned through illusions, fog, and denial. It cracked shells. It forced rebirth. In my case, it burned down the masks so thoroughly that the version of me I’d locked away years ago finally walked out, blinking in the light, asking for snacks and freedom. I let her out. I chose her. I fell in love with who I am. Best jailbreak I’ve ever staged.

    Which brings me to the million-dollar question we all ask at the end of a year like this: How do we not repeat the same patterns like it’s a cursed Netflix rewatch? How do we know what to leave behind in 2025, and what’s just showing up wearing a fake mustache pretending to be new?

    When something familiar appears again, is it because we haven’t learned the lesson… or because this time we’re being offered the option to simply not engage? Or is it that we are attracting similar situations because we are stuck in the same frequency? How do we know what’s aligned, and what’s not?

    Because, of course, toward the end of the year, few patterns I know all too well resurfaced. Same vibes. Slightly different fonts. More complicated than last time, because they always are. Personal growth apparently comes with upgraded difficulty levels.

    Cue indecisive me, collecting data like a scientist in a lab coat, trying to make a “fully informed decision.” Which is hilarious, because if I’m being honest, I already made the choice a long time ago. Maybe this isn’t a crossroads. Maybe it’s just background noise. Maybe nothing is that deep. Maybe the core lesson has always been the same: choose yourself unapologetically, stop abandoning yourself to fit into situations not meant for you, and trust (annoyingly, patiently) that things are working for you, even when it feels like the universe is freelancing.

    Time will tell. Time. That funny little illusion we all pretend is real while it calmly laughs in non-linear.

    We spend our lives surfing waves of illusion and call it reality. Maybe in 2026, more layers of reality become accessible. Maybe more people stop being afraid of the unknown. Which would make sense, we are living in the age of information, curiosity, and the “wait, that actually makes sense.”

    So here’s to the lessons of 2025. This transformative “9” year. May we leave behind the patterns that truly need to go, and stop labeling everything as “DO NOT REPEAT.” Not all repetition is bad. History itself is repetitive. Humanity is repetitive. Of course our small lives contain echoes. In a world where everything is frequency, we’ll keep attracting similar situations if we keep broadcasting the same signal.

    The trick isn’t forcing new outcomes. It’s shifting the frequency.

    To attract what we want, we first have to know how it feels. Learn it. Tune into it. Practice holding it without panic.

    To attract what’s aligned? That’s the scenic route. Balance. Self-trust. Letting go of control. Responding instead of forcing. Being present. Listening inward instead of outsourcing direction.

    I’m choosing alignment. I’m choosing balance.

    Happy 2026. Let’s try a gentler level this time.

  • Don’t Run From Yourself (You’ll Catch Up Anyway)

    At some point in life, you realize there is no such thing as “the future.” Not in the dramatic psychic hotline sense, but in the mildly inconvenient, existential way. Everything is apparently happening at once, and time is just… how we keep ourselves from panicking.

    Which means the thing you’ve been running toward (or away from) has probably been right there the whole time. Some of us feel things before reality as we perceive catches up. We get called “psychic.” No. We are just tuned into time differently than the average person.

    What we like to label intuition, telepathy, or how did I know that? isn’t a superpower. It’s not witchcraft. It’s not even particularly sexy. It’s just… being tuned in. To yourself. To others you resonate to. To your patterns. To that quiet inner signal that’s been trying to get your attention while you were busy refreshing your phone and questioning every decision you’ve ever made.

    It’s not mind-reading. It’s just frequency recognition. Once you know how something feels: a person, a city, a situation, you can sense it from miles away. Like a radio station. Some frequencies fade. Some don’t. Some stay stubbornly on air like a song you didn’t ask Spotify to play but now somehow know all the lyrics to.

    Have I mastered turning every frequency off? Absolutely not. But I have mastered turning my back. And I mastered not getting swayed away with all the coincidences and reminders that still manage to find me everyday. I mastered not giving an emotional response, other than cracking up once in a while when they get too ridiculous. And honestly, that’s an underrated life skill.  

    The more connected you are to yourself, the less random life feels. Patterns start revealing themselves. Yours. Theirs. Life’s. And yes, awareness can feel a little boring. Like being the only sober person at a party. But it’s also what keeps you from replaying the same emotional storyline with a different cast and a slightly worse ending.

    That’s one of the points life on Earth tries teaching. Not running from yourself. Not outsourcing your direction to fate, tarot cards, exes, or the universe’s customer service department, which in my humble opinion, doesn’t exist the way we wish it would.

    Because when you’re connected to you, you already know where you’re going. And suddenly the people and opportunities that appear make sense. Suddenly you’re less busy forcing outcomes and more comfortable letting timing do its thing.

    Once you start noticing how interconnected everything is: people, places, timing, moods, you notice something else too: alignment is contagious. When you’re aligned with yourself, aligned people show up. Aligned opportunities knock. Aligned chaos waits politely instead of kicking the door in.

    Funny how that works. The moment I stopped obsessing over destiny and started trusting myself (while handing the truly uncontrollable bits over to God), life aligned in ways I never could’ve planned. I wanted the “go with the flow” last year. I got it. Just not in the aesthetic, Pinterest-board way I imagined.

    Turns out clarity doesn’t always arrive loudly. It comes with fires that burn down the masks, storms that blow out the dead skin away, and then it just you on the shoulder and says, Relax. You’ve been on the right path longer than you think. 

  • (Almost) White Christmas

    Yesterday, the air smelled like snow. You know that smell, the kind that sneaks up on you, taps you on the shoulder, and whispers, “Put your expectations down, but trust me anyway.” I didn’t get my hopes up. I never do. I just knew. And sure enough, it snowed. The first snow of the season here.

    Apparently, I don’t just travel with actual baggage; I bring weather systems. Missed the November snow in Bern, caught it back home in Bulgaria. Timing has never been my strongest skill, but when it hits, it hits.

    I’m reunited with my parents and our dogs for Christmas and New Year’s, sitting in my parents’ new handmade sunroom while snow falls politely outside. Courtesy of my father, who can build actual structures with his hands. Which explains… A lot. Apparently this is why I have a soft spot for men who can build things. Especially out of wood. Especially if they don’t need an instruction manual. I, too, have woodworking plans. Turns out it’s genetic. The blueprint was there all along.

    Now, let’s be honest. I’d choose Alpine cold over this humid, windy chaos any day. This is the kind of cold that seeps into your bones uninvited. And yet, yes, I’m still considering a swim in the Black Sea, despite it feeling like minus seven degrees outside. Limits? Never met her. My idea of fun doesn’t need refinement, just a matching level of insanity and other humans who hear “freezing water” and think, “Perfect.” Especially if that’s a mutually agreed first-date plan. 

    After Christmas dinner, and an ambitious amount of mulled wine at apéro, I slept for twelve uninterrupted hours. Twelve. A coma, really. A well-earned one after a week of sleep deprivation and questionable decisions.

    And then… the dreams.

    Three different men starred in them. One by one. Like a rotating cast. I feel dirty, in the best possible way. Real me is on a wholesome family holiday. Dream me, however, had a packed social calendar, dream dates. One was the regular. The recurring character. Always there, stopped complaining about it, there is no point. This time particularly committed to reminding me what I was allegedly missing out on. The other two were new. And new is always delightful. I was eventually pulled back to reality by our puppy launching himself into bed like a furry alarm clock with zero respect for narrative closure. 

    And somewhere between the snow, the wine, the dreams, and the dog hair, it hit me how far I’ve come since September. Back then, I was still mad at him. Actively. Professionally. Now? Life is too good to bother. Plus, I closed the loop. Finally. Turns out some things don’t need force, just timing. And a little snowfall for dramatic effect.

    I’m out. I’m free. Free to live and enjoy the absolute crap out of myself, like a graduate freshly released into the world, slightly unhinged, deeply grateful, and fully convinced that the best part might still be ahead.

    And honestly? I’ll take that kind of white Christmas any year. Light and fluffy. Good vibes, BBQ meats with a side of potato salad with homemade French Dressing. 

  • Mission: Inner Peace (Now With Extra Sass)

    Nothing whispers “mission accomplished” softer than uniting with your own energy after years of chasing nervous system regulation like it was a limited-edition NFT. Yeah. I said it. Me, myself, and my vibe: finally in alignment. Chill, calm, and absolutely unwilling to outsource my peace ever again.

    And then there’s my creative spark. Oh, the elusive little rascal. Vanished years ago like it was dodging taxes, only to waltz back in a few nights ago with, “Hi, remember me? Let’s doodle.” Not AI-generated, thank you very much. AI could try, but it doesn’t have my brain’s level of chaotic brilliance. My head is basically a Pinterest board for symbolic dreams, very specific snack cravings, mixing things I love (the Aare, fondue and the animals at Dählhölzli) into an artwork. Think an alternate universe Bern where the Aare is flowing fondue, the herbivorous zoo animals have turned into cheese eaters, and they’re having a “fondueschwumm” meanwhile the carnivorous ones are BBQing at Eichholz. Don’t worry they bought the meats from supermarkets, no zoo animals were harmed making these illustrations. Yay my child level absurd creativity is back. 

    So there I am, cozy-ass apartment, candles flickering like tiny, passive-aggressive cheerleaders, fake sunlight doing its best impression of a tropical vacation, playful music playing like it has insider knowledge of my mood swings. I’m drawing. Then I’m sawing wood. Sanding it. Smelling the nostalgia of sawdust from childhood… it’s literally the adult version of playing with Lego, but with a hint of meditative stillness. Maybe I inherited some of my dad’s craftsmanship genes, maybe I’m just happy to have something that doesn’t require Wi-Fi.

    Oh, and yes, I’m on a social-media hiatus. Hermit mode: activated. I posted my illustrations in my stories, called my mom (hi, mom!), that’s it. No notifications. No external stimulation. Just me, my thoughts, and the occasional existential chuckle.

    Because sometimes, hermit mode isn’t “antisocial,” it’s the height of self-love. It’s a soft rebellion against chaos: “I’m too peaceful to scroll. I will eat the Rösti and let my tastebuds dance. I will sip my tea. I will spend time with my plants.”

    In the quietest, softest way, life throws random surges of happiness at me as well. Love. Gratitude. Little nudges that feel like someone sprinkled edible glitter on my aura. It feels… yummy. Like, I-can’t-believe-this-is-real-but-it-is yummy.

    And the icing on the cake? My inner runner and inner chaser finally RSVPed “yes” to the self-love party. No drama, no chasing, no fleeing. The party has one strict dress code: heart-centered vibes only. And the DJ? Yours truly, spinning only tracks approved by my nervous system.

    So here I am. Peaceful, calm, armed with my art, my sawdust, my emergency fondue and chocolate stashes, and a renewed appreciation for the absurdity of being human. No Bern. No cosmic outsourcing. Just me. My vibes. My energy.

    And truly? I’ve entered my “I lived, I healed, and I’m kinda hot about it” era. I’m living proof you can survive full‑body ego extractions, spiritual plot twists that make telenovelas look subtle, dark nights, emotional detoxes, cosmic curveballs, karmic escape rooms, entanglements so confusing they deserved subtitles, identity deaths, resurrection arcs, and whatever the hell you call “healing while inhaling sawdust.”

    And somehow? I came out of it with good skin, working chakras, and a nervous system that no longer files HR complaints about my lifestyle.

    So no, I wasn’t supposed to be a monk. Or the next Buddha!? I’m still me, just healed and regulated. Plus balanced, finally. I’ve been craving balance more than some Libras I know. 

    But here’s the humbling part: I’m fully aware life might drag me into another dark night if there’s more junk to peel off. And that’s fine (optionally I can really live without one.) But right now? I’m enjoying the absolute hell out of this peace.

    Because me (and the pillows that have absorbed several liters of my emotional hydration), we earned this era.

    And I’m unapologetically YAYing to that.

  • Ice Walls

    My relationship with the cold began after I was mentally, emotionally, and spiritually destroyed. I couldn’t even stand the heat, my chest would tighten, my breath would catch, and the sun felt like an interrogation lamp I never agreed to sit under. I hated the sun because it was warm and bright and cheerful, three things I was not. I even avoided the sea, the same sea I grew up with, because water was too emotional. Too much flow. I needed the mountains instead. The heights, the rigidity, the stillness, the cold air, the quiet blanket of snow. 

    I became cold-resistant out of sheer survival. I learned to control my muscles, to reverse the involuntary flexing that comes with feeling cold. When you relax your muscles in the cold, you stop feeling it. Wild, I know. That little trick trained me to control my emotions too, especially the negative ones. I built walls. My heart became an ice fortress. Elsa would’ve been impressed. 

    Then he came along. (There’s always a he, isn’t there?) I remember the exact night my walls melted in front of him. With him, I started enjoying the sun again. I found peace near water again, like I used to. I remember floating, laughing, breathing. I was healing. I even lost my cold resistance, which at the time I blamed on his overheated apartment; meanwhile, mine was hanging out somewhere between 13 to 16 degrees like a polite fridge. Now I know it wasn’t his radiator. It was my nervous system feeling safe. Warm. Nurtured. 

    It didn’t last, of course. I’m cold-resistant again. But this time, I don’t hate the warmth. I can enjoy both the sun and the snow, the flow and the stillness. My apartment’s still cold, but I’ve got blankets. Layers. Tea. Balance. Orange and blue. The Moon and the Sun. The Feminine and the Masculine. Shadow and Light. Harmony.

    My walls are still down, but don’t get me wrong, the boundaries are very much installed. I learned them the hard way. I broke every rule I had for a person, stretched my limits into a yoga pose that didn’t exist. And that taught me everything I needed to know about myself. 

    So even if my ego still throws shade at him and says, “no forgiveness, not today,” my soul knows better. It sees the whole thing as growth. As healing. As my love finding its way back to me, even if it took the scenic route through chaos. 

    Someone once told me I needed to get hurt to learn. At the time, I thought, “that’s a terrible teaching method.” But they were right. Pain really is the ultimate life coach. And the sooner we accept that, the sooner we get to ride the waves of life instead of fighting them.

    Some waves crash you down, some you ride like a pro, but either way, the ocean always teaches you something. That’s probably why I want to surf so badly. My emotional body has been riding waves its whole life; it’s only fair my physical body gets to join the party, so I can master the act of Surrender in real time. 

    So maybe, just maybe, the point isn’t to stay warm or cold. Maybe it’s to live in that perfect middle ground; balance, harmony, integration. Learning to dance between shadow and light, and realizing you’re both the wave and the one riding it. 

  • Infinite Mirrors

    The universe is basically a very dramatic mirror. What you see depends entirely on the angle you’re holding your life at, the filter on your mood, and whether you’ve slept enough. History repeats itself – especially if you haven’t done your homework – and sometimes the echoes are so literal they feel like bad rewrites of a play you thought you’d left backstage.

    Case study: dogs.

    My grandparents had a husky. I named her Happy because, if you’re going to rescue something, you might as well give it optimism as a name. She arrived like an accident of fate, not a purchase. Later we had a tan hunting dog who refused to leave us that we had no other choice but to take him in. One Christmas, Happy nearly died. I was a teen, and in that small, ridiculous human way, I used my Christmas wish on her healing. Months of illness turned to recovery, and she got a third chance at life; rescued off the street, loved, and then loved again.

    Fast-forward years. Another husky rescue; Alex. He already had a name. Another tan hunting dog that successfully got himself adopted because he refused to leave. Alex got attacked. Untreated wounds became infection; he fell ill. It stopped being coincidence and started to look like a pattern; a repeating riff on a melody I recognized but had no sheet music for.

    At my parents’ place, another rescue who found us by herself, injured a leg during the same patch I was limping. This March, apparently, was Injury Season. Or perhaps it’s simply that the world hums in patterns, and sometimes the hum reaches everyone within earshot.

    Look at the weather. Stormy weeks mirror stormy moods. Clear nights feel like reconciliations with life. Stars pop on like tiny agreement notices, saying, Yes. You are still part of this. Nature mirrors our bodies, our feelings, our odd little crises. We borrow metaphors from it because evolution handed us the original instruction manual: watch a river and you’ll understand flow; watch a tree and you’ll learn rootedness.

    We are connected: not in a platitudey, inspirational-poster way, but in a slow, undeniable choreography of cause and echo. If you stop for even a minute, and you start noticing, you’ll find more mirrors than you have in your bathroom cabinet.

    Sometimes the reflections are gentle: a breeze on a balcony that makes you remember lying on your childhood roof naming cloud animals (fox! swan! very questionable whale). Sometimes they are cinematic: you feel like you’re watching your life from a balcony above it: a passive observer in a movie you wrote but forgot your lines for. Those dreamlike moments are not glitches. They’re the universe handing you a high-def still of the pattern: pause, study, understand.

    There are people who minimize mirrors in their life (metaphorically and literally, some of them hate selfies). I get it. Maybe mirrors are inconvenient if you’re not ready to adjust your hair or your narrative. But pretending mirrors aren’t there doesn’t stop the reflection. It just postpones the conversation.

    So what if we accepted that we come from invisible roots above and below that tie us to the soil, the stars, and everything in between? What if the planet is one enormous organism and we’re polite bacteria? (Philosophy aside: I like the imagery.) If we stop treating daily life like a to-do list and start reading it like a novel, there’s more meaning than we usually allow ourselves to see between the lines.

    The point isn’t mystical showboating. It’s noticing: the feather on your path; the way a dog’s eye holds you and remembers you months later; the way your limp matches other people’s (and your parents’ dog’s that lives 1’500km away) ; the way a chance conversation solves a problem you didn’t know you had. These are small miracles disguised as coincidences.

    So maybe the work is simple and impossible at the same time: observe more, judge less, and loosen your grip on the wheel. Float a little. Let life look back at you. If dreams have been whispering the script all along, perhaps reality is only waiting for you to show up and read it.

    And if you’re still unsure. Try the dog test. Rescue one, watch how history and heartbeat rearrange themselves, and then tell me the universe isn’t excellent at mirrors.

  • Labels and More Labels

    Twin flames. Soulmates. Lightworkers. Starseeds. DFs, DMs… The internet has turned into a spiritual alphabet soup. The deeper you dig, the more labels you find. It’s basically like googling a headache and suddenly discovering you’ve got a brain tumor.

    Humans have this relentless need to label everything. Introvert, extrovert, ambivert, and now ortrovert? Healers, psychics, mediums… At some point, it starts sounding less like self-discovery and more like an HR department from another galaxy.

    But here’s the kicker: some connections don’t need labels. They’re just it. I’m me, you’re you, we already have names. Do we really need to slap on a nametag too? At the end of the day, we’re all just particles colliding in the same human experiment.

    And then there’s the “one great love” theory. Some say you only get one. Some say two. Either way, it sounds suspiciously like the rules of a board game no one agreed to play. The truth? Great love isn’t always fireworks and epic ballads. Sometimes it’s subtle. A smile you didn’t expect. Healing you didn’t know you needed. Or finally knowing what you want in life after a five-year detour through chaos, heartbreak, and questionable decisions.

    So maybe the point isn’t the labels at all. We don’t call ourselves surfers after one wave, or hikers after one trail. Our hobbies don’t define us, so why should our labels? Especially when some people collect them like medieval kings collected titles “Duke of This, Lord of That, Keeper of the Gridlines, and Occasional Reiki Practitioner.”

    Maybe the real trick is to embody who we are, let it evolve, and not take any of it too seriously. To stop over-analyzing and start floating; like we’re drifting in a river, letting the current take us.

    Because at the end of the day, labels may try to tell us what we are. But only we get to decide who. And in the end, no label ever defined us better than this: human, just trying to figure it out. 

  • The “Tsch Tsch” of Enlightenment


    Last year, I mocked a billboard for grilled meats. “Tsch tsch,” it read, trying to seduce me with the sound of sizzling. As if I was Gordon Ramsay. As if I had a Weber collection in my non-existent backyard.

    Every time I walked past it, I rolled my eyes like the world’s most judgmental art director: “Really? That’s the best they came up with?”

    And then… this summer, during one of my grilling evenings at the park that I ever so look forward to, just around the time the billboard ads had made a come-back, winking at me… I heard it. Tsch tsch. Suddenly, it wasn’t an ad anymore. It was a cosmic truth. I had been enlightened by a sausage.

    That was the moment I realized: most of life’s great understandings sneak up on us like this. They sit right under our noses – which, ironically, we literally can’t see without a mirror – until one day, something clicks.

    Until then, life hides its answers in plain sight, just out of reach. And no matter how many people point at it, explain it, or warn you about it, you won’t see it until your moment arrives.

    So I began to wonder; how much of life do we silently judge in others, dismissing what hasn’t yet clicked for us? And how much compassion could we hold if we remembered that everyone’s “click” has its own timing?

    And maybe that’s the point: we all learn differently in our own different timings. Some people can just take advice. I, apparently, need to be charred in the fires of direct experience.

    So maybe the secret isn’t to roll our eyes at other people’s “not-yet-clicked” moments, or judge situations through our own limited perspective; the one that might only make sense to us later. Maybe it’s not to form such strong opinions in the first place, since half the things we swear by today will sound either naïve or too harsh tomorrow. Maybe the secret is to accept that enlightenment can sound like sizzling meat, look like a bad breakup, or arrive disguised as a metaphor we never asked for.


    Maybe the real wisdom is this: life isn’t a straight line of lessons. It’s a series of sizzling sounds, waiting for us to finally hear them.

    After all, one person’s “Tsch tsch” is another person’s “Ah-ha.”

  • Blowing Out Candles (and Other Traditions We Can’t Seem to Quit)

    How many things do we keep doing simply because… we’ve always done them?

    This year, I had my birthday with my parents. Lovely day, lovely cake, the kind you buy from the store that still insists on plastic decorations nobody needs. Then came the candles. And for the first time in my life, I thought: why am I doing this? Blowing out candles suddenly felt pointless. Last year, it felt like magic, like one strong puff could carry my wish straight into the universe. This year, I did it out of tradition. As if the wish would expire if I didn’t.

    It made me wonder how many other things I keep alive purely because of habit.

    Take photoshoots, for example. Growing up, we always had them. My mom loved them, my dad, the family photographer, took them, and I adored them. It became our thing. My love for photography grew from theirs; I graduated from family portraits to hiking landscapes, and eventually, architecture, just like my dad. But this year? The thought of a photoshoot feels… meh. And yet I know we’ll probably still do it, because it’s tradition. Because “we always have.”

    Is that growth? Or un-conditioning? Or just me rebelling against ancestral programming like it’s a Netflix subscription I never signed up for? Most of my early twenties felt like a crash course in breaking cycles my parents never broke; and somehow, that growth rubbed off on them too. Turns out, learning doesn’t stop at 50. Or 26. Or ever.

    Life’s ripple effect is funny that way. I’ve learned my biggest lessons through love and romantic connections. My parents? Through me, their only child. And somehow, our growth overlaps. Like a family group project none of us asked for, but all of us are in.

    And then there’s how love multiplies. Once, I bought someone a massage gun for his sore hips. I would have never thought of getting myself one. But I tried it, liked it, bought one for my parents, and then we got one for my grandparents too. One thoughtful act snowballed until suddenly everyone’s muscles were happier. That’s love for you: powerful, exponential, and sneakily practical.

    So here’s to traditions we outgrow, lessons we can’t skip, and love that multiplies like a group chat you never leave.