Maybe you’ve been there. Emotional spikes. Anxiety. Nervous system doing the cha-cha. Impatience. Clinging. Non-linear AF. Highs, lows, instability. Here’s the thing – that’s not how we’re meant to live. Call it mid-20s growth, call it planets doing whatever since 2023, call it having a twin flame connection according to the internet that I don’t buy into, call it the Wood Snake shedding layers whatever – I’ve had my fair share of consciousness stretching, ego bruising, skin-shedding, and soul-level upgrades. And finally… I connected the dots.
Lessons have accelerated since March 2025. Awareness expands. Consciousness stretches. We keep shedding. But now? We’re moving into embodied creation. Trauma-bonds are turning into co-creation. Alignment is speeding up. Old ways stopped working. Words, thoughts, energy: they manifest faster. Karma arrives on time. Some things that used to need years? Now they need days.
I used to manifest with emotions: want it? It happens. Reject it? It doesn’t. No expectations, no daydreaming allowed. Just feeling, releasing, moving.
Now, manifestation is calm knowing. Clear directions. Quiet confidence. Following intuition without thinking too much. Moving without expectations. Regulating emotions (yes, even when the tricky). Calm logic, calm mind, calm energy. That’s where the real power lives.
The mind? It still freaks sometimes. Morpheus has been telling us “the mind has trouble letting go.” since 1999. Dreams hit with uncanny timing. You “predict” things. Maybe you’re great at pattern recognition, maybe time operates differently for you than it does for some others. Reality aligns, bends, shifts. Universe listens like your phone algorithm listening to you at 2 a.m. You can’t help but question the whole thing.
“Ignorance is bliss,” I’ve been hearing more and more. Cypher said it too, but we can’t go back. We can’t unsee. We can’t unlearn. I’ve had my Cypher phase too. After a series of ego bruising, I accepted. So… just shrug. Smile. “Fine, whatever.” And then: have some fun.
I’m in that phase now: fun + co-creation + fire containment. Fire Horse energy blazing. Planet transits doing their thing. I feel the shifts first (yes, I’m quick). Others will catch up eventually. They always do.
Until then? I’m living. Creating. Laughing. Moving with energy I can hold. Fire contained. Power activated. Queen of Wands mode: ON.
Happy living. Happy fire. Happy manifesting.
And oh… One more thing. Your mind wants to figure it all out. Wants to control. Wants to be sure. Let it go. And just live.
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.
There is a very specific cosmic joke reserved for people who enjoy discomfort. In my case, it’s called cold water immersion or going out undressed in freezing temperatures to feel the icy air nibble on my skin. While normal people are inside sipping tea at -4°C, I went swimming in the Black Sea for fun, and then sipped my herbal tea in my thermos at the beach.
There is actual science behind this madness, and no, I didn’t arrive here informed, researched, or wearing a lab coat. I stumbled into it the intuitive way: a few years ago I noticed that cold air and cold water calmed my very fried nervous system almost instantly. That was enough proof for me.
Let’s dive into the cold waters now.
Your nervous system isn’t weak. It just forgot how badass it is. It basically runs on two modes:Sympathetic (fight, flight, panic, existential dread, “why did I send that text”) and Parasympathetic (rest, digest, calm, actual peace).
Most of us live permanently in the first one.
Cold exposure forces a controlled shock. It rips you out of autopilot and drops you straight into regulated survival mode. And when you come out of that icy panic bubble alive, your nervous system goes, “Oh. We survived. Cool. Guess we can relax now.” That’s vagus nerve activation, baby. Emotional regulation, improved stress tolerance, less dramatic reactions to life in general.
Cold water is basically emotional push-ups. When it hits, your body releases endorphins, norepinephrine, and adrenaline: a chemical cocktail that starts as “this is illegal” and ends as “I can handle literally anything now.” Basically my favorite type of cocktail. Too bad they don’t serve it at regular bars. Who wants to open that type of bar with me? Anyhow, over time, your system remembers this. Future stressors feel smaller because your body knows it survived worse.
And here’s the important part: emotional regulation isn’t just talk therapy. You can journal until your wrist cramps, but if your body doesn’t know how to handle stress, your nervous system won’t either. Cold exposure yanks you out of your head and into your body. Thought spirals stop. Panic becomes manageable. You’re present instead of catastrophizing your entire existence.
Cold + conscious breathing is where the bliss happens. Your heart races, your breath spikes, muscles tighten. that’s automatic. But if you slow your breathing instead of panicking, and relax your clenching muscles, you’re literally training your brain to stay calm under pressure. That’s neuroplasticity. Every time you relax enough that you don’t shiver, your nervous system levels up.
And no, this doesn’t make you emotionally numb. Quite the opposite. It builds emotional resilience. You still feel deeply, you just don’t collapse every time life pokes you with a stick. Perhaps soft core, hard shell in action. Which is one of my favorite phrases.
Because mental strength isn’t a personality trait. It’s a muscle. And just like any muscle, that can be trained. Cold water is nervous system boot camp. Emotional fastball training. A reminder that you can face discomfort, breathe through it, and come out clearer on the other side.
In my case, cold exposure has evolved from “mental health experiment” to full-blown personality trait. Somewhere between frozen swims and icy air nibbling at my skin, my brain decided this is how we get dopamine now. Is it an addiction? Possibly. But there are worse addictions than voluntarily freezing yourself to feel alive.
At this point, I’m just hoping to find equally unhinged humans who think a cute date involves cold water, deep breaths, and laughing hysterically afterward.
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.
Last year, I made a vision board. You know, one of those very intentional, aesthetically curated collages where you casually tell the universe, “No pressure, but this please.” It was stacked: alpine scenery, river swims, Bern, mindful girl energy, techno nights, outdoorsy hobbies, sunshine, maybe even a puppy. Very balanced. Very “I have my life together” coded.
I didn’t actually hang it on the wall though. Not because I didn’t believe in it, more because I didn’t feel like explaining my long-term soul vision to short-term situations. Which, in hindsight, was already a clue. And frankly, none of those situations lasted long enough to earn a tour of my inner world anyway back in the day when I still gave dating in Italy a shot. It was pointless when the type of guy I know I want belongs to a whole other geography, and linguistic background.
Here’s the plot twist: almost everything on that board happened. Plus some surprises that were aligned with what was on the board. Even the puppy my parents ended up adopting because she accidentally ended up on their doorstep turned out to be black and white instead of black and brown, but we have a new puppy. Not magically overnight, not in a neat linear order, but unmistakably so. Except for one thing. The career part. That one sat there looking… vague. Half-hearted. Like a placeholder slide in a presentation you swear you’ll fix later.
Because while I apparently know exactly what I want in love, lifestyle, geography, energy, rhythm, scenery, temperature, and background soundtrack… But career-wise? Big blinking question mark. Creative fog. “We’ll circle back.”
Which got me thinking: maybe vision boards aren’t magic wish lists. Maybe they’re mirrors. They don’t create clarity, they respond to it.
When you’re clear, life moves. When you’re vague, life shrugs and says, “Cool, I’ll improvise, and show you what you want.”
We don’t attract opportunities by being perfect. We attract them by being honest about what we want. And when we don’t know yet, choosing to figure it out might actually be the first real decision. That choice alone seems to flip a switch. Suddenly paths appear. Detours make sense. Timing reveals itself retroactively.
The irony? The board was never the point. Clarity was. Alignment was. Frequency was.
I wasn’t attracting aligned opportunities in areas where I was undecided, and that wasn’t punishment, it was feedback.
So maybe the real takeaway isn’t “make a better vision board,” but “get clearer with yourself.” And if you’re not there yet, at least be clear about wanting clarity. This little game called life seems to respect that.
As for the rest? It tends to work itself out. Just not always in the font you expected.
Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that your future self has been quietly running the show this whole time?
We’re taught to romanticize fate. Destiny. As if life were some external force dangling clues in front of us, daring us to interpret them correctly. We wait for signs. We wait for permission. But what if the guidance we’re looking for isn’t coming from out there at all?
What if “future you” is already whispering in your ear, because everything is happening at once, and we’re just stuck experiencing it like a linear Netflix episode instead of the full series drop on multiple screens watching it al at once?
Picture a motherboard.
Time isn’t something that passes. It’s the board itself. You’re not the board; you’re the signal moving across it. Your choices light up different pathways. Free will is which traces activate. Intuition? Signal feedback from other nodes. Past, present, future, all online simultaneously.
Some routes glow. Some stay dark. Maybe somewhere, in another version of you, those dormant paths are fully powered. The whole system already exists: you’re just experiencing which circuits youenergize through thought, attention, and choice. Perception and decisions.
Zoom out far enough and sure, the mainframe is the universe. Obviously. But here’s the thing: when we feel like we have no free will, it’s usually because we’ve hardwired ourselves too tightly into the mainframe: outsourcing our knowing instead of listening inward.
I’m not saying free will is an illusion. I’m saying it’s more internal than we think.
The more we trust ourselves, the more we stay in our bodies, the more present our energy becomes, the louder the signal gets. When the analytical mind finally shuts up for five minutes, something else comes online. Something quieter. Older. Smarter.
That’s when time stops feeling linear. That’s when you feel close to creation. To unity. To the universe.
And to yourself.
I couldn’t help but wonder… In a world where the answers were never ahead of us, but already humming beneath our feet, waiting for us to notice which path lights up next, how can we maximize the input?
I couldn’t help but wonder… How many cities are actually designed to destroy us… and why do they never send a follow‑up apology email? I feel happy for my girl friends who found home in Milano, and how this city that’s my training ground and zen-testing, is somehow their happy place.
Some places drain you without remorse. The noise, the density, the emotional smog in the air; suddenly your body is clenching every muscle like you’re preparing for impact and didn’t get the memo.
And then one day… Your upstairs neighbors decide they’re headlining an Italian R&B World Tour. Your other neighbors are reenacting Parliament: The Musical. Your coworkers are collectively stress-breathing like a broken espresso machine.
And you catch yourself thinking, “can noise kill you or just spiritually assassinate you?”
Turns out: neither, but it can make you question all your life choices and consider becoming a hermit in the Alps for a couple of weeks.
So naturally, your brain does what any responsible adult brain does: It dissociates. You escape to the reality you want in your dream: You’re wandering through a cheese expo, sampling Swiss cheese like you’re the Queen of Lactose. Life is good. Your cortisol is on vacation.
Honestly? I crave cheese the way some people crave stability. My dream house? Made entirely of different types of cheese so I can nibble on the walls when I’m stressed.
And when winter hits…? Throw me into a lake of fondue. Let me backstroke through melted Gruyère like a happy little raccoon.
But reality hits like a cold shower: Your neighbors are still loud. Your job is still loud. The planet is still loud. Where am I gonna go? Live on a star? Although that was a childhood dream of mine, even my inner child got educated on science, biology, and space.
So you retaliate with the maturity of a seasoned adult: You BLAST your own music out of spite. You slam on your Beats like you’re performing a noise exorcism. You decide that inner peace means “no outside noise. Just me, my playlist, and maybe God if He’s quiet.”
Meanwhile, your little sneaker who wants to sprint to Switzerland on the next train, is packing her tiny emotional suitcase like, “Enough. Let’s go where the frequencies are civilized. And calm.”
But no. Not this time. Because this era is called “You’re Not Outsourcing Your Emotional Stability and Your Zen-Mode to Switzerland.”
No Bernsie. No Aare river emotional support field trip. No letting Switzerland do 70% of the energetic heavy lifting while you pretend it’s your breathing exercises.
This season? Is radical sovereignty. It’s me choosing to be zen here, not just in a country that feels like a healing crystal (not everywhere, just in some places, for me.)
So it’s me. My cozy-ass home. My emergency fondue stash (obviously). My music. My energy. Me, regulating myself like a tiny enlightened bouncer at the door of my own nervous system.
And somehow… It’s working. Just not every single day. But guess who catches me when I burn-out? Me.
I used to think I wasn’t spiritual at all. I couldn’t sit still to meditate, what I did to ground myself suspiciously looked like walking barefoot in the park, and every time someone said “visualize light,” my brain responded with: how about we just feel it instead?
For a while, I felt guilty about that. Like I was missing some invisible membership card to the Enlightened People’s Club.
But then, one day, somewhere between the flow of the Aare and the rhythm of a Swiss-German song I couldn’t stop humming with dragonflies landing on my body, I realized: I am meditating. Just not in the way people say I should.
Maybe spirituality isn’t meant to look like sitting cross-legged with your eyes closed. Maybe it’s just being fully alive. Maybe meditative states happen naturally when your feet touch earth, not when your mind repeats affirmations. When you come across an animal, an insect, a bird and your heart’s walls melt. When you’re in a city that feels like home and you don’t have to do anything else but be.
Maybe alignment isn’t found in routine, but in recognition, the moment you notice how your entire being lights up in certain places, around certain people, under certain skies.
Maybe meditation is as simple as relaxing your body when its automatic reflex is to tighten up from cold. Maybe it’s keeping yourself calm in a sauna when your heart races. Maybe it’s balancing on a board or holding onto a boulder. Maybe it’s focusing on your breath to fall asleep, or on an ascent when your heart is racing.
Maybe your flow state is when you’re going down a mountain on your bike. Maybe it’s hearing the sound of moving water. Maybe it’s being underwater. Getting kissed by the sun. Feeling the salt on your skin. Gliding through powder, or the waves. Carving on your skateboard. Whispers of wind that feel like freedom. Birdsong at 4AM. Morning red, evening pastels. Watching the clouds drift laying on grass. Smelling the air after rain or just before snow.
Some souls don’t come here to follow the steps. We come here to remember that there were never any to begin with. We can find the spark in anything. We can turn anything into purpose. We can be anything our heart calls us to be.
We find divinity in movement, in breath, in laughter, in mistakes, in the way the world mirrors us back to ourselves. And when we stop trying to do it “right,” that’s when we finally realize; we’ve been doing it right all along. We don’t need a label for the way we choose to live this human experience we call life.
So no, you won’t see me in linen clothing with crystals, affirmations, or with the wild eyes of the people who’ve spent too much time in Bali. But you will see me living my life with awareness.
Today, I accidentally grounded myself. Not in a “spiritual practice” kind of way, more in a “bureaucracy dragged me to Switzerland and I ended up on a random walk by the Rhône” kind of way.
Normally, I’d call that walk “too flat, too boring.” I’m a mountain girl. I crave altitude, challenge, sweat, existential breakthroughs at 2,000 meters. But my body, still in recovery, had other plans. Apparently, she wanted flat. Gentle. Ordinary and yet with hidden beauty everywhere.
And somehow… it was perfect.
I passed quiet valley towns, waved at black nose sheep, spotted horses, crows, a shy eurasian jay, the all black crows I love so much, cure sparrows… Basically, a Disney line-up for introverts. The sun hid behind the mountains, the air bit just enough to remind me it’s November. I photographed the first frost of the season like it was a celebrity sighting.
And for once since my August Bern trip which I spent 9 days in a constant state of bliss thanks to the Aare; I wasn’t thinking again. Not about what’s next. Not about the past. Not about anything, just the occasional Swiss German grammar questions I came up with. And my new favorite song, Grüens Liecht playing in my mind on repeat. My mind was… empty. And it felt peaceful. Blissful.
Afterward, I did what any enlightened woman would do: blew too much money at Migros and Coop. My fridge always looks like a Swiss grocery aisle – chocolate, cheese, butter, salad dressing, zopf… I even bring pasta back to Italy. If Italians find out, it won’t be good for me. In my defense I buy it for the shape. They don’t have “hörnli” and I love that shape of pasta because it reminds me of my childhood. My taste buds definitely don’t care about geography. They like what they like.
Then, like the universe wanted to wink at me, I stumbled into Fasnachtseröffnung. The costumes, the brass, the wild joy of it all. I’d been thinking about 11.11 11:11 for a week, and suddenly there it was, three days early. Unexpected, and definitely brought a smile.
My old self would’ve hopped on the next train to Bern, chasing the gravitational pull I always feel towards that city, my personal north star. But instead, I stayed grounded. I stayed here. And maybe that’s growth: realizing you don’t need to orbit the brightest star in your universe to feel illuminated.
Today reminded me when you’re whole, when you’re present, the coordinates don’t matter. Peace travels with you.
I’m 27 now. And I’m not ashamed to admit that it took me a very long time to understand the concept of self-care. My upbringing was basically a cross between an endurance test and a renovation show. We didn’t “rest.” We tiled. We didn’t unwind. We rebuilt houses. We didn’t go to all included resorts. We worked on the boat.
My parents weren’t the “weekend spa trip” kind of parents. They were the “let’s sand the deck and live in the camper van while the house is being built” kind. Every summer had the faint smell of paint thinner, and at least one power tool soundtrack playing in the background. That was our version of a lullaby.
In my youth-athlete era, my coaches carried the same torch of intensity. Rest days? Optional. Pushing limits? Mandatory. Up until this year, I genuinely believed that the entire point of exercise was to find your breaking point, and then casually jog past it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my family. But none of them seem to know what “taking a day off” actually means. My grandparents live in the countryside, which basically means their version of retirement is “working forever.” The women handle the house, the men disappear into their basements to “work on projects” (translation: aggressively drilling things for fun). Maybe that is their version of self-care, but honestly, it looks like cardio with tools.
My mom talks to me about their days. I get tired just by listening about it. “Your dad worked on the staircase he’s building single handedly, and crushed some wood for the fireplace, and oh now he’s wiring some cables in the basement.”
So, naturally, it took me a while to realize that self-care doesn’t have to involve sweat, sawdust, or physical exhaustion.
Today, I had a revelation. I realized I had free will and could make myself crepes; just because I wanted to. No birthday, no brunch invite, no celebration. Just… me and a frying pan. I lit candles, put on some music, and even diffused essential oils like I was my own spa therapist. Then I whipped up a homemade Himalayan salt, oil, and rosemary peel because apparently I am now that person.
Here’s what I’ve learned: self-care doesn’t need to be an all-inclusive spa retreat in Bali (though, if anyone’s offering, I’m in). It can be small, simple, and even slightly chaotic. Maybe your version is retail therapy and buying yourself flowers. Maybe it’s doing face masks while watching conspiracy documentaries. There’s no wrong way to love yourself.
For me, self-care looks different every day. Sometimes it’s me half-asleep on the couch after giving myself a full massage with a gun that sounds like a small helicopter. Sometimes it’s me balancing on my wobble board, lights dimmed, downtempo techno in the background, my apartment smelling like palo santo and ambition.
The point is, self-care isn’t about perfection, it’s about permission. Permission to rest. Permission to do nothing. Permission to light the candle, eat the crepe, and enjoy the hell out of it.
Because it turns out, taking care of yourself doesn’t mean pushing harder. Sometimes it just means finally letting yourself stop pushing at all without a single thought.
Good Feelings Club 