Tag: writing

  • 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.

  • Little Nudges, Big Love

    I used to “complain” about how, whenever my energy dipped, it was on me to raise it again. No random nice surprises. No someone magically fixing it for me. Just me. Alone. Picking myself up, brushing off the low vibes like crumbs from last week’s cookies.

    Since March, that’s changed.

    It started with a tiny male bee. A little creature, seemingly tossed from his hive, struggling on the sidewalk while I was rushing home, fifteen minutes earlier than usual. I picked him up. Gave him sugar water. Found a resting spot on my balcony. While I was lounging on the couch, a gentle nudge told me to check on him. And then he flew away. Free. And somehow, watching that little rescue soar, I felt alive again.

    Since then, the universe has been dropping love-coded breadcrumbs everywhere I go. During my solo trips, gentle nudges lead me to things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise: a ring and a white rose from the Aare, a mustard-yellow backpack, a playful dinosaur postcard, a 9 of hearts card, a pink rose, the moon rising behind the Alps during sunset. If I hadn’t followed the little voice inside me telling me to go to Kirchenfeldbrücke, I would have been wandering around Altstadt missing the most beautiful moonrise I have seen yet. Bern has this way of loving me back. 

    Sometimes it’s dragonflies dancing around me, landing on me. A cricket hopping onto my pinkie. Spiders weaving their tiny, intricate homes across my swimsuit, my phone, me. Occasionally, it’s a lost subway insect I release, or a stranger I stumble upon who needs help at the exact moment I’m there to give it.

    Other times, it’s quiet moments: a baby smiling on the train, a dog locking eyes and wagging like we share a secret, crows getting strangely friendly.

    The last one? A spider landing on me right as I sat on the ground, followed by the discovery of a great horned owl down feather. A tiny reminder: look. Pay attention. Be open.

    Often, we don’t need grand gestures to lift ourselves. We just need to notice the little things. The universe whispers, we just have to listen. And sometimes, it’s these tiny nudges that remind us: yes. You are alive. You are seen. You are loved.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The Spider in the Bathtub: A Story About Goodbyes

    It was almost a year ago.
    A spider accidentally drowned in the bathtub.
    Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. A real spider.
    Small, delicate, curled in on itself. Its little body in the water puddle.
    I picked it up gently and laid it out on the coffee table, hoping maybe it was just stunned. Maybe it needed to dry.
    Maybe it would wake up.

    I left the room for a moment.
    When I came back, the spider was gone, thrown away.
    No ceremony. No goodbye.

    I felt the kind of grief that punches through logic. The kind that makes no sense to the people around you. The kind you can’t explain. I know because I had tears in my eyes when he said he threw it out, the kind of tears he could not relate to and didn’t even take seriously.

    But I knew this wasn’t just about a spider.

    Because I’m still not over it. After almost a year.

    This was about every goodbye I never got to say; laid in front of my eyes in the form of a bathroom spidey I had formed a mild emotional attachment to, whose accidental death was my fault, and it was thrown out by the person I loved.

    In my life, people leave.
    Not dramatically. Not loudly.
    Just… suddenly. Quietly. When I’m not looking.

    Loved ones pass away when I’m away.
    Breakups happen over the phone.
    Pets are gone when I’m away.
    Endings, real ones, never seem to happen face to face.

    There are no doors closing. No farewell hugs.
    Just empty space. A sudden absence. A vacuum that no one acknowledges.

    So I carry them.
    All of them.
    Inside.

    That spider cracked something open in me.

    Because I wanted to sit beside it.
    Watch. Wait. Witness.
    And if it didn’t come back, I wanted to give it a good goodbye.
    A sacred one.
    Even if it was “just” a spider.

    But I wasn’t given that chance.

    And that’s been the theme.
    The life pattern. The grief blueprint.

    “I wasn’t given that chance.”

    What do you do when life refuses to give you closure?

    You get it in your dreams at night.

    You get it in the wind that makes you remember a certain moment in your life.

    You get it by making new memories by yourself in the places you used to go together. In the streets you laughed, kissed, argued… Lived life. Even briefly.

  • We Broke Up, But Why Did We Also Break Apart?

    on post-breakup territory wars and becoming strangers with people we once undressed our souls with

    No one warns you about the silent custody agreement after a breakup.

    You get your side of the city. I get mine.

    You get the bar near your place. I’ll avoid it like it’s cursed.

    I get the bookstore downtown, but only before 2PM, because I know that’s when you usually go.

    The mutual cafe? Dead to both of us.

    We don’t talk about it, but we feel it.

    And suddenly, we’ve turned a love story into a war over real estate.

    We used to walk these streets like we were creating a world together. Now we’re living in the ruins, divided like ex-nations.

    There’s no judge or jury…

    But somehow, we both know which cafés are now forbidden, which parks are now sacred, and whose friends are no longer “neutral ground.”

    And I can’t help but wonder why does a breakup have to mean a complete delete of the non-romantic parts of a connection?

    We weren’t just lovers. We were people.

    Friends, even.

    We shared music, dumb jokes, late-night thoughts about the meaning of life.

    We sat on balconies and talked about our parents.

    We slow-danced in kitchens.

    We cried. We laughed.

    We knew each other.

    So why is it that, after it ends, we’re supposed to act like we never existed?

    Why is “just friends” seen as a downgrade, not a grace?

    Why do their friends have to stop being our friends?

    Why is it suddenly “too weird” to say hi without pretending like the past didn’t happen?

    Why does the end of romance mean the end of all relating?

    Maybe it’s ego.

    Maybe it’s pain.

    Maybe it’s our culture telling us to “cut the cord” and never look back.

    But maybe, just maybe, we’ve forgotten how to hold space for nuance.

    Maybe two people can love each other deeply, part ways honestly, and still care, without it being “messy.”

    Maybe it’s possible to outgrow the role without erasing the person.

    To say:

    “I no longer want you as my partner, but I still respect who you are.”

    “I won’t be at your birthday party, but I hope someone brings your favorite cake.”

    “I’m not yours anymore, but I hope you’re happy.”

    “I’m moving on, but I remember us fondly.”

    We don’t have to vanish from each other’s lives like ghosts.

    We don’t have to pretend it didn’t matter.

    It did.

    It just doesn’t anymore.

    And maybe that’s okay.