Writing by the Window with Birds Outside (June 12, 2025)

God, it’s mad being human.

I constantly feel like I need to be doing something
To stop the fluttering panic in my chest
The jolt that goes through me when I wake from a nap
The internal nagging, a constant flow of thoughts
Gripping and clawing and shaming with fear, fear, fear.

My parents dying, never having children, never finding love, getting in trouble, hurting people’s feelings, doing things wrong, wrong, wrong and being filled with regret, regret, regret.

Maybe if I can just think a little harder — roll that breakup and those unkind former friends around a bit more with the tongue of my mind I can solve my past and my future.

I panic sitting with myself — there must be something I definitely should be doing —
And so I stress over the prices of tax for a car ,and where I should live, and how I should negotiate on my rent, and has my life been a failure?

I rush outside to feed the birds, leaving sunflower seeds on the left pillar by the stone wall, partially protected by the rain by a pine tree.
The ivy growing up its trunk has died and is now a golden flapper dress for it to wear.
It will not strangle it or block its sun.
Like intrusive thoughts, or depression, or anxiety.
It gets to own it, for a change, to flaunt its beauty in its new dress.

Are the birds eating more important than my writing?
Did I not feed them two bags full this morning,
In the rain, drenched to the bone,
As a fellow walker commented of me from dry inside her car window?

How do I know what I write will have any value?
How do I know it won’t become lost like so many other things I’ve written?
Oh, the effort to organize them, to put them into the world.

I want to watch the birds as I write, eating my seeds, and feel comforted that
I am reaching someone. My being here matters to someone.

So many thoughts that I think, sitting by my window as a huge sea truck turns
Around in the rainy lough beside me.

And isn’t it mad that this is just one of my body parts — my brain.
Under my skin I have a skeleton — sitting here, like a Halloween decoration,
On this chair.
And organs and nerves and blood and all these things I don’t even think about,
All the time working for me,
Keeping me alive.

And I spend all this time focused on thoughts and worries and feelings.
And what is my brain anyway but something grayish and lumpy?

What a weird thing it is to be human.
How do you make sense of any of it,
With that one lumpy grayish part of yours?

Thoughts (June 13, 2025)

I have a million thoughts a day
And I don’t know which are mine.
Many seem more like suggestions of what I could think than actual thoughts.
Often contradicting each other,
This incessant internal chatter.

They can make me crazy without realizing it.

A million screaming children, a million angry Instagram comments, a million snide remarks, all inside my head —
Are any of these me?

Sometimes I will think something true,
And it pierces like ice blue water.
No other thoughts can stand next to it
The truth shines so strongly.

What would it be like to have only that —
Truth and silence?
No inner dialogues with myself, those who have hurt me, all the injustice my mind rants about.

My eyeballs could stop staring at the contents of my brain
And instead turn outward and see
All the beauty that is there.
My eyes, my ears, my voice, my soul — could be in the world
Experiencing and expressing itself
Rather than imprisoned in the virtual reality within the confines of my head.

Or perhaps — for argument’s sake — the world outside is as awful as some of my thoughts suggest
(I don’t believe it is, but bear with me)

Then my brilliant muscly brain who has so much skill at concocting realities
Can make something outlandishly beautiful and miraculous within my skull
And I can exist there.
Seeing the world through eyes with the hum of fantasy and love behind them.

And, in this state, I believe, we are so much closer
To all those ice blue moments of truth.
Things are so much better, I believe,
Than our minds can even fathom.

Beach Prayer (June 14, 2025)

Today I found a prayer on the beach
Thin, black ink in loopy cursive
On lined paper torn from a spiral notebook.

I unfolded it, not knowing what it was,
But hoping for connection, a story
A bit of magic
Something more than a receipt
A shopping list perhaps.

When I read the opening line:
”Just want to say thank you
Lord and universe…”
I felt I was invading something
Reading a message meant for someone else.
Not God, but someone who needed to find it, someone other than me.

I stood on the vast beach, with clouds overhead,
And the only two other beachgoers
A rain-coated man and woman
Filling white buckets with what I guessed were mussels.
There to kill things.

Though with the riots happening an hour and a half away,
Should I be criticizing collecting mussels?
How do we exist without harming anything?

Maybe the message was for me.
I read it, but more of a skim, feeling sheepish
Like I was reading a diary
Would someone see me?
Had the message been tossed in the ocean?
Was it wet from rain?

I refolded it and placed it on the sand where I’d found it
With two shells on top of it, like sculpted angel wings

I wouldn’t throw it in the trash.
The words made this litter sacred — they meant that I wasn’t alone, that others were grateful and confused and hopeful and worried and asking for help.

And I went to pick up other trash
To make the world better
And scraped my finger so blood shone from it,
As I attempted to shove it all through the opening of the trash bin.

But I left the prayer and the mussels I’d saved,
For the tide to come in and save them.

Today I sat at a bench in Paris eating salty olives out of their plastic bag.
Behind me — it was a double-sided bench — a couple took a photo
And I saw myself in their screen in the background.
How many photos are there in strangers’ homes with me in the background?

I sit here now, under the Eiffel Tower, feeding pigeons.
It started with one—scruffy with patches of feathers missing from his neck
And me knowing I have sunflower seeds in my bag
Rolled tight with a hair band.

And I wonder if I am bothering people with the crowd I’ve caused
Pigeons and two brown birds who don’t seem to understand how to pick up the seeds.
Why do I worry about this?

I sat here first, before the Polish husband, his head shaved around the sides,
Sat feet from me and smoked.

(And before all of us were the birds.)

I watch the Eiffel Tower listening to Fade Into You, my phone pressed to my ear
So that the music doesn’t bother others.
When I set the phone down I hear the hundreds of words and voices around me
So many sounds, they all hum, and I look at the rustling leaves on the trees
That are giving me shade on this hot July day.

The Polish couple video-calls family—face after face on the phone—to surprise them
When they rotate the screen from their faces to the Eiffel Tower beyond them.

Dark skinned bearded men walk by chanting, “Beer, Wine!” or “Blankets!” or carrying links of Eiffel Tower keychains that they tell the family behind me are “One euro.”

“Enjoy the Life” is tattooed on the Polish woman’s arm.

I want to tell her husband to stop smoking and blowing it on me.
I want to tell them not to sit so close to me.
I thought they were French at first, so I didn’t — I was the visitor, the background.

I find comfort and connection in the background.
In the birds, in the rustle of the leaves.
In the thoughts that change your perspective from the angry shoutings of your brain
And put you in this place where everything is wonderful
And delightful
And for you to experience.
When I look up at the Eiffel Tower—did I ever realize it is such a light shade of brown?

I see tiny people walking on stairs or looking over viewing decks or riding up
Yellow and dark orange cable cars.
If I look close enough in my photos of the tower, I could find them
If they look close enough in their photos of the view,
They could find me

Sitting on the grass in black shorts and a white t-shirt
Writing in my journal or feeding pigeons or avoiding wafts of smoke from the Polish couple by holding my breath
Or snapping a picture of my own, not knowing all it is capturing.

I have often felt like the one who did not belong.
In Solana Beach I’d walk around couples or families having professional photo shoots
Or feel that I was messing up their Christmas photo,
Boogie boarding in the background.

—I pause to look up as a dozen yellow-shirted bicyclists with gold halos ride through the park.

I ask the Polish couple if they’d like me to take their photo.

I turn and see a young French girl with a San Diego t-shirt
And I wonder if I belong more than I think.
If I am not a background thing to be erased,
A pigeon to be chased or shooed away.

Why is someone standing with someone else more important?
Why is the group?
Maybe they are the background
In this life of mine.

Three girls stretch out a turtle blanket, folding it between them.
Turtles are my symbol for patience.
And I think about a future where I am the foreground
And my thoughts, feelings, and heart are what matters
Where I am chosen and seen, seen and chosen

And everything fades into a peaceful background.

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Last year, while living abroad in Ireland, I went to Paris for five days by myself. I recently reread the journal I kept during those five days.

I’ve corrected a few typos and added some punctuation, but otherwise have kept the entries almost exactly as they were written.

Reading them feels like a little portal. (Even more so than hugging the pillowcase that I still sleep with from my one-star hotel — white with red stitching — which they let me keep after looking at me like I was nuts when I asked if I could buy it.)

Here they are.

Day 1

I saw a woman on a motorcycle with her dog strapped to her chest.
The word “chien” came into my head, like a miracle.
"Un petit chien,” I said to the Uber driver. I was so excited with my French.
(Even after he pronounced it completely differently.)

I kept reading the time to destination on his screen, happy it was long, wanting to stay in that car watching France happening out our windows and all around us for as long as possible.

Day 2, Part 1

I chastised a French child in Spanish. You’d think the swan incident in Warrenpoint would have silenced me, but no. This boy came up to me with a BB gun and wanted to show me how he could shoot one of the bunnies in front of the War Museum. (Was it also Napoleon’s Grave?)

”No! Es horrible!” I said and then covered my eyes and walked fast away so he wouldn’t try and show off. Later I looked back and the bunny was happily (and safely) munching grass.

(I think the kid understood what I said.)

Day 2, Part 2 (My Paris Hotel)

Look at this beautiful life I get to live
It fills my eyes with tears
My comfy white bed that fills the whole room
My window open all night
If I lean over and down I can see the blue sky
There is Paris outside
And I get to walk the streets
Being me
Exploring
Being me

Day 3

I slept in and then left my hotel to go find Rue Henri IV, go shopping, and go to the jewelry store I’d gone to with my mom.

On the street was a huge street fair/market. I met an amazing woman named Elizabeth and bought jewelry (she gave me free jewelry too) and got the ring I wanted (the other girl passed on it) and then I found YSL shoes for 80 euros.

I put the things back in my hotel and then set off looking for the jewelry shop. I ate strawberries on the way and they were amazing.

The shop was there and the owner made extra earrings for my family and told me the place that was his favorite in France was Mont Saint-Michel and drew me a map. I told him his shop was more memorable to me than Notre Dame. He laughed. He said Mont Saint-Michel was magical like Venice. (One of my all time favorite places.)

I walked to Henri IV Boulevard and then wandered and went into shops.
I took a picture of a man dressed as a carrot in front of the Louvre.
I ate grapes.

I went to the 2nd island (Louis?) and explored and ate more strawberries and read Anne Frank in the island park and fed pigeons. At sunset I went down to take a photo of a wooden turtle and fed ducks and chatted with two French teenage girls.

People played music on the bridge.
Earlier in the day people danced, their bags lined against the curb.
Everything felt alive with gratitude to be living.

Day 4 (Les Deux Magots)

Happy Bastille Day. I am sitting at Les Deux Magots.
I find it impossible for my head to be in one place at one time.
I am constantly jumping into imaginary scenarios or conversations or trying to understand something that happened in the past.

- Planes for Bastille Day just flew overhead, so I had to run out of the cafe to see them!

What I was going to say was how expansively wonderful it feels when your mind leaves the past or future and joins you in the present.
It feels shockingly alive. Vibrant. Naughty even.
It feels like you are awake in a movie or video game and you get to explore everything.
How fucking amazing that we can come here whenever we want?
Whenever we remember it exists, and join ourselves in the present.

Day 5, Part 1 (Overlooking Saint-Louis Island)

So many beautiful things can happen in a morning
I write now against a wall on the island in the Seine
Music—a trumpeter—plays from the bridge
Near him a waiter on a break drinks coffee from a tiny cup
I bought my second basket of strawberries and sunflower seeds
To feed the ducks that live at the dock on Saint-Louis Island
Today there were babies
And pigeons and crows and seagulls
And when I left a French man
Who I was worried had been judging me for feeding the pigeons
(I’ve seen signs around in French about rats and the trash cans hang with clear plastic bags — I wonder if this is for this issue)
Holding out water in the orange cap of his drink, hoping a pigeon would drink it
And I felt so touched by the world a lump rose within me
And I saw the word Michel written on a lamp post and thought about how I love him
This morning I bought a long pink pearl necklace for my mom
The stainless steel gold (is there such a thing?) twisted in beautiful art deco patterns to hold each pearl
I went in a puppet shop
I woke and spoke to my mom and then slept again
My window wide open all night to the Paris air
Like I was partially sleeping outdoors
I woke thinking of Andrea Gibson, a poet who died yesterday
And when I checked my Instagram the first post I read was a poem of theirs about the afterlife
And how heaven is our height
I read from Anne Frank’s Diary
Peaceful and alive in my small hotel room which I have fallen in love with
And then I ventured outside, into Paris
I am enchanted with this world
The trumpeter is now playing Frank Sinatra’s My Way

Day 5, Part 2 Yesterday (Written on Day 5 about Day 4) (Again on Island w/ Notre Dame overlooking Saint-Louis Island)

After breakfast I got more strawberries and found white t-shirts to buy after wandering the city and I went to read in bed which led to napping. Then I went to the Galway pub, because I was feeling lonely and not sure what to do with myself. I brought my book and then met two 18 year-old English boys. Tom and Charlie. Charlie is the chief zookeeper in (near?) Manchester and they have snow leopards. They invited me to go with them to see the fireworks and on the way we stopped and drank a bottle of wine. It was Tom’s first trip without his parents. When we watched the fireworks from the Eiffel Tower (a tree was in front of us) Charlie held my hips and put his arms around me. I think a French guy asked if I was his mom. I don’t feel old or even see myself as old. (They said they thought I was 28, but granted 28 is ancient to an 18 year-old.)

When I left I had almost a 45 minute to an hour of walking to get back to my hotel but it felt wonderful — the street was a stream of people. I felt so comfortable on my own. More so than in some of the moments with Tom and Charlie where mid-story I’d want to stop talking and felt like I was performing in some way. It made me miss my own company. I found it again as I was alone in the sea of people.

I don’t feel older, but oh how I’ve grown. Things feel more magical. More free. More ok. Maybe that is all getting older is. Maybe that’s what it feels like. More you in a way. You as a child, but freer. I wonder if the moments I felt uncomfortable were moments I “should” myself or worried about what I was doing.

This morning I read a quote by Andrea Gibson that said, “The worst thing that ever happened to you wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to you. Hating yourself for it was.” I loved that. It is so true.

Day 5, Part 3 (Park by Louvre)

The dandelions float like magical star orbs
And I wonder
If people even notice them
People talk about politics and war and how everything has gone to shit
But have they seen the dandelions
And the way that, from this angle, that sphinx statue’s tail looks like a swan?
Or that a pigeon has landed on that other statue’s head?
Do they not know that we are all going to die — each one of us has only our allotted time?
And how amazing — we are here now
Look at how the breeze is lifting even more dandelion stars
Look at the Moorhens and the ducks
The bees searching and pollinating the beautiful flowers
You can find heaven here, if you look

Day 5, Part 4 (Still in the park)

I still haven’t moved from my bench
In Paris I feel like I am living even when I do nothing at all
I bawled watching a video of Andrea Gibson reading her afterlife poem
I googled if Moorhens are bullies (I’ve always seen them as kind)
I saw a pigeon with his foot entangled in string and googled how to help him
Although now he knows I’m thinking about it and is wary of me
What is it we have to do anyway?
What is it we have to prove with our productivity?
I have gone to zero museums on this trip
I have gone to one restaurant, and not til yesterday
Instead I have wandered, without a map
Eaten strawberries as I walked
First the flesh, then the stems
I’ve fed birds, including pigeons, which I’ve just learned is illegal
(Although I just saw a little boy sharing his sandwich and felt delighted)
I didn’t think I even liked Paris, or the French, or France
I wasn’t excited to come here
But now, I feel in love

Day 5, Part 5 (Sitting by the Water on Saint-Louis Island)

I feel so peaceful and happy here.
I have been reading Anne Frank and eating sunflower seeds for over an hour (two?)
Around me French people sit and chat or drink wine
Boats pass and the water laps, sometimes splashing me
Music is playing on the right bank
People sit on both banks, people go by in boats
I feel wonderfully not self-conscious
Like I fit in, laying on my back with my backpack under my head, or writing in this green journal
I don’t feel like I’m traveling alone
I feel at peace
More at peace than I felt at home for so long
V wrote me and said it was her mom’s birthday today
And that maybe her mom had me send her the Andrea Gibson poem about the afterlife
And that made me cry. I did feel this urge to send it to her.
Maybe we are all being helped so much more than we know.
Anne Frank is helping me with self love. She shows all her thoughts and emotions in her diary and it makes me accept my own fullness more.
It makes me think of the Irish bicyclist I met on the Greenway in Newry
Who told me everyone has good and bad and we have to love all parts of ourselves.
That the bad parts are some of the most fun and if we don’t love them, we are leaving out a huge chunk of who we are.
How peaceful to love all of ourself.
How free.
My thighs are sunburned from all my time sitting in the park and sticky now with a spray on after-sun that the chemist recommended.
I feel happy and calm and the relief of that makes me cry
It reminds me of those moments years ago when I’d have a few minutes where I wasn’t feeling depressed — and how I’d cry out of gratitude
I feel a break from the anxiety now
And my whole body wants to bawl with relief
How wonderful to just be
To have moments without worry
Oh god, I want this always
I love getting to be with myself

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I decided to go on a silent retreat.

It all began the night before when, sitting on the couch in front of my TV, I googled “San Diego meditation retreats” on my phone. The first three results were all silent ones. I hadn’t considered a silent retreat. I’d actually been googling because a friend told me a meditation retreat would be a good way to meet a man who is kind and soulful. Which I imagine would be difficult if you aren’t allowed to talk.

But I was intrigued.

I clicked on one that was starting in a few days and read through the rules. No talking. No phones. No technology. No reading. No writing. Interesting.

What would my brain do with all that space?

Perhaps I’d become enlightened. Finally.

I looked at the price. $2,545 for 5 nights. I plugged in the address into Google Maps. A 2 hour and 46 minute drive. I looked at the picture. A one-story house with a deck and a few picnic tables, surrounded by trees. Hmmm… It looked… hot. I imagined myself standing on that deck unable to talk to anyone. (Or no one else being there and me not being able to ask where everyone else was.)

I glanced towards my dark window and thought about the beach steps from my condo. I thought about the fact that I already live alone. And then I thought about how, instead of paying $2,545 and driving 2 hours and 46 minutes each way, I could hold my own private silent retreat for myself, for one day, right here. I went to bed excited. I’d saved money; I’d saved time; I’d saved gas. And tomorrow was going to be magical.

I woke Friday morning feeling alive. I checked my phone for the time and saw a text message which made me flinch. (The rules said no reading!) I tucked the phone back into my bedside drawer and went into my home office to continue my organizing project. I went through box after box. I was strangely efficient. Knowing that I couldn’t talk, or call anyone on the phone, or go through my emails, or check social media, or work on my writing, made me feel present with myself. Surprisingly free. Certain obligations — things that normally tugged at my mind — couldn’t exist.

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I took old notebooks out of storage bins and stacked them in my bookshelf. I went through knickknacks and decided which I wanted to keep and which I wanted to donate. I consolidated my travel gear, I organized my closets and my entryway. I found hidden surprises in a box, underneath my old dog’s leashes, that caused me to say out loud, “Jesus, Samantha!” And then be shocked by the sound of my own voice and my uncontrolled outburst. And then it was back to silence.

I finally decided that I would get rid of my old coffee table, the first coffee table I’d ever bought, for the first time I ever lived by myself. I was twenty-two, living in a small Westwood apartment near UCLA Law School, and it was black and chunky and from Pottery Barn. I thought it was the coolest, fanciest thing in the world and that I was so grown up for having it. I’d kept it for over two decades. It was now junky looking and didn’t fit, but I loved what it symbolized and tied me back to. I hated law school. But I loved that coffee table and that brave lost girl who lived with it. Now I silently pulled the table away from the couch and to the center of the room, and then on top of it stacked my other boxes of donations.

I needed to be out of the house by 1pm to be safe. My housekeeper, who is family to me, comes on Fridays and I couldn’t not talk to her if I was here. I wrote her a check and a Post-it note telling her to take items I was donating if she wanted any of them (breaking the no-writing rule, but it was quick and the check was necessary) and then packed myself a bag for existing outside at the beach for at least the next 4-5 hours while she was at my home. Hiking boots and socks for if barefoot walking got painful. A thin sweater. A green juice and a watermelon juice. A credit card. And my phone, always on silent mode, tucked into a zipped pocket in case there was an emergency.

I raced out the door. I was cutting it close.

Walking through my complex I felt nervous. What if someone said hello? How would I not be rude if I couldn’t respond? I looked down while also smiling, so that I didn’t hurt anyone but also seemed pleasant. (Isn’t it weird how my brain works?) Outside of my complex I reached the stairs for the beach. I went down worrying the same thing. No one said anything. I reached the sand and felt free. I’d made it. There was space all around me. And I was now off on an adventure for the rest of the day. And I didn’t even have to feel bad about not writing. I wasn’t allowed. It was like time had opened up.

I walked along the water’s edge. I love the water’s edge. It is so incredibly peaceful. My brain, however, immediately told me it had things it wanted to chat with me about. It wanted to know how I felt about the fact that some people really don’t like me. Or rather, it wanted me to know that some people really don’t like me. Apparently this was very important and relevant to that moment.

“It’s ok that some people don’t like you,” I silently said within my mind, having a pep talk with myself. “After all, you don’t like everybody.” At this point I was passing by a fisherman. As I did, I did what I always do when I walk by fishermen — feel a tinge of angry judgement clench inside me and then send love and protection to the fish in the water, hoping that they don’t get caught.

“For example,” I continued, “You don’t like that fisherman.” I thought that was a good point. I didn’t have to be liked by everyone or to like everyone. It was fine.

I continued walking. People were playing on the beach and in the waves. People were laying on towels. People were walking. The path before me stretched out, half ocean, half sand flanked by cliffs — a day of exploring and silent adventure by myself.

It was then that I noticed something on the sand. An emaciated young seal. An orange cone was beside it, next to a barrier drawn in the sand around it, and sitting beside that barrier a woman with long gray hair.

As I neared this seal and the woman I could hear the words inside my head: “Yep, you’re gonna break it.”

I went and sat down next to the woman.

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“What’s happening with the seal?” I said. Out loud. “Has anyone called a rescue organization?” My words were bold and loud in my ears. I was already reaching for my phone. Unzipping the emergency pouch. It was 1:20pm.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The lifeguards said they were going to call SeaWorld. Do you know someone to call?” I was scrolling for the number of the Humane Society, who I’d called a few weeks earlier over a sick cormorant. I called them, pressing 1 for emergency. They transferred me to SeaWorld. I left my details and the description of the seal on a recording. I clicked the sound button, taking my phone off mute so I’d hear them when they called back.

And I settled in, next to this woman, protecting the seal.

The seal opened his huge almond eyes and looked at us. He’d lean in our direction. We’d watch him breathe. Sit up. Lie down. Roll onto his back. When the tide came in and the seal moved, we’d move, and adjust the barrier lines in the sand to keep giving him more room and move the cone to keep it from floating away. We made a border of seaweed to keep people from getting too close on the water side. People would come up and ask us questions, like we were the authorities. And then they’d go on their way. I could feel that he felt protected by us. It might sound crazy to say, but I felt it. He kept moving closer to us, and we’d move away, and then sit back down and send him love. The woman’s granddaughter doddled over and stood beside us. She was maybe two. She open and closed her hand in the direction of the seal and repeated a word. “She’s saying heal in Spanish,” her mom told me, who’d followed her and wrapped her arms around the little girl. We were all the gaurdians of the seal.

For an hour or so the older woman and I talked. We talked about animals. We talked about spirituality. She told me about raising consciousness and how raising your own can raise the consciousness of others. That it can cause a spontaneous shift.

Since I had first arrived, there had been a fish laying on the sand in front of the seal. Its little mouth was open in a surprised “o” and it looked dead.

“Do you think we should throw the fish back in the water?” I asked. The seal wasn’t interested in it, despite being so thin, and maybe the fish still had a chance.

“No,” the woman answered. “The seal won’t like it if anyone gets that close. That fisherman brought the fish over it and it didn’t like him being that close.” She pointed towards the water where a man stood fishing. The same fisherman I had walked past.

I shook my head and couldn’t help but exhale a laugh. Of course. Of course the man that I had walked past and thought to myself that I didn’t like had caught a fish and tried to use the fish to save the same seal that I was now trying to save. I looked over at the fisherman. At that exact moment he caught another fish. And I watched him take it off the hook and throw it back into the water. Catch and release. The universe always does that to me.

It is so beautifully humbling. So loving in the ways it gently shows me where I am not quite so enlightened. But it’s so nice to be wrong.

I looked at the woman and told her about my earlier thoughts about the fisherman. “I have chills!” She said, rubbing her arms.

Eventually, the woman needed to leave. She went to collect her stuff, which was with her family, a few meters away. Just then, the lifeguards drove up. And we all got to watch the rescue. I stood there beside the sand line that I’d drawn, sending love to this seal, as they caught him and put him inside a cage. He was loaded into the back of the red lifeguard truck and he looked out at me and I cried. I felt so happy and relieved he was going to get help. The woman and I hugged multiple times. The tide came up and washed away the fish and most of our barrier.

And I continued walking.

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As I walked I wondered what the rules were now. Was it back to silence?

A storm the night before had pushed mounds of seaweed onto the sand at the North end of Solana Beach, and curious seagulls were scavenging through them for treasure. I watched one who looked very proud of himself. He had what looked like a lemon and was stomping around with his big feet as he carried it in his beak, almost as though he was tempting the others to chase him, like a dog with a ball. I watched him try to swallow it whole and thought, “That can’t be good for him.” Another group was pecking at a similar fruit, so I walked over and they scattered as I bent down and picked it up with the intention of breaking into into edible pieces for them. But it wasn’t a fruit at all. It was the size and shape of a lemon, but it was slimy and fleshy and appeared to be alive. I was confused. I looked behind me and saw a couple staring at the other bird. I walked back to them and again broke my silence. “Do you know what that is?” I asked. My voice still seeming so foreign when I wasn’t supposed to be using it.

“It’s a sea hare,” the man told me. (It was a Sweet Potato Sea Cucumber, but I wouldn’t know this until a week later when I checked iNaturalist.) The man was wearing a t-shirt with the same circular pattern filled with flower shapes as the bracelet I was wearing on my wrist. My sister had just given it to me. The flower of life. The three of us walked together. I saved a Sweet Potato Sea Cucumber as well as an actual sea hare which we found afterwards. The three of us talked about the tiny universes that exist everywhere, including on us — the bugs on our skin and in our eyelashes. Then they reached their parking lot and I continued to walk.

I picked up trash. Saved bugs from the waves. Walked up rotting wooden steps so smoothed and beaten by water they felt cushy to reach a trashcan at the top of the cliff. I washed my feet in the beach shower and sat beside it to slip on my hiking socks and boots while listening to a father and son talk about surfing. The father helped unzip his son’s wetsuit to wash off. “That was our best session yet,” they said. The dad offered to carry the boy’s board. “No, I want to carry my weight,” the son said and they left together.

I kept walking. I walked along the 101 overlooking the bluffs of Encinitas. I’d only driven it before and now I was one of the people I’d always driven by. I silently observed everyone. Two pregnant women in matching black spandex. A young couple with a long-legged girl with bright white socks. Construction workers fixing the sidewalk. I walked and watched everything. Like I was in a video game.

After passing the Self-Realization Center I went into the Center’s bookshop. I’d never been there before but it had an open sign and reminded me of a place my aunt Holly would have liked.

I was conscious of everything. The mother and son browsing the Indian fabrics. The two sales ladies. I looked at wind chimes. Two had dragonflies. One had a heart. My fingers played with a metal bell. I wandered to a display of bangles. A mix of beautiful golds and turquoise blue was tied together, the first to catch my eye. I fingered the tag. $26. My lucky number. (And half off. Even more lucky.) The mother joined me and put a stack of emerald green and gold on her wrist. “The green looks beautiful,” I said. My voice once again somewhat startling. She took them to the counter and bought them. I picked a stack of gold and yellow. I have hundreds of bangles. I’ve been to India five times and I didn’t need any more. But I loved the beauty of them on my wrist. And just being in the magic of that day.

At the counter I asked the two saleswomen if they had any beginning meditation classes that they’d suggest. Clearly, I needed help with it.

I told them about my day, and that as a silent mediator, I was getting an F minus. They told me I broke my silence for the perfect reason. “I think you get an A plus,” said one of the women. “And the fisherman story is exactly the type of story they talk about in the temple.” They gave me a free book and told me about a mediation class and then gave me a recommendation for a cafe that served breakfast all day.

I tucked my book and my bangles into my bag and took myself to afternoon breakfast. I sat in the sun. Watched a father come in with his tiny daughter. Watched them carrying their drinks. I ate every bite on my plate while reading my new book, even though I wasn’t supposed to be reading.

I wandered into a shop next door that had hanging crystals in the window. Wandered around looking at the displays. Bought two tiny Samadhi Himalayan Quartz stones and a blue quartz pendulum. Tucked them into my bag and continued walking.

In town I looked at people and shops and restaurant windows and flowers growing along the sidewalks. I made my way back to the beach, down the steps onto the sand. And I started walking back. Passed boys playing football. The water was high, so I took off my shoes and put them back in my bag. I saved more bees, bringing them to flowers, and picked up more trash. There were no trashcans here, so I used the single use nude nylon try-on sock that I’d found in my backpack’s side pocket — a remnant from trip to a shoe store in Dublin — as a trash bag for little pieces of plastic and the wet tar I kept finding on the waters edge.

At one point I had to wade through the water. The beach was gone and the tide reached all the way to the rocks. My shorts were wet, and at one point I stubbed my toe, but it felt like an adventure. The tar went through my nylon sock and stained my hand and fingers sticky black.

At sunset, I met a woman with a large plastic bucket, who was making the largest bubbles I’d ever seen. She’d made the contraption herself. She let me use it too, even though I told her my hands were covered in tar. Before the bubbles were closed, they looked like huge tubes and you were looking inside of them, their opalescence and shape was amazing and just the feeling of looking down them was like looking into a different world. I commented on it multiple times, and each time she said, “Are you high? Only high people notice that!” The closing of them looked like you were making the shape of a heart. It was so satisfying to watch. We laughed and talked and made bubbles together for about an hour. I wasn’t looking at my phone. Families came to play in them. A group of teenage girls came and I ran around with them, trying to blow bubbles inside of the bubbles. She made fun of me for that. “It was like you were one of them!” She said. It’s strange to me that it stands out that I’m not. I feel the same age as everyone. She had me dunk my hands into the solution so that I could catch bubbles in my palms. “And maybe it will help take off that tar,” she said. We talked about her upcoming 50th high school reunion and if she’d go. “What am I going to say, that I make bubbles?” She said. “Yes!” I said, “What you do is wonderful!” We talked about the history of the area. The things she’d seen and the people she’d known. About the huge El Nino that had apparently happened the year that I was born. She showed me pictures. A seal had been washed into her families yard. They drove it to SeaWorld. We exchanged numbers. I walked her to her car. She offered me a ride home.

But I said no, and I walked. It was dark now on my walk back, but the sand was still warm. I walked back trusting I wouldn’t step on anything I shouldn’t, hearing the water and the dull roar of the waves and feeling like it was just me and the ocean and the dark sky and I was held by it all.

What a wonderful day. I climbed back up the stairs and into my apartment feeling replenished.

What a perfect silent retreat.

It made me think of the words a friend once wrote me: What’s meant for you will always return.

In Ireland, they have a similar phrase. They’ll stop their slagging for a moment, look you in the eyes, and say, “What’s meant for you won’t pass you by.” It melts like warm butter on your heart. It’ll make you tear up in a pub. “An rud atá i ndán duit, ní rachaidh sé tharat.” That’s it in Gaelic. I can’t pronounce that one. I can only say “Sláinte” (cheers) and "Seachain an bhearna" (mind the gap).

When I flew to Dublin from California on my one way ticket, I brought two suitcases, a rolling carry-on, and a backpack. Everything was carefully selected. My laptop with a power converter. My camera. A large sketch book for my art class. A small purple journal patterned with hummingbirds and bleeding heart flowers. A ziplock bag filled with my favorite Pilot Precise V5 RT pens, in case they didn’t have them there. “What do people wear in Ireland?” My mom and I looked online. “Jeans,” my mom said looking at photographs, “People wear jeans.” I didn’t bring jeans. I packed my green ruffled dress for St. Patrick’s Day. “I don’t have room for the green dress,” I told my mom. “You have to bring it!” She said. I rolled it into a dense ball and wedged it against the side of the case. And I tucked in two old fold-out maps of Ireland that had been my auntie Holly’s. Holly traveled to Ireland after a breakup to live in a friend’s empty cottage. She died over twenty years ago, but my mom still has her sister’s files — the beautiful and strange things Holly collected and kept, including her maps. “If you want to know Holly and how her mind worked, look at these files,” my mom once told me. I didn’t need the maps. I didn’t think I would use them. (I use my phone.) But I wanted them with me, so they came.

When I arrived, I immediately unpacked my things into my small one-bedroom apartment. I was alone in the country, but I had my green dress hanging in the closet. My hummingbird journal next to my bed.

Soon after, I’d buy a plant from Dunnes. I wanted something alive with me. I’d go searching for a flat top sheet —in Ireland it’s common to only have a fitted sheet and duvet, which doesn’t work for me—and also buy a soft teddy bear wearing a bathrobe and matching eye mask. I wanted something to hug as I slept.

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I’d walk into the center of town nearly every day, passing an antique shop called Needful Things. The window was filled with oddities, and my favorite was a small Beswick figurine of a fancy pig wearing a bowtie, a purple vest, and holding what I thought was a conductor’s wand. Of all the objects, this was the one set on a small black plastic rotating display. I’d stop and watch it twirl. It felt like it was there for me. I’d written a children’s book, Henri and the Magnificent Snort, about a French bulldog who is bullied and called “Pig Dog” because he snorts. The “Pig” is the part of himself that he thinks is unlovable. By the end of the book, he embraces all of himself. I’d see that twirling pig conducting an invisible orchestra, and tell myself, “Don’t let my insecurities be the conductor of my life.” I felt comforted every time I saw it. It was my friend on my walk in Dublin. One day, the pig was gone from its usual spot in the window on the rotating display. Instead, in its place was a false glass eyeball. I rushed into the store and asked, “Is the pig gone?” It was still there. It had just been moved. I felt such relief. I bought it. My home’s first knick-knack.

I went to the National Gallery of Ireland, and bought an 8”x10” print of Harry Clarke’s The Wild Swans, in the gift shop. The painting is of a brown-haired girl wearing a butterfly dress and being carried across the sky by swans holding ribbons. I looked at it and thought, “That’s how I want love to feel.” My home’s first new art.

Later, I’d have visa issues and have to leave until they were sorted. I packed up my suitcases (stuffed with my green dress, my robed teddy, my conductor pig, and my swan girl) and left everything on the landing of the stairwell of my apartment building.

I’d travel to Northern Ireland on a train and then a bus with only a backpack and my carry-on rolly bag. I’d live there for what would turn out to be three months.

I brought with me only two pairs of shoes. My hiking boots, which I wore on the train, and black ecco sneakers, which I figured I could try and make look fancy (and which I’d later learn stained my toes when they got wet). People in Warrenpoint would know me for my shoes. They’d cross the pub to show my feet to their wife, “Look! Sam only has two pairs of shoes!”

Having less made the objects that did come into my life feel more meaningful. When I arrived at my Airbnb, placed in the window beside my bed was a wooden carving of the word “RELAX” with two wooden carved bears crawling on it. I had the same single word back home, on my balcony in California. (Now if I could only figure out how to actually do what it says…) And the wooden bears — wood-carved bears are a very specific sign for me from Henri, my angel dog that I wrote my book about. (You can click here if you'd like to read about that sign.) I slept next to that word and those bears every night. It felt like it was meant for me.

The same was true of moments. When you’re alone and in a foreign country, the things that happen to you and the people who talk to you stand out. You’re not surrounded by anything familiar — places, objects, people. So you notice more. Like the man who played the flute across the street from my living room window the first few days I lived there. I found him so comforting as I sat at my writing table. It often felt like the universe was taking care of me. I remember as a child watching Tom and Jerry Tot Watchers, and how the baby would climb around a construction site, peaceful and oblivious, and the scaffolding would just line up and everything would turn out ok. Sometimes, I felt like that tot.

When I arrived in Warrenpoint, I was wearing a bracelet. I didn’t realize it was a Miraculous Medal. I’d gotten it in Dublin, when one day on a walk I began chatting with a woman who was sitting in the sun on her doorstep with her two French bulldogs. We started talking about her dogs and how I’d had a Frenchie too, and she invited me to come sit with her, opening the metal gate. Her son brought me a chair and made us both tea, and the woman shared with me writing she had done at the local community center and even a rap song she’d made (was it with her grandson?) about the neighborhood. Neighbors on the street said hello, and as I sipped my tea and played with her dogs, two women with pamphlets stopped to chat and asked if they could tie a necklace around each of our necks. I thought free jewelry was nice, but didn’t want a necklace, so I said I’d love it as a bracelet. My tea partner wanted hers as a bracelet too, and so we each got one tied and knotted around our wrists with string, and they had a little charm of the Virgin Mary. I’m not religious, but thought “I’ll wear it until it breaks off.” I liked how the bracelet tied the memory of that afternoon to my wrist, like a little souvenir of a special moment.

In Warrenpoint, people would see that Miraculous Medal and think that I was one of them. “You’re Catholic,” they’d say. “Not really,” I’d say. I was raised Protestant (something I learned you whisper in Ireland), and then was an atheist for about two decades, and now consider myself spiritual and open. “No, you’re Catholic,” they’d insist. And so I was Catholic.

But an embarrassingly clueless one. When my two closest girlfriends in Northern Ireland texted they’d meet me at the local pub later, because “Blessing of the Grave is on on Newry at 7pm” and they were both going to be at it, I felt hurt. Why wasn’t I invited to this Irish Rock Concert too? I stared at my phone, fretting, and then timidly asked if I could go. My friends wrote back, “You could go and let on you’re a long lost relative of someone buried in the graveyard.” So… it was not a rock band. (But we decided that if the three of us ever started one, that would be the name of ours.)

And sometimes I learned to stay silent. Like when my hiking buddy — a kind, older gentleman who originally became friends with me because he thought I was someone’s niece — took me for a drive through a neighboring city, its flags and homemade decorations for The Twelfth up on houses and strung across the streets. “Look at all those Protestants!” He snarled through the windows. A side of him I’d never seen. Like the loving family dog when a stranger comes to the house. I sat beside him, looking through the windows, my Miraculous Medal hanging from my wrist.

In Northern Ireland, I bought another plant. (Miniature pink roses.) Another flat top sheet. A handmade ring made from an Irish coin with my birth year, from a market in the park. The only one that was my year. It fit perfectly. One day, walking back from the bluebells in Narrow Water Forest, I rescued a flightless brown butterfly from the busy road. I brought him to that park. When he later died, I placed him on my windowsill, overlooking where the man had played the flute. Beside him, would be placed a caterpillar I’d rescue from an ant attack. He didn’t make it to having wings, but he was valued too. These little dead bugs were my writing friends.

Nearly every day, I fed the birds at Donaghaguy Waterworks. They knew me at the pet stores in Warrenpoint and Newry — I was a regular, loading my backpack and later my rental car trunk with my bags of Brambles Swan & Duck Food and sunflower seeds for the swans, cygnets, moorhens, coots, crows, robins, and ducks. I’d come to know the local walkers. The nanny with the little boy and little girl. (The little girl I’d sneak extra bird food to — she fed them with such care, watching and studying me in a way that made me feel cared for.) I’d come to know the local birds. Where they hung out. I had my favorite duck. He was my favorite bird in Northern Ireland. I hope he knew. (I think he did.)

I took two brown duck feathers with me to remember that duck, that place, that time, those countless walks around the lake. The robin that landed in my hand. The swan I stood up for after seeing him being abused by a boy trying to show off how loud a sound he could make when he hit him with wadded-up bread. The babies that I watched grow. The coot I cried for. The little piles I made of sunflower seeds for the robins on the top of the fence posts, and how it’d feel like a sunrise in my chest when I’d see other people were following my lead and leaving seeds in the same spots. Like I could exist even when I wasn’t there.

I took those two duck feathers to my home in Warrenpoint, and then to Dublin, and then to California. They are now on display in my living room in a little blue and orange vase covered in stars that my mom painted at a pottery place I forced her to go to. The vase holds six meaningful feathers of 2025. My Dublin swan feather from the solitary swan who lived in Grand Canal half a block from my apartment. (As a side note: I talked to so many locals who had given that swan a different name and a different story. To one man, the swan was Daphne. To another it was Jerry. Another had named it something in Arabic that I can’t remember, but told me he’d seen his wife die, and so he came to visit and feed him every day. Lots told me they were the one who fed him. They’d say it with urgency. That swan meant so much to so many people. Myself included.) Then there were the two magical feathers I stumbled across on trips I took that year to Africa — one from the CAR and one from the Seychelles. (Those ones are secret.) And there was a single spectacular peacock feather from Warrenpoint’s gorgeous resident peacock, which I discovered walking home one day from the lake. I found three peacock feathers together that day — I kept one, and gifted the two to the other members of Blessing of the Grave.

It’s interesting the things we take and the things we leave behind.

I brought back the feathers, and also two rocks, two shells, and lambswool soaked in pee that I collected from my favorite Northern Irish beach. A place where I spent hours climbing and exploring and marveling at the beauty I’d found all by myself. There were bunnies everywhere. Almost no people. It felt like paradise. I brought back my teddy bear and my conductor pig, which both remind me of my bravery. My swan girl painting, a rug that is the softest thing I’ve ever felt (I had to ship that one), and the dead butterfly and caterpillar. (How do I explain those? It just seemed sad to leave them. Like they would disappear. Like no one else would appreciate them.) I left plants, and clothes (but not my green dress), and furniture, and bags, and shoes (but not my famous black shoes), and lights, and books, and art, and my printer. I left blenders and flat top sheets both in Ireland and Northern Ireland. I left a pile of things for the woman who cleaned the apartments in Dublin, along with a tip and a stone bracelet, and she sent me a WhatsApp message that made me cry on the plane and think, “I wish I’d left more.”

I like to think of my objects that I gifted and left in Ireland — these things that I touched and that were part of my life — now out in the world. I hope that they are part of the way I’m still interwoven in the Irish fabric. I hope people are still leaving seeds in my spots.

I’m home now in California and faced with a new reality.

Boxes. Boxes. Boxes. Stuff. Stuff. Stuff.

While I was in Ireland, leaks from my upstairs neighbor gutted much of my condo. My life was shoved into boxes, stacked into rooms, moved to storage, shifted and reshuffled while I was gone. Now I am sorting through every single thing I own. A million versions of me.

The calendar on my wall has a picture of a blue woodpecker and says “January 2025.” The month I left for Ireland.

It’s a time machine, looking through these past objects.

What parts of me do I want to keep? I want to hold all those past me’s in my arms. I remember being her, I think as I flip through old photographs and writings in old journals. It’s so strange how time moves you to a place where you can look back at yourself.

I have a ziplock bag filled with artifacts from one of the scariest experiences of my life. If you looked at it, you’d think it was filled with trash. In a way, it definitely is. An empty plastic water bottle. Bright pink and yellow post it notes covered in my handwriting. The disintegrated black plastic heel base of a shoe. I didn’t want to throw them away. They are part of my bravest moment. Things that I can touch. That I can say, “These were what was with me.” I can remember that girl, sitting before a judge and jury as she brought a lawsuit for her dog against a billion dollar vet company. The water bottle she took in every day. The notes she wrote to her lawyer. The shoe heel that broke when she stood before the jury and tried to discreetly pick up from the courtroom floor without anyone noticing. I don’t know what to do with these things. Do I throw them away with all the rest of the trash? Do I make them into an art project? They aren’t an ordinary bottle, or notes, or shoe heel. They are my bravery in a bag. I remember being her. Being there.

My friend recently asked me, “Are you a pack rat?” (I’d mentioned that I still had the first tape I ever got, MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Em, given to me by my grandma Buffy. I was ten, and I wrote her a thank you letter for it.)

“I don’t know,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“It means you can’t throw things away.”

I’ve driven carloads of donations of my stuff to the community center the past month and a half. But I thought of that ziplock bag.

And isn’t strange how in the end, we keep nothing? How we make these little piles in the world of stuff and things, and then we are the ones who disappear?

It’s such a strange thing to exist here. It makes me think about animals and how they do it. (I watch them for clues and to try and understand the purpose of it all.) It makes me think back to a funny thought I had a year and a half ago, before I left for Ireland. The month before the blue woodpecker on my wall.

It was right after I had a panic attack, sitting on a curb outside a Christmas-themed drag show. My first drag show. I wore knee high boots over my red pajama onesie, complete with a butt flap. I stepped outside with a friend, took a polite half-puff off his weed vape as I waited with him, and remembered that I couldn’t handle even a polite half-puff of today’s weed. Something was wrong with my ears, I told him. When I spoke it felt like I was hearing myself somewhere far away. I told him that I was sorry to be uncool, but that I might need him to carry me to the hospital. I told him that I was sorry to be uncool, but that I might need him to call my parents so they could come pick me up. (Yes, I was in my 40s.)

Finally, my ears came back. We went back inside to the rest of the party and I ordered some french fries and tried to pass as a normal human being. Everyone else was talking and laughing. I was focused on the french fries. It seemed so obscene. I could look at an object. Take it. Put it in my mouth. And make disappear. And I could just keep doing this over and over again. And people thought it was completely acceptable. No one was even looking at me. What if I did it with chairs? Just picked them up and ate them! I nodded and smiled as though I was listening to what others were saying, but I wasn’t. I could only think about my mouth.

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It still seems so bizarre as I sit here writing this. How we go around (and animals do it too) eating things and making those things become a part of us. That that is what we do all day. I eat smoothies every day, and I’ll think about this as I pour the thick fuchsia juice into my cup. How all those berries are going to become me. And then isn’t it strange how our bodies let go of what they don’t need. We’re constantly peeing and pooping. Our hair drops on bathroom floors or gets wrapped around poor pigeon toes. Our skin becomes the dust that fills our vacuums. And then, eventually, we die and our entire bodies become the dirt and the thing that is grown and eaten. And that everything — the things we eat, the objects around us, the sky, the trees, the stars, our cells — are all made up of the same matter. The same particles. Everyone we love. Everyone we hate. People we don’t know. People we watch through car windows, quiet or snarling. We’re all made up of the same matter. We’re just eating and pooping out ourselves. We’re just keeping or donating parts of ourselves.

Towards the end of my time in Northern Ireland (before I went on a trip to the Congo and the CAR and then back down south to Dublin), I went for a walk on Carlingford Lough Greenway, a cross-border walking path. Part of it goes down the middle of the Newry River, a narrow path bordered by wildflowers, and then water on either side and then land. It feels like you’re walking down the divide between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was so peaceful and so beautiful, this strip of land suspended between two worlds.

As I was walking on the path, a man passed on a bicycle going the other way, then suddenly stopped, turned around, and walked his bike back to chat with me. We talked briefly about traveling and birds and then out of nowhere he started giving me the most beautiful life advice. We stood together in the middle of the river in the sunshine and he told me that we had to love all of ourselves, including the ‘bad’ parts of ourselves. And that the ‘bad’ parts were usually our most interesting parts. If we didn’t love those we were missing out. I loved that. That all parts of us belong. Then he got back on his bike and rode away. Like some sort of bike angel. His name was Clifford. I only know this because I collect moments too. I record them in the Notes App on my phone. I searched for “bike” and found this, written on July 7th, 2025.

I read the rest of his advice in this Note today, as I share it with you, typos and all. I’d forgotten everything other than what he’d said about loving the ‘bad’ parts of ourselves, but it all seems relevant to me now.

Maybe it was meant for you too.

It’s nice how things can be lost, and then come to you again when you need them. Advice, people, objects, messages. It’s like the foam ball in the ocean. You can toss it into the waves. If it’s meant for you, it won’t pass you by.

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When I was a freshman in high school, my mom took me to Nordstrom to get my eyebrows plucked. I hadn’t even known that eyebrow plucking was a thing. A week before, a girl at my ballet studio had casually mentioned plucking hers, after which I questioned everyone I knew, “Do you pluck your eyebrows?” I became increasingly panicked as I discovered that nearly everybody had been doing it for ages, and all the while I’d been walking around happily oblivious and hairy-faced.

When we got to the makeup counter, the Nordstrom lady, a pair of tweezers pinched between her fingers, looked at my eyebrows and exclaimed, “You’re deforming your face!” Which confused me, because I hadn’t done anything. This was just my face. She then proceeded to pluck, one by one, every egregious eyebrow hair by its firm root. My eyes watered fat tears down my cheeks.

Afterwards, I don’t remember looking different. I don’t remember seeing my face at all. But thirty years later, I haven’t forgotten the sting of the Nordstrom woman’s words. Or the distorted echo of those words inside of me, which chanted, “Something is wrong with who you naturally are.”

I had my first psychic reading when I was 40. It was a “Soul Purpose Reading.”

The year before, I didn’t believe in psychics. Or souls.

But during covid, something within me broke open and I changed. I can’t point to one exact reason; it was more like a million little things in my life converging together in perfect timing, like a river formed from many tiny streams.

Here are some of those streams:
(I want to record them, so I don’t forget.)

During covid, I spent months in complete isolation.

I worried that every person I knew might die. I felt angry, hurt, and confused. I didn’t understand the actions of other people. And then—slowly—I started to realize that other people weren’t me. (Shocking!) They weren’t seeing the world through my eyes while they acted the way they did. They had their own thoughts and reasons and histories. I started to feel a deep surrendering within me. A letting go of responsibility for others. A letting go of thinking that I understood (or was meant to control) the big picture.

At the time, I was having a major psoriasis flare-up. Over sixty spots dotted my body. I was feeling disillusioned with doctors, especially after the recent death of my dog at a vet. I didn’t want to take drugs, and I was scared of going to a hospital during the pandemic for the recommended laser treatment — so I decided to try plant medicine. I took herbs, stopped drinking for an entire year (I was alone and bars were shut anyway), and ate almost entirely raw vegan. I began to heal in ways I didn’t know were possible. I would wake in the mornings with my body buzzing with energy.

I spent my time painting with watercolor pens. I wrote. I danced alone in my condo in front of the mirror. I hummed. I sang. I watched Queer Eye and wrote quotes from it in my watercolor paintings and cried. I wrote in a journal every day. I read spiritual books.

One of my closest childhood friends died. I’d grown up with her since I was six. She was someone I’d measured myself against my whole life, and suddenly she was gone.

I grieved. I meditated. I spent lots of time in nature, going on walks, and watching birds. I was given The Light Between Us as a gift, and I underlined and wrote all over it. I spent time with my parents. I spent no time with people who had drained me. I started feeling intensely grateful. I shifted to a new stage in grieving the loss of my dog, my friend, and other loved ones I had lost in my life. I had synchronicities and signs that made me feel like I was communicating directly with the universe. Everything looked different.

All of these things coming together the way they did, in the timing they did, shifted my belief system. I couldn’t have planned it. I would have bet all my money against you if you’d told me it would happen.

I had spent more than two decades as an atheist. I believed that “when you’re dead, you’re dead.” But now I had this overwhelmingly grateful feeling of, “I was wrong.”

And I just felt open.

I felt floored by the beauty and possibility of it all. I wondered what I’d even call myself now. Spiritual? (I used to hate it when people called themselves spiritual. It sounded flaky, fluffy, and somehow elitist at the same time.) But now, it seemed like the closest word that fit. Other than “Open.” Can you answer the question, “What are your religious beliefs?” with, “Open?” I was going to sound crazy! I was everything I had once judged.

But I was open. And I was open when a family friend recommended a psychic that she’d used.

The reading was on Zoom. (It was covid.) Apparently, we’d signed up for (my mom and I each were doing one) Soul Purpose Readings. We were going to learn about our past lives and also about the specific purpose our soul had.

My laptop was propped open on the small wooden dining table in the center of the log cabin my great-grandfather had built, across from the cuckoo clock with its mechanical bird and pinecone weights. After months in isolation, my parents and I had driven up to the family ranch in Montana with their dog, Zulu, all of us peeing on the sides of roads to avoid public restrooms and wearing gloves when we touched the gas pumps. Everything felt like an adventure.

The psychic came online. Her name was Carol. She was kind and warm with blue eyes and wavy chestnut hair.

We introduced ourselves and then she began speaking to me, “First, let me explain about souls. All souls are timeless. An old soul is simply a soul who has had lots of human experiences. Someone who has lived many times as a human being, here on this planet. The first thing I need to tell you is, this is not you. You are a new soul.”

I stared at this woman and felt an immediate sense of release, like I had been recognized by someone who loves me in a crowd. I shook my head in wonder and said, “That makes so much sense.”

I’d always felt like an alien.

I wasn’t sure why. Sometimes I wondered if it was because I’m adopted. I’ve never looked into the eyes of anyone who is related to me. I’ve never been able to point to someone and say, “That person has my nose.” Everyone else has all these links. I feel like I’ve dropped into this world from outer space. I’m pretending to be human and I don’t know how to do it.

“I’ve always felt like an alien,” I said out loud.

Carol laughed, and said, “That’s because you kind of are.”

“Your mom, on the other hand, is an old soul. She has an entire football field that could be filled with her past lives.” Carol told us my mom had been both sexes. She’d been in the gold rush. She’d been in England. She’d had lives at the top of the stairs and the bottom of the stairs. (But wherever she was, she was always in charge.) She’d been a water dowser. For me, Carol only saw one past life. She told me I’d been a Native American in Northern California, before the Europeans came. My contribution to my tribe was my knowledge of plant medicine. My specialty was healing skin conditions.

Carol told us that old souls and new souls are often paired because they can help each other. Each have different strengths. I thought about how my mom can read people almost instantly. I’ve introduced her to people and within two minutes she will know what it takes me two years to figure out. I once introduced her to a new friend at brunch. “She will screw you over,” my mom said. I argued. Told her she was being judgmental and that my friend had a difficult childhood and needed love. And then, two years later, my friend did exactly what my mom said she would. And I was stunned.

“You’re still trying to figure out who’s who in this big human zoo,” Carol told me. I liked the sound of it, how it skipped on my tongue, and wrote down her words in my notebook.

I asked her, “What was I before, I mean, if I wasn’t human?” The psychic had an answer, but I don’t know exactly what she said. It was something along the lines of that I could have been a “nature spirit” and maybe a few other things. But the Zoom kept cutting out because of the bad Wi-Fi connection at the cabin. And I couldn’t hear it on the recording when I listened afterwards either. Maybe I wasn’t meant to know.

Carol told me I was pure love, and that my soul’s purpose was to nurture. But that with that nurturing, I was only supposed to “set the stage.” I wasn’t supposed to do it all. Give love, but don’t do it all. Set the stage for others. (I’m still trying to figure out how to do this. To love with limits. To just set the stage and let the miracles of other people growing and being loving happen.) She said I had a deep connection with animals and children. I hadn’t told her that I was currently writing a children’s book about animals.

I sometimes think that maybe my mom’s soul convinced my soul to come to earth. That my mom said, “I’ll help you. It’ll be ok. Come on, let’s go.” I can picture her tapping on my shoulder, shaking it, pulling the covers off me, like how she used to get me out of bed when I was a teenager. (I’d wake very annoyed.) Or maybe it was more like childhood when she sang, “You are my Sunshine” and “Good Morning to You” beside my sister and my bunkbed. Maybe her soul woke my soul up. Said, “Come on, here we go, let’s go have a human experience.” I may not know people who I’m related to by blood, but I’ve found my soul family. My mom, my dad, my sister. This little alien couldn’t be luckier to have the family I do.

A year later, back in California, I’d end up having a chance meeting with a numerologist. I’d started crying in a local gift shop, when the woman working there asked me, “How are you?” (I was in the middle of a lawsuit against the vet, and I was struggling.) The woman reached across the counter, took my hand, and said, “You’ve got to see Pam."

The next morning, Pam, the numerologist, would confirm what the psychic had said: “You are a new soul.”

“I know,” I responded. Like she had just told me I was right-handed.

When I later went to a moon circle event Pam was holding, she went around the room, naming everyone’s past life. “Nun, royalty, soldier… nothing for Sam, this is Sam’s first time being human… mother, artist.” I was the only one there without a past life. Like a weirdo.

Pam hadn’t seen me as a Native American. She said I’d had no previous lives, and that being a new soul meant I was from the future. She said that the future was a more beautiful and loving place, and that new souls were here to help bring us there. It sounded nice.

You always hear about old souls. Being an old soul has always been the compliment. But for the first time, I was thinking about the beauty of being a new soul. The wonders of being a little alien learning what it’s like to have a brief time being human.

As I write, I have a painting of myself as a little girl to the right of my desk. My grandma Peggy painted it. I am running on the beach, my hands open, a huge smile on my face, my hair in a ponytail. I can feel my joy looking at that painting. I can feel the innocence. It feels like new soul energy.

Sometimes, I think about what it’ll be like to come back as a human in a future life and find out about myself now. What would I want to hear? I think I would love to hear that I was a writer. An artist. That seems so brave. I hope to hear that I was someone who fell deeply in love with her soulmate later in life and was a wonderful mother. (I hope for these things deeply now for my near future.) I’d like to hear that I was someone who helped animals. A world traveler. Someone who was loving and kind and made people feel loved and accepted and less alone. Someone whose loving ripples reached out beyond where she could even see. These things would make me happy. I think I’d be fascinated to find a book I wrote or a poem or a piece of artwork I made. It wouldn’t even matter if it was good. I would just be astonished to see it. I’d be in wonder.

As a side note, I’m feeling scared right now to write this piece. I’m struggling as I write. Maybe it’s because I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s true or not. And I don’t know how to stand up for it if people criticize it. People’s anger scares me. People’s hate and judgment scare me. I get overwhelmed just looking at Instagram — the chatter in the comment sections feels like I am personally being attacked, even if I’m looking at something completely unrelated to me. And, I’ve also felt hate and judgment within myself. It’s so strange being a human. Or maybe it’s scary to write because writing often just feels scary. Putting myself out there feels scary. Any thought. Because what do I ever know? (What do any of us ever know?) In some of the spiritual books I’ve read, they say that everything boils down to two things: love or fear. Everything. And the right path is always to follow love. I try to remember that when I’m afraid. A friend told me that fear is just love that hasn’t learned to trust. I try and quiet down my panic and keep writing my messy, imperfect, I’m-not-sure-if-anything-I-think-is-right-or-not thoughts. This is what is going on in my head as I write. I go from moments of calm to moments of complete fear. I don’t know if it’s like this for others. But I’ll continue. I’ll give the fear that is rustling within me a big loving hug. I’ll trust the process. And meanwhile leave this paragraph here, so you can see what it’s like in my head. Sometimes my writing feels like my weird alien call out into the void. To see if there are any other aliens out there too.

*Extra side note: I just went on a beach walk to clear my head. I saved some bees from the ocean, carried two crabs to hiding spots in the seaweed, picked up trash, tossed back seaweed into the water so it could keep growing, felt the waves on my legs, and watched seagulls fighting over a stick. I’m ready to continue writing.

What I thought about on my walk is, when I’m upset or confused by someone, I need to remind myself that I don’t know what their soul has been through in the past to make them act the way they do. I don’t know what they’ve been through in this life—or potentially in their past lives. Maybe, for example, they were a killer in a past life and so in this life, by comparison, they’re way cooler and nicer. They’re progressing!

Also, I don’t know what their soul purpose is. It might be completely different than mine. This thought has helped me in recent years. About ten years ago, I was sexually assaulted by a neighbor. I felt hurt by it for a long time. I’ve felt denial, shame, anger, sadness, rage, detachment. (As well as sadness and anger because the people I turned to for help did not help me.) I also felt somehow furious with the world that he was allowed to exist. That he could walk around and be there, talking, having a body, existing — when he had hurt me and he had hurt others. But years later, after learning more about souls and soul purposes, I had a thought that helped me shift the energy, at least in the moment. I thought—wait, I don’t know his soul purpose for this life. What if his soul purpose in this lifetime is to be a complete asshole? And if it is… he is absolutely nailing it. He’s getting A pluses across the board. It made me laugh. And it made something within me release. I get to let go. That’s not my life. I’m not in charge of other people—what they do, or who does or doesn’t help me. They are on their own life paths, learning their own things, fulfilling their own purposes. That’s not my job. I get to focus on my own life’s purpose.

There’s a shift inside you when you think of people in terms of their souls.

When I first started believing in souls, I used to go on beach walks and stare at other people walking the beach like they were something magic. And they were. It helped that I hadn’t seen people in a very long time. Suddenly they were so fascinating. Souls, walking down the beach in human bodies, maybe not even realizing they were souls, and having their silly human thoughts, but meanwhile connected to something so much deeper and greater than that one body, and that one moment in that one lifetime. As I watched them, I wondered what their past lives had been.

I asked one of my best friends if she thought she was an old soul or a new soul. “Oh, I’m definitely an old soul,” she said. “Because things will happen in my life, and I’ll think, ‘Oh no, not this again.’”

Since my readings, I’ve thought about what it means to be a new soul, in a world that usually only talks about old souls. And I’ve examined myself and my characteristics through that lens. If I am a new soul, where can you find signs of it in me and my history?

Spatially, as a child, I was off. I couldn’t figure out my right from my left. I struggled to learn how to tie my shoelaces, and instead wore those double velcro strap shoes until a very late age. My pediatrician told my mom, “She doesn’t understand where her body is in space.” She told her to enroll me in ballet classes. I think about what it would be like for a soul to have a body for the first time. How strange and confusing it would be.

Also, despite loving writing, language has always been difficult for me. I’m dyslexic, don’t remember vocabulary well, and can’t spell. I think about how language would be something completely new to a new soul. How old souls would hold language within them like muscle memory. With me, I have to really work at it. The same with foreign languages. I watch other people learn foreign languages with shocked amazement. How do their minds hold it? I took French classes four days a week while I lived in France for three months, and yet on my last trip to Paris the immigration officer stamped my passport and I said, loudly and proudly, “Grazie!” It makes me feel better when I look at people who pick up languages easily and think, “Well, maybe they learned it so quickly because they were French in a past life!”

The same goes for names. Like spelling and words, they don’t stick in my brain. They just sound like weird, abstract noises. I can ask someone their name, ask them to repeat it, practice it all night in my head, and still forget it by the morning. All language is foreign to me.

And then I wish I could be one of those people who says, “I forget names, but I never forget a face.” But I forget faces too. All the time. Even people I (apparently) know. I have gotten myself into so many embarrassing-for-me and hurtful-for-the-other-person situations, that I now say, “It’s nice to see you,” whenever I am meeting someone for the first time. (Because I never know if it is the first time.) With so many eyes and noses and faces, I can’t keep them all straight in my head. I haven’t had lifetimes of practice, like the rest of you old souls. It’s like playing a sport for the first time. I can’t pick up the subtleties or even notice half of what’s going on. I’m just trying to figure out how to hold my racket!

“You probably aren’t interested in history,” Carol, the psychic from my Zoom reading had said to me. It feels rude to I’d say I’m “not interested,” but none of it sticks. I can’t remember dates or wars or what happened when. They are stories that people tell me and then I forget them. “Well, why would you be interested—you weren’t there!” she’d said. Which made me laugh, and then think about people who are passionate about a certain time period in history —maybe that time used to be their home.

What I am interested in, is what it’s likes for an individual human to be a human. How a particular person experiences it and makes sense of it. I love deep conversations. I love reading memoirs. I’m wondering if people like me inside their head. Or if there are clues to my own existence through how others understand the world. Sometimes it feels like the answers to the universe can be discovered just by staring at another living being’s eye. Like all the knowledge in the world is there.

As a group, humans often confuse me. I don’t feel like I quite fit into what comes naturally for so many people. I don’t feel enraged by the things that enrage them, I am scared of how quickly they fall into mob mentality, and am consistently baffled by how they justify or don’t mind being unkind. I watch them and feel lonely. I don’t understand how they treat animals the way they do. How they see them as lesser. I don’t see that. Animals. Insects. Plants. They seem magical to me. Imagine a world without birds. Terrifying.

At times, however, I feel incredibly human. Embarrassingly so. I feel my own anger and rage and anxiety and the emotions frighten me with their intensity. I become all the people I judged. I’m not sure what to do with these feelings. It’s not easy being human.

Sometimes, I watch myself, like in a dream, when you’re floating above yourself, or somehow right next to yourself but not quite in your body. I watch myself experiencing things, like a parent watching a child. Look, there’s me, flipping out. I watched myself when I was going through the grief of losing my dog. Sometimes I was in it and overwhelmed by it and drowning. Other times, I was watching myself and the way my brain worked. The waves. The calms. How I’d feel pain and then other times feel numb. I could sometimes step outside of it all and watch and think, “Wow, look at what my brain does. Look at how its getting me through this.”

I know I’m extremely sensitive. I imagine that, compared to others, I experience emotions and all life with the volume turned way up. I can’t watch scary or violent movies. I don’t like roller coasters. (My new soul stomach drops on swings.) I experience emotions and all my senses viscerally. As a child, I was afraid of fireworks. I spent Padres games secretly terrified, dreading the overwhelming booms of that would start once the game finished. The booms shook through me. Like I was the one exploding.

With that sensitivity also comes a depth of good feelings. I love deeply. Intensely. I look at people I love and think, “I can’t believe you exist.” I am blown away by their human form. Mesmerized by the angle their hand hangs from their wrist when they stand. Amazed that they have wrists. And freckles. And skin. How insanely wild. And I wonder, if having many lives could make you desensitized to the miracle of wrists.

I imagine people with past lives going through wars and disease and pillaging and deaths. Maybe having those past lives would make day to day things not such a big deal. Put things in their context. “Oh, death again.” (Or maybe the grief stacks and it’s worse. I don’t know.) Maybe animals being killed seems like no big deal if you’ve had a hundred lifetimes watching them be killed. But I know that to me, everything feels new and intense and vibrant and raw. The fact that there is death at all seems like something I cannot grasp.

I don’t know how other people are doing it — losing their parents and continuing to live. When I was in high school, in the span of two years, I lost five family members: grandparents, including my grandma Peggy, and a great aunt and uncle. I felt completely knocked over. I thought, “What do I do? Do I wave a white flag to make it stop?” I remember standing in the parking lot outside my local Red Robin and scanning the lot thinking, “My grandma isn’t anywhere. She isn’t on a trip. There is nowhere in the world I could travel to find her.” The shaky restlessness inside my torso felt unbearable. I started saying “I love you” to my parents every time I left the room. (I still do with my mom. My dad told me to stop.) I didn’t know when it would be the last time I saw anyone I loved.

After those two years, the world no longer made sense. I didn’t know what other people were doing — how everyone was acting so calm and like it wasn’t coming — death. I kept imagining that everyone was happily floating in tubes or boats going down a river and there was a huge waterfall right ahead, and every single person who went over that waterfall died, and yet no one was doing anything to stop it. They weren’t trying to swim away or even screaming that it was coming. They were all just floating. How was everyone just floating? Why was no one else panicking? “We are all going to die!!!!” I wanted to scream. “Right, we know,” they might have answered. It was like I was living in a horror movie. No one else minded.

“It’s part of life,” people would say. I’d look at them like they were crazy.

In Northern Ireland last year, I watched a Coot not feed its struggling baby. I watched the baby die in front of me. I was sitting on the bank of the Donaghaguy Lake, and two older Irish women stopped behind me and watched the baby die too. They said, “Oh, that’s sad.” I bawled. The old women left me and continued their walk. I bawled for at least 15 minutes. A robin came flew and perched in directly front of me on a reed and stared at me. I no longer felt alone and was comforted by this little presence. I still think about that baby.

And I can cry because of beauty and gratitude just as easily. After a breakup, I cried because I drove by three clusters of flowers—red, pink, and orange—growing on the side of the road, and the colors looked just so intensely beautiful together. And I was amazed that I was there, still alive after the worst thing I could have imagined in my relationship had happened, getting to see that beauty. Or when I walk in the ocean, and feel the salty water somehow like warm soft velvet against me as I move—my skin against the water makes me cry.

I wonder if there are other people like me. I look at people on the outside, and wonder if the insides match the parts they are showing. That’s something I appreciate so much about kids. Their insides match their outsides. As people get older, they hide.

My old French bulldog has a popular Instagram account. People follow him and write to me from all around the world. About seven years ago, a woman wrote me through his Instagram account and shared a picture of her Frenchie. She told me that she could tell that I was a very loving dog mom, and that she wanted me to take her dog, because she was going to kill herself. She wanted to know that her dog was going to be taken care of before she did it. Panicked, I requested to follow her back. When she’d written, I’d been lying in bed, feeling overwhelmingly depressed. When she accepted I saw all of her recent posts. She was a beautiful, thin, blond woman having wine with friends, riding horses, and posting pictures of family. She used the hashtag #livingmybestlife. She was someone you’d envy if you scrolled through her photos. And yet she was also writing to a stranger saying she was planning suicide.

How often are people pretending? Who are we even pretending for? Who does it help? I think it would make anyone feel like an outsider—if they were pretending to be someone else and living in a world where everyone else was pretending too. No wonder so many of us feel alone. I searched through this beautiful stranger’s photos and found the country and general location she lived in by her tagged posts, and after doing some research, I sent her a long message and free suicide support and therapy near her home. She told me she was moved that a stranger would put all that effort into helping her, and she promised me she wouldn’t hurt herself and that she’d contact the support I sent.

I cried in my bed, a 3.5-by-6.5 piece of metal in my hand, connecting me to this person hundreds of miles away. This crazy weird world. The connections within it. The pain of pretending.

A year and a half ago, I was attacked by someone I’d once thought was a friend. I’d been seeing a grief therapist at the time to help me recover from my breakup, and when I wrote her what happened, she wrote back, “Oh for f*cks sake, that woman is totally crazy.” Which at first made me laugh and feel supported, and then later got me thinking.

For the vast majority of my life, I have thought about myself as crazy and everyone else as normal. I have watched others, like an undercover alien would watch earthlings she is trying to assimilate with, and tried to understand myself and the world accordingly. I have tried to determine what was right and wrong, good and bad, by studying those around me. I have seen those who have treated me badly as reflecting something in myself or showing me something that I am supposed to do or to change. I have consistently seen myself as “wrong.”

What if, instead of looking at myself as crazy and the rest of the world as sane, I looked at everyone—everyone—as though they were crazy. Everyone in their own unique way. Myself included. But more importantly, at least for this exercise, everyone else. Then when people behaved badly, it would be something that had to do with their disorder, their life, their trauma, their issues, their possible past lives, or future lives, or alien lives, or life purposes. Then I wouldn’t have to study others for how I should be. Wouldn’t have to mold myself to the likes and opinions of others. Further, I could embrace the notion that came to me during covid that, maybe, I am supposed to be different. Maybe I am not supposed to change who I am to conform. Maybe my weirdness is my gift and I am just supposed to be that. Maybe we all are, but I don’t have to look to others and see how they are doing it. I just need to do that thing inside of me that feels natural and not play a role. I don’t have to act. I can just be.

Maybe this is part of my soul purpose — nurturing myself. Letting myself just be me.

During covid, I watched a TV show about an Indian woman. She was beautiful and had huge wild eyebrows, and they stretched almost down to the sides of her eyes, like my strays would if I didn’t pluck them. While watching that show, I stopped plucking mine. I let them grow thick and wild and unkempt. I didn’t blow dry or straighten my hair. I didn’t even wear deodorant. I didn’t wear makeup. I just felt free and untamed.

One day, I decided I wanted to venture into a store. I hadn’t been to any stores other than the occasional grocery store when I didn’t do Instacart delivery, and I was ready for an adventure. I decided I would go to a large department store where I knew I could social distance. I took myself to Nordstrom. Going down the escalator and looking around felt like I was venturing into an exotic planet. I went by myself and most of my face was concealed behind a large baby blue surgeon’s mask, which made me feel even more like I was on some sort of fun, secret mission by myself. As I stepped off the escalator I noticed a Nordstrom employee walking in my general direction. I started veering to the left so that we wouldn’t breach social distancing. But the more I veered, the more he veered. I was confused. He was staring right at me, and continuing to veer. I stopped and stared at him. He shook his head, “I’m sorry, you’re so beautiful,” he said. And then he walked away. I looked at my reflection and realized that he could see almost none of my face. All that was visible was my eyes and my big, hairy eyebrows. And I was in Nordstrom. And I was beautiful.

If you liked my writing, I hope that you will subscribe so you can read more of my work.

It’s free and I’d love to have you here.

Love, Samantha 🐧❤️

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P.S. Do you feel like you are an old soul or a new soul? Do you believe in souls and past lives? I’d love to hear your thoughts about all of this in the comments.

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My heart looks like a penguin.

On my dad’s 80th birthday, I fainted on the stairs on the side of a cliff near my home. I’d walked down the 116 steps to the beach to write my dad a message in the sand. I wanted to photograph it and send it to him as a birthday surprise. On the way back up the cliff, around step 83, I lost consciousness. I woke with my face pressed hard against a step, my knee scraped, the side of my nose split by my sunglasses, and a man standing over me yelling, “Do you know how old you are?” Which I found rude.

He described me falling, and inwardly I cringed. I hated that he could describe moments of my life that I had no access to. As if my story was not my own.

It reminded me of when I was twenty and studying abroad in Oxford. One night, while walking on High Street, I was hit by a black cab. It threw me — breaking the straps of my shoe, giving me whiplash, and leaving me with patches of asphalt burn on my shoulder, knee, and thigh where I hit the pavement. The cab sped away. While the college nurse treated my wounds, she told me the cab driver would be easy to catch; Oxford had video cameras all over the city. My insides clenched. I was horrified imagining my body caught on video: out of my control, flying through the air, my limbs moving on their own. I didn’t want anyone to ever see that. I thought it would only exacerbate what I already felt, which was, oddly, shame.

I can’t tell you why. I can give you a million theories. Maybe some of them are true.

I do know, however, that at times there is something about having a body and being alive and human that feels so overwhelmingly vulnerable and strange and out of control that my mind doesn’t know how to wrap itself around it. I’ll have moments, like right now, looking at my left thumb holding down the page on my notebook as I write these words on the beach in front of the same steps I once fainted on — and I see the little criss-cross crinkles in it and the fine blond hairs sprouting from it. And I think, “that hand, that finger, is mine. How wild.” It’s strange that I can look down and see it. It is something separate from where I am thinking my thoughts. But it is also me. It’s hard to explain the weirdness of existing. At times I want to run up to strangers and say, “Isn’t this wild? Isn’t this crazy that we all exist?” And in that frame of mind, why be ashamed of any of it? In that frame of mind, isn’t it all just fascinating and bizarrely cool?

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A week after I fainted on the stairs, I fainted again. This time, in the passenger seat of a girl’s car — a girl I didn’t know well, but desperately wanted to like me. We’d gone to high school together and ran into each other at the post office, where, after I mentioned I was feeling a little off, she offered to drive me home. Sitting next to her, my vision went blurry. I tried to remain cool while saying, “I can’t see,” and then my eyes rolled back into my head (she told me later — to my horror) and I passed out.

My doctor ordered an echocardiogram. An ultrasound of my heart.

I came in for my appointment feeling quietly excited and sentimental. I was 43 years old, and I was going to see my heart for the very first time in my life.

I sat in the patient’s chair, in my thin robe, feeling like I was in one of the million movie scenes where they are seeing their baby for the first time. I stared at the monitor as the technician placed a gel-covered probe onto my skin.

And then there it was. It was black and white and one-dimensional. It was a moving alien. It looked like a small dancing penguin. It flapped its little heart valves like little penguin wings. It looked so fragile and so beautiful.

I felt like I was watching a baby. I lay there staring at the screen with tears in my eyes. I didn’t look away once. I didn’t want to miss a single second with my heart. Like it was my child, dancing for me on a dark stage.

How do you feel so much love for a body part that you’ve never seen before? Seeing it outside of myself felt like watching myself, outside of myself. And it was a self I felt so much love for.

I thought about how all along there had been this sweet little creature inside of me. Beating for me. Day and night. My whole life. Even when I said awful things to myself. It was still there. Pumping. Giving me love.

I’d seen penguins in Antarctica in my early twenties. I was in law school, and feeling strongly like I didn’t belong there. I’d look around at all the students typing their notes into their laptops beside me in class and wonder how I got there. Like I’d been dropped in through the ceiling into a seat in an alternate universe. One day I felt this strongly in a Criminal Procedure class, and I leaned over to my friend Cindy and whispered, “I’m in law school. What am I doing here?” She glanced over at me, her french manicured nails clicking with purpose at her laptop keyboard and, without missing a beat, shook her head and answered, “I have no idea.” And at the same time, I was terrified of the step-off-the-cliff-edge, free-falling-darkness I felt in my stomach whenever I thought of dropping out. I was confused about my entire life. Being an adult was scary and seemed unfixable.

For my winter break, my family went to Antarctica.

It was unlike anywhere I’d ever been — it was like being on another planet. From our boat deck, the sun never fully set so it was always light and you saw the horizon in every direction. A daily shifting landscape of pastel streaked icebergs and snow and water. And then, most amazing of all, in this freezing foreign world, there was life. Everywhere. Birds, seals, whales, leopard seals, and penguins. How could they exist here? It felt like finding aliens on Mars.

I was fascinated with the penguins. That they existed at all. The adorable way they walked. That they had this entire life. An entire world. Here. So far away and disconnected from everything I knew.

I would think about them when I went back to Los Angeles and law school. Whenever I felt stressed. I would think of the penguins, existing in that world, at that exact moment. And something inside my chest would feel spacious. Like I could breathe.

From then on, penguins would remind me of this feeling. This peace. A connection to something more out there, beyond whatever problems were chattering away in my mind.

It seems fitting that twenty years later, when I first see my heart, I’d see a penguin.

It’s mind-boggling how there are all these parts to us. That we have whole worlds within us, working for us, keeping us alive and healthy and making it so we have bodies, so we can go out and experience this world and mistakenly go to law school and travel to Antarctica and faint on cliffs. All these separate parts working together whether we are consciously thinking about them or not. How often have I forgotten that I even had a heart? Or a skeleton? It blows my mind that we are all walking around with skeletons under our skin. Skeletons on the beach. Skeletons on the swings. Skeletons going to the grocery store.

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Sometimes I will go days (weeks?) without even thinking about my heart. Other times, when I remember, I make a conscious effort to drop into it. To shift away from the floating, scattered chirpings of my brain and all of the spirals my thoughts lead me on, and to drop into that deeper place within my chest. To experience the world from there.

I started intentionally practicing this in 2020. My mom and I were doing online meditations together during COVID, and the instructor would tell us to be in our heartspace. So I would go for walks into the local lagoon, and I would focus on consciously dropping out of my head into my heartspace.

I have a busy mind, so what I’d do was imagine that I had a huge funnel going through the top of my head. The funnel is so wide that it fills the entire space in my head, leaving no room for my brain. Then the neck of the funnel goes straight into my heart. My brain is completely bypassed. And I’d imagine the heavens and universe pouring its wisdom directly into my heart. This makes me feel connected to the world in a whole new way. It’s a quieter, deeper intelligence. It’s far less chattery. Far more peaceful and grounded, while also somehow also sky-filled at the same time.

When I do this, it makes me feel like I don’t exist, and that I exist as everything around me all at once, at the same time. It feels like freedom.

When I walk around with an imaginary funnel through my head, the world feels so much brighter. Colors are more vivid. Birds are everywhere. When they fly, they feel like answers to questions I’ve been pondering. Like the world is talking to me. That it is one big pulsing beautiful thing. I can breathe, like when I imagined the penguins in law school.

I’ve been told that our brains are like radios, and that they pick up signals rather than come up with the thoughts themselves. It’s an interesting thought. It makes thoughts so much less tied to who we are. (It makes me think of the phrase, “Don’t believe everything you think.”) It makes me think about how our brains are just one organ. One small part of us. And what if we just turn that radio organ volume down, all that static, all those channels that aren’t even ours or that we don’t like hearing, and just tune into the steady “thump…thump” of our hearts. And follow where they lead us. These little compasses inside each of our chests.

What if we don’t have to know everything in our heads? What if we all fit together with an intelligence that isn’t kept in our brains. Like how my heart beats and works for me without me even thinking about it. Or my spleen and my gallbladder do whatever spleens and gallbladders do without any effort on my part. What if we can just trust that we are part of something greater and love ourselves for it? What if we can stop worrying about controlling ourselves and how we come across to others and what everything means and just flap our penguin wings and know that we are who we are supposed to be. And that it all works together. That we are all part of some bigger organism, all connected, all beautiful pieces of some big whole. We are crinkled, hairy thumb knuckles and also part of the whole.

In this past week, I have had a million beautiful moments that made me feel a part of something bigger than myself. Like I’m a little thumb or a heart or spleen in the body of the universe.

I just moved back to San Diego, after over a year living in Ireland, and I’ve been unpacking boxes that had been in storage and donating things that I realized I no longer need or use. I loaded an entire car full of boxes into the back of my mom’s Subaru and drove to the Community Resource Center. On the top of one of the boxes was a white metal rice cooker that has been a part of my life since childhood. But I never cook rice. But I still felt sad, putting it in the box. Like I was giving a part of myself or my family away. When I got to the donation drop point, the volunteer worker Diane (who I’ve gotten to know well this past week), said, “Is that a rice cooker? Ours just broke last week! Would you mind if we let the workers use this?” And I felt saved.

Or when the air conditioner repairman who came to finish installing my new air conditioner told me about how when his father died, he had known it in his body that he had just passed. He had felt it while about to board a plane at the airport. When he got on the plane, a couple sat down next to him, and before taking off, ordered four Coors Light. His dad’s favorite drink. I cried as he told me. The night his dad passed, he conceived his son. I asked him how old his son was, and when he said six, I ran to grab one of my children’s books to give him. He asked me what the book was about. “Bullying,” I told him. His son had just been taken out of school because he was being bullied.

Or at my mom’s church last week, watching her sing in a concert with her choir. The way her face lights up when she sings and how beautiful she is. Her halo of red hair, her high cheekbones, the adoration in her eyes, the expressions she makes with her lips and mouth, how earnest she is. I cried watching her. I feel so proud and so lucky that she’s my mom. I watched the whole concert with a kind of foreigner mindset. I’ve just spent a year viewing another culture and people and how odd and beautiful and strange everyone is. And in that church that I’d gone to since childhood, I now looked with the same kind of wonder at how odd and beautiful and strange we are too.

Or at the beach a few days ago, when I walked up to a woman who I thought was trying to untangle a balloon ribbon from seaweed. Something I’ve done many times. “Do you need some help?” I asked her. She held up the seaweed to me. She wasn’t untangling a ribbon. She was admiring all the different seaweeds, tangled together. “Isn’t this amazing,” she said. And it was. We stood together and touched the little bulbs and stroked the tiny jagged edges of the leaves. Her name was Pauline and she was a great grandma who had spent her summers in Santa Cruz and loved the ocean and had worked for a plastic surgeon who did reconstructive surgery on children’s faces. She had perfect teeth and a bright smile and wore a white t-shirt and would open her arms, one holding the seaweed to the water and exclaim things like, “Aren’t we lucky!” And we were. She asked me, a few times, where I lived and what I did, and I told her I lived here and was a writer. “You’re a writer! What a gift to be able to express your thoughts!” She said. And she took my hand and kissed it. And I took her hand and kissed it back. And thought about how she was right. And how lucky we are. And I walked home. Up the same 116 step staircase where I’d once fainted.

It turns out, my heart is fine. I just have low blood pressure and have been told to eat more salt. I have a perfect, penguin heart.

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I moved to a house in Dublin with a yellow door.

On a bus tour, I was told the city’s brightly painted doors
Began when Queen Victoria died.
England decreed that Dubliners paint their doors black in mourning.

They rebelled with color.

I laughed—
the life in people, the spirit of it.

And what of the notion that when life gives us hard things—any hard thing—
We don’t have to go along with the story?

We can paint our door bright yellow.

In the pub last week, a man talked about his sister, who is in a wheelchair with MS. She can’t feed herself.

He said he’ll do, “Here comes the airplane,” with her spoon,
At times intentionally missing her mouth.

“You’ve got to treat her like she’s normal,” he said.

And no one slagged.
And I watched him with open-hearted wonder.

Another way to say love.

And when he left for a cigarette,
Everyone else opened up—
About health struggles
In their families and in their own lives.

Could their family member have heard them when they were in a coma,
Their own personal struggles with epilepsy.

And the connection, and the vulnerability,
Felt like yellow paint.

It’s an interesting thing, being alive in this world and knowing that your time here is finite. What do we do that matters? Today I saved a fat, furry bumblebee from a busy Dublin sidewalk, and it felt like the most real thing I did all day. I took him into someone’s front garden, where a wild snapdragon flower was growing out from the wall, and felt my heart soften watching him navigate the two fuchsia buds.

In Ireland, where I have been living this year, flowers bloom from the most unlikely places. They sprout out of ancient stone walls, out of cracks in roofs, between steps and the pavement. I love their tenacity. I love knowing that so much of that beauty is there because of... poo. That flowers grow from seeds eaten by birds and fertilized by their droppings – that they grow from this mess and make the world more beautiful. I like to think of this when things in my life feel a bit… “pooey.”

I once was the proud human of the greatest dog who ever lived. (I know that many humans feel that way about their dogs, and I love that about humans. I love that we can all be right.) My dog’s name was Henri. To others, he was a French bulldog. To my heart, he was my little soulmate. I loved this dog more than I have words to express. He made me feel more important, more loved, more special than I think I have ever felt in my whole life. Every time I walked into my front door it felt like Christmas. I would take off my bags, sit down on the floor, and he’d come running to me and put his arms around my neck and we’d hug, our hearts pressed together. I was his favorite person. I can’t think of a greater compliment in the world. Even just the way he would look at me – it melted me to tears.

Seven years ago, Henri died a traumatic death because of veterinary negligence. For six years, I was involved in legal proceedings, hoping to prevent what had happened to him from happening to others. It was brutal. Animal rights cases in California are extremely difficult – animals are treated as property by the law ­­– as though animals are inanimate objects and not valuable in their own right. In my case, the opposition brought a witness who said that Henri’s death had saved me money because I would no longer have to spend money on buying him toys and food. This is what people are up against when they try and protect animals. My case was so hard, but at the same time, I felt like I had a shot in hell. Not a clear shot. Not an easy shot. But I felt I had a chance. Which was more than so many people. So, I followed my heart. Even when I was told I was going to lose. Even when I was pressured to give up and be silent. Sometimes I questioned if I was crazy. But then I would think about how 80-year-old me would feel looking back on my life. And I knew that older me, would be proud of myself if I tried and I lost. So I kept going. I cried a lot. Went to the beach and let the cold water wrap around my calves and ankles. Screamed. Ran. Slept. Thrashed about under my sheets. Cried some more. But, I kept going.

During the lawsuit, I would see signs posted around my hometown in Southern California saying to “Pick up after your dog.” It felt like they were speaking to me, and that I was supposed to clean up this mess that had been my dog’s death. It wasn’t for my dog – he was gone – but for others. I felt a responsibility to other dogs, and to protect their lives. I wish someone had done it before it had happened to mine. I would see discarded plastic poop bags left on sidewalks or on the lagoon hiking path near where I lived, and I would pick them up and carry them to the trash. It felt like the lawsuit, like I was carrying the poo for other people. Sometimes it felt like a burden and an annoyance. How could someone leave this behind? Why did I feel the need to carry this? Other times it felt like an honor. To be able to be someone who could do something.

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Since moving to Ireland, I pick up trash that others seem to walk by. The Grand Canal is a block from my house, and every day it is littered with bottles, empty cigarette packets, food containers. I go there to feed the birds – a swan (that an old man told me is named Daphne) and a few families of Moorhens and today three ducks – and have times when I feel furious by the trash others leave behind. Don’t they care about the beauty? The weeping willows and budding wildflowers and baby birds and fish and cranky swan and the grey heron that sometimes trolls the water’s edge? And then I had thought, maybe they don’t. Maybe I am the one who gets to appreciate it the most. Maybe I get more out of it than others – maybe it is my gift. And I felt something in me soften. Last week, I went to the beach with a friend. While walking over to a dumpster to throw away my trash, I picked up trash that others had left behind in the sand. People here often look at me like I’m strange when I do this. “You’re just supposed to leave no trace,” my friend said. “I want to make it better,” I said.

In the end, after years of court proceedings, a jury found in my favor – coming back with a verdict of negligence and concealment – and the vet surrendered his license. I cried, sitting outside on a stone wall. I felt so close in that moment to Henri. I felt so proud of him. When I think of the scene now, me on the stone wall, I imagine myself as one of those flowers, growing from the poo.

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While I was in the throes the lawsuit, I needed to think about something good outside of the case to keep me going. So I thought of what I would do with the money if I won the lawsuit.

This is what inspired my vision: My favorite sound in the world used to be the sound of Henri drinking water. He slept in my room (in my bed) and I’d keep the sliding glass door open to the balcony, with his water bowl just outside, and at night, I’d wake to hear him lapping at the water. I would lay there feeling so happy, knowing that he was being nourished and that soon he’d be climbing back (up his little doggie steps) into bed with me.

After Henri died, I thought about his water bowl and back to a special memory from my childhood. When I was fifteen, my family went on a trip to Namibia to see desert elephants. I’ve always loved elephants. The magic of them -how they look like mythical beings mixed with dinosaurs and at the same time seem so similar and relatable to humans. On this trip, my family was taken to see a newly made elephant watering hole. It was in the middle of nowhere – just desert and no people around for miles. Yet next to the structure was a plaque… with my dad’s name on it. My dad is a private person, and when he donates money he almost always does so anonymously. But they had surprised him with this plaque, and I loved it. I loved that my dad was helping elephants have water, and that the only beings around to read his name would be the elephants.

And so that inspired my idea. I wanted to give the money from Henri’s lawsuit to build a watering hole for elephants. I wanted to create a giant “dog bowl” that would be visible from heaven and would help elephants and other wild animals be able to nourish themselves, the way Henri had nourished himself with his water bowl. And I wanted a plaque by it that said “The Henri Childs Water Bowl” for the elephants to read. I would think about this water bowl and the elephants during hard times (and there were many) in the years and years of the lawsuit. Elephants became a bit of a sign for me during the case.

After winning Henri’s lawsuit, I contacted Big Life Foundation and told them my story and asked if they had need for a borehole for elephants. They did. In the Nairrabala Conservancy, which is a wildlife migration route north of Amboseli Park in Kenya, the land had no dry season water. This is where Henri’s water bowl would be constructed. Further, the water would not only help the elephants and wildlife, but would also be piped to the Maasai residents, so both humans and animals would be benefiting. I donated every penny of what I received in the lawsuit to Big Life Foundation. When the wire transfer of the last of the money went through, I sat and cried. I felt so grateful. I felt like life was flowing through me – like life was happening through me. I got to be a part of something so much bigger than myself. I felt like flowers were blooming through all the parts of me that before had only hurt.

In Ireland, it is considered lucky if a bird poops on you. It’s such a positive attitude, and it makes me smile. But maybe it is even deeper than this. Maybe it is the same with life. When life poops on you, through hardship or tragedy, it can feel awful and unbearable and like the whole world is that poop. It is all you can see. But at that moment, you are existing in a snapshot. You don’t know the whole story yet. You haven’t seen what is going to blossom. You haven’t yet seen how life can transform unimaginable brokenness into unimaginable beauty.

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Losing Henri was beyond painful. Going through the lawsuit stretched me in ways I couldn’t have fathomed. But what beautiful flowers came from that soil. Henri didn’t get to live forever and neither do I, but what an unfathomable thing to be a part of life. To get to leave behind parts of yourself that continue to grow, continue to nourish. What a magical world it is, that you can be a 25-pound dog in California and positively impact the lives of elephants and animals and people living across the world in Kenya. I watched a video of the Maasai people blessing the construction site before the digging started and just stared at my phone in wonder. How incredible that so much pain could turn into something so mind-blowingly cool. What a magical world it is where you can be a scared and grieving girl and still help make the world a better place. I hope to one day visit “The Henri Childs Water Bowl.” I hope that Henri sees it from heaven and feels proud.

There can be great heartbreak in this life. But wow - the beauty that can grow from a broken heart. It makes me weep with gratitude. To be alive. To get to feel it all. What an incredible gift.

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Do to unforseen events, Henri’s Water Bowl is currently raising money for completion. The water that that the drills reached is unpotable and needs to be treated with reverse Osmosis and piped, requiring the raising of an additional $25K to finish the project. Big Life Foundation is hoping to raise it before June, when the drought season begins. If my story moves you and you feel you would like to be a part of creation of The Henri Childs Water Bowl, I would love to include you in the mission. By donating any amount to Sips for Elephants your money will be funding the completion of the creation of the Henri Childs Water Bowl.

Also, if you’d like to donate in honor of your dog (or dog angel) and want your dog to be featured as a dog hero on a tribute being made on Henri’s website and Instagram please DM me at @henrilefrenchie on Instagram or email me at henrilefrenchie@gmail.com with a picture of your donation and picture of your dog and your dogs name.

Also, if you donate $100 or more, DM or email me with your address, and I would be happy to mail you two free signed copies of my children’s book, Henri and the Magnificent Snort, made out to whoever you like, as a thank you gift.

Thank you, so much, for being an animal lover.

I wish for you that beautiful things bloom from every place your heart has ever been broken, and that you feel loved by life beyond your wildest dreams.

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How do you trust the unknown?

Last year, I traveled alone to the Seychelles, to live on an island smaller than a square mile for a month. I went there to volunteer with tortoises and sea turtles.

During that month I spent my sunsets guarding green sea turtle hatchlings as they took their very first steps in life. Tiny, clumsy, heart-breakingly-vulnerable steps. They were following the warm glow of the sun. These turtles were just newborns, their eyes seeing light for the very first time, and yet nature was already forcing them to venture out — on their own — across the wide white sand beach and into the waves and vast ocean.

Sometimes I felt a muffled screaming from within my abdomen of, “This isn’t fair! They’ve never swam before! They’ve never walked before - they haven’t done anything! They’ve never even eaten before!” I’d feel the urge to scoop each one up, protectively, like an abandoned puppy, and take them home and feed them and protect them and make sure they would never be hurt. One in a thousand green sea turtles makes it to adulthood. One in a thousand.

But I didn’t.

And I was in love with every single one of them. Every single one.

Instead I stood beside them in complete awe, tears flowing down my cheeks. A 45 year-old human. Watching a newborn do something more courageous than anything she’d ever dreamt of.

I’d watch them as they took their first steps forward, awkwardly pushing their baby bodies, some with bellies not yet finished absorbing the yolk from their egg, their newly formed little flippers pattering against the sand, their tiny faces knocked with it, white sand grains rimming the edges of their beautiful big eyes.

I’d watch them as they made it across the beach, and water touched them for the very first time. Wondering if it is what they thought water would feel like. Beside them, I’d feel the same wave on my feet and legs, loving that we were being touched by the same thing, at the same time.

Sunset after sunset, I’d walk beside these turtles, guarding against crabs who’d run to grab them and take them into their holes, smoothing the sand before them of footprints, and whispering to them, “You can do it. Keep going. Keep going!” I’d snap pictures of them and film them and wonder if that would be the only photo ever taken of that little soul. If they’d live through the night. I’d think about if my brief moments with them were their only moments they’d feel love and attention. If my love for them would be the one love they felt in their short life.

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Some babies were fast and raced ahead of the others. Some were so slow from the beginning, and already tired, and yet they had such a long journey ahead of them. Some of the turtles were born deformed, and yet still they moved forward. I watched one, dragging a tiny non-working leg behind him across the sand. “Will he be ok?” I pleaded with Ange, the island’s turtle expert. He told me he’d seen adults come to lay with injured flippers. So he could make it. I beamed love out of my heart at that baby, like a Care Bear, hoping it would help. Others had been in nests that had been attacked by crabs, and so they started the world disadvantaged, and yet these babies too moved forward, with bits and pieces of themselves damaged. I saw one who mostly went in circles, his brain must have been affected by the crab attack. We called over Ange and he helped him. Another had lost an eye. At first I thought it was only covered in sand, but there was nothing there. And he was still heading out into the world. Slowly. But going forward. I cried a lot for him, feeling so much pain that it almost felt personal. Like I had caused his half-blindness. Or that I was the one-eyed turtle myself. I couldn’t feel the difference between that baby and me anymore. Or any of us. I cried for all of us, going out in this world half-blind. There is so much unknown and yet we still go. I walked with that baby turtle, all the way to the water.

At one hatching, a baby died right at the start. It was alive in the nest, yet died before it ever got to the beach-walk part of life. It didn’t even get to feel what water felt like. I wondered what it had felt in those moments it had lived. If it could have been loved more. If that would have helped. I carried it in my gloved hand to the water’s edge and took a blurry photo of its tiny face, eyes still open, and its tiny body within my rubbered fingers. And then I let it go. We wore gloves to protect them. But they were in a world of crabs and sharks and huge fish and birds and crashing waves and rocks. Life didn’t wear gloves.

Then I turned and saw all the other turtles that I was missing. Doing their first steps, something that would happen only once in their life, ever. All the beauty happening all around me. The constant, heartbreaking beauty of being alive in this world. Everything during those sunsets felt so intense and love-filled and painful and precious and poignant.

Almost every night, tears flowed down my cheeks, my heart humbled and aching with the overwhelm of getting to be a part of something so miraculous. I’d laugh, I’d squeal, I’d cry, and I’d look wide-eyed and cartoonishly delighted in photos, like a child on Christmas morning. I’d look at the baby turtles and think about all the silly things I worry about and how what they were doing was scarier and more vulnerable and braver than anything I was facing in my life. What incredible little beings.

Then I’d fall asleep at night, exhausted from my day, while those little babies were out there, in the huge dark ocean at that exact same moment.

At the start of the year, I didn’t have a view of the Seychelles in my future.

It was January, and I was living in my hometown in Southern California and feeling… stuck. I felt like I was waiting for something to change, but all that was happening was I was walking in circles, like the turtle whose brain had been hurt when the nest had been attacked. And I was quite literally going in circles: every day I’d stretch my double-bowed laces around the hooks of my hiking boots and leave home to walk the beaches, neighborhoods, and lagoon and then back, my feet and mind pacing the same tracks and getting nowhere.

So I booked a one-way flight to Ireland. A country where nothing was familiar, but where I hoped I’d feel less lost. In the LAX airport, outside my gate, I wrote the first lines in my new journal, which was blue and covered in pink hummingbirds and flowers:

January 19, 2025

I already feel lighter. Freer. Like I am entering the life I am supposed to live. Like I am a part of life. Flowing with it. Not a rock, stuck against the side of a waterway, stagnant and pounded and unmoving. I am floating.

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I didn’t know what I was doing or what would happen, but I was going. And that felt like light. Like following the sun. My first full day in Dublin, I walked to the ocean and cried. I had made it somewhere and it was beautiful — a huge stretch of ripple-printed sand and then water and blue sky. I took a picture of my hiking boots against the ripples. I took art, writing, and photography classes. I cried. (A lot.) I laughed. I bought a Leap Card. I felt confused and alive and hopeful and scared. I went into pubs alone and sat myself down at the bar and made friends with strangers. I joined a pub quiz team. I bought a blender. I became Instagram friends with the man in the blender shop. I saw daffodils peeking their yellow heads up out of the dark soil, like promises of sunshine.

Three months later, the weekend of my birthday, I had to leave. I needed a longer stay visa, and to be somewhere else in the meantime. A few days before my time was up, a man standing beside me on a road island began talking to me while we waited for the crosswalk light to change. He told me he was originally from Northern Ireland and he recommended that I go to a small city called Warrenpoint. We walked down the sidewalk together and I looked at the man’s baseball cap. It had a yellow flower on it, and the word “Courage.” I booked an Airbnb with zero reviews but a picture of a living room window overlooking the water of Carlingford Lough. Two days later, I was on a train, off to Warrenpoint. I pushed a chair and table next to that window to write. I lived there three months.

It was in Warrenpoint where I decided my next adventure would be the Seychelles. I wanted to be around animals and sunshine and I researched places to volunteer in Africa and did a video application for the position from my seat by that window.

And then I was off to Africa.

I wonder, how are we so different than the sea turtles?

Each morning when we wake up, we don’t know what the day will bring. We don’t know what the future holds. Whether we are traveling or at home. We don’t know. And yet we go. Each day we climb out of bed and we go.

I think what I am most afraid of, is how shit I am to myself when things go wrong. How I beat myself up. How I tell myself I should have done something differently and that I caused whatever happened to me. It makes me afraid to enjoy the moment. It makes me afraid to be happy. Because I am so scared of how mean I am going to be to myself if things go wrong.

I watched a video once of a blind French bulldog running around in his backyard, his face full of innocent bliss. And then he ran straight into a tree. And I bawled. Bawled for him. Bawled for me. For those parts of me that have felt so happy in life and then been hit so hard and felt like that hit came because I had dared to let myself be so happy. I don’t even know if that’s exactly it. But there is a fear there. A fear of thinking that I am ok. Of thinking that the world loves me, and, after something happens, then feeling like I was wrong or that I should be punished for having thought that. Maybe that’s it. Because that is making me cry now. I am afraid that if I’m not afraid, I’m going to get hurt.

But I am going to get hurt. We are all going to get hurt. There is a zero out of a thousand chance that we are going to make it out of this life alive. But we get to do it. We get to do whatever parts of our life that are given to us. Some of us get to make it all the way across the sand to the water. Some of us get lots of time in the water. Some of us get to make it to adulthood. Some of us are fast. Some of us have one eye. None of us can see the full picture. And how beautiful we all are. Like the green sea turtles. Like that Frenchie. We deserve those moments of bliss. We deserve the bliss and to not take the trees or the crabs personally.

But how do we do it? How do we deal with this lack of control?

I’ve watched my mind deal with it in… creative ways. Such funny things, minds.

When I was in my twenties, I was in a OCD therapy group. There were four of us, and then the therapist. We all had different issues. One man was afraid of trash. He’d swerve his car on the road to avoid hitting it. One woman was terrified of the intrusive thoughts she had about hurting her baby. The third person, I can’t remember.

And then there was me. One of the things that I did was that I had a ritual for when I was on planes. Here was my ritual: Every time I got on a plane, before the plane lifted its wheels from the runway, I had to have both feet firmly on the floor, I had to clasp my hands together, fingers interlaced, and I had to pray. (As a side note: At that point in my life I was an atheist.) And the prayer I said had to be exact. It was the same every time. It was something like, “Dear God, please have this be a safe and happy flight for me and everyone on board. Thank you. I love you. Amen.”

I did it every single time.

I had a trip coming up with my boyfriend in a week.

“Well,” the therapist said, “You know what you have to do.” And I did. He worked in exposure therapy.

“I know,” I said, “I can’t pray on the plane.”

“No.” He said. “You have to do everything that you always do. Feet on the ground before take off. Hands with your fingers interlaced. And you have to do the exact same prayer. Except this time, you have to pray for the plane to crash.”

I stared at him.

Pins of adrenaline were pricking me everywhere.

But I wanted to get better.

So I said ok.

On the day of the flight, I stood on the jetway with the other passengers and my boyfriend, nearing the plane door.

I fidgeted with my luggage and stared at the smooth white door coming up ahead of us.

My boyfriend leaned towards the woman standing in front of us. “My girlfriend is going to pray for the plane to crash,” he said.

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I can’t remember exactly what the woman said, but she naturally went into full-blown hysterics. (This was not too far post 9-11, so I didn’t blame her. I blamed my boyfriend, who was thoroughly enjoying himself.) I think she tried to get me to say I wouldn’t and told me that she and her entire family were going to pray for the opposite and that their prayers were going to counter mine. I didn’t want to be rude, but I was trying to heal. I couldn’t listen to her. I had to focus on crashing the plane.

Once I was on the plane, I did it. Feet firmly pressed on the ground before takeoff. Hands pressed together, fingers interlaced.

“Dear God, please crash this plane and kill me and everyone on it. Thank you. I love you. Amen.”

I was tense the entire flight. I was panicked at the landing. But then, we landed. And nothing had happened.

The next flight I did the same. And the next. And the next. Then I started mixing it up, afraid that my new prayer had somehow replaced my old. “Dear God, do whatever you want,” I’d say. And still nothing.

I wasn’t flying the plane.

We aren’t in control. It’s horrifying and it’s wonderful and it’s horrifying and it’s wonderful again.

I watch my brain to this day, trying to solve life like a puzzle. Trying to make the right choices, the right decisions, think the right thoughts so that everything works out ok. Right now my brain is noodling around where I go next. Is it time for me to go home to California? Is that the right choice? Will my life crash and burn if I choose the wrong thing? You’re not flying the plane, Samantha. Relax. Relax.

While writing this, I am watching a woman out my window in my Dublin apartment, standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus. She is listening to music on her phone and headphones and she is dancing. She is making writing so much more fun. She is beautiful. No one really seems to notice her or acts like it’s weird what she’s doing. Everyone is in their own heads. There are so many ways to be. We can be worried. Or we can be waiting for our bus and dancing. And life goes on either way. We’re all going to the same place, eventually. No matter what we do or how we pray or how fast or slow we are. And that’s ok. Buses come, and I’m happy when they aren’t hers. So I can watch her keep dancing.

Now she’s gone. Swept up by her bus.

The other day, I put on clean hiking socks that I had had on my trip last year in the Seychelles. They’d been through the wash, but as I reached my fingers into them, the toes were filled with that fine white sand from the beaches that the sea turtles crossed to the water. I poured it out onto my desk and then sprinkled it around, like fairy dust, over everything.

The sea turtles have to do that walk on the sand to the water. You can’t carry them directly to the ocean. It’s important. The environmental director told me this during one turtle sunset. It imprints something within them. They’ve done studies. The ones who have walked it as babies can return, if they make it to adulthood, to that same beach, to lay their own eggs.

Look at all the places we walk, not knowing where we’re going. Maybe they’re important too. We are all half-blind, but maybe we are being imprinted with something we cannot see. But something we can feel. Maybe we’re being guided by nature and instinct and yellow flowers and gods that listen to some of our prayers and ignore (thank god) others, and maybe we have to trust that this whole thing is bigger than what we can see and what we can control and just keep going towards the light, vulnerable and courageous and blissful and unknowing of what is going to happen next.

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Sometimes I need to remind myself
What a miracle it is to be here at all

My gray bath mat on the bathroom floor
On a rock spinning through space

That all of this blood and these organs and bones and cells
Grew together so that I can exist

And cry about heartbreak and worry
What strangers think as I clean trash out of the canal
Hoping to make a happier home for the swans and birds
Living there

There are so many things to be angry about, so many things
To judge, to worry about, to fret over
And what a gift that we have brains growing in our heads

To think all these silly thoughts
That mean nothing real
And yet feel so important

How privileged we are to get to be such idiots
And to think that we know what is going on

How wonderful it is to be wrong

To be made up of love and not even know it
What a miracle it is to exist

Written on my bed in Rathmines, Dublin after staring at the gray bathmat on my bathroom floor (2025)

I thought I had never traveled alone.
But I think I’d forgotten who I was.

And I’ve found myself,
Over and over again
In Ireland.

I’ve found myself in the little moments,
That feel less like moments
and more like the whole world.

Like yesterday, in James Christopher’s cab,
Watching Dublin in the sunshine through his windshield
As he told me how much he loved his wife and family
And how lucky he’d been in life
When things hadn’t gone as he’d planned.

He told me about the tin roofer spoofers he knew
And the invisible Fuck It Bucket his wife told him to keep on his dashboard,
For tossing in everything that upset him.

And I was sure that I was the luckiest person in the world to get to be in that cab,
In this city,
In my life.

Or last Friday, in Galway,
When I’d walked nervously into a pub alone
And sat on the only open stool at the bar,
Next to Jimmy, a small white-haired man
Who confessed to me that he hated Guinness—or any drink—he was so sick of water.
He had to drink so much water during his cancer treatments
He had decided he never wanted to touch anything with water in it again.

We talked for over three hours—
About atoms, computers, dreams, reality, being the center of the universe,
How we know nothing.

And I felt so unbelievably lucky to be in this 2 person weirdos club—that’s what we called it.

Half way through the night, before Jimmy went to the bathroom, he stopped and stared at me.
“What a conversation. God, you’re bright.”
I felt emotion welling within me.

And I wrote his words in the notes of my phone,
As a badge.

When I originally wanted to come to Ireland,
I thought I’d go for a month.
“Stay for much longer,” my dad said.
“You’ll barely know where the post office is after a month.”

This Monday—5 weeks in—I found my local Rathmines post office.

A bee was sunning herself on the green plastic outside where you buy stamps
Next to the change dispenser
Her back left leg swollen with pollen.
Perhaps she was also looking for change.

I went inside to buy postcard stamps for my parents.

“I made it. I found the post office.” I can say.

From the other side of the world. From the other side of time.
Writing back to that me
Who wondered if she should go.

- Written by Samantha Childs in Dublin in 2025

What if we all belong, exactly as we are? With our exact desires and thoughts and all the things inside us that we never say aloud. What if all those things belong?

I have TMJ. I’ve had it for years. I mentioned it to a physical therapist and she told me that I’m not saying what I want to say. And that’s certainly true. I lock so many things away in my mouth. There are people that I’d like to go up to and scream “CUNT!!!!!” into their face so loud that their head falls off. God, it feels good to even write that. So freeing. And also wow — that’s not something you’re supposed to say. Especially not in America. That is a very bad word in America. I love hearing it in Ireland. It makes me laugh. It feels like freedom. It feels like delight. Like when you are young and learning how to cuss for the first time, and how rebellious and wild you feel. The amazing power at having a word that feels like a firework, so bold and full of emotion.

I long for that kind of freedom in all areas of my life. And not just so I can yell cunt in the faces of people who have acted like complete cunts. But also just the freedom to say what I really feel, and what I really think, and what I really want. The freedom to know what those things actually are — to see them clearly — and not have to sift through thoughts that have already been watered down by my inner filtering process that considers “how would this make so-and-so feel” and “what would someone think” and “is this kind” and “is this helpful” and “will I regret this in the future” and so on and so on and so on. It’s like the instant a thought enters my mind a racecar team shows up and switches out every part — and what drives away isn’t what arrived. “This is better,” they say. And I don’t know how to argue with them. I’m not sure I even remembered what I started with. What was my original thought? What did I even want?

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Do our bodies watch us as we lie? Do they watch us, like curious observers, as we think and feel one thing, and yet say and do something completely different? Do our bodies, watching all of this, think, “I don’t matter.”

The physical therapist gave me an exercise to do for my TMJ. It’s called the lion’s pose. She told me to tilt my head back, and open my mouth, and stretch my tongue downwardly out as far as I could. Like the jaws of lion yawning.

This week, in the car, I was stressing about an issue with my contractor, and feeling particularly angry, so I tried the lion’s pose while driving. (I must have been an interesting sight.) And then, when that didn’t give me immediate release — where is my immediate release! — I decided to step it up a notch with my on-the-spot therapeutic invention: lion’s growling. I drove along, past parking beach-goers, on the two-lane road, stopping at each stop sign, while sticking out my tongue and growling as loud as I could, like a lion. When I got to my destination, I parked, got out, and acted like a human again.

Anger is such a confusing emotion for me. For so much of my life, I’d stuff it inside. I actually didn’t even know that I felt it. For years, I’d have dreams where each night I’d repeatedly scream at the same person. In the morning I’d wake, feeling embarrassed by my dream outburst. I’d think of the person and feel nothing. And I’d think, “that’s so strange, because I’m not even angry at them.”

When anger appeared in my mind, my racecar team changed all the parts of the car so immediately and so drastically I couldn’t even identify it as anger. Instead I’d feel nothing. Or exhausted. I felt exhausted all the time. It’s hard work constantly changing out all those parts.

I was scared of anger. To be honest, I am still scared of anger. But I feel it now. (Even awake!) And I’m learning how to deal with it. I am growling and growing.

I wonder if other people also have a race car team switching out the parts on the things that come into their heads? I wonder what it’s like in everyone else’s heads. I study other people for clues. Itry to understand the world and myself by looking at them.

This is one of the reasons I love memoirs and personal essays. I love finding myself in the pages written by other people. (You can find it in fiction too.) I just love seeing how people think, the weirder the better, the deeper into the stuff-you-don’t-say-out-loud the better — because that is where I find my exhale. My relief. My relief at not being alone here on this planet with all these people with their thoughts covered by their heads. Last year I spent days walking around Paris by myself — something I was initially scared to do — and found myself having the most wonderful time rereading The Diary of Anne Frank on park benches and laying against my backpack on the stone walkway at the edge of Île Saint-Louis as boats went by on the Seine. And what I loved was all of her beautiful human messiness, there on the page. I loved all the parts that her father probably originally omitted from the first publications, because he didn’t want these sides of her that he hadn’t realized existed, shared. I loved the texture of that beautiful, brilliant 15 year-old girl. She made me, a 45 year-old girl, feel not alone with my own texture.

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And what if we didn’t edit ourselves or omit the parts of ourselves that we thought were disagreeable? What if we just said what we wanted? What if we let our racecar mechanics team take a break? And what if, doing that, was actually the best thing for everyone? What if we’ve been hurting others, not just ourselves, by this constant not being ourselves?

I have a small story, so inconsequential it feels almost embarrassing to share, but I think about it so often — and it illustrates this idea. I’ll call it my Smoothie-Pizza story.

A year and a half ago, I was was walking through my neighborhood, when I ran into my friend, Jim. I was on my way to drop something at a shop, and he was going just next door to the shop, to the local pizza place, to meet another friend, Zoe. He told me to come by and say hi. So after going to my shop, I went over and sat down briefly to say hi, meanwhile thinking about how I was craving a smoothie. Then Jim offered to buy me a pizza. I was touched — he’d never bought me anything before — but in my head I was thinking, “I really want a smoothie.” Zoe said to me, “You’re a vegan, right? I will split a vegan pizza with you.” Which seemed like the nicest thing ever — Zoe wasn’t vegan and we were just becoming better friends. I felt so included and like everyone was being so kind. So even though my mind was yelling “Smoothie!!!!” I said yes. I ate my half of a vegan pizza. And then I got up and went home.

The next day, Zoe and I went to a Padres game together. We ate, drank, and danced (even getting on the jumbotron) and it was such a fun day. But one thing she casually said blew me away. Zoe told me about how the day before, she had been a little disappointed because she had really been hoping to have some one-on-one friendship time at lunch with Jim. And that she realized it wasn’t planned that I ended up there, but it made her a little sad, because she’d been missing having quality time with him. I listened and nodded, and in my head was thinking, “Oh my god! I didn’t want to be there!” The whole time I’d stayed there and ate a pizza because they were being so nice to me, but what I really wanted was to be home drinking a smoothie. If I had just done what I wanted, then they would have gotten what they wanted. But everyone was being so nice and polite and we all ended up doing what none of us actually wanted.

It was such a small thing. Such a small event. But it blew my mind.

And it made me think: What if it is always like that? What if all of our true desires and wants and preferences are aligned? I imagine our true wants and desires being big rays of light going from our heads upwards and connecting us to the heavens. And how all of those rays fit perfectly. We were all meant to fit perfectly together.

But so many people (most people? all people? certainly me so much of the time) are not following what our true wants and desires are. So we are bumping around and messing everything up. I imagine God looking down, knowing all of our inner desires and seeing these rays of lights and knowing every time we don’t follow who we are, and thinking “Come on, you people. Just be who you are! It all works out when you are!”

In the wild, everything has a place. Elephants are elephants. Dung beetles are dung beetles. And it all works out. If the dung beetle started thinking he needed to uproot trees like an elephant and the elephant started trying to roll dung thinking he needed to be dung beetle, it would be a mess. Maybe we are doing that, when we aren’t being true to who we are and what we feel. We are all puzzle pieces but because we are constantly twisting ourselves and silencing ourselves and shaping ourselves into what we think others want or what we think is nice, it makes it so nothing flows the way it is supposed to. None of our edges snap into place and we always feel a bit like we don’t belong and everyone feels like things are slightly uncomfortable.

What if we are just supposed to be us? What if our wants are the best thing? What if when we want a smoothie instead of pizza, the kindest thing we can say is, “I want a smoothie.” What if that makes it better for everyone?

I try and remember this whenever I silence myself. I wanted something specific from my contractor, and I was stopping myself from saying it, even though I felt it, because I was thinking about him and what was best for him. And then I had the thought, “Smoothies and Pizza.” What if I just say what I want and what if sticking to that is what is best for everyone? Because that is what I feel inside. So maybe that will make everything else align. And in the meantime, it’s what I know. I know what I want. And not doing that causes lions growling and dreams and who knows what else.

I once took a road trip on my own up the coast of California and to Oregon, and stopped to see Glass Beach in Northern California. After parking my car, and walking up a path leading to the ocean, a man with a white mustache and a wide brimmed hat came walking back from it, and pulled from his pocket a handful of glass stones. (Despite the sign saying not to take any glass.) “Take one, throw it in the ocean, and make a wish,” he said. I figured the sign would approve of me throwing one back. I closed my eyes and picked a small clear glass pebble from his loot and pinched it between my fingers and then held it in my palm. He told me that the glass used to come from a dump — that the ocean used to be filled with glass trash. And that the ocean had made it into something beautiful. “Nature fixes everything,” he said. It felt peaceful the moment he said this. How even trash, when given to nature, would turn into beauty. How when we got out of the way, things were ok. And I thought about ourselves, our true natural selves. How nature runs through us. In our wants. In what we love. In who we love. In how we feel. And what if this part of us —surrendering to the nature within us — could fix us too. What a release. What a relief.

I continued walking, found a spot, and made a wish for my future on my on sea glass pebble, standing on the rocky shoreline of the pacific, sea lions sprawled about being sea lions. Then I tossed this glass — something that started as sand, then became glass, then trash, and was now going back to its natural state — back to the ocean.

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In California, the succulents bloom in winter.
Fat green bodies send up a cartoonish display
Yellow, red, and orange.
Such unexpected, ridiculous beauty.

When do humans bloom?

Last January, I found a monarch butterfly,
Rain-battered and knocked from the rosemary bush,
His chrysalis still partially wrapping his abdomen.

Dead-seeming,
Until I touched his tiny back leg,
And his tinier black claw
Touched back.

Such unexpected, ridiculous beauty.

I named him Harriette, or Mo. (Mo the Monarch.)
And fed him apples and nectar and bananas and mango-berry smoothies.

I watched him use his proboscis for the very first time
Clumsily unfurling it, his new body part, this new him,
To touch and drink juice
From my fingertip.

I walked him around the neighborhood and in the garden
Dandelion blossom
To
Dandelion blossom.

He probed within the tiny yellow petals
And I felt teary.

When I bought him yellow daisies in a green plastic pot,
The saleslady at the nursery said,
“Poor thing. He emerged at the wrong time.”

Harriette (Mo) had three crumpled wings and one strong one.
He could not fly.
My hands were his transport.

But he opened and closed his four wings in the sunlight
Proudly
Like he was everything he was meant to be.

I held my plastic pot and asked, my voice shaking,
“What if I’ve emerged at the wrong time?”
The saleslady said,
“I think you’ve emerged at exactly the right time.”

Harriette (Mo) died in my hands last January.
This January, I moved to Ireland.

“Isn’t it a cold time to go? Shouldn’t you wait until spring?” people asked.

But when do humans bloom?

I bought myself yellow roses,
Climbed under my blankets, the Dublin buses outside my window,
Held my own hands,
And thought of Harriette, opening and closing his three crumpled wings and one strong one.

I want to be like him.
Unafraid of blooming, of emerging unfinished.

An unexpected, ridiculous, crumpled and strong beauty.

REFLECTIONS

I moved to Ireland a year ago. I didn’t know a single soul. The day after I arrived, I began writing the poem above. That day was exactly a year ago today.

Currently, I feel like the country is throwing me a happy anniversary celebration, because the last few nights the Irish sky has been lit with an aurora borealis. I’ve scrolled through photos of the beautiful skies, feeling like this was meant for me.

The week after I arrived in Dublin, I took my newly written poem, handwritten in a pale green Leuchtturm1917 notebook, to a poetry event at The Lord Edward Tavern. I didn’t consider myself a poet, and I didn’t know anyone there.

I didn’t know anyone anywhere.

But the day before, I’d had an emotional day. I’d walked to the River Liffey, where I stood on the wooden boardwalk next to two men with missing teeth who were feeding the seagulls. They chatted with me for a while — they wanted to know my thoughts on the ten men who died from the hunger strike in the prison. I told them I hadn’t been following the news, not knowing that it had happened in 1981. They talked about it as though it had been yesterday. Once they’d emptied their bread bag, I left them, with no one else to talk to, and walked to Christ Church, where I sat on bench in a patch of sunlight. I looked at my phone, and a friend of a friend had forwarded me a message about a monthly poetry night, which was being held the following night, in a pub across the street from Christ Church. Strange. I looked up. I was at Christ Church. The Lord Edward was right in front of me. It felt like something small to grasp onto.

I was cold, so I stopped into a sandwich shop, and ordered myself a sandwich, because it seemed like a nourishing and warm thing to do. It wasn’t good, but I ate it, sitting at a small table by a window, and feeling suddenly so sad and lost. There was no one, in any direction, that I could run to or that I knew. I’d have to cross oceans. I was completely alone. And I had no idea what I was doing. Why was I even there? I started crying, and though I realized I must have looked like a freak, sitting there chewing and crying, I was too exhausted to stop it. Sadness and lostness needed to come out of my eyes. I kept my head and body turned away from the counter and the rest of the shop in an attempt to shield myself, pressing my face towards the glass. Outside the window, a group of older women were feeding the pigeons on the sidewalk in front of the shop, dropping crumbs from the brown bags with their purchased sandwiches. This made me feel connected. The kindness in it. I loved seeing all the Irish people the past week feeding birds — I’d seen it all over the city and each time it felt like a little hug to my lonely heart. I’d watch people, sitting on park benches, take a bite and then share a bite. As though the bird deserved it just as much as they did. Like it was a lunch for two. I tucked the crusts of my unfinished sandwich into my unfinished chips bag (or crisps, as the Irish call them) and followed the map on my phone to another sight seeing spot, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where I stood before the fountain and fed the birds the rest of my lunch. I felt better. Like I had something in me to give.

Then I walked to Dublin’s coastal train, the Dart, which was crowded, so I stood and talked a few stops to my temporary travel mates — a young American girl and a Brit, who I believe were there for teaching training. I told them how I was feeling and the Brit described my feelings as “being lost at sea” which felt perfect. Then they got off, and I was alone again. I got off at Blackrock, where I went to night classes — art, photography, and creative writing — and then took the train home again. Back in my apartment, I stood in my bedroom and looked in the mirror on my closet doors and realized my shirt was covered in seagull poop. Was it from St Patrick’s Cathedral? Was it from the River Liffey boardwalk? Had I been walking around in it all day? Had I been crying in the sandwich shop and covered in poop?

The next night I walked alone to the poetry event at The Lord Edward. Sat at a table with people I did not know. Wrote my name on the sign-up sheet, even though it made my stomach drop and my heart flutter. Stood up when they called my name and walked to the podium, to read my handwritten butterfly poem out of my pale green notebook, my hands and voice shaking. Especially on certain lines. I thought I might cry again in front of strangers when my voice cracked at, “Proudly, like he was everything he was meant to be.” And I rushed to get the words out at the closing lines, from buying myself yellow roses on, worried that I wouldn’t be able to finish and imagining the awkwardness of the whole room if they had to watch that. I went back to my seat, my face hot.

Afterwards, when all the readings were done, people came up to me.

Some told me they loved my poem. Others wanted to share stories with me about butterflies that they had saved. One woman had found one in the windowsill in a stairwell in a castle. So many wanted to tell me what had happened to them.

And suddenly I felt so much less alone.

I was doing it. Shakily. I was becoming what I’d hoped for in the poem.

The day after Christmas, a doctor drew on my forehead with a purple pen. He drew a Cyclops eye. It was slightly off-center and stretched vertically from just above my left eyebrow all the way to my hairline. Approximately four inches of my face was covered in this purple drawing. In the center of the eye he drew a circle — the eye’s iris — around the slightly shimmery pink patch of skin that I’d once thought was a psoriasis flareup.

“This is what we have to cut,” he said. The entire eye.

I don’t remember how I first saw it — this new third eye staring back at me. The reflection of a mirror? The nurse’s iPad? And I don’t remember what I said. I remember that I was trying to act normal — act like a human — while the whole world felt like it was vibrating, humming, shaking.

They talked about chemo. They didn’t recommend it. I asked about doing nothing. They didn’t recommend it. It would just keep growing. There were questions and decisions, and I didn’t feel qualified to answer any of them. These were questions for a grown-up. I didn’t feel like a grown-up. I’m 45, in human years. But inside, I’m sometimes 7. Inside, I’m sometimes not an age at all. But they asked the questions anyway. Did I want a plastic surgeon? Did I want to schedule a consultation? Or did I want to trust them with the scarring? Did I want to go back to Ireland and wait six months to do it? I could come back. Or do it there? They didn’t recommend it. Did I want them to see if they could get me in while I was still here? It was the end of the year and they were very busy. Did I want them to try?

I always thought, as a child, that when I grew up I’d have this switch, so that my insides matched my outsides, and that I would actually be a grown-up. It seemed to make sense with how the outside world works — there are different laws for children and adults, they are treated differently, there are different expectations. I think I imagined, without really thinking about it much, that as a grown-up what I’d feel was confident and strong, wise and cool, competent and safe, and in so many ways completely different from how I felt as a kid. That kid part of me would be just a memory.

But it never happened. I see the world through the same eyes as when I was a child. Inside this body, I’m the same. It’s still me in here. The inner adult metamorphosis never happened. I am a caterpillar with wings. (Do all butterflies feel this way?) And I know this isn’t entirely a bad thing. I love my eyes. My way of seeing the world. (Most times.) My me-ness. But it’s confusing. Because I thought someone else was going to show up.

I also thought that my outer metamorphosis would be different. In elementary school I was pretty certain that when I was a grown-up I was going to look exactly like Kelly LeBrock in The Woman in Red. Maybe even with the music as I walked. But I’m still me. I have a kindergarten school picture in the bedroom at my parents’ house, and I think I look pretty much the same. To me, I still look like a kid. The same is true for everyone I knew when they were young — when I see them, even if they are balding or have wrinkles or gray hair — my eyes see the them I knew in high school, or elementary school. Maybe they are wearing a more wrinkly outfit, but they are just kids, and the outfit doesn’t seem permanent or like it’s really them. It’s just something they are wearing that day.

Everyone was staring at me. They were waiting — waiting for me to answer these grown-up questions. The doctor, the nurse, my mom, maybe others but I can’t remember. (Did they feel like kids too? Playing the part of doctor, nurse, mom, and others while I played the part of patient? I didn’t think of this then, but I do now.) At the time, everything in the room felt electric fuzzy — like the channel of my life had been changed to one that was filled with static. Could others hear the static hum in my ears? I felt frustrated with my silent inner adult, the switch that never came, and even more so with the world for putting me in this situation. I felt quietly furious with the universe. Shouldn’t I know more and have more opinions? I was being asked like I should know. What are you doing, universe? Why are you putting me here and not stepping up? Shouldn’t I feel what was right within me? I felt some things, but those feelings felt so small I wasn’t sure if they were right or what I wanted. Such quiet little thoughts. I didn’t like this channel. I think I made a joke about a Harry Potter scar. Maybe twice. But it didn’t seem funny. Who was I making jokes for? I felt so far away — so different — from the doctor and the nurses in front of me. I wanted them to tell me that they too had basal cell carcinomas. That we were all the same. And I felt so, so tired. I’d made enough decisions for a year. A year of living abroad where everything was new and nothing decided. And then the past few weeks, an endless stream of choices after a neighbor’s leak caused my condo in San Diego to be demoed for mold and asbestos, and I was suddenly unwittingly forced into a major home renovation, much of it while I was 4,800 miles away. Pick floors. Pick cabinets. Pick countertops. I didn’t want to pick cancer treatments.

Also, strangely, I felt fairly certain that none of this was real. That if I walked out of the room I wouldn’t have cancer and we could all just do something else. (But that would have sounded crazy to say out loud. The closest I came to it was when I asked, “Can I do nothing?” They didn’t recommend it.)

I sat in the patient’s chair, staring up at the doctor with my three eyes, wondering where my inner voice was. Waiting for some strong, wise, inner knowing that would show up and tell me, calmly and lovingly, what to do and what to decide. And when I didn’t hear anything loudly I prayed, in a way that I question might be OCD-y, but it was all I had in that moment. I asked the doctor to check his schedule. And I prayed that if I was meant to see that doctor and do it now, that there would be an appointment open on Monday. I just wanted it done, I thought. Maybe because I was tired. Maybe because I didn’t trust that a plastic surgeon would do it any better and booking a consultation and doing more scheduling seemed too annoying. Maybe because even though I didn’t fully believe it was cancer, I just wanted to stop worrying about it and it seemed like if I let the people who wanted to cut it out cut it out, that maybe I could move on with my life. The doctor came back in the room. They had an opening on Monday and could squeeze me in. I’d be having the surgery in three days.

After leaving the doctor’s office, I went for a walk. I wanted to be alone. To have a place for all this static friction inside and around me to dissipate. On the 101, I took a picture of the fuchsia bougainvillea silhouetted against a cloudy sky, the muted sun shining steadily beside it. The photo gallery in my phone is three photos of me with my purple-forehead-eye in the hospital, and then immediately bougainvillea. A reminder that life goes on. Rooms change. I turned down a side street and sat on the curb in front of a house with a large totem pole built in the front yard and a sign with a phone number if you wanted one built for you too. I was looking at everything through a bubble — I was in a little, walking bubble of emotion, and the world felt muted. Part of it felt safe. Being with myself in my emotion-shaped dome. Like when you walk around with grief as your companion. Like your secret with the world. But it also felt thick. Cloudy. Isolating. A fort for one under the duvet.

I wondered about the significance of this happening on my forehead.

I search for meaning where I imagine maybe others do not, because I read my life like I read books. I wonder what the message is. I want to know what the writer (the universe/God/truth/meaning) is saying. What is the universe telling me? It’s how I understand things. I was a Lit major in college, I studied creative nonfiction for my graduate degree, but even before all those things, it’s just how I think. I see symbolism and meaning everywhere. I’m in a constant conversation with the world around me.

And my forehead. My forehead has a lot of meaning for me. I’ve written a whole children’s book, Henri and the Magnificent Snort, based on it.1

In middle school, I went to a new school, where I was bullied. I wasn’t prepared for it — my childhood before it had been wonderfully loving — and I was shocked by the fall, and didn’t know how to defend myself. I didn’t even know how to think about myself. I was chanted at and called “Egghead,” because of my big forehead. Everyone stopped talking to me, including my old friends who’d gone to the new school with me. My sudden unpopularity was seen as contagious. I felt ashamed, and thought that if no one stood up for me and everyone went along with it, the problem must be me. I dealt with these feelings by developing an eating disorder.

I wanted nothing from the outside world inside of me.

I wanted less of me that could be seen. Less of me to hurt. A year and a half later my family transferred me to a new school, after my mom realized what was happening. Things got better, but from that moment on, I spent my whole life viewing myself from the lens of “What is the worst thing someone could think or say about me?” I wanted to know what that awful thing was, so that I wouldn’t have to experience the fall. So that I could mold myself into something better so that the world wouldn’t turn on me. Before I was bullied, I thought I was great. I never wanted to be caught off-guard again. I still do it today. I still screen my actions and thoughts and existence through that lens. It’s not rational, and it’s incredibly hurtful to myself. My head is full of bully voices. It can be deafening. The fear of a thirteen-year-old girl who had the bottom fall out of her world.

On the curb, I thought about a stand up comedian I’d watched on TV who got breast cancer after years of joking on stage about how small her breasts were. I thought about the parts of ourselves that we don’t love. The parts that we are mean to. Do those parts hear us and get sick?

My forehead, to me, seemed to be a symbol for what I thought was unlovable in myself. The part of myself that was shameful and rejected. My forehead was what had caused an entire study hall, filled with every single boy in my grade, to start chanting “Egghead” as I sat at my desk in the front row, terrified. Later, I thought about when I got this small pink patch on my forehead. At the time, I’d thought that it was psoriasis, like the other patches I sometimes got. At the time, I was in a relationship where I felt confusion and shame, and where the man that I loved would later stand by and say nothing when others called me names. I would feel like time was folding in on itself, and that I was again my thirteen-year-old self in middle school. That girl is inside of me. I am all the younger me’s, they are all inside of me. Peering out of my eyes at this world around me.

The thing is, it’s a beautiful forehead. And it’s just a forehead. A regular beautiful forehead.

On the curb that afternoon, I chastised myself. I thought that if I hadn’t been so affected by the bullying this wouldn’t have happened. If I hadn’t worried my whole life about shame this wouldn’t have happened. If I hadn’t been in that relationship, this wouldn’t have happened. I felt frantic for answers. I grabbed my phone and asked ChatGPT what she (I call her a she—we can go into all of this later) thought about all of this, and she told me I had done nothing emotionally or spiritually wrong. That it was random that I had skin cancer on my forehead. Definitely not connected to some deeper meaning. I flipped. Random?! What was the point of anything then?! I googled what Louise Hay would say about it in, You Can Heal Your Life, and could barely read, I was so furious at ChatGPT, but Google said Louise’s affirmation for cancer is, “I lovingly forgive and release all of the past. I choose to fill my life with joy. I love and approve of myself.” I text-yelled a little more at ChatGPT and then put down my phone and cried. Big, hot tears crying.

I was so scared that I would no longer have my face. That my forehead — which I’d been so ashamed of and kept hidden under a thick cut of bangs for decades— was now going to be disfigured. And I wondered, with heart bursting full of fear, is this going to prevent me from finding love? Prevent me from having a family? Did I… ruin my life? I cried and I cried. And then I got up, and walked home.

Sometimes, you don’t appreciate something or see its beauty until you realize that it’s threatened. That you might lose it.

Later that night, I washed the remaining purple off my face and went out to meet friends for drinks. I was exhausted, unsteady, and awkward from my day. But also thought that this might be the last time I had my face. I wanted to have these final moments out in the world with it. My friends wanted to know how Ireland was. Was it all amazing? I couldn’t think about Ireland. I wanted to know if people would still be friends with me if I was disfigured. If I no longer looked like me. Would everyone reject me? I felt crazy inside. Like I was pleading with people through my eyes and they had no idea why. One friend made me feel better. “What if I’m not hot anymore?” I asked him, after telling him about the surgery, and trying to sound jokey but feeling very serious. I think what I was really asking was — What if I’m not loved? He said, “What if you’re hotter?” I laughed with relief. And I thought for a moment, wait, what if I am hotter? The world felt bigger with that possibility out there.

My first cancer scare was in 2024. This time, it was breast cancer.

I went in for my annual mammogram. I’d only ever had one before. But this time, they called in someone else to study the image with them, and spent a while talking before telling me that I needed an additional scan. I felt annoyed, but not worried. They said my breasts were dense; I’d been told this before. To me, it sounded like a good thing. But apparently dense breasts are harder to read. I came back for my follow up, feeling uncharacteristically carefree. I felt proud. Look at me, universe! I’m not even worried. I’m calm and cool. The technician smooshed my breasts between the machine’s plastic panels, in various poses, and had me hold my breath. I felt like I was nailing it. I was the best patient. After my scans, they again had two people study the image. And then — the doctor came in to talk to me. This was different. Things started to shake. This was the floor starting to drop out. She said that something was wrong. That I needed to get a needle biopsy of my right breast. I remember standing there in a dark room before her, next to the machine that had smooshed my boobs, wondering, “Why is she being so mean to me?”

I have watched people who had responded to cancer with incredible grace. When I was my late thirties, I had a childhood friend who died of a rare brain cancer. I’d known him since we were four. He was my same age. After his diagnosis and up until his death, he posted about his journey online, as he and his family traveled around for treatments, and he was always so positive, upbeat, and beautiful — as though he were encouraging us, the readers. His posts were light-filled and inspirational, the entire time. After he’d died, I went to his celebration of life (which he had planned himself) at Scripps Aquarium. There were memorial cards there with his smiling picture on one side, and the words “See and be the good in the world” written on the other. (I have those words illustrated on the back cover of my children’s book now.) Everyone walked around the party, talking about him, and I felt like we were all so lucky to have even known someone that beautiful — that he’d always been this otherworldly being, like an angel. Like a deep, old soul. You watch people go through tragedies, and the beauty that steps up and shines through them, and you wonder if you would be the same way.

I did not handle myself gracefully.

I called one of my best friends and declared, “No. I’m not doing this. This is not my life. If I have cancer, I’m offing myself.” Then later I felt the shame of it — of my lack of grace, of the intensity of my fear, of my saying things out loud that you’re not supposed to say, of the worst things someone could say or think of me for saying them. I talked to my friend again days later, sheepishly, about what I’d said. And she told me that after I’d said it she’d thought, “Wait, I don’t want to do this life without Sam. If Sam’s offing herself, then I’m offing myself!” It was the nicest, weirdest, most wonderful thing she could have said. Because instantly, I no longer felt ashamed of my feelings. I wasn’t judged. And I no longer felt alone.

I was very scared of cancer. But that fear seemed abstract. What didn’t feel abstract was my fear of losing my breast. Of no longer feeling like me. I was terrified. And I have never felt more love for or more protective of my breasts than when I learned I might lose one of them. I had had so many unkind thoughts about them over the years, but now I loved them fiercely. They were perfect. I regretted every moment I’d ever thought any less.

In middle school, while I was bullied for my forehead, I was also going through puberty. Such an awkward, horrible time. I think I associated the two — my shame and social banishment occurring exactly when my body was morphing into something sexual. My first real crush had been in that study hall, chanting “Egghead” with every other boy in the grade. I quickly decided I didn’t want boobs. I wanted to stay a child; not morph into this monster. And I didn’t want to look like all girls who were mean to me. I wanted to go back to where things were safe. My eating disorder gave me a way to do this. And as I got skinnier and skinnier, I was rewarded at my ballet studio, where I went every day after school. At school, I could go a whole day without anyone talking to me. In ballet, I became someone who was popular and envied. Who the teachers used as an example. I’d watch myself in the mirror, my body so exposed through my thin leotard and tights, monitoring every jiggle as I bourreed. I was so scared to become a woman. I thought I was grotesque.

Now, when I feel beautiful, it feels like such a gift. People act as though it’s something to be ashamed of — thinking that you are beautiful. (I felt nervous even writing the “What if I’m not hot” comment before — the brazenness of suggesting I might be attractive.) And I feel those same judgy thoughts within myself. But I have spent so much of my life energy hating my body, hating my face, thinking I was disgusting and deserving of abuse. My poor body. My poor face. They stayed with me, worked for me, kept me alive, did all of their jobs, during all that abuse I put them through. All that hate. All those mean names and thoughts. And my face and body were beautiful the whole time. All of me was beautiful the whole time. They deserve lifetimes of being thought of as beautiful for all they have been through. I am. I am beautiful. Why does it feel so exposed to write that?

The weekend before my biopsy, my mom and I went whale watching in Mexico. We floated out in our small boat onto the Laguna Ojo de Liebre on a bright blue day with our guides and the other three travelers in our group, who were loudly singing the Disney song from Moana, “How Far I’ll Go.” In days, I would be on an operating table being cut, but today I was wearing a bright orange life jacket, whale spouts erupting in the distance all around us like cannons, and loudly singing out into the water with strangers, “See the line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me. And no one knows, how far it goes.”

It felt like another world. Whales were everywhere. They were coming up to the boat, rubbing alongside it, swimming under it, staring at us with their huge eyes, and letting us touch their barnacled skin. They apparently loved boats with children. The excitement. They could feel energy, our guides told us. My sister had told me to try and kiss one. (She had gone on the trip the week before.) I told this to one of the other travelers, a young pilot in training with a bright smile, and when one got close she filmed me while squealing “This is your moment!” as I flipped my baseball cap backwards, leaned out over the edge of the boat while gripping the sides with my hands, and kissed a gray whale on the head and laughed with joy. What a moment. I love that video. The joy in it. The capturing of a point in time where I was so happy and free, despite being so afraid. I’ve always loved whales, but when I see them now I think of the reminder that you can trust. That things can turn out okay, even when you’re so scared. That you can stop worrying, and allow yourself to enjoy the magical moments in front of you.

If I’d been at home, I would have been stressing about what was to come. The cutting that I didn’t want to happen. The mangling of my breast that I didn’t feel I was allowed to say no to. But on that boat, life was perfect.

The whales of Laguna Ojo de Liebre have a heartbreakingly beautiful history. The name of the lagoon is Spanish for “Eye of the Rabbit.” Our guides told us it was named this because rabbit’s eyes are red. And while the breeding and calving lagoon was now a regulated whale refuge, it had once been a place where whales were trapped and slaughtered. It had been red with whale blood.

What happened next moves me to tears. After the whaling stopped, and after years of violent encounters and fear of humans, the whales began to become curious about humans and then finally to trust. In a lagoon named after the blood of their ancestors, they now play with you. They let you touch them with your hands. They bring their babies up to the boats. They push their faces to the water’s edge and stare at you. Let you kiss them on their heads. They forgave. They forgave the worst thing we could have done to them.

This past year, I went to a WWII museum in Normandy with my mom. My mom never met her father because of the war. Her mother was a newlywed, pregnant with my mom, when the war office told her that her husband was dead. A week later the war office would tell her that so was her brother. Incredible, the things that people survive. Incredible, the hope that my not-yet-born mother became for her family.

The museum was dark and filled with reconstructed war scenes, using the tanks and cars and planes that had actually been in the battles. These huge masses of metal. I didn’t like being in there with them. These death machines. From all around the world. Nazi. Ours. I felt disrespectful as I quickly walked through, not stopping to read everything, but I didn’t want to be there. Until I reached the last room. In a long, brightly-lit hall, framed photographs of white-haired men who had once fought were hung beside placards with their stories — in their own words — and a small photo of them at the age they’d been in the war. Many stories made me cry. Some made me laugh. They were so human. And one made me bawl.

An American veteran, named Paul Gray, had written about what happened to him on D-Day and also about what happened when he came back for the battle’s 54th Anniversary with his family. He wrote, “As we gathered together along with some veterans of the 1st Division, my daughter noticed three men standing a short distance away that she had seen there before. Being the inquisitive person that I am, I went over to introduce myself. One of the men spoke English and he told me that they were veterans of the battle that was fought here too, but they were German! They had been the men shooting at us while we landed. “We come here to show that we know we were wrong” he said. Upon hearing their words I invited them to a picnic lunch we had prepared and we became friends. The war was really over.” 2

My heart broke open thinking about these men who had once been shooting at each other, 54 years later sitting together at a picnic as friends. What astonishing beauty. My mom and I stood together crying reading that one.

Later, we went to Omaha beach. The sun came out, the sky was brilliant blue, and I saved compass jellyfish that had washed ashore, scoping the sand beneath them so I could carry them without being stung back to the ocean, where I’d hoped they’d be ok.

The day of my breast biopsy, I was given a hospital gown and a white plastic ID bracelet. I was in a hospital I’d never been to, and the waiting room was filled with other women wearing hospital gowns and white plastic ID bracelets. I wondered if they came here all the time. If they all had been battling cancer for years. I wondered if anyone knew that I wasn’t supposed to be there. That I wasn’t one of them. I was in disguise, wearing their costume. It was like I was in a movie, but I was the only one who knew we were in a movie. All the other actors thought it was real life. They lived there.

I found the journal entry I wrote the day I was told I needed a biopsy. February 7, 2024. Here are parts of it: “Yesterday was the anniversary of the first day I walked. Today I got a follow-up mammogram and I was told I needed a breast biopsy. I felt like it was wrong. Like I had done something to cause it that I could somehow undo or fix. If I went back in time and filled out my form differently. Somehow, this must be in my control. I don’t know what I said. I think I asked about the scar or what it would do to my breast, because after the doctor left the tech drew a small line on the back of the handout I had been given, to reassure me how small the scar would be. And handed me a tissue. My eyes had filled with tears over my mask as I had stood there listening to this news. To this new alternate reality. I have never loved my breasts more. In all their imperfection I love them. I didn’t want them to be hurt. To lose them. I didn’t think that this year would be about health challenges. I was told [by a psychic] that I was going to find love before I turned 44 and that is less than 3 months away. And today I was told that I need to biopsy my right breast. This isn’t what I was expecting. This isn’t what I’ve been holding on for. I’m not sure if I’m being punished or if I’ve done something wrong or if I’ve messed up my timeline.”

The operating table had a hole in it. I lay face down, my right breast through the hole. They stuck a thick empty needle into my breast and sucked out tubes of my insides. The insides of my breast looked like nude-colored jelly worms. There was a plastic cub filled with them. They told me they’d taken more than they’d originally thought they would. Was it six jelly worms from my breast? Twelve? All this me, sucked out of me. Taken. Didn’t I need those? I wondered if my right boob would be noticeably smaller. Then, into the hole they had created within me, they inserted a tiny metal marker, the size of a piece of confetti. So that future doctors would see it in scans and know where they’d already biopsied. My marker was shaped like a miniature dumbbell. A symbol of strength, I thought. But I’d wanted the bowtie. (There was another marker that looked like a bowtie. I wanted that one, because it reminded me of my dog Henri, and the tiny bowties I use to dress him in before he was killed.) But I got strength instead.

The procedure cost $14K. After insurance, I paid $2.5K.

I went home, my chest in bandages.

On leap year, I got the results. I did not have cancer. That night I told the man that I’d been in love with for two and a half years. That night he kissed my bandaged breast. A few days later, he’d tell me that he wanted to be with me. And I’d be completely stunned by how beautiful the world was. How things were coming together, even when I hadn’t been able to see it. Even when I’d felt so lost for so long. The universe had always been helping me. My whole life was about to change. The psychic had been right. I stood in my parents’ kitchen just stunned thinking about it. A few days later the man I loved would tell me he’d changed his mind. He would tell me he couldn’t speak to me anymore and that he was deleting me out of his phone.

I have a port stain birthmark on the back of my right arm. It’s an odd blurry shape. When I was a young child, I used to be afraid that I’d get kidnapped away from my parents and be disguised as someone else so they couldn’t find me. (Which for some reason, in my mind, would always include dyeing my skin. Like I was some sort of human Easter egg.) I don’t know if this is a normal fear that children have — being taken — or if it felt more intense in me because I was adopted. I’d been moved in life before. But I’d tell my mom that the way she’d always know it was me, was to find my birthmark. I remember telling her this, my brilliant plan, in my parents’ bathroom in our old house. How bright and lit up the bathroom was, my mom in front of the mirror listening to me, fixing her hair, while I excitedly explained how I could never be permanently taken away. Because I was marked!

I have another childhood memory at a doctor’s office, I was there for something else, when a doctor casually told me that I could have my birthmark removed — they could laser it away. I had been confused. Why would I want that? It was as though he’d told me that he could remove my nose. Current me loves that my younger self couldn’t fathom that there was anything wrong with my birthmark. Or with myself. I love that innocence. It reminds me of Henri. He never understood when other dogs didn’t like him. They’d be barking or growling at him, and he’d briefly pause, and then hop around, his little tush up in the air, thinking they wanted to play with him. I loved that about him. His complete lack of understanding that he could be disliked. Also why is that innocence? Isn’t it truth? About all of us? That we are lovable exactly as we are. The rest is just fear. Fear isn’t truth. My dog knew. As a child my mom told me birthmarks are where angels have kissed you. I loved the thought that angels had been looking after me my whole life. I felt deserving of that. When I got older, I’d sometimes wonder if maybe my birthmark wasn’t attractive, but I kept it, like a tattoo, in memory of that younger me that didn’t think anything was wrong with her. The man I’d loved had told me it reminded him of a fantastic fungi. Young kids always point to it and say “owie,” with concerned looks on their faces. They then want to show me their own scraped knees and elbows. To compare wounds. A stranger in my neighborhood bar told me it was ugly and that I should have it removed. I turned to him and shared the story of me when I was young and that doctor and thinking that nothing was wrong with me and how I wanted to honor that little girl. I doubt he was expecting any of that and just dealing with his own stuff, his own worries, his own life as he sat on his stool drinking. We all have scars, birthmarks, and markings of where we’ve been hurt. Some are easily visible. Some are not.

I like it when people share theirs. When they show me the way they think, the things that have hurt them, the ways they are healing and growing where you can’t always see it. It makes me feel less alone inside this body and head of mine. I also like knowing the parts of other people that are consistent. The angel kisses that make sure that the people who love us will always find us.

Maybe all our cuts are angel kisses. They are places that prove we are penetrable. Where the line between “this is me” and “that is you” no longer feels firm. We’ve been opened. We are not as solid as we believed we were before. We are also not as alone.

In 2021, one of my friends, V’s, mom died of cancer. I loved her family. I’d traveled with them to India, multiple times — once to be in V’s wedding. I’d flown to meet them when they flew to pick up V’s newborn daughter. I got to be part of that. I videoed her mom holding her first grandchild. I’d known them since I was a college freshman. I’d met V on my first day. I’d decided she was going to be my best friend a week later, when we went to a party together and I saw her dance moves. Pure magic. There was a wildness in this one, and I was hooked. While V’s mom was dying, I felt like I couldn’t settle in my skin. The world was shaking. V and her mom were in Massachusetts and I was in California, but I could feel it — my insides were tethered to their family home across the country. V would call me and wonder what to do, how to exist while her mother was dying and she knew the end was coming, soon. I remember lying in my bed and telling her that some moments feel like they have no end — like the present can stretch in every direction around you — and that she could be in that space now, with her mom. I’m not sure if this helped. Sometimes things just come out of my mouth. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s hard being human. I didn’t know what to do with myself and this shaking within me. So I signed up and went to a yoga class, cried on my mat as I did the poses, and remember coming to the realization there in that room, that there were so many things that I was afraid of in my life (one of them had been taking that yoga class), and that whether or not I was afraid, or if I faced these fears or not — just like V’s mom, I was also going to die one day.

The last full day that V’s mom was alive, I was invited to go boogie boarding. I have grown up by the beach my whole life, but, as uncool as it sounds, I was scared of the water. I loved the ocean — looking at it, the sound of it as I slept with my windows open, walking alongside it on the beach. But I wouldn’t go in, beyond my lower calves. And even there, I’d start to panic. (What could fit in that shallow space?) There was a whole world below the surface — a world that could see me, but that I couldn’t see. I felt completely out of control. I thought about sharks. Irrationally. I can prove the fear was irrational, because I would think about sharks in swimming pools. I could imagine them. And it terrified me. I didn’t talk openly about my fear of the ocean. When people learned I was from San Diego, and had lived by the beach my entire life, they’d all ask, casually, if I surfed. Like that was something that I could just do. Others didn’t know it, but at the beach there was an invisible line. The sand and into half a foot of water was on one side. The rest of the ocean was on the other. Other people were allowed to cross that line. I wasn’t.

But on V’s mom’s last full day alive, I was invited to go boogie boarding, and I said yes.

I was terrified. The girl who’d invited me was a jock, a college tennis coach, and so was her friend, so that was even scarier. I felt like I had to play it extra cool in front of them and not be a 41-year-old who was afraid of the water. I’m sure that even acting I did not come across as cool at all, but it was better than what was going on in my head. In my head I was screaming. But I went in. To my lower calves. And then to my knees. And then to my thighs. And then even to my oh-my-god-do-you-know-the-size-of-the-sharks-that-could-fit-right-here hips. Waves came and I was scared. Scared to go under them. Scared to be knocked over when I jumped. They kept coming. And I started pushing out. Trying to catch them. And, I did. I would catch them and ride them, the waves around me, the board beneath my belly, and suddenly I realized something. This was so much fun. And, in that instant, the line was gone. I could go in the water. I could do what other people do.

I wonder what other things I could do. Things I watch from the sidelines, feeling like I’m not adult enough or enough enough or just somehow different from the people doing them. Things like have a husband. Have children. Have a successful career. Be an author that people love. I watch these things, like how I used to stand on the beach watching the water, thinking that only people different than I was got to go in.

I know that one of those lines, before this past year, was traveling alone. I would talk to women who’d traveled alone, and feel they were better than I was. I felt too crazy to travel alone. I’d imagine myself having a nervous breakdown in a shitty hotel room in some foreign country and forgetting how to feed myself or walk out the door of my room, and then just, I don’t know, maybe dying. Just dying of panic and complete incompetence at being a human being. I didn’t say these things out loud. This is the first time I’ve fully articulated them. Instead I said things like, “Wow. Is it scary?” The thing is, I wasn’t scared of the traveling part. I’ve traveled a lot. I was scared of myself alone.

I was scared of that feeling of floating in water where you can’t see below you, but below you can see you, and you just can’t handle the fear. The vulnerability.

But then last year, something inside me changed. I’d spent nearly a year in my hometown feeling so lost and heartbroken — I’d walk the beach and neighborhood and lagoon I grew up in, searching for answers within me. I was walking in circles, waiting for my life to change. So I boarded a plane, and flew by myself on a one-way ticket to Ireland, a country where I did not know a single soul. My cab driver, Frank Hayden, asked me why I’d come. I told him I’d been waiting for my life to change. He told me he knew I was there because of a breakup. Up the street from my Dublin apartment was an 80s-colored mural, with the huge words “You are Alive” and then, smaller in the corner, an asterisk next to the words, “You are not less than.” Over the year, I’d walk past it so many times. Over the year, I became someone I did not know I could be. And yes, sometimes I did have breakdowns. And I kept traveling alone. And I’d find myself sitting next to Americans who were on work trips or short vacations to Ireland, asking me, “How do I do what you’re doing? I want to be where you are.” They were staring at me like I was across some line, like I’d once stared at the people in the water. On a bus ride through Connemara, I was asked by a dark-haired Australian girl who’d been living there far longer than I had, how she could meet more people and I found myself giving her my personal tips, all the while thinking, “Wow. I’ve become the woman I used to go to.” And later I’d find myself at even more adventurous locations. I found myself at one point — a snapshot in my mind of a perfect moment — alone, bicycling along the most surreally beautiful coast of a Seychelles Island and feeling… limitless.

Isn’t it wild the ways we can grow? Isn’t it wild that the rips in our lives can connect us to a whole other understanding of what the world is?

Two years after that day boogie boarding, I’d jump off the boat into the deep ocean in Indonesia, before anyone else, to swim with whale sharks. The girl who was afraid of depths beyond her lower calf. Afraid the creatures that could fit within those inches. Now the whale sharks were all around me, nine or ten of them. The ocean depth felt endless. Strangely, I felt no fear. I felt wonder. I felt connected. I felt, bizarre as it may sound, like I was flying in outer space with magical giants. I felt at peace in a way that my rational brain cannot explain.3

This year, when I came home briefly to deal with the emergency of my condo, I scheduled a mammogram (my first since the biopsy) as well as a breast ultrasound. I didn’t want anyone else cutting my breasts unnecessarily. It felt like a gift to myself. In a circular inner waiting room, I sat in my robe looking through a book of watercolors that talked about appreciating the small things. There were illustrations of bugs and robins and shamrocks. There were two other women there with me, one older, one about my age. I chatted with the older one about the art on the wall — a mural depicting the ocean, made to look as though you were looking through a window rather than at a hospital wall. The woman was kind, peaceful. The younger looked rattled and she kept checking her phone (which I judged). The older one was called back. It was just two of us now. She put down her phone and told me she was nervous. I immediately softened. I told her I’d had a scare last year and it all turned out ok. She nodded. And then she said… she said that she just needed to make it to — and at this point she said a certain amount of time, months or years— but my mind blanked because I realized that she actually had had breast cancer and was hoping to be cancer-free. I had thought she was like me, there for a routine check. She thought I was like her. I felt almost guilty for my good luck. I did not tell her. I felt so much love for her. We talked about the mural on the wall. About how her view at her work was of a parking lot, not the ocean, and that was helpful because it didn’t make her want to be outside. Except for once, when they had a party and did up the parking lot with disco balls. “More parking lots should have disco balls,” I said. “It would help with road rage.” Then she asked me, “Why do we have breasts? I mean, they look good. They were good in my 20s but now I’m 50 and I don’t need them… Do you remember those press-on nails? We need breasts that are snap on and off.” We both came up with ideas for snap on boobs. Big ones. Sporty ones. Ones for backless dresses. “Disco balls!” she said. “Those would be popular for New Year’s!” The nurse came in. My friend was up next. She thanked me for making her laugh. I told her I was sending her good vibes and disco balls. I sat alone in the waiting room, wondering how I got to be so lucky.

My ultrasound was great. The technician showed me the screen and how my breasts, because they are dense, look like they are filled with little stars. They are healthy and look beautiful. One has tiny dumbbell jewelry. As she scanned me, the technician chatted about how she had a baby at 18 and now has three jobs. She said she didn’t get to do her 20s and thinks that she will be a 45-year-old mom who is wild. She looks forward to that. I fully encouraged it. I left feeling connected. And grateful.

There are so many times in life where I want answers immediately. Something goes wrong and I want to understand. I want to know now, why things are happening the way they are. I plop down on curbs and ask ChatGPT or shout “why” at the universe or throw silent (and sometimes not so silent) tantrums. Some spiritual teachers say that we choose our life experiences before we come to earth. We choose things so that we can grow and that these choices were all made from a place of love. I like this perspective. Sometimes it can shift the feelings I have about something I’m going through, when I sit down and ask myself, “Why did my soul choose for this to happen? What am I supposed to be learning from this?” It helps. Other times, I feel less spiritual and more frustratingly human. I’ll wonder what the hell is happening right now and worry that maybe I’ve wandered off my life path. That I’m being aimlessly battered and wasting a life that I was meant to be doing something else with. A life where everything inside of me screams, “Yes. This! This is where you’ve always been meant to walk.” Instead I’ll find myself in moments of walking the beach and saving bees and ladybugs and feeling connection being followed by crippling doubt as I wonder if I’ve wasted my time doing things that don’t matter because I don’t know how to matter. And that will start my mind racing and my inner bullies chanting and I’ll think about how maybe there are scars and wounds inside of me that cause my anxiety and racing thoughts and prevent me from being someone bigger. Someone braver. Someone who got to have all the things in life that she’s longed for. I’ll worry that what if inside of me is unhealed and it doesn’t know how to heal?

What if I’m just too sensitive? A delicate flower, as my dad sometimes calls me. But then I can remind myself of an idea, a little thought, that makes me happy — what if our weaknesses are our strength? We just have to flip it. I love when that thought pops into my mind. Maybe what I think is wrong with me is actually what is right with me. Yes, I’m sensitive and I think a lot, I feel a lot, and I read life like it is a book. And because of all of this, I get to experience so much magic.

The day after I came back to visit San Diego this winter, I found a baby tiger shark washed up on the beach at sunset. It was right by where I’d boogie boarded, on the day years ago when I’d first braved the ocean. I ran to it and scooped it and the sand beneath it up in my hands and carried that baby shark out into the water, the waves splashing at my thighs, soaking my sweatpants. I released it, astonished, watching it swim away as I thought, “This is exactly where I was meant to be.”

The weird thing is how everything is temporary. How every saving, of the shark, of the bugs that I carry to flowers, is not really a saving, but a prolonging. Everything still dies in the end. Our bodies break in the end, no matter what. And then we go on to the next adventure. It can be so haunting and beautiful at the same time. It can make things feel pointless and also so meaningful. It can make you brave the ocean, jump off of boats to swim with whale sharks, and fly away to Ireland.

It’s been less than three weeks since my forehead surgery. I actually enjoyed the day of surgery. I chatted with the nurses. I didn’t panic or feel shaky. I talked about egg freezing with a nurse who wanted to freeze her own eggs. I talked about skin care recommendations with another, and what it was like for her having children later in life. Later, a nurse would ask me if it was scary to travel alone. She’d heard there were snakes in the toilets in Australia. She told me about the dress she’d bought for New Year’s and what a good deal she’d gotten. It was normally an $80 dress. Only later would I see a picture of what I looked like during some of these conversations. It looks like you can see my brain. And yet there I was, chatting away with everyone like I didn’t have a huge hole in my head.

I even enjoyed going out into the waiting room, between each cut, where you waited for the lab to test its borders to see if you needed to be cut again or if it was time to finally stitch you up. I’d enter the waiting room with a huge bulge of bandaged gauze protruding from my forehead, and see all the differently patched faces staring back at me as I opened the door. We all looked so ridiculous, so undignified, so beautifully human. I shared this observation with one nurse and she laughed and said, “Oh yes, some people are rhinoceroses, and others are unicorns…” I was happy I was a unicorn. The child inside of me appreciated that. She loved unicorns.

I was cut five times in my Mohs surgery, and got twenty-three stitches. In the end the stitching was able to be horizontal. A little horizon across my brow, like the place where the sky meets the sea, like in that Moana song. It will one day blend together with the other life lines on my forehead, which feel like a little map of my life — visible markers of all the feelings I’ve had along this journey.

Later, driving in the parking lot after picking up yet another medicine at CVS for my face, I thought again about the meaning of all this — all of the breaking and healing. Over and over again. Is this what life is? An endless breaking and rebuilding? And then that night, at 3 a.m. I felt so vastly sad after waking from a dream where I was searching for the man I’d loved in all of our old places, but never finding him. It’s been almost two years now, and yet I still feel the hole. When is the war over?

But, I also stood in my half demolished/half rebuilt apartment on Friday, the setting sunlight pouring through the widows, looking at the highlight photos my phone had made for me that day. So many of them were beautiful moments that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had my heart broken. I stared at the variety. The range. And I’d felt this depth of gratitude for all of my life experiences — the people, paths, emotions, and places I’d gotten to experience. I leaned against a huge cardboard box, sawdust at my feet, dusty sunlight all around me, and felt stunned by the beauty of my life and wondered how I ever complained in my head at all. Look at how lucky I was.

Today, my stitches are out, and beneath the scar tape that my sister bought me is a long thin line that is still healing.

My secret cyclops eye.

Another way to see things.

This morning I woke at 5am in panic. My mind immediately began to race, thoughts of cruel neighbors and a man I’d loved jumped into my head like a surprise attack. One moment I’d been unconscious, the next I was lying in a dark room, heart pounding. I felt angry with the intrusion. “You are safe,” I told myself, too tired to put my hand on my heart, but imagining that I was doing so. But those words made me angry as well. They didn’t feel true. They felt like placation, something a therapist or an article on anxiety would tell me to do.

So I thought about the feeling within me, the terror I felt, and in my adrenaline-and-sleep-deprived state identified it as fearing death. What I was feeling was the fear of death. So I decided to try something else. And so I said to myself, “I am going to die one day.” Strange. Just hearing the truth made my body immediately stop gripping. And I continued, “I am going to die one day. And I don’t want to spend my time thinking about this.” I felt calmer. I reached over for my phone and jotted down a few notes, so I could remember it in the morning. Then I fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

Truth does this for me. It quiets down the noise in my head — more than quiets it, it displaces it completely, leaving everything clear and calm and pure. Sometimes when I feel emotions, I get visuals that pop into my head at the same time. A sort of emotion-sensory synesthesia. This happens to me with truth. Everything feels and looks like a canyon filled with bright crystal blue water. The constant puzzling of my mind stops and I feel truth like space, like a release, like an exhale, like peace. It feels like clear blue water.

Last week, I read two poems that I wrote in Ireland to my dad. He told me days later, as we were sitting down to watch a movie, that I needed to publish them, either online or in a book, but that they definitely needed to be shared with more people. I liked that he thought they were good enough to be shared. That felt wonderful. But yesterday when he mentioned publishing again I felt pushed and panicked and like I needed to escape to somewhere where no one could judge me. I don’t think such a place exists. I think it’s somewhere you need to find within your own mind.

This morning I thought, maybe I just need to start. Start putting myself out there. And so I looked at the notes in my phone. (I am constantly writing notes into my phone. They are not organized. Checking now and I currently have 3,104 notes. I have planning on being a writer for decades.) I went into Substack with the thought in my head, “My Brief Time Being Human.” How do I want to spend my brief time being human on this beautiful planet. It felt more like an expansive idea than a question. I’m not an expert at being human. I am terrified of so many things. But I get to be here, for a little while, in this precious human body, experiencing this wonderful, confusing, amazing, sometimes painful, but always beautiful life.

Last night I lay in bed scrolling Instagram (Note: this is not how I imagine my ideal me spending my brief life) and I saw a reel from an emergency physician who said he’d witnessed thousands of deaths and was with people as they said their final words. With many, he recorded them. And that the number one phrase recorded was “I spent my whole life on…” After which, the people would speak of regret. They would say things like “I spent my whole life at a job I hated.” Or, “I spent my whole life with someone who didn’t love me.”

I don’t want to spend my whole life waiting to be good enough to write or brave enough to share my imperfect self with the world. And I am scared. But I only get a brief time being human.

And I think of my parents. They are in their 80’s. I have spent the whole year living away from them in Ireland and Africa. I want them to get to see me try. To get to see me put my writing out there. Yes, I’m scared of judgment. Of not being good enough. Of feeling hatred from others. And I might not feel safe. Bad things might happen. But guess what - I am going to die one day. That is for certain. And I don’t want to spend my whole life procrastinating being a writer (or my true self) and being scared that people aren’t going to like me or be mean to me. People are going to be how people are going to be. That is not my job. How people treat me or what people think of me is not my job. It’s exhausting, it sucks my life energy, and focusing on that and managing how people respond to me takes me away from who I am and makes this world such a lonelier place to be. Also, it’s impossible. It’s not for me to control. No matter how hard I try. If you can worry less what others think, you can be more yourself, and when you’re more yourself, you show other people that they can be more themselves, their true selves, and when we are all our true selves that’s when we feel truly loved. Truly seen. Truly like we belong. I want that for myself. I want that for everyone. It’s so much less lonely. It’s so much more free. Let the people who want to hate you, hate you. Let the people who want to leave you leave you. And let the people who would love you if they really saw who you are, get the chance to see who you really are. Then it’s real. Then it’s true.

An Osprey just flew by my window with his talons full of nesting material. I’ve never seen that before. I feel like the universe talks to me through nature, often birds. Osprey have a special meaning to me. Years ago, I had to testify on the stand in a court case before a jury. I was determined to tell the truth and I was also terrified. I knew that didn’t do well, the whole case could crumble. I’d also been told by my lawyers days before that I was going to lose. (We were up against the insurance agency of a multibillion dollar company.) In the morning, on the day I was going to testify, I went for a walk on the beach to try and steady my nerves. As I was walking past Fletcher Cove in Solana Beach I turned my head and saw an Osprey flying at my level. Right then, he dove into the ocean and emerged holding a fish. Directly next to me. It felt anything but random. I didn’t know if I’d win or if I’d lose, but I knew I wasn’t alone. I knew the universe was there with me. I think about that now, as I write this, putting my truth out into the world and not knowing how it will be received.

For so long I felt like I needed to be “better” before I put anything out there. More sure. More solid. I imagined myself evolving into someone who was sure of her thoughts and feelings, who could write extremely well, and who could put something out there that was incredible and also that would prove her worth — something that showed the world “Samantha is a writer.” I kept imagining some future version of myself that was so much better than my current self. I think, as I think of it now, that I was also a bit terrified because that person I imagined is so different than I am. She isn’t me. And in the meantime, in all this waiting, I am losing all of these current imperfect versions of me. They are dying without ever being given a chance to speak, to be seen, to be loved. I often don’t write things down — or I write them only as brief little phone notes or scribbles in a journal — because I haven’t been recognizing the value in the now me. The person who isn’t solid, who isn’t evolved, who isn’t sure of her thoughts and feelings and can’t write extremely well and who is amazingly here and thinking and feeling and living and messing up beautifully every day. I think I take her for granted. I think she’s going to be here all the time. Her thoughts. Her worries. Her perspectives. Her weirdnesses. Her emotions. But she’s not. We have a million little deaths as we grow. We forget. Emotions change. Thoughts shift. They always will. And I’m losing all those messy versions of myself by not sharing them or thinking they are important or ready enough to share. And the thing is, I will always be a messy version. I will always be something that is shifting and growing and evolving, until the moment I take my last breath. Beyond my last breath, I think, but who knows if I’ll have access to a paper and pen at that point.

What is the perfect moment to share yourself? When are you complete and ready? What if we were only going to take one photograph of a tree - to show it for all that it was, a perfect tree. When would we take it? Would we ignore it when it was a seed - is it not a tree then? Would we not photograph it when it was a sapling? Would we have to find the perfect season - would we want the leaves green or the orange and yellows and reds of autumn? What about when its leaves had fallen? What about when it was very old, and had lost some of its branches? Or when it had fallen over or was cut down and was only a stump, but still alive and being nourished by the plants and fungi around it? Or what about when it itself became the soil and mulch and was now nourishment to the other plants and trees and forest? Doesn’t it have value in all of those stages? Isn’t there beauty in all of it?

The day before New Year’s Eve, my family scattered the ashes of my aunt Sharon in my parents’ rose garden. The sun was setting through the clouds over the Pacific and two emerald colored hummingbirds were zooming about chirping their sharp little hummingbird chirps. I had been with Sharon when she scattered her husband. (I’ve written about it, and maybe one day I’ll share it here.) It was the first time I remember scattering ashes — we had put Ken (my dad’s half brother) into a pond in a London park that Ken had liked. Her friend had commented about how the fish were eating him, which they were, but I’d thought at the time was an insensitive thing to point out. Sharon had been crying. I had been trying to protect her while also thinking about how strange it was having my uncle, who I didn’t know very well, all over my hands. Now I was scattering her. Afterwards I washed my charcoaled fingers in the kitchen sink. One day, someone will be scattering me.

It’s bizarre to me how people die. How things shift. How we change form. How we are like the tree. All those stages of us, as we grow, and then we become the dirt that nourishes something else. How we are all made of the same stuff.

But when in all of this do we share ourselves? When do we let ourselves be seen? When are we good enough to stand there and say, “This is me now.” What am I so afraid of?

New Year’s Eve it poured rain and afterwards I went to check on Sharon in the rose garden. I imagined that she’d be all soaked into the soil and already part of the roses, but she wasn’t. There were clumps of her everywhere, gray and white and grainy against the brown soil. She was there and she wasn’t. The bizarrity of existence.

And what was left of her now? Her ashes against the rose garden soil. The sound of her voice in my head. The way she sprinkled “OR WHATEVER” dramatically through any story she was telling. How she’d liked that black burette with red hearts on it from Anthropologie that I’d bought her for Christmas years before, even though I’d worried that she wouldn’t. That her favorite hotel room at the Les Artist Hotel in Del Mar was the Lempicka themed room. That she wore brightly colored bob wigs when she celebrated Mardi Gras in New Orleans every year. That she loved drinking white wine and sometimes wrote me random strange text messages. (I’m guessing while drinking white wine.) The cadence of her voice. How she’s say “Okay” super drawn out, expecting you to nod, to make sure you were following what she was saying. Her high, joyful laugh. How she would sometimes grab your arm when she was excited. Her smile. The sparkle in her eyes.

What am I so afraid of?

Years ago, my mom’s childhood paradise, a small ranch built by her grandfather in Montana, caught fire, and over 90 percent of it burned. I walked the property with my mom and my French bulldog, Henri (who I’d later bring that lawsuit for), feeling my mom’s devastation — the thickness of it. The ancient pine forests she’d grown up playing in had disappeared into a barren, otherworldly, Martian landscape. The huge log barn, which my great-grandfather and his friends had built, was gone. As were the barn’s contents — it had been storage for the belongings and history of my family — the prized possessions and memories of my great-grandparents, my mom’s mother, father, birthfather, and sister Holly who had died of cancer. It was all burnt to the ground. Holly’s marble collection was scattered throughout the soot, little twisted bubbles of bright melted glass. The small tree on the top of the hill, with its stunning views of the entire valley and where my grandma and Holly’s ashes had been scattered, was also now dead, though still standing. A beautiful skeleton raising its twisted arms to the sky. I didn’t know the right thing to say, I didn’t know what would make it better. I kept repeating, “Thank god they saved the cabins.” (The two small cabins my great-grandpa had built were still standing. The firemen had saved them.)

It was Henri, my Frenchie, who saved that moment for me. While we were standing outside, surveying all the damage, Henri, huge smile on his little frenchie face, began rolling around — ecstatic — in the charcoal and soot until he was covered head to toe in black ash. We had to take him home and give him a bath in the cabin’s tub. And he hated baths. I love thinking about that moment. The symbolism in it. When life burns things to the ground, you can roll around and frolic in the ashes. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to say or do the perfect thing. You get to just enjoy that you don’t have control of everything and that you get to be here, for a brief time, feeling all of it, including the joy. I think we are meant to feel joy. I think that is part of our purpose here. Maybe that is true of all times. Burnt to the ground or not. Maybe we are allowed to just be who we are, imperfect and real, at all times.

For years I had a black plastic magnet on my fridge with the words “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” It traveled with me from kitchen to kitchen. I love that quote.

Some of Henri’s ashes are now scattered at the dead tree on the hill. Maybe I will be too when I die. I would like some of my ashes to be with some of Henri’s ashes, wherever that ends up being. I suppose it’s all connected anyway. This whole world. This whole universe.

In the meantime, I’d like to enjoy my brief time being a human being. Before I become a tree or a rose or a spirit or something reincarnated or an alien or whatever beautiful thing happens to us next. I’d like to not regret how I spent my time. To realize that it is precious. To let go of my anxieties, not because I tell myself I am safe or they are solvable or because I can be sure people won’t hate me or be unkind or stop loving me, but because I only get a limited time to be me in this form. So I want to honor that gift. And part of that honoring is to stop (or remind myself to stop) worrying about being perfect or right or how others perceive me. It blocks me from sharing myself. It blocks me from feeling free to exist as I am. It blocks me from knowing who I even am, if I’m constantly self-editing for fear of some made-up observer. It disconnects me from others and from myself.

On New Year’s Eve I sent out a text to some of my friends and family. I felt nervous doing it. I overthought things. My anxiety tries to sooth itself with overthinking. (It doesn’t work.) But I pushed through and sent it. What I sent was the photo of a bee that I saved from the beach last week with some words I wrote over the photo. (I am a bug saver. Saving bugs and other animals makes me feel like me. One of my most frequent dream themes, along with flying, is that I am saving small animals. It’s been that way since I was a child.) Anyway, I’ve put the same photo today as my profile photo for Substack. (I will also include it above in this article, in case I ever change my Substack profile photo.) In the photo there is a wet and disheveled bee, sticking out her tongue, on top of a purple flower. And over it I’d written the words “I photographed this bee this week after saving her from the ocean and bringing her to this flower, where she cleaned himself and stuck out her cute bee tongue. Hoping that if you’ve been knocked around in the waves of life, that 2026 is the year you are carried to your flower.” I sent it to a few people, and then realized that it had a typo. I had originally written the bee as a boy, because I tend to think of animals as boys — maybe because growing up almost all of our pets were boys — but then I googled it and confirmed that worker bees are in fact girls. So I’d changed the bee’s pronouns in all places other than one. “Himself.” I felt shame when I first realized what I’d done. And then I thought, nope, I’m not going to go back and retype and recenter the whole thing. And… I’m going to keep sending it, just as it is. Because I don’t need to be perfect. It stops me from showing up. It stops me from showing myself to the world. It’s exhausting.

I am thinking the same with this Substack post. I could spend days or weeks on it, perfecting it and making sure it was better, more polished, more profound, more attack-proof. Or I could put it out into the world imperfect, as a way of showing myself that I myself am allowed to be out there and imperfect. And I can spend my time writing more and worrying less.

New Year’s Day I woke up and laying in bed thought about what my New Year’s resolution should be. I thought about my own self talk, and how negative and judgmental it can be, and I thought, “I want to talk to myself lovingly this year.” And then I thought about how I like when spiritual teachers say that our purpose as humans is to give and receive love. What a wonderful purpose. I think of myself as a very loving person, especially when it comes to giving, but I know I need to work on receiving. And I need to work on both, when it comes to loving myself. So I thought about what if I made my resolution to give love to myself and to receive love from myself. And for a while that seemed like a very good idea. For a few minutes at least. But then, I began to struggle with what that actually looked like. What would that actually feel like? I’d already thought at least ten critical things and scared thoughts before I’d even gotten out of bed. Was I already failing? And was just asking if I was failing another non-loving thought?

Then, I stopped and thought about truth. And how that feels. How clean, and clear, and crystal-canyon-water-blue, and peaceful that feels. What if this year I just strove to be true to myself? If I spoke to myself in ways that were true? If I shared myself in ways that were true? Truth is love. When I say the truth, I feel connected. When I feel the truth, I don’t feel afraid. Truth is such a pure way of giving and receiving love. It’s a way of trusting in a beauty that is bigger, a way of trusting in something that we don’t have to manipulate. Something that exists that we can tap into. I also thought about the idea of true love. The beauty in that. The peace. The joy. The feeling within me when I think of it. I decided I wanted to be true. Not perfect. Not polished. Not judgement-proof. Not waiting-until-I’m-better-in-the-future. Just true as I am in this moment.