Liberated women liberate other women, and trapped women try to trap other women.

I’m writing this for you. And I’m writing this for me a month ago, and me a year ago, and the year before that, and every version of me that will need to hear it again.

I think it’s easy, in a world moving this fast with this much going on, to convince ourselves that everything is exactly as it seems, that what we can see is all there is and there’s nothing underneath the surface. It’s more comfortable that way, honestly, to not have to think about energy, or the past, or what’s still unresolved, or our own shadows. It’s not that I always want to dig up the past or live underneath the surface, but I want to be fully liberated and honest with myself, so I can be honest in my relationships. And to do that, we have to talk about the hard things and feel free enough to finally resolve them. I’ve found that on the other side of those hard conversations, whether with ourselves or with others, the relationship gets stronger and more honest through that tension.

Somewhere along this year, and especially this last month, I started holding myself back from being fully alive, fully myself. I took on a lot of what felt like judgment, which I think happens to all of us when we stop filtering, when we stop asking which voice is ours and which belongs to someone else. My three months in Paris were delightfully, deliciously, intoxicatingly liberating. And at the same time, there was a tiny, insidious voice in my head telling me I didn’t deserve it, that I shouldn’t be living this freely, and living between those two felt like the worst kind of dissonance. I stepped away from writing here right when Substack seemed to be at its peak, and it felt good to be far away, from the noise and from so much of what was happening in the States.

Through the first year of my divorce, I was deconstructing so many of my beliefs and values and feeling more liberated than I ever had, and at the same time I could see it was making a lot of people uncomfortable. As much as I leaned into that freedom, it felt like a real threat to my belonging, on top of the divorce already being one. It made me question everything. And eventually I just got tired, even with a whole new life in front of me, and even though I’d been honest all along about the days that weren’t happy or free at all. For the last two years I’ve felt left to reconcile what really happened in those final years of my marriage on my own, to make peace with it and try to feel seen and held in it without anyone who was there for all of it, something I’ve written about before. No one else could really know what it was like from the inside. And the people who’ve lived something like it will understand that on a level nobody else can.

By the end of my time in Paris, I was struggling to breathe, quite literally, with a sinus infection that wouldn’t let up, though looking back it feels like a metaphor too. For the first time in my life I wasn’t employed, and the panic of that had been sitting right alongside the choice I made to run across the world and live out a dream. Paris lit a fire in me, like I wrote about last time, but I didn’t come home because I was ready to. I came home because my visa expired. That first month back, I tried so hard to keep the fire going, to get excited about my life here in the Bay, and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t tell if I was starting over or picking up where I’d left off, and every decision felt like a verdict. It was overwhelming, and my nervous system did what it does and shut down. It was a proper post-France depression, all sadness and disappointment after feeling so free. These days I can breathe again, with more clarity than I’ve had in a long time about what my life is, why, and how to stay connected to myself inside it. I had to give it time, but not idle time. Time exploring that hurt and grief, letting the version of me who wanted to stay in Paris scream and pout, whatever her reasons. This is the part most of us want to rush through.

I know writing this openly isn’t everyone’s way, and not everyone in my life would choose to share this much. I understand that, and I respect it. But so much of my own healing came from women who were willing to tell the truth about their lives, teachers and writers whose honesty lit something in me, made me feel more alive and less alone. That’s the intention I want to write from. For me, the line between privacy and art comes down to why you’re sharing, and I’m sharing because it might reach someone the way those women reached me.

I like to say I’m in the business of truth, both professionally and personally. I’ve always been drawn to the things you can’t see but can feel, in my art and in my work, and for me the truth is all three, the past, the present, and the future. Looking back over these past two years, I can see the moments where I let myself be liberated and rode that wave for as long as I could. And I can see the moments where I let other voices in without sorting through them, like forgetting to sort the paperwork, what’s mine and what’s someone else’s, and filing it all under my own name. Those are the moments I trapped myself again without noticing. I can see that at times I’ve been subconsciously apologizing since late 2024, when I chose divorce, apologizing for living loudly, for seeming okay after such a life-altering transition when I wasn’t always okay, and somehow even for being honest about that. All of this is coming to the surface now, and with it, a lot of clarity.

When I left my marriage, I thought that was the final-boss liberation, the one big door I’d walk through and close behind me, and then the hard part would be over. And in some ways it was. But what I’ve been learning since, slowly and mostly by accident, is that liberation isn’t something you arrive at so much as something you keep choosing, the same way you choose self-respect and self-trust, the same way you choose what to wear every morning. They’re all decisions. And once you start making that decision in one corner of your life, it seeps into all the others, into who you let close and what you’re willing to tolerate, into what you engage with and where your time and attention and heart go, and which rooms you finally walk out of.

I watched Practical Magic 2 this week, and Sandra Bullock’s character, Sally, says something close to this: safety and security are an illusion. I think I went to Paris half looking for both, and now that I have more of them here, a job and a home and a routine, I can see what she means. None of it is guaranteed, and I find that freeing. I can love what I have without gripping it so tightly.

In Paris I met a friend, Hannah, who changed the way I thought about my own standards. She saw a version of me that I wasn’t always living up to, and anytime I lowered the bar for myself, I could feel it from her. She just expected more of me, because she already saw me as a woman who deserved it.

Since coming home, I’ve found more women like her. Women who give it to me straight, lovingly and without much cushioning, and then hope I’ll do something with it, with no attachment to whether I do. Every time I leave one of those conversations, it feels like someone opened a window in a room I didn’t know was stuffy.

And then there are the voices, plenty of them our own, that already have a structured little plan for how our lives should look, where anything outside of it gets met with worry or a little judgment. It’s easy to take that as care, and some of it probably is, but we don’t have to live by it.

This is individuation, the slow and tender separating from the belonging you were born into. It doesn’t have to come from running away or from forgetting where you came from. It can come from honesty, and from the surrender of no longer wanting to shrink, or to withhold parts of you. Part of that separating will be learning to ask your own questions, and to trust your own answers. And you will still want to belong, you just won’t be willing to pay for it with pieces of yourself anymore.

I think so much of liberation comes down to asking who you’re giving your power to. Who gets to decide what your standards should be, how you live your life, how you run your relationships, how you see the world. Once you take that power back, that’s the liberation. And then there’s the harder question, of how much of it someone actually took from you and how much you handed over. It’s a lesson I keep relearning, how comfortable it can feel to be shackled, to be told what’s right and wrong. For me I think that comes from a dusty old good Christian girl place, the part of me that still wants someone to tell me I’m living inside the lines.

What I’m still learning is that it isn’t my job to liberate anyone, and it isn’t my job to make anyone comfortable with my liberation either. I spent a lot of energy this year trying to free the people around me without even realizing I was doing it, mostly because I wanted to keep them close. Your only real job is to be a good friend to yourself, to be free in how you live and how you speak, in how you treat other people and how you treat yourself, and to trust that the women who are ready for change will feel it and come a little closer on their own. And little by little, I’m letting myself stop apologizing for being free.

Liberated women liberate other women without even trying, just by the way they live. Trapped women trap other women because that’s the only version of life they’ve been shown. Both are contagious. I’ve been both, and I can tell you the first is so much more fun. We get to choose which version of ourselves we take on, and which one we intentionally pass on.

After my last post, I renamed this space Tender Age and never said why. I think liberation can begin at a tender age, while we’re still soft enough to be shaped. And if we never get the chance to finish that work, we can stay at a tender age our whole lives, easily moved and easily told who to be. Being free, to me, is becoming the one who decides. Still tender, I hope always a little tender, but no longer so easy to bend.

Liberation asks for a small death and a small birth, every morning and every night, letting go of who I was yesterday and waking up a little braver, a little more willing to be bold. I’m not always graceful about it.

Right now what holds me most is having my own home to come back to. The lake in the morning, the people I’ve found here in Oakland, the little routines that ground me. I’ve been learning about my nervous system beyond the surface level, and the same one that shut down that first month back finally feels settled.

I used to think freedom meant leaving, and lately I think it might also mean landing.

What I’ve learned is that you will forget.

You will forget how. And you will forget when. You will forget why. You will forget who. You will forget who you are.

You will have been so busy listening to everyone around you. About what you can and can’t… about who you’ve been. Who you can and can’t be and grow into. Their voices will be so so loud.

So I’ll ask you what I’ve had to keep asking myself.

How free do you speak?
How free do you laugh?
How free do you love?
How free do you move?
How free do you eat?
How free do you want?
How free do you desire?

And I mean nourishment in every sense, not only food, and not only pleasure or sex or money or the work you give your days to. It’s energy. It’s cellular. It’s this deep feeling of worth, of knowing in your bones that you deserve to be nourished at all. And underneath all of it, the relationship you have with yourself, the most important of them all. Because when you liberate yourself, that’s where the inner peace is, and the enjoyment of your own company that you’ve been searching for your entire life.

How free?

xx,

Lena

Here’s a bit of how it sounds as I walk the streets of the 6th arrondissement...

how free can you recognize yourself to be?

deeply tunnel visioned in the here and now.

the past can take care of herself, the future uses hope as a muscle...

and whose voice is that? are you willing to be brave and speak back to it?

I’ve been here two weeks and I keep doing this thing where I sit somewhere seemingly ordinary - a café, the floor of the apartment I’ve rented, the tenth on a slow afternoon… and the beast, the shape, the energetic force of how I got here arrives all at once. A rush of memory and sensation from the past decade.

I came for a wedding and decided I’d stay the month for a little ~eat pray love~ post-grad soul search. A childhood friend who, when she first started planning, didn’t ask me to be a bridesmaid. She was being careful with me (re: divorce), and I appreciated the thoughtfulness. When she did ask me to stand beside her it was an immediate yes. In my head this wasn’t about me, it was a chance to show my love for a friend. Plus, I thought I was no longer as fragile as I once was one year ago, two years ago. My family, being my sweet family, did their concerned and loving dance:

are you going to be okay standing up there? is this going to bring something up?

The thing that surprised even me was that I stood next to her and sort of felt nothing. Not in a numb, dissociative way (I know that feeling well), but more in a peaceful, observational way... for a ritual I can no longer relate to wanting, the label of marriage and the validation from others that my relationship exists in this black/white way and the white dress and the public vows. What I felt was hope for her, for her future, what this decision would bring her. I drew visuals of joy and enoughness for her life in my mind. It’s taken me a long time to be able to say that for another, without a fleck of bitterness in my heart. Before, I think I was just trying to convince you and myself.

France isn’t new to me. It’s maybe the oldest, most honest part of myself.

When I was sixteen I did a language immersion in Brest, Bretagne, and something in me just recognized it as a sort of home. The first time I understood the phrase, when you know, you know.

To me, France permissions me to move at the pace of a feeling, which, I feel in my body as slow and deep. I’m a Cancer, a romantic, a girl who felt and still feels everything at full volume in a country that mostly wants me to turn it down and rush through.

France was the first place (and in my head, person) that didn’t ask me to. Most have an American Dream. Well, mine is the French Dream.

I went home convinced this was the life I was going to live. And then I did what a lot of us do. I finished high school, rolled into my local big state university, the current of a lazy river everyone you love is running down (fast). You rationalize it all, maybe we can make those dreams a bit of reality down the line. France will always be there. To seal the deal, I fell in love with a boy I’d later marry. The French Dream got foggy, fun to say out loud but not fun to actually take seriously, easy to set down.

I set it down a lot, actually. In retrospect, I easily gave it up whenever the idea became too uncomfortable. Whenever someone distracted me enough with taking care of them, or following down a palatable path.

In college I studied abroad again, in Aix-en-Provence. I was physically there, but mentally next to my then boyfriend in small-town Indiana. The French was optional now. No teacher watching, no host family who couldn’t fall back on English. A lot of my classmates were American, and the person I loved was an ocean away in a way that felt unbearable to a twenty-one-year-old who’d never really been apart from him for four years. I decided what I was building in the US felt brighter and better than the original dream. I told myself I could have France in a small way. Visits, a little french here and there. Ways that didn’t cost me the life I was already building.

During those months, my mom called to say she was having a knee replacement, (except it wasn’t a knee replacement, it was breast cancer), and I jumped at the chance for a reprieve from unfamiliarity. I went home about a month early.

I’ve spent years deciding whether I regret that decision or the decision post-undergrad to not go back to France. I don’t think I do... my body was already in some kind of shutdown and home was where the people I could co-regulate with were. I see now I’ve always been good at leaving. Similar to all my lessons in life, I did the best with what I knew to do at the time. And if I didn’t do those things, I wouldn’t be here now. And I like where I am now.

After 2018, I boxed the dream of moving to France into something palatable and in the future, like a lot of us do. Healthcare consulting. A somewhat stable job in Tech. Follow family.

A life in France, without labels and impressive names to attach to it, wasn’t enough in the currency I’d been raised to count in (how are you going to impress people + “make something of yourself” was a love language in my community).

I remember when I landed here, how I used to fantasize about simply teaching English here, the Peace Corps, all the Midnight Library versions of myself I didn’t pick up and tucked neatly, quietly away.

My ex was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2019, and the idea of living a big life redefined itself into living a big, healthy, happy life… with him. My relationship consumed my headspace, all day, every day. I was the manager of that organization, and it was a very important project.

Park City, then San Diego, the two of us against the odds. Cultural norms + differences, an autoimmune diagnosis that felt just as much mine as his (codependency peaking), “finding ourselves” but together.

It was good in the ways it was good. But I was handing over my dreams one at a time, and calling it building something together.

His sister passed suddenly in 2022. We got married in 2023, and by then a large part of my identity and personality had become about the unit I’d invested in. Making sure he was okay, the relationship was okay, and then me. In that order.

But now, I don’t really believe you ever really find yourself, I believe you return to yourself. And in the process of returning to myself, that return didn’t include him.

Here’s what I find almost unbearably tender in hindsight: through all of it, I kept routing myself back to Paris.

For our honeymoon I asked to stop here before going to Mallorca.

The year it started coming apart, my dad had family to see in Lyon and I pushed for us to spend a few days here.

I can see now I was running toward the one place that had ever helped me hear myself.

While here in 2024, I heard the whisper to leave my old life and start a new one, preferably here.

One day I parted with my family that trip, sort of my first day alone in the city, and just sat with her for a while. I tried to listen to what she was telling me and what a life by myself might look like. Here.

At the risk of sounding unstable, when I’m home and I can’t hear myself clearly, I get on my bathroom floor. Paris is my bathroom floor. It’s the room with the door closed where I dare to ask myself the hardest questions I’ve been avoiding.

Because it isn’t the postcard version, the so-girly, so-romantic Paris, though she’s that too.

It’s that this is a place that makes meaning out of things that look, on the surface, like they don’t need any.

I’ve never resonated with the phrase it’s not that deep.

I’m a writer, I get brave, I go deep and down in the basement of our thoughts and psyche.

And why not? We are here anyway. Might as well explore.

My hobby is clearing out the cobwebs.

Maybe making sense of it, maybe coming up with more questions.

That’s just the world my brain lives in.

France doesn’t ask me to come up.

But it also doesn’t make meaning heavy the way I sometimes do.

Here, being intentional and finding beauty can be light. It can be healing. It can be freeing.

The slowness, the presence built into the ordinary hours of a day, the art and poetry baked into streets rather than forcibly scheduled into it. It regulates me. Not because I can’t be regulated at home, but because here I don’t have to work for it.

Paris is a woman to me. I’m half kidding and I’m not.

She’s angry and stubborn and also romantic, a lover girl, and that is so completely me that I feel like I’m looking at a reflection.

The way I feel like a reflection of Oakland/San Francisco/California, which I still love deeply and is not in competition with this. But I feel in some ways, like I’ve explored that world, and France in the capacity I want to, I have yet.

There’s a Jane Fonda line I’ve carried for years...

you spend your life exploring, and what you find when you go back to your girlhood is that you become all the things she was, the things you never knew at the time were really you, because you’d been so busy being who other people thought you should be.

I posted that quote the day I got married… (that didn’t age well lol)

I believed marrying my middle school sweetheart was me honoring that little girl, keeping her dream. And maybe it was, partly.

But here’s the part that scares me and the part I have to say out loud: I was so sure about him. Certain in my body, the same way I’m certain now about this. And I was wrong, or at least it didn’t stick.

So how do I trust this feeling when I’ve trusted that exact feeling before and it broke? I don’t have a pretty or clean answer.

The only difference I can find is that wanting him was a want I’d been handed, and wanting this is one nobody gave me.

I used to think my life was happening to me. I’m starting to see it was a series of small decisions I didn’t know I was making, and that the 16 yo that chose France was consciously choosing something no one expected her to. But you only get to see that in retrospect.

I realized something last week on one of my meditative walks around the city.

If you’re lucky, you get to live more than one life.

You’ll be born and you’ll die inside a single lifetime, and then, if you’re lucky, you keep going. A second life. Then a third one, and who knows how many…

The Elena who was married, the one before 2024, I think she was born and she died.

And these last two years, business school and processing everything, was a kind of incubation, a slow cooking into whoever this is.

I think that’s what Paris is for me right now. Not the new life itself, not yet, but the first clear window into it, into who I get to be on the other side of the one that ended.

Grad school was its own kind of scaffolding - structured, full of people, shaping me whether I noticed or not. Now, no program, no expectations, no partner, is the first time I can remember being genuinely on my own. From the outside it is a blank slate.

But the blank slate I’ve come to care about is the internal one.

For once there’s no institution and no relationship setting the temperature of my inner world, which means the only voice left to manage, nurture, or hear is mine.

So I’ve been doing a lot of self-coaching, a lot of listening to how I talk to myself when no one’s around.

They say the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So I’m noticing how I do one thing, and then how those patterns show up in other ways, and in other parts of me and my life.

So I planned to be here a month and I’m already daydreaming about much longer than that. Now or in 3 months or a year or never….

But I’ve been honest with myself about every corner of that little daydream cloud, even the ugly parts.

There is a bit of a melancholy thought that surfaces that says

there’s nothing left for me in the states

It isn’t quite true and it isn’t quite not.

I look at friends and family settled into their partnerships, a life I don’t actually want, but feel small-town pity graze my skin, a shame it didn’t work out, what’s she like now?

and on my worst days, the pressure to prove I’m okay, or even better off

That mindset of lack, simply because I no longer have a husband, rubs off on me briefly before I have to actively brush it off like dirt off my coat.

Here, nobody is waiting for me to grieve a life I actively chose to walk away from. Knowing it was a choice between being alone or married. Not with someone else or married.

So yes, there’s a lone-wolf, run-away thread in this. But underneath it is something that’s been pulling at me for sixteen years, and that thread doesn’t feel like fleeing. Right now, more than running from, I’m running toward.

I don’t know yet if I’ll stay. I don’t know whose voice it was that talked me out of this the first time, or the second. I just know I keep ending up in the same city, asking myself the same questions each time a little braver to hear my honest answer.

xx,

lena

The old story would be that I deserve them, that I had it coming, that the universe was settling a score. That I had been much too happy to be allowed to go on like that.

But what if these aren’t hits, or disappointments, or punishments. What if they’re nudges toward a different direction. Perfectly, minutely tragic, just enough to get my attention and make me finally stop to think.

If I keep hitting what feels like a wall with myself, is it the wall, or is it me?

Maybe it’s not fair to give a definitive you’re doing it all wrong. Maybe this is just an in-between, a redirection from Spirit. The tunnel you have to go through from Oakland to get to the island of Alameda. The ferry from Seattle to Whidbey. The boat from LA to Catalina.

When it doesn’t pan out the way you thought it would, you call it failure, you fold, you shut down. You feel like you’re falling apart, like you don’t have a grip on anything.

But maybe you’re just not paying enough attention.

So let’s start with the smallest of things:

The way you’ve been saying yes when you meant no.

The way you’ve overexplained, justified, defended.

The way you’ve let others convince you what was best for you in the name of love or reputation, despite knowing who you are to your core.

The way you’ve been doing too many things at once, none of them the thing you actually want or need.

The way you’ve been questioning past decisions you know in your bones were intuition, aligned, and heart led.

I stepped onto Berkeley campus as a married woman, one who realized somewhere in her first semester that her marriage wasn’t working and wasn’t going to. By the time I left, I had walked away from something I had spent a decade building and believing in.

It was the bravest thing I have ever done.

What I didn’t see coming was how quickly my need for belonging would look for another chain to fasten herself to.

My brain said woof that was so scary, let’s never do that again,

and my body ran with it.

The first man I was with after the divorce was protective in a way that felt like both relief and threat at the same time. He took the side closest to the street when we walked hand in hand.

The girl in me, tired and desperate for emotional rest and co-regulation, moved to the front of the class, like she had been waiting all along to be called back up.

Through business school I started noticing how the women who were married or partnered were met differently by the world, how the room reorganized around them, how their boundaries didn’t need defending.

An unwanted suitor was less of a threat at a party when her husband was standing right next to her.

My friends stood a little taller, a little prouder, after they got engaged. I quietly observed, bracing myself to internalize a truth I really didn’t want to accept.

The version of this I’m describing isn’t the 1950s traditional scene. This is the 2026 version. Quieter, more insidious. It runs in the background. It thrives in the silence.

We’re not stuck on a woman needing a husband to drive, to vote, to live on her own. At least not anymore. Not out loud.

She’s brilliant, and SO accomplished

AND she’s married to (these days he also has to be Someone, which I won’t pretend I disagree with)

AND she’s a mom

The accomplished woman is made more legible by the partner standing beside her. Even the most progressive among us know the rate at which a single woman in her thirties starts getting asked when, and the rate at which her married friend stops being asked.

Even then, once married, come the questions about kids, and even then, with kids, come the questions about more kids.

The questions only cease when it’s visible that a woman has given all of herself to her family. When she’s tired in a way sleep can’t fix, when her ambitions have quietly resized themselves to fit a calendar that is everyone else’s besides her own, when she’s running on the residual energy of being needed.

And if society is REALLY lucky, she’s strained her closest friendships, forgotten what she once dreamed of for herself, and become financially dependent on her partner. Abandoned her wellbeing and embodiment. That’s when she’s fulfilled her role. Done her duty. Follow the template that so desperately comforts us.

I say this knowing it cuts close. The mental load, the permission, the safety are nuanced for both single and married women. Nothing is black and white, and I know well the responsibility and pressure that can come with being partnered and having a family.

But somewhere along the way, I started to subconsciously walk back toward my original definition of love, belonging, and connection. Where it’s sourced. The quickest way to find it. Not all at once, not loudly, not on purpose.

My entire life, a name-brand career, education, image, and husband had been armor in the war of trying to prove I was enough.

The 2026 script doesn’t make you choose, though. It asks you to stack.

Career and partner and family, all at once. Just one isn’t enough.

When my armor started to come off, I went looking for new pieces of it everywhere. In dating, in friendships, in appeasing my family, in apologizing, in humbling myself, in the next thing I could attach myself to that might carry the same social capital.

The next thing that would keep me quiet, safe, palatable.

I accepted breadcrumbs and boyish, unintentional behavior from men I would have walked past a year ago. I kept habits I knew were making me feel like shit. I broke promises to myself like they didn’t count.

I even used guilt. I manufactured it in my own body and carried it around in my backpack. If I had left a good man, at least I was suffering for it.

No one could come for me. I was already punishing myself all day, every day.

The chain was about whether or not a man stood next to me. And what that meant about me. The rest of it grew from there.

I stopped standing as tall. My energy shifted. The belief became embodied so quickly I didn’t catch it leaving. I would skip the book I loved and open the dating app instead because somewhere I had decided that was the safer investment of my time and energy.

It all started to boil down to how I looked and who I was with. Dramatic when I write it out, but the subtleties stacked. When I felt the need to stop dating, others would question it, then I would gaslight myself that I was just afraid to open up, when really I was exhausted and needed space. Time and attention on myself, for the first time in over a decade.

The girl in me was desperately seeking safety, belonging, validation, and she was willing to shrink for it. Last summer was a constant battle. It was the first time I had family move to the Bay, a clear source of belonging and safety. One day my self-trust was out the window, the next day she was back, apologetic and curious.

There’s a song I keep coming back to that asks am I woman enough to find out what I need. I wrote about what that question opened up in me, about a belief I didn’t know I was carrying that being a Woman, capital W, was reserved for wives and mothers. The question started about partnership. About what I was accepting in dating, about who I was letting close. But it didn’t stay there.

It became about how I was treating myself. How I was holding myself? How I had been living. The question landed a second time in my therapist’s office, when she asked me do you have permission to be a woman, and I said no, I have permission to be a girl.

That answer made sense the moment it left my mouth.

There was a shadow hovering over me, a secret subconscious one I wasn’t able to shake or tell to fuck off: a partner gave you edge and safety in the world.

A kind of standing you couldn’t earn alone. It was the only world I had known growing up.

The youngest of three girls in an immigrant family raised in the midwest; fear, dependency, and tradition in my blood before I had words for either.

A woman can be everything, but she’s better with a man, and best when he’s wrapped around her finger.

I could be fine on my own.

But with someone, I was something else entirely. A beautiful storm of power, politics, and a false sense of safety.

A few weeks out from graduation, I’ve been less expansive than I was my first year in Oakland, when I had nothing figured out. Smaller, quieter, more careful with the space I take up. Trading expansiveness for legibility again, the same trade I made the first time.

It feels like everything I do around this time of year will be held against me.

If I’m happy, I’m selfish. If I’m sad, it’s no wonder and deserved.

Both stories already written for me.

But I think the wall is telling me something. The parking ticket, the flare, the towing, the bad interview, the stomach bug, all of it.

Spirit doing what spirit does. Redirecting. Revealing the shadow so we can choose whether to let it run the show.

Next week I leave for Paris for a month. A place that has always made me feel bigger, not smaller.

Going to sit with all of it for a while.

Where do you chain yourself?

Where are you still blaming others for your own chains and your own limiting beliefs?

Two years ago I broke one chain.

This year I’m noticing the smaller ones, the ones I fastened myself in the dark, while I was busy looking for somewhere to belong.

xx,

lena

p.s. a poem I’ve been obsessed with

The first word out of my mouth was holy. The second was lifeforce.

And even as I was saying it, I was catching myself, because lifeforce in my head had always been a visual.

Birthing. Mothers.

I was face to face with a belief I no longer liked: being a Woman, capital W, is reserved for wives and mothers. And the minute I left my husband, I was thrust back into being a girl, needing protection and validation, trusting anyone and everyone except herself.

A girl fits, where a woman is wild. A girl appeases, where a woman relaxes.

In society, single women are girls and married women are Women. In the brief time I was a (Wife) Woman, I was treated differently. Even as I type those words, I question myself. Was I behaving differently? Were others respecting my boundaries more as a wife, or was I just unapologetic, leaning on marriage as a buffer for my no?

Whether it was me or them or both, somewhere along the way, I had constricted. I had shifted back into the same limiting beliefs I started to have in marriage around what I could and couldn’t do, who I could and couldn’t be. But this time I was single, reaching for something new to hold onto.

When I left, it was under the pretense that I would create my dream life on my own. As time went on, I started to believe the lie many women buy into when seeking marriage: you need someone else to help you get there.

The good was alone. The great was on the other side of being chosen.

In the past year of dating for the first time in my adult life, I kept catching myself reaching for that ceiling from the outside in, looking for someone to hand me the rest of my own aliveness. The pleasure, the depth, the more, as if it lived in someone else’s hands.

Coming up on two years since I was given the second lease on life that is divorce, the ceiling was never real. It can get so much better with just me, the mornings, the evenings, the body, the wanting, all of it.

The song’s question lands different a year out, when this is the version of myself that rebuilt it all.

By the end of that session, my therapist asked me, do you have permission to be a woman? I instinctively said no, I have permission to be a girl. Then I corrected myself. Yes. I give myself permission to be a Woman, capital W. Not as a wife. Not as a mother. Lifeforce, strength from within.

The woman I was looking for wasn’t on the other side of a ring or a baby or a name change. She was the one already here, the one who blurted out Holy and Lifeforce (capital H, capital L) before her mind could catch up, the one who knew before I did.

When you walk through the world afraid to trust yourself, others are afraid to trust you too.

When you walk through the world believing you matter, others believe you too.

Sit with the question long enough, and you’ll pivot right back around. To yourself.

xx,

lena

I started classes at OVRHL. The first studio I’ve found since living in the Bay that has no interest in letting you hide or shy away. If you’ve never cried through a pilates class, here’s your foray.

There’s a move called swimming. You’re lying on your stomach, arms and legs extended. There’s this buildup, a settling in, an anticipation that starts to feel like dread if you let it. And then the teacher claps, “SWIM”. You don’t get much of a choice. Brain off, body moving, arms and legs fluttering like you’re in water.

I don’t really know how to swim. Never learned (immigrant parents?) So in my head the motion feels less instinctive to me than it seems to for everyone else. And somewhere in the middle of March that started to feel like its own kind of metaphor. Maybe everyone feels like they don’t fully know what they’re doing. Maybe the move is just to keep going anyway. You’re doing the technique right. You’re just not allowed to think as much anymore. Keep swimming. For you and only you.

What I didn’t expect was that moving through physical pain would start bumping up against a floor of emotional pain I hadn’t touched before. Like my body had been holding something that my mind hadn’t gotten word of yet. My therapist says it’s likely shock. Delayed, stored, patient.

About halfway through class, it all starts surfacing involuntarily. Mountain climbers, and then flooded… with visuals. Memories. The 17 year old version of me inches closer. Facing me, confused. She is waiting on an explanation. Someone to tell her it didn’t turn out the way we had planned when we started to fall in love in small town Indiana. I’d weep through entire sequences just trying to figure out what to say to her. And whether or not to keep straight arming her, or let her come close to break the news.

On the spring solstice, I went to a 108 class. 108 sun salutations, which in yoga marks a transition ... an ending, a beginning, a shedding. I did something I never really let myself do in a yoga class. I stopped and wrote throughout. Whenever something came up, I put it down on paper in its most raw form because I knew I couldn’t lose it. The emotional intoxication was too thick to trust my memory. That state where you’re so full of feeling, the tether holding you to you breaks and you can’t even find the other end of it to retie it back together. Saturated, drowning, inebriated.

Now after a full month, I don’t just go to class for a workout, I go because I know I’ll have the opportunity to release the valve on the pressure cooker of life. I go because I know I’ll unearth something I haven’t come to terms with yet. And that something is likely a shadow that will show up later if I don’t face it now. Casual, normal people stuff.

I have been afraid of my anger for some time. and in class is when I see it, hear it, feel it. Anger however, I’m learning, builds momentum for change. Anger is a clear instruction manual on how to maintain your boundaries for the next time. Anger shows you where you self-abandoned for the sake of another.

A few weeks ago I started TMS. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. A non-invasive treatment that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate neuroplasticity in the parts of the brain responsible for mood and executive functioning. No medication, no sedation. Just your brain reorganizing itself back toward baseline. Back towards “in proportion to reality”.

I sought it out because for about two weeks out of every month I tend to get swallowed with PMDD. And nothing I’ve tried has been able to fully interrupt that pattern. I needed something that could reach the part of me that effort alone can’t get to.

This summer will be three years alcohol free. Between the hot pilates, TMS, CRM therapy (+ my sisters, best friends, Oakland, living on the lake, ecstatic dance classes… etc etc) I feel healthier and more stable than I ever have. Not finished or perfect. Just deeply connected to myself, which I think is the goal?

This past week was two years since my ex and I started falling apart (April 1st). I know the date the way you know a scar. Your body remembers before your brain catches up. I woke up that morning this week and I wrote to him and I wept. Because I can deeply miss someone I never thought I’d lose, and be at peace with the fact that we lost each other at the same time. Because two years can feel like just yesterday and also like another lifetime in the same breath. My body tends to forget the hours of therapy or societal expectations to be over it by now when you’re acutely triggered by a memory, date (or new piece of information you learn about him through a friend of a friend of a friend).

Sometimes I’ll be walking and I see someone from far away and for a split second I let myself imagine it’s him coming toward me. Last week it was a guy on a red Trek road bike. This week it was a guy that walked just like him. I had a tough morning on Monday and I listened to a voicemail from him in 2018.

The last nine months I’ve felt it more than I ever let myself before. and something about letting it be that loud has made me more gentle with myself and the nuances of change and letting go. I like giving space and air time to some of these musings (there’s plenty more I don’t broadcast) even though it’s likely confusing for others. It can feel isolating to grieve and process all on my own and I like having a safe corner of the internet to feel it all with. Plus I retired from “making sense to others” a few years agoooo.

During a week this month when getting out of bed felt simply impossible, I put my wedding ring on my right hand. Paired it with a ring from the farmers market that says Protect This Woman. Something about reclaiming the symbol. Something about making a small promise to myself in the middle of rough sensation.

I started telling myself:

hope is a muscle. you build it by using it even when it’s sore.

Here’s a cheeky piece I wrote amidst all the blurry and ironic edges of watching versions of you die and rebirth through integration…

Two years out from a divorce I didn’t see coming ... or maybe one I saw coming for years and wasn’t ready to name ... I’ve been thinking about what the aftermath actually looks like. not the gorgeously curated version. but the real one. which has involved a rotating cast of characters I have started calling, privately, my doulas.

post ten-year relationship, you get a few.

the great sex zero compatibility doula.

the emotional connection feels like talking to your therapist doula.

the intoxicating chemistry doula.

the amazing conversations but I don’t know if I’m attracted to him doula.

the nostalgic hometown doula.

the our cultures are complete enemies doula.

the was he actually the one this whole time doula.

the foreign doula. the childlike play doula. the long distance doula.

the doula you would have dated if you weren’t married.

the 40 year old doula. the doula with a daughter.

the can he help me build the life I’ve dreamed of doula.

and then, immediately after ... the money can’t buy love or presence or a grown man doula. the mess and a half doula. the I’m tempted to fix you doula.

the good news is that none of them are as good as the doula you’ve had all along within yourself.

meanwhile my friends are getting engaged. having babies.

I am learning to hold my joy for them and my disorientation about my own path at the same time. divorced at 28 will do that to you.

get good at feeling two things at once.

March also had a lot of good that I want to name out loud.

I was involved in two Circe events - a community for women in the startup ecosystem. I’m building my coaching practice and brand slowly and intentionally, while figuring out what the people and leadership space looks like for me post-grad.

I was on The D. Tales with Allison Kahler - a podcast about divorce that says out loud what you’re too nervous to. And conversations I would have needed this time two years ago. We talked about meeting my ex at age 10, marrying at 27, divorcing at 28, and what it means to outgrow the only love you’ve ever known. Listen here.

I was also on Breaking Up With Binge Eating with Georgie, alongside Mehek Mohan, founder of Kahani. An app I help shape as an advisor and use in my own rhythmic eating recovery (a term I coined with the help of a somatic eating therapist I worked with last year, Stephanie Mara) . We talked about what support looks like in the moments between therapy, why shame gets louder in silence, and how to build something for the middle space of recovery. Listen here.

Both conversations asked me to say things I usually only write.

In less than two months I graduate from Bschool. I keep trying to feel the full weight of that and mostly I feel the weight of everything it took to get here. The months and weeks where school was the only container that held me together when nothing else did.

I know there will be grief in that ending and liberation in it too. I’ve rebuilt before. I know I can do it again. And for the first time in a while I’m starting to feel something that might be excitement about what comes next ... about continuing what I’ve already been building, and the possibilities that are still taking shape.

My last post was born on a particularly inspiring lake walk and it needed it’s own space. Read here if ya want. Thanks a bunch for being here <3

Soundtrackssss

march vol. 1 ... the one that held the heavy weeks

march vol. 2 ... when things started to lift

april, building ... still adding to this one

xx,

lena

Not as a flex, not because it was likely, but because he decided to build himself from the ground up in a country that didn’t know his name

And just wondering why he kept studying and working and carrying a pipe dream for unborn children he hadn’t met yet, and a nuclear family he hadn’t built yet

And just wondering why along the way he met a Palestinian woman and chose her, and she chose him

An unlikely pair by culture, by family, by everything people use to decide who belongs with who

And just wondering why any of that happened at all

And just wondering why that was okay and not okay at the same time I shift in my seat with that

Because I can love what tradition gave me and still want to know who decided it was right

Is tradition, tradition because it’s stable and healthy

Or is it tradition because one person thought of it and called it right, and the rest of us followed without asking any further questions

And just wondering why that father, 30 years after leaving Syria, bought a condo on a lake across from San Francisco

That would allow his freshly divorced daughter to live rent free and keep building a life she had expected to build alongside someone else

Because she had just left the person she would have leaned on through all of it, through school, through the years that don’t have a floor

And just wondering why, when she walks said lake trying to stay afloat, trying to remember how to want things again she crosses paths with a girl her very own age, laying in the sun, with a jar of peanut butter and a menu of drugs by her side

Her only agenda for the day. Her calendar is full.

A meeting with K, C, H

Her forms of sustenance, entertainment, purpose, meaning, to-dos

And the lake is her home

Is it all her fault that she will spend her 24 hours sustaining herself on peanut butter and staying locked in the cycle

When I had people and tools to pull myself out

Just wondering why I was given a roof over my head

And healers and teachers with the tools to pull me out, again and again

In another life… she is me, and I am her.

She wants what I want. Love, belonging, a reason to stay, a reason to believe

The only difference is what was built under me when I started to fall

All these unlikely things had to happen, in order, without breaking, to get me here and her there

And that’s the part that’s confusing

Because we want there to be a formula

A straight path that explains who ends up okay and who doesn’t

And there isn’t one

Just wondering why addiction and depression engulfs some of us, only touches others, and completely skips over the next

Just wondering if I deserve this

Just wondering what I should do about it if I don’t

Just wondering what deserving means

Is taking care of myself repaying the universe for this undeserved gift

Is that how I repay a father who carried us before we existed

I grew up believing in a Heavenly Father

Now I believe in a heavenly mother, because men have disappointed me too much to believe they would create anything they claim to love without destroying it in due time (10 years later)

My brain offers that I’ll come back around to religion and church and I resist it

Fuck that shit

but I’ll accept that Hope is a muscle I’m willing to build

Heavenly mother

And thank you, Baba

All the same

I head out the door

To take care of myself and others

Just wondering, and it hurts to wonder

Here’s what I wish someone had told me at 16: eating disorders evolve into something completely irrelevant to food or even the body. They become an addiction to control. Food is just the language your body uses when it doesn’t have another one.

I spent over a decade cycling through every eating disorder on the menu. Anorexia, Bulimia, BED, Orthorexia, the in-between ones that don’t politely fall into a single DSM-5 category. The ones where you’re “quasi recovered,” “doing so much better,” and “really committed this time.”

In 2023, five days before my wedding, I flew from San Diego to New Jersey. My dress fit. By the wedding day they had to sew it two inches smaller. I had fully relapsed.

I don’t remember a ton from that time, but the memories I do have feel engraved in my flesh and bones. I was confused, irritable, and lightheaded most of that week. I kept hearing what felt like an angry, scared voice that wouldn’t let me change direction or my cycle of repetitive, restrictive thoughts. It was a familiar grip.. but this time it felt like a chokehold. The control felt like calm when everything else felt like chaos.

By the time I was standing in that dress, sewn tighter, smiling for photos, I had left myself so many times I didn’t know there was someone to come back to. I told myself I would or could quit after the wedding. But when the time came and I wanted to follow through on my word, it was easier said than done.

This body carried me through every version of myself I tried on for someone else. Every abandonment, including the ones I forced on myself. She fought to keep my lungs pumping and my blood warm while I was busy apologizing for taking up space in it.

And she’s still here. She didn’t leave when I left myself. She patiently waited.

That’s the thing I want people to understand during a week like this. Your body is not the enemy. She never was. She is the most loyal friend you’ve ever had and you’ve been treating her like an obstacle or a problem to fix.

We're living in the loudest, most confusing time in history to have a body. Everything sounds both healthy and unhealthy. The marketing for weight loss drugs sounds compassionate. The body positivity campaigns have corporate sponsors.

The messaging isn't even polarized anymore, it's just muddy.. everything packaged to sound like it's good for you, which makes it almost impossible to tell what actually is. If you've ever had a complicated relationship with food, the noise isn't just confusing and loud, it’s dangerous.

Your relationship with your body is spiritual. She has been speaking to you your entire life and you’ve been telling her to shut up. The restriction, the bingeing, the body checking, the weighing.. those aren’t failures of willpower. They’re a nervous system desperately trying to communicate with someone who stopped listening.

Recovery isn’t linear. I know everyone says that and it sounds like a poster in a therapist’s office, but I mean it specifically. I mean that I can write publicly about eating disorders, advise a recovery tech company, do the work in therapy every week, and still have moments where my jeans feel wrong and I know I’m not actually upset about the jeans.

I always like to say… the floors in my apartment never feel clean enough and my body never feels skinny enough and that’s how I know I’m hurting about something deeper than either of those things. I’m just being honest.

The difference is though that these days, I catch it quicker. Now I hear her and I say: I know you’re scared and you’re doing your thing. But we are okay now. What are you actually trying to tell me?

And then I listen. Closely. Not perfectly. Not every time. But more than I used to. And that’s the whole dance.

This week I got to live that on both sides. I hosted a Year of the Horse ceremony and watched a room of women settle onto mats, open journals, and collect together in community. There is something that shifts when you give people permission to be in their bodies together..even just one hour of being witnessed, of writing what’s true on the page instead of holding it in the body.

And today I saddled up. If you’ve never done equine work as part of healing, it’s hard to explain. A horse mirrors your nervous system, not your words. You can’t perform wellness on the back of a horse. You have to actually be in your body. It cracked open a new level of healing I didn’t know I was ready for.. and it reminded me that recovery lives in the body, not just the mind.

Recently I’ve started visualizing a protective bubble around myself anytime I think about my recovery, my food, my body. A fortress. Inside it I only let in what’s positive, flowing, easeful, loving. Everything else stays outside. It sounds simple but choosing what you let into that space over and over again is its own kind of discipline - a more gentle kind.

The hardest part of recovery was never treatment. It was the 167 hours a week between sessions when I was on my own. That’s the gap most people fall through. That’s also exactly the gap Mehek Mohan is building for. Kahani (कहानी, “story” in Hindi) is a digital recovery companion for eating disorders that meets people in that space. Gamified, community-driven, grounded in real clinical frameworks, and it doesn’t feel like homework. I’ve gotten an inside look as a beta user and it’s the kind of tool I wish existed when I needed it most. (If you or someone you know could benefit: getkahani.com)

If you’re in it right now, hear me clearly:

your body is not an unfinished project.

She is not an accessory or a social capital statement.

She is not meant to be used for power or intimidation.

She does not need to contort for love or friendship.

She is not your family’s or the government’s.

Your body just is.

She is yours.

The most honest and intimate and fragile part of you.

Handle with care.

xx,

lena

Valentine’s Day morning and my shoulders are tense. I need to remind myself to take a breath - repeating my therapist’s recurrent reminder.

I was preparing to tell the truth, again, to a room full of prospective Berkeley MBA students. The truth of what went down two years ago, April 2024.

What I left, & why I left.

A few days before, this familiar voice shows up on my front door. The same one I bitch about to said therapist every Friday morning.

Is this really true? Are you being dramatic? You were the only one in that relationship besides him. How could anyone trust you when you can’t even trust yourself?

I’m so used to distrusting myself that saying my lived experiences out loud still feels like fraud. Fair warning that the world will confirm that fear if you let it.

Someone who knew me before I left, sat through my talk and called it “an interesting perspective.” A “different take” from what they knew. As if it was a fictional story or an opinion piece. As if it was just one version that I chose to run with.

If you are a divorced woman, you know this feeling. The quiet invalidation. The room that isn’t sure whether to believe you, feel sorry for you, stay far far away (or something in between). The question underneath the question: but was it really that bad?

So you sit down at the dinner table with said voice. You sit with the shame. You name it. You let it move through you. Every time you say what you saw out loud and talk back to that voice, the shame seed gets a little smaller. Every time you describe the sensations, your fear, your processing. That voice loses ammo. That voice loses evidence. It forgets what it came for. Not gone. Smaller. Quieter.

So after I got on stage and said scary and true things I wrote this:

I dug deep this week. Again. Shoveled out the pile of shame that sits in the pit of my stomach. I set it down and walked away. I heard the beg of my body. I said I was safe to leave my old life. I said I was safe to stay, with my scared, terrified, brand new self.

You are safe to leave. And you are safe to stay. You decide where and when.

That night, my best friend and I went to see Wuthering Heights.

They were kids first. Cathy and Heathcliff running around screaming and laughing. Andddd within ten minutes I was crying in a dark theatre. This is a record for me. Cue laughing and crying while I turn to Anna and we start laughing at ourselves. My body had recognized the scene before my brain understood what was happening.

I wasn’t watching them. I was watching us.

We’re in 6th grade. 10 years old. Almost two decades ago. We’re outside our middle school in small town Indiana, waiting at pickup. He just finished tennis. I just finished dance. He’s hitting me on the head with his racket and I’m giggling. It’s flirty and fun and playful. It’s simple and there’s nothing else to it. We are so young. We have no idea what’s coming.

My eyes follow Heathcliff running after Cathy. Were we really that young? Because in my head, with him, I’m still at the oldest 17. Not 29. I envisioned him behind me in line at Berkeley Bowl last Wednesday. I’d still be 17 if I saw him today. Time stopped somewhere along the way and I don’t know why and I'm a little frustrated by that. Can we catch back up? I feel stuck.

Here’s the thing about Wuthering Heights that nobody tells you between all the hot and steamy excitement. It’s not a love story. Or it is, but not the kind they sell you on Valentine’s Day. It’s two people who can’t exist without each other and can’t exist with each other either.

Is that kind of love even possible? Is it healthy? Is it functional? (It’s not)

I don’t think ours was. And I don’t think theirs was either.

Leading up to Valentine’s Day I’d noticed yearning creeping back in. I made a dating log in chronological order working back from my most recent date and before bed I'd scroll through these people in my mind like a kind of escapism. Bedtime stories. Some girls count sheep.

My therapist asked me to add a column for 'how did you actually feel with each of them?' None of them were quite it. Not the reality of them. The idea, sure. The romanticization. The movie version. But the flesh-and-blood, Tuesday-morning, how-do-you-actually-feel-in-this-room-with-this-person version? Not yet.

So maybe what I’ve been grieving isn’t a person. Maybe it’s an idea.

Here’s the cruelest part of grieving someone who’s still alive: we are the only two people who witnessed that relationship. The only person who could sit with me in those memories, who could say yes, that happened, yes, that was real, yes, we were those kids, yes I fucked up there, yes you fucked up here.

The person who showed up for me in high school through the beginning of my eating disorder. The one I would escape to my rival university for every other weekend in college. Who I sat through doctors appointments and practiced interviews with in my early twenties. Who I stood side by side with at too many funerals, and countless weddings.

Joy, safety, frustration, repeat.

Laughter, exhale, tears, repeat.

He’s the only person who knows. And he’s the only person I can’t speak to about it. And I simply can’t ask him to hold that with me anymore (even if it’s an unsaid, energetic ask).

There's a scene near the end of the movie where Heathcliff writes letters to Cathy and Nelly throws them straight into the fire. This time of not seeing or speaking to my ex, cold turkey, but publicly processing my grief in poems and essays knowing he would never read them. That's the letter in the fire.

I've been writing to someone who will never receive it. I've known that. I write anyway. Because the writing was never for him. It's for me.

I am proudly and unapologetically selfish in this way and I plan to continue to be. Until it stops feeling like selfishness and starts feeling like what it actually is, which is kindness and softening and making peace with my past instead of burying it alive.

When Heathcliff watches Cathy die, something in him doesn't just break. It empties. And sitting in that theatre I realized I recognized it. Not from one moment but from living it slowly over the last year and a half. Letting go, piece by piece, draining out the idea that my ex would ever come back as the version of him I held in my head.

Watching that scene was a painful kind of torture that also felt soft and warm. When you’ve been carrying something invisible and unspeakable and suddenly it’s there on a screen, bigger than you, you feel less insane. I’ve been shouting into a void for two years. And suddenly there’s Heathcliff doing the same thing.

This is just what grief looks like when the person is still alive.

During the breakdown of our relationship, I was Cathy. Deteriorating. Fading. Losing myself inside something that was killing me softly. My body was shutting down. I didn’t know who I was anymore.

And then after. In the grieving. In the letting go. He became Cathy. The one I was watching fade. The images of him that over time turned into what felt like the ghost of him. I have a flashback to our last Facetime, a year ago, where I closed my eyes while he spoke, trying to hold onto the sound of his voice, knowing the memory would fade one day. My grasp and tight fists, growing sweaty and weak as I fight against nature forcing me to let go.

I’ve been so worried about having left him at the altar. When I left myself hundreds of times before that without a second thought. Because the world rewarded me for it. They expected it from me.

Every time they called me selfless, accommodating, easy, strong, a saint. That was a eulogy for a version of me that deserved more.

This was never an abandonment story. It was a reclamation story that everyone, including me, mistook for abandonment.

It’s a fragile art. Let the memories move past you like clouds. Him in your kitchen. Him with someone new. Your last quick! kiss me bye. His last I’ll be home in 10, love you baby.

Let the sensations and sounds drift right on by. You didn’t ask for this, but you can watch it arrive without following it home. You don’t owe it your attention just because it showed up uninvited.

This is not punishment. Or denial. Or stuffing it down. This is a form of reclamation. This is your pivot.

Tomorrow is the Lunar New Year. The Year of the Fire Horse, which only comes around once every 60 years. In Chinese there’s an idiom: mǎ dào chéng gōng. Upon the arrival of the horse, success is secured.

We just spent the Year of the Snake shedding. Old skin, old stories, old versions of love that were never quite what we made them. And now the horse is here. Double fire. Momentum. Forward. Onward.

I'm hosting a little Galentine's slash Year of the Fire Horse gathering this week. Part celebration and social, part exhale. I want to introduce mirror work, which if you haven't heard of it, Louise Hay's Mirror Work: 21 Days to Heal Your Life is where to start. The concept is simple. You look yourself in the eyes and say kind things to yourself out loud. It sounds easy until you try it and realize you'd rather do literally anything else. Do it anywayyyy.

So on the other side of this weekend, I’m wildly different from last year. Not empty. Not compensating. Not longing. Just deeply okay. Securely held by myself and a truth that feels so good in my bones.

Me to me to me to me. It’s you to you to you to you.

xx,

lena

I’ve seen anxiety and I recommend taking your juiciest deepest belly breath of the day

I’ve seen numbness and I recommend taking your meds, writing a short poem, and wearing more color

I’ve seen anorexia and I recommend looking yourself in the mirror, asking what kind of life you want to keep living, and then sit down and eat dinner mama

I’ve seen bulimia and I don’t recommend

I’ve seen OCD and I recommend talking out loud to yourself, and choosing one thought that stops the spiral

I’ve seen PMDD and I recommend proactively doing whatever the hell you need to do to not fall into a depressive rut

I’ve seen sleeping with people to numb the pain and I recommend stopping that shit

I’ve seen romanticizing the struggle, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice and I recommend laughing at the constructs and moving on with your day

I’ve seen performative religion, spirituality, wellness obsession dressed up as virtuous and I recommend only doing what feels soft and honest in your mind and body

I’ve seen pretending your mental health stuff doesn’t exist and I recommend facing it in titration

I’ve seen walking around with an inherited sense of shame and culpability for existing, leaving someone, or trying in any capacity and I recommend releasing your grip

I’ve seen apologizing for being emotional or feeling like too much and I recommend remembering you’re only too much for someone that can’t hold or see all of you

I’ve seen hiding and I recommend making yourself be as seen as possible

I’ve seen silencing and I recommend saying it louder for the people in the back

someone asked Glennon Doyle if writing about yourself is self-indulgent and her wife jumped in to say we only ask women this question

we only question whether a woman’s one wild and precious life is worthy of being spoken about

especially if it’s centered around a relationship

and I felt that

I judge myself that my writing picked back up to write about divorce, my past relationship

like was I just a partner?

should I be over it like everyone wants me to be?

am I being dramatic or self-absorbed?

or worse, am I addicted to nostalgia because it feels better to miss something and someone rather than nothing and no one?

dying to be seen

dying to be heard

dying to be known

dying to be taken seriously

but then Glennon quoted Maya Angelou, “if I am human, then nothing human can be foreign to me”

her whole career is based on the idea that she’s nothing special

if she thought she was special or different she wouldn’t be writing

it’s just curiosity around the human experience

and that’s what I’m doing here

I’m not special

this divorce, this grief, this unraveling, it’s not unique

but it’s mine to describe

and maybe in describing it someone else recognizes themselves

feels less alone in their own mess

your story is your right to tell

I’m trying to step into a version of myself that writes from curiosity

about what it means to lose yourself

to grieve someone who’s still alive

to rebuild from scratch

some days I think I’m just writing to figure out what’s actually true

most days I don’t know

I keep writing anyway

xx,

lena

November 4

Mr Man and the Divine

An older man is practicing his boxing moves. Let’s call him Mr Man.

His yellow t-shirt darkened with sweat stains. Brow furrowed, he’s ruminating.

yesterday’s frustrations

this morning’s bicker with his wife,

tomorrow’s fears

health and wealth

Two little boys no older than five clumsily walk past, staring up in awe

They get a little too close

Mr Man isn’t paying attention to his surroundings. Right, left, under, over

yesterday’s frustrations

this morning’s bicker

tomorrow’s fears

repeat

just a little longer, until it all feels a bit softer

It makes me pause and hurt a little

The boys must be so confused, they wonder

Will I do that when I’m older?

Should I do that when I’m older?

Do I need to do that when I’m older?

Mr Man used to box with his dad when he was little

It was something that helped him get through the days. Release the valve of tension. Return to himself.

Find a center of gravity that didn’t involve hurting other people

I’m starting to hurt for the boys

like I’ve hurt for the girls

Will the boys be okay?

The stars look different tonight from when Mr Man was their age

He had to do things they might not have to, or will they?

Will they try to be more or less like him? Will they be loved and accepted as they are without fitting into any of the boxes?

Or will we fear them, reject them, villainize them?

And how much of that is warranted?

Should I fear you?

Will you hurt me?

Before I take a daily walk I make sure I’m wearing an oversized hoodie over my leggings, safest if I have my big headphones on

look straight ahead, no eye contact

even if they follow, even if they yell

even if they grab my arm

I make sure my hair is never in a ponytail, too easy to pull (learned that lesson last week)

How much of the dangerous identity was handed to them? How much of it did they choose to pick back up, time and time again?

The woman that taught him honesty

The woman that taught him softness

The woman that taught him how to love, how to lead

The woman that taught him to break open

The woman that taught him sobriety, by begging, or leaving

The woman that taught him

Over and over

Again and again

Should I fear you?

Will you hurt me?

If there is a divine feminine, maybe there is a divine masculine

He will teach me too,

inhale a hopeful breath

will I run into him? have I already?

will I know it’s him?

will I want him?

will I need him?

will he need me too?

November 11

I wasn’t supposed to be back yet.

I wanted a runway—time to mentally (and melodramatically) prepare myself to be back in all our spaces. But the universe was tired of my avoidance and ripped the bandaid off for me.

I’d quietly exiled the pink sunsets and salt air the same way I turned away from the cornfields and small-town gossip of Indiana, and the smoky, snow-filled mountain days we spent in Park City.

When San Diego comes up in conversations, I still feel queasy. I lose my appetite. Some part of me remembers too much to eat.

Yeah I lived there before the Bay.

Will you move back?

Ah.. yeah I’m not sure… I’ll need a while before I can

Passively waiting for raw skin to scab over through situationships, teary therapy sessions, and rage-filled runs.

Too many ghosts. Too many versions of myself I wasn’t ready to face.

But now that I’m here, the first place I notice you is in the air— which, lucky for me, is everywhere

I’m staying at our friends’ place.

There are remnants of us, in every inch of this town

the lamp we left behind, now in their guest bedroom

the succulents we planted, now on their patio,

the marble side table we celebrated finding at a garage sale

our giant fig tree you spent three years meticulously nursing, now the statement piece in a coffee shop somewhere off the 101

Our fingerprints are scattered, our footprints faded—

on Ponto Beach, where we held each other knowing it was the end,

in our favorite coffee shop overlooking the cliffs,

Sunday mornings with a matcha donut and one cold brew between us,

at the Gelson’s we’d stop at after dinner for a pint of ice cream,

and the hills behind our house where we raced home after dark.

Everyone seems to have a piece of us.

Everyone except us.

I tell myself I won’t spiral.

But maybe unraveling is the most functional thing I’d do all year

I could just be in a low place when it comes to companionship.

too many almosts,

too many men who don’t care if I get home safe,

or who were undermentored by their fathers,

all with strong opinions about who I am and what I want.

I’ve forgotten what it looks like for someone to care.

Forgotten what it looks like for someone to simply take me as I am—and have that be enough

I tell people I’m happy for them. The houses, the pregnancies, the way life keeps moving forward.

And I am, mostly. I even mean it—though it catches in my throat when I say it out loud. It comes out a little forced, a little practiced, like I’m still convincing myself.

Part of me still aches that ours didn’t.

That I had to find a version of peace that feels too much like giving up.

When can I stop punishing myself?

Just let me know and I’ll try—

but I’ll probably still come back around to it.

I’m not sure if I’m picking up Hurt and Guilt at the grocery store because they’re familiar,

or because I plan to cook with them.

Either way, they’ve been in my cart for months—every single week.

I don’t know how else I could have fought for us

I’m racking my brain trying to see it all from your lens, but it won’t click.

And you can’t see it from mine.

And maybe that’s the point of divorce—signing the dotted line and finally agreeing to stop trying.

If I avoided my grief all year,

I made up for it last night

I took an Uber to our old place.

My mom used to do that

drive by our first house in New Jersey,

sit out front, cry a little,

and wave to it like it was a person.

I’m here now, in our old driveway,

standing in the version of the life we were building.

I picture you next to me—

just another Tuesday between work calls.

We take a beat, kiss in the sun,

barefoot, playing with our kitten,

laughing about something dumb from the morning.

Have you been back?

Maybe healing is just learning how to visit the places that made you

without trying to move back in.

I told our friends about the house in Vista we wanted and joked about meeting back there in 20 years.

They are hopeful for us.

I’m not sure if you are.

A black cat peeked through the curtain when I arrived

for a second, I thought it was yours.

I stood there with my luggage in the driveway,

the air thick with déjà vu,

wondering what I was even doing.

I must’ve looked crazy.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Will this place always haunt me?

Will I move back down and start over again?

On my own or with someone new?

Have you been back?

November 11

They told me you’re seeing someone new.

I smiled and said good, good, good—

then cried once I closed the door behind me

I tell myself I only want to know you’re happy and healthy, but if I’m honest, I just want proof that you still exist in the same world as me.

If we can fall in love with the idea of someone,

we can grieve the ghost of them too.

It feels lonely knowing you’re the only one who ever knows what those 10 years looked like.

If we never speak again, I’ll be left with the stories we made—unsure which parts were real and which I’ve made softer over time.

The sole witness to a life that keeps replaying, carrying a world only we knew.

I still don’t sleep well.

You steadied me at night—your breath, the warmth, the illusion of safety that love can so easily disguise. You steadied me until the day you became the reason I couldn’t sleep through the night.

November 21

Not Sure Which Ache

I’m not sure which ache I’m nursing tonight.

The one I woke up to this morning, or the one I did for 10 years.

Sometimes in the dark, when the lights are low, I see your face in theirs.

The stranger from Vegas becomes you.

Mexico City becomes you.

Business school, the dating app, all of them — for a second, in the half-light, they’re you.

You’ve never been in this bed, in this city, in this apartment, but somehow you’re here every night.

I’ve cried with every single one of them.

I laugh it off quick, or say it’s not personal — it’s not that big a deal.

But my body knows. My body still carries the blueprint of you.

You laid next to me once with all your secrets and all mine too.

Now I’m trying to figure out which ghost I’m sleeping with.

The voices of what I should have done differently only get louder when I spend nights alone. That’s why I know I need to do it more.

I called my sister last night and asked for her forgiveness.

It felt like the closest thing to you.

She was confused, like they all are—wondering why I’m still apologizing to the ghost of you.

I’m wondering how you’ve been.

I say I just want to know if you’re sober, but really I miss the rhythm of our conversations — the kind that feel like a seatbelt locked in place.

Last night I read old texts and listened to voicemails from 2014 just to remember your voice again.

I guess I like to torture myself this way.

I’d start worrying about your health again once I got mine under control.

Just like I used to.

I’m so used to being okay with half full on my own so that I could reach over and catch your fall.

Make sure I was just barely afloat before looking your way, making sure you’re good.

We went through hell and back together.

So I’m sorry I think of you these days.

I don’t know which rat race exhausts me more — the constant search for someone new, or the endless loop back to you.

Everyone expects me to keep looking for this other half.

The excitement, the thrill, the distraction.

But who am I without this pursuit?

Is it enough to be visible to the world without someone by my side?

And if I choose to stop — if I choose stability and solitude over the search — am I strong enough to live with what I’m giving up?

The premature grief of a life alone. The safety I felt with you that I might never feel again.

The regulated nervous system.

The seatbelt.

I’ve seen enough and done enough against the grain to know that choosing myself will be lonely.

Enough to make me question if I want to fight for it.

I feel fear rising.

Can I dig deeper?

November 24

Faking My Own Forgiveness

The building I live in has residents mostly over 60

The past six months I’ve been sloppy with my presence

When I first moved in, I made myself visible—said hi in the lobby, looked up from my phone, recycled correctly

All the tiny in-between moments, choosing to be in the world instead of in my head

I noticed the other residents never scroll on their phone while waiting for the elevator so I challenged myself to do the same

Today, Elaine and I stood waiting in the lobby together

If I hadn’t put my phone in my bag, I wouldn’t have met her

I told her I liked her black heels with the gold buckle on the toe

She said they were 30 years old, just like the rest of her clothes and the amount of time she’d lived in Oakland

The life alert alarm on her necklace made me soften and a bit sad

I gave her my apartment number. She gave me her landline.

This morning I noticed my rumination has ramped up a bit — obsessive thoughts trying to untangle what happened, or maybe they’re just a strategy to keep you alive

I keep trying to replay the day I drove away, trying to remember where exactly you were standing in the driveway

I only know: you wore your favorite hoodie, you were holding our cat, waving goodbye

We both pretended I would be gone for three days, our last kiss on the corner of our lips intentionally

We said we could feel it lingering longer that way

The details that don’t make the difference, burned into my brain

I’m haunted by versions of you— 11, 16, 20, 25, 29

high school tennis matches —- I’m on the yearbook team, required to take your pictures, blushing the entire time

midnight in small town Indiana college towns, cramming for exams and sharing cold coffee

hospital chairs and IV bags dripping slow

at your sister’s funeral, numb alongside you

thousands of planes, countries, cities

dreams we fulfilled, and even more we didn’t have the chance to yet

you on your knee in the sand

vows we meant

a home we filled with sound

building something just to watch the foundation crack

All these versions of you — none of them the sober version I need now

Last night I dreamed you were running from the law

I was the only one in the crowd who could make out your face

I was so proud that only I could

until it hit me that only I could

Your parents always begged me to tell them what you were thinking

I’m begging to know the same now

The only person who could help me understand what happened is the only person I can’t ask

The floors in my apartment never feel clean enough

My body never feels skinny enough

That’s when I know I’m hurting about something more than the floors and the way my jeans fit

This time of year I get down about us—but I tell myself I’m better prepared this year

It’s always a faking and wishful thinking

In a few weeks, it would have been 11 years

I’ve deleted all the texts and voicemails from the men I met this year

Everyone except yours

They don’t have a reason to be jealous or weary of you except maybe just that one

I know there’s no use in writing poetry that’s really just letters I’ll never send

But it feels cathartic all the same

Anyway, I was glad I met Elaine today

Eighty years old, living alone in my building, 30 years in Oakland with a landline and a life alert

I wonder what she carried in these halls

Who came home with her, or left in the middle of the night

What questions or burdens or lightness she woke up with and went to sleep with

I wonder if she had to leave someone, or if he left her

If she had to start over, and forgive herself and someone else at the same time

I envision the nights she spent cooking dinner for herself, bringing up the mail, tucking into bed at night

Moving through the same things I am tonight,

washing the dinner dishes, FaceTime my sisters, pull down the shades, light a candle, tell myself goodnight

I wonder if she’s faking it right alongside me

We smile and wave goodbye anyway

Wondering all these things about each other

November 26

They’re Going to Tell You to Sit Down

They’re going to tell you to sit down

I’m not quite ready to quit being unhinged

Getting ready to put on my healed face for the holiday, I’m sure you are too, (right?)

Palatable habits die hard

In one breath I’ll be fine, and in the next I’ll crumble in my sister’s arms

I’m kinda bored of this? I’m sure you are too (right?)

Is being sad about you just more comfortable than not?

Everyone wants me to calm down and breathe deeply

Meditate every morning, do the shadow work, or just shut up about it already

I’ve done it all. It’s. Not. Working.

I pulled the hoodie you gave me when we were 16 out of storage

Along with the black box of shit I locked up when I left 18 months ago

You wrote to be returned upon exchanging of vows in sharpie on the inside

I tucked it under my arm so no one in the lobby would see me smuggling you up

How bad for me could it be?

I’ll wear it like any hoodie and no one will know

This is stupid, I’m sick of myself

It is what it is, you have to move on, Elena

You’re the one who left!!!

On repeat

Stop sleeping around, go to yoga, do your homework

Most of the time I can walk in a straight line

I don’t drink or do drugs so I write bleeding heart poetry as my escape

Do I have your attention?

My maturity regresses about ten years this time of year, can you just let me have the floor?

I just need one day.

We both know that’s a cute little lie.

Can I grow the fuck up by January first?

Anyway, you’re fine, get on the plane and forget about it

He’s fine and you are too

It’s 2019, Blackout Wednesday, six years ago today

We walk into a bar in Terre Haute, Indiana, hand in hand

All our high school friends reunited

I feel the seatbelt click

The dopamine hit of belonging

This is it — what we built

I think I’m grieving all that seemingly silly shit now

The fact that I placed myself so comfortably by your side for this version of life

And now only the ghost of that version of me is there

They’re going to tell you to sit down

I’m not quite ready

December 5

Trunk

They say you can tell how much a woman loves herself by who she lets love her.

I’m watching my self-respect double in size,

in real time

like a time-lapse of something finally being watered.

And I’m not the only one watching.

My sisters. My best friends.

I catch them exhaling, smiling softly like they’ve been holding their breath for years

like I’m finally seeing what they saw all along,

hearing what they said all along.

I don’t text back the guy who made me question my intensity.

The one who told me who I was instead of asking.

Who narrated me like I wasn’t standing right there,

like he knew the floor plan better after five weeks than I did after a lifetime of living here.

I don’t turn toward the ex

who couldn’t be the man I needed

even when I made myself so small I could’ve fit in his pocket,

even when I handed him the blueprint and the tools.

Ten years of trying to be seen by someone who couldn’t stay sober long enough to look up.

Ten years of speaking into a room and hearing nothing back but my own echo.

I let those threads fall slack.

I hold a quiet funeral

for every almost that asked me to abandon myself at the door

and for the one that did, slowly, for a decade,

while I called it love.

Two months ago, a good one showed up and I flinched.

Not because he did anything wrong,

but because he didn’t.

Because kindness without conditions felt like a trap I couldn’t name.

And got scared to stay long enough and find out.

I’d already written the story:

I’ll ruin him like I ruined the rest.

I’m the common denominator. I don’t get to have this.

And there was even one who agreed

who couldn’t hold the mirror I handed him,

so he flipped it back and called it mine.

Told me I was the pattern.

Told me to step away, heal up, sit this season out

anything to avoid what I’d named out loud

about the deficit in our dynamic that left me feeling inadequate and small

I almost believed him.

It’s easy to believe the voice that confirms your worst suspicion.

I pushed the good one away with both hands and convinced myself it was wisdom.

I thought I was protecting him from me.

Turns out I was just believing the saddest, most critical voice in the room.

So I turned around to see who it was.

Not to fix her.

Not to therapize her into silence.

Just to see her.

The one who learned to believe early on

that love requires her to lose herself,

to put him before it all

and accept crumbs for herself,

that she’s too much and not enough in the same breath,

that if something good shows up, she should probably run before it figures out the truth,

or drains her dry.

I didn’t argue with her.

I gave her what she wanted more than anything from all those men — to be known, and held

I just said: I see you. And that story isn’t real anymore. You’re not asking for too much.

I told her she can rewrite the pattern

and stay tethered to herself,

in the mess,

despite the mess.

She didn’t leave the room

But she got quieter, sat down, and listened.

I’ve asked my therapist a million times

if I should lock myself in a tower for a year?

swear off men like the other traumatized divorce writers on Substack? buy a new journal?

conduct a cheeky séance? and call it a day?

Am I too broken for this right now?

Am I wearing scars on my sleeve?

She doesn’t flinch. She says she’d tell me if I was.

Then she names the voice: You know this one. You’ve met her before.

The one who says safety lives in deprivation.

The voice that says if you make yourself small enough, empty enough, alone enough,

nothing can make you ache, or cry, or yearn,

nothing can make you feel the volatility of being full and empty ricochet through your cells

She’s right.

It’s the same black-and-white thinking I’ve been unlearning for years,

just wearing a brand new dress,

calling herself protection,

whispering that restriction is the only road to safety.

But I know better now.

I don’t have to starve myself of love to prove I’m now worthy of it.

So when she asks what I really want,

I say: a really strong, sturdy trunk of my tree.

Something solid in me that doesn’t sway when the wind picks up.

The confidence to stand alone

so that when I choose someone,

it’s not because I need them to hold me up.

She says: bingo.

Because the right love doesn’t ask you to disappear.

A healthy man won’t need you lost in him to feel found in himself.

Maybe I pushed the good one away

because easing in gently, patiently waiting,

staying unafraid of my messiness,

listening like it matters,

All just felt so foreign.

And I questioned if I was deserving of it.

Maybe I pushed the good one away

because I didn’t know yet,

that I’m allowed to be chosen

without earning it in pain.

The right person won’t cower at my depth,

he will ask for more.

I know now.

I’m not saying I’m done and dandy.

I’m saying I’m healing and letting myself be held.

Turns out those aren’t opposites.

Turns out your roots grow stronger when you stop mistaking the scared voice for the true one

and when you finally let someone see you

who actually has their eyes open.

A year ago you hemmed the bottom of my pants the night before I needed to leave for a work trip

A picture from that day popped up in my photos

That happens a lot these days

I went to the Apple Store last week and asked if they could remove all the photos from my phone before July 2024 when I told you I needed to leave and couldn’t come back home for the first time in ten years

They said that wouldn’t be a good idea so I swallowed my pride and sometimes look at photos before July 2024 on a Monday afternoon while we are several thousands of miles apart and 365 days from the moment

Anyway, I wanted to say thank you for doing that

and all the other wonderful things you did that contributed to making me question whether I should leave

and not come back for the first time in ten years

January 28

On my walk this morning, I passed a girl who looked sorta like me

Her wedding ring was pretty and sparkled a bit with the sun

For four years something like that would make me jump a bit

Clutch my left hand and check to make sure my own ring was still there

Where it safely should have been

Today, I didn’t forget it at home

I didn’t lose it

I know where it is

And every morning for the past 8 months I have chosen not to put it back on

The fourth finger on my left hand feels pretty bare and it still surprises me every time I reach for it

Sometimes it’s fine

Sometimes it really sucks

Most of the time I just keep walking

I move around the lake, next to the sassy geese

Past the newly in-love couple sitting on the sunny, grassy hill memorizing the blood vessels on each other’s hands

Quickly brush past the recently diagnosed with tears in his eyes

And the group of Reggae drummers that meet at the Pergola every Tuesday night

Sometimes it really sucks

Most of the time, I just keep walking

February 2

I didn’t let myself cry too hard so I could continue concentrating on the road. She held my hand. The first of what would be thousands of times over the course of the next seven months that I would stop myself from crying too hard so I could concentrate on the road.

On the way home from Target repurchasing move-in items for the first time without him.

On the way to class. On the way home from class.

On the way home from spending an evening with friends and all their significant others where I plastered a smile on my face for five hours.

On the way home from a date.

Sometimes it worked, most times it didn’t.

February 6

I Decided to Leave, But I Have to Wait for Permission

Seven months ago I called you with a piece of paper by my side

It had some words my therapist helped me come up with

Among them being I want a divorce

From there we talked once a month

It was sort of this hazy, slow erasing

Trying to move gently through the motions of our new lives, dodging memories of the life we built together, living in a quasi make-believe reality where we weren’t sure how to speak of each other

Throughout it, I felt pretty severed

Distraction, disassociation, grieving in titration,

and the occasional,

bi-weekly grief shit storm

I didn’t feel the urgency until recently

The desire to be validated in my decision and itch to move forward, shake off the energy I started feeling years ago before I could even admit it to myself

The shitty thing about divorce unlike any other uncoupling or breakup is having to get approval to leave someone that you stopped feeling loved and known by and something that you gave everything to, yet still after leaving, have to continue giving more

You called me while I was pulling out of the parking garage this afternoon to let me know the courts denied your paperwork

Yeah, not sure why

The nonchalance in your voice made me break, anger rising in my chest, my hands breaking a sweat

I realized I haven’t been running enough

I haven’t been angry enough

I judge myself, embarrassed for how upset and dramatic I responded

So I psychoanalyze like I do

It’s kinda like looking at the most painful decision you’ve ever had to make in your life

Leaving a good man

With the unanswered question of

Will I ever love again?

Staring at it

in the mirror,

in old pictures,

in songs,

in people

Having no one but yourself to validate

Oh it’s real,

you definitely said the words

Twice actually, when he called and asked if you would change your mind in the middle of the night

Something you can touch and taste and feel and hear

A decision to walk with reckless abandon towards yourself

Yes, baby, you did that

Wake up in the morning, remind yourself again that I mean, technically it’s pending but we can pretend for your sake that it’s final

It wasn’t a nightmare or a daydream

It was a reality that you are begging to step fully into

But you need approval, a bit of permission

A few signatures

A goddamn case number

Yes, you gave every cell of your being

Permission to surrender

Yes, you tried your best

Yes, you were a good wife

Whatever the hell that means

Permission

Approval

Can I go now?

I ask the clerk at the desk

A few more signatures sweetie, come back next week

February 28

My Cold Feet

Somehow, I’m always going to bed with cold feet. It’s fucking annoying. I wear wool socks, I bundle up in my fuzzy robe. But without fail, by the time I climb in, they are freezing and I can’t seem to heat them up myself.

When I first started living alone, I’d have to run my hair dryer on them. Otherwise I’d spend 30 minutes lying awake, flipping side to side like a fish out of water. Huffing and puffing to fall asleep, the thought flashes across my brain like the city lights outside my window. Remembering how quickly my feet would warm up in the 10 years I spent with them wrapped around yours every night. I feel a little sad, mostly annoyed. First, cold feet. Now, unsolicited yearning.

A couple months ago I told a guy that I struggled with cold feet, metaphorically and literally. And how this seemingly small annoyance most nights would open me up, crack me wide awake, to feel your absence, and all the empty space in my room that we thought you would occupy.

I remember it feeling like such a let down. Sharing a vulnerable, kind of embarrassing corner of my messy mind with a stranger. A raw wound I was dressing up in gauze or putting foundation on as I walked out my door every day. Was I trying to build quick intimacy? He asked if I have Raynaud’s Disease. The practicality of his question, and evasion of emotion made me smile. I’m not sure what I expected him to say or do so I drop it altogether. It’s my own little inside joke with myself.

Throughout our decade, I don’t think you asked me that question once. I feel a little sad, mostly amused. It’s exactly the reason I loved you. And one of the many reasons I had to leave you.

I’m pretty sure I had cold feet when I walked down the aisle toward you. Does it make me a bad person to admit that? Was I irresponsible to straight-arm any doubt that I thought was normal? I wouldn’t know for sure because I had gotten really good at ignoring myself by then. I learned to bulldoze through my life, in all those uncertain situations, catapulting and fixated on the end goal so that no one could label me as weak or indecisive.

the “it’s just tough times”

the “well I’m unhappy too”

the trying to fall asleep with cold feet

They don’t tell you that if you’re rushing toward an end goal that isn’t meant for you, you’re wasting time anyway.

Since you’ll have to turn right back around and start over.

I will say I’m pretty good at doing the opposite these days.

I hear myself loud and clear.

Walk back up the aisle if I have to.

I wear wool socks, I bundle up in my fuzzy robe.

March 30

spaces and places that heal

On the water, you’ll see the 80-year-old woman on her walker at 7 AM every morning feeding the birds

The couple that went on a walk to talk through a fight hoping it would make it better, but really it just made it public

The strangers on a first date taking turns sharing their life like a dance, carefully choosing each word and story like each step. Thinking before speaking, deciding whether to step that far forward just yet or uphold the curated two-dimensional image that they would rather see themselves

The mama running with her baby in a stroller, desperate for some fresh air she forced herself to leave the house, gambling a mid-nap wake-up before she blew a fuse

The tiny chihuahua in a bright pink knitted sweater

The owner who matches her and probably got a lot of joy out of doing that

The Jack Daniel’s bottle left on a bench from the night before that makes my heart sink, pisses me off, and makes me laugh all at the same time

The Saturday run club that everyone was just lucky to show up for, social anxiety running between each body in motion

The two girlfriends spilling the tea, catching up on the last month of their lives, or sharing as much of their life trauma as one hour allows

Or the two guys shooting the shit, afraid to talk about much beneath the surface

The woman that sleeps in the corner under the pergola covered in dirt but with the most clear beautiful blue eyes

We smile every morning, just two women

The Free Palestine paintings and protest flyers

A city grasping to stop the incoming bullet train wreck of a society

The person that just needed to get a goddamn run in

On the water, all of us are on one path, moving the same direction, some pushing forward, some savoring the sun, and some just trying to get through the day

March 30

Home is

Home is where you took all your pieces apart

picking them out like splinters one by one, or like the tiny rocks stuck at the bottom of your shoes

unapologetically, but quick! (to avoid prolonging the ache)

Home is intentionally picking up ones you’ve never touched before, foreign shapes and sizes and colors

Pieces that created so much Presence that you look straight down and feel your feet on the ground beneath you, shoes with scuffs and dirt, planted firmly on the graffitied sidewalk

Pieces where you can see clearly, colors brighter, sounds louder

Pieces that force you to look straight up at that speckled sky you took for granted

mornings, afternoons, and nights as the years passed you by

Pieces with so much Pleasure that you have no choice but to gently close your eyes, lean your head back on your pillow, arch your back and sigh (the kind they warned you about in church), one of the only things that can stop your racing mind

Pieces with so much Play, you’re back in middle school without inhibitions, at dance practice with your best friends after school, writing 16-year-old Tumblr poetry in the mornings before dad drops you off on his way to work

Pieces with so much Permission to be whoever you want in the world, create whatever persona that feels aligned and soft and lovely to you that day

Living wide awake, with reckless abandon

These pieces are new are right and old and were waiting for you

These pieces you never thought you could create, fleeting pictures that flashed in your mind daydreaming while you were living a life that didn’t feel like yours

These pieces are home

Home is a place that held you in all the disassembling and reassembling

In all the trying on and pivoting in a different direction and “can I trust myself?”s

In all the “was that a waste of time? or just learning about myself?” moments

Home said that it’s all beautiful, all lessons, all ugly, all good, all bad and everything in between, all black, all white, all grey

actually

Home is every color and no color

everywhere and nowhere

someone and everyone

Home said keep going moment by moment, day by day

Home said to rest

And she said

it’s all enough, just as it is

April 9

the space between

Sometimes I’m walking my neighborhood

Or at a stoplight

Or at the farmer’s market

And I see two people next to each other, usually not more than 10 inches of space between their bodies

And I wait for the space between to disappear

When one person needs a hug

Or pulls the other in for a kiss

Or reaches out their hand to link fingers

No inhibition to who surrounds them

Sometimes the space between

Disappears quickly

Other times it moves in slow motion, with hesitation, like a question

Will you meet me halfway? Or will this be one of the moments I regret giving too much?

I’m always watching the space

Sometimes with neutrality, I don’t really care

I’m just curious

Sometimes with fondness, I’m happy for them!

Sometimes with dread

A reminder of the exhale that comes from leaning

I don’t always need it

Would just sometimes be helpful

To not always have to prop myself up

The space between feels like the most abstract and beautiful thing I’ve thought about all week

Because I’ve had to talk about a lot of reality

And sometimes I’d like to talk about what we can’t see touch or feel

I keep thinking about the energy in that space

All the years, the weight,

or all that isn’t there, all that can be missing

And still someone closes the gap

I saw it between two toddlers this afternoon

Everyone gathered round in awe and anticipation

Like the couple seconds we spend in front of a painting in a museum or when we allow our dog to approach another

Letting the energy reveal itself

Before we take control

Grasp and grip when we’ve reached the top of our discomfort tolerance

And decide what purpose it will serve for our good

April 9

Writing is nothing more than paying attention

Looking up and down and side to side

You can break up with him if you need to

You can hang up the phone or leave the party if that would help

You can beg for the ring

Or think your dream job will do the trick

But also know that whatever feeling you’re chasing, solitude you’re looking for, dying for, thirsting for

Can be found within you

is waiting, patiently for you

June 22

I sit on this hill

I sit on this hill next to my apartment. Kids are squealing, couples overlapping each other’s bodies, bare feet criss-crossed, groups of friends building up the electric current of gossip or connection, maybe a bit of both.

I sit on this hill.

Most times it’s not complicated.

I just like it. It makes me happy.

Helps me ground. Feel where my feet are.

And then other times, I come to feel the hurt, hard.

Before this month, I had been walking with it, talking with it, grocery shopping with it, smiling & laughing.

Kissing with it, sleeping with it.

I went to North Carolina and France and Mexico and Japan and Brazil with it.

I went to all these places and back.

But if I’m being really honest (which I’m trying to be more) I really hadn’t yet stared it straight in the face.

I distracted myself with everything I could think to pull out of my pockets.

I could definitely hear it calling for me to come downstairs, begging me to stop wishing it away.

But my pain tolerance was pretty touch and go up until now.

I tried memorizing the sound of your voice the last time we talked.

I closed my eyes and took mental notes as if I would be able to maintain a grip on the volume and inflections.

I knew one day my memory would get fuzzy and forget whether you talk fast or slow, how you say my name.

How you say You’ll be okay

A year ago feels like a bad dream and I still can’t digest that we are strangers.

I’m happier and healthier and I hear you are too.

I speak kinder to myself the way you tried teaching me to.

I guess maybe I come to this hill to talk to you.

Sometimes. Not all the time.

It was your birthday recently and I was upset with myself for feeling sad.

But since we lost your sister I’m able to recognize grief quicker and more easily.

Grief is having a lot of love for someone and nowhere to put it.

I texted my sisters and my mom that day.

Just plopped all the love I used to give to you right down in front of them.

Anyone want it?

June 22

I considered quitting writing

I considered quitting writing a few weeks ago

I was feeling tired of my incessant need to say things out loud

Rolling my eyes at my insatiable desire to make meaning

over and over,

Yesterday, today, tomorrow, repeat

I often look around and see shades of neat boxes people put themselves inside

& I struggle to close the walls of my own

I struggle to define what my writing, or really what any of my pile of stuff is

I can’t seem to pin down the seemingly needed ‘purpose’ of it

On a Saturday, I’ll think I have it (all) figured out and then by Monday it slips into an entirely new category or rhythm or shadow or shade of messy

So I thought maybe it’s not worth doing

It’s not worth torturing myself over

And then I sat with that reality

that possibility of keeping quiet

Keeping it all to myself

And what I’ve realized

is that Writing is how I tell the truth

To myself

and to whoever is willing to listen

Writing is how I make meaning

And not to be dramatic, but writing for me, is living

It’s noticing

It’s stringing impulses and emotions and sensations together into

Words that I intimately graze my fingers against

the layers of my invisible tough skin

that I’ve built up through years of challenge and grief and hard shit

Writing is how I breathe

and live a life that has a vibrant, colorful, and beating heart

Because I already know what it’s like to lead a lifeless life,

and I don’t see any reasons convincing enough to return to it

Writing allows me to bring my very tender, very opinionated self to the surface of my sleeve and proudly state that my softness is my strength

Standing relentlessly and unconditionally next to the idea that truth and honesty and vulnerability will always bring us closer

To ourselves and each other

Neither I nor you need the four walls of containment and false freedom

for permission

to see colors brighter, to feel the expansion of breath within your chest,

Or the sweet release of your death grip on certainty

You’re allowed to create something

For no seemingly productive purpose

You’re allowed to create something that makes you feel alive

or scared

Actually you’re required to create something, if you have it

that makes you feel alive

and scared

Over and over,

Yesterday, today, tomorrow, repeat

xx,

lena

Joe Hudson talks about three awakenings. Mind, heart, gut. He says the mind wakes up first. Then the heart cracks open. Then the body finally speaks.

I’ve woken up three times in the last two years. Although I can see the progression of mind, heart, and gut in my own story, I sometimes think the gut speaks first but we often silence (and/or shelf) it until the mind is receptive to what the gut was kicking and screaming about.

My Mind waking…

May 2024. A solo trip to Asheville first, then Paris. I drove through the Blue Ridge Mountains and asked myself questions I had always been too scared to say out loud.

….what do I actually want my life to look like?

….have I tried my best to create that life with him by my side?

….where am I not being honest with myself?

I let space and time be my answers.

I’m going back to Paris in May 2026. Two years later. A completely different person. I already feel both giddy and struck with grief.

My Heart waking felt slower. Messier. Post divorce and starting over, you assume that’s the hard part. And it was in a lot of ways. But I was also just beginning to see the layers, feel the layers, face sensations I had numbed and co-regulated through for a decade.

Teary therapy sessions, confusion on whether I was crying about my ex husband and the life I had dreamed of suddenly falling apart or the guy I met last week. Rage-filled runs, a completely dysregulated nervous system, and now no access to the learned method of coping I had all my life.

In November, I gave a talk to my MBA class about intuition, coming home to yourself, and divorce. Something I’d been dreaming of for a year and a half. It stretched me in ways I’m still processing.

A few weeks ago, I recorded a podcast episode about it with Allison Kahler on The D. Tales Podcast (stay tuned for the release!)

I’ve been saying the thing out loud, over and over, until it stops living only in tense shoulders and a pit in my stomach at the end of the night. My Heart woke up when I stopped performing vulnerability and healing, and started to actually feel.

And then finally. My gorgeous Gut spoke. In August, I started getting spots all over my body. After three months of thinking they were bug bites, or mites, or a stress rash…the dermatologist told me it was Psoriasis. Autoimmune. Triggered by stress.

Offff course I would become an autoimmune girly.

The adrenaline of separation, divorce, and business school had carried me through the first year and a half. I was too busy rebuilding to notice what it cost. But by summer, the high wore off. My body started keeping score.

Psoriasis triggered a lot. For better or worse. The eating disorder voice piped up with her usual suggestions to go to extremes. Shame started to set in. How could I let myself get to this point? I prided myself on taking good care of my body. I thought I was done self-abandoning when I left my marriage.

Turns out, a muscle like self-respect is just that. A muscle. And life will continue to test you in all the creative ways it finds.

My Gut woke up last. But spoke up first. Take that for what it’s worth the next time you feel the urge to gaslight yourself. <3

What I’ve learned in the last 8 months is that growth doesn’t always look like climbing or pushing or changing. Sometimes it looks like finally sitting down and listening.

So here’s where we are at now… I spent a month in LA mid December to mid January. I had resistance going back to SoCal. I was quick to shit on LA for being sceney and dishonest. But what I realized is that it might actually be one of the most honest places. You’re seeing both the facade and what’s underneath it at the same time.

I’m debating moving back down within a few years. But right now the Bay feels most like home. I want to continue repairing my relationship with image before I live somewhere like that again. More on that another time.

I discovered The Class while I was there and it changed the way I think about movement and expression. I learned in real time how much emotion is simply energy begging for motion.

Somatic movement, music, dance therapy. These have been integral to my healing the past six months. Learning to let things move through instead of storing them in my body until they become spots on my skin.

I had a somatic session with Jen that untangled things I didn’t know were knotted. A breathwork session with Ari. A life coaching session with Rafa. People who asked better questions than I was asking myself.

I’m not saying to go out and do all the wellnessy things. 2/3 of these people were friends of mine before they were my facilitators. But I am saying to push yourself if you’re feeling stuck.

Over the holidays I watched the Before Trilogy for the first time. It gave me a different understanding of relationships through time. It reminded me of the nuance of love and partnership. All the in between in a love that’s honest about its imperfections.

Last week I listened to Justina Blakeney on We Can Do Hard Things talk about self-respect. It reminded me of a lesson my therapist has taught me when I expressed fear of losing myself in a relationship. How a truly healthy partner won’t allow you to get lost in them. About the difference between love and the urge to be adored. It felt like someone finally named what I’ve been circling for months.

After that, I pulled my wedding box out of the attic. For the first time in a year and a half. Vows. Save the dates. Photo books. The whole nine yards.

I cried with it for a bit. Then I kept some of it in my apartment. On my nightstand to look at again before bed. Not as a shrine. Not to sulk or torture myself. Not because I’m afraid to let go. But more so as acknowledgment. A desire to sit with the feelings I couldn’t sit with a year ago. Curiosity for what would arise. A reminder of what was, seeing now with more gratitude instead of only grief.

I even put on a necklace he gave me years ago. He had one of my favorite words engraved on it. Pentimento.

In painting, pentimento is when earlier images show through. When you can see where the artist pivoted an idea. The first version still visible beneath the final one. I like the concept because it shows our evolution and iterations. Both lined with beauty, both necessary parts of the story.

I’m learning to be okay with that. Who I was with him still shows through. I don’t have to paint over everything to move forward.

My relationship with myself has completely shifted. Even in the low mental health moments, I was able to parent myself differently. To sit with her. Brush her hair back. Lift her chin gently. Ask her to inhale for three, exhale for four. And stay.

And I think that’s the self-respect Justina talks about. Not performing okayness. Just refusing to abandon myself even when it’s hard.

All of 2025, I kept a practice. Every week I wrote down the good things that happened on a post-it. Small things. Big things. Just evidence that life was still moving, still offering, still good. Looking at that collection now feels like holding proof. That even on my lowest days, there was something worth noting.

Three months left until I graduate with an MBA. Then France in May. Then real life begins again. And I feel ready.

I’ve stopped forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do. I made peace with the slower pace my body has been asking for.

I’ve dated enough to start understanding the difference. Between healthy pacing and genuine connection. And the pull toward a trauma bond dressed up as passion. I’m learning to notice when I’m reaching for someone to regulate me versus actually wanting to know them.

It feels different now. Partnership as something that would add to my life. Not complete it.

I’ve gotten really clear on my Dharma lately. Dharma is a Sanskrit word. It means your purpose. Your path. The thing you’re here to do.

I’m not afraid to say it out loud anymore because I know it’s inevitable.

Mornings, I write. Afternoons, I work in the people space. Evenings, I teach. Dance. Yoga. Somatic movement. Whatever wants to move through me.

My life feels so full. A future I’m actually excited about. Deep and frequent connection with my best friends and family. I truly couldn’t have dreamed up a different life.

And so. At times when it feels hard to reconcile the fact that I had planned for forever with someone who is no longer here. I have to trust that this life I’ve built was waiting for me on the other side of all of that.

The earlier image still shows through. But so does everything I’ve become since.

xx, lena

a few things I’m loving lately

Some of these I mentioned above. Here they are again, plus a few more.

The Before Trilogy. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight. Watch them back to back if you can.

We Can Do Hard Things podcast. Specifically the episode with Justina Blakeney on self-respect and relationships. It named things I didn’t know how to name.

The Class. In person in New York or LA, or digitally from anywhere. Movement as emotional release. Changed everything for me.

Joe Hudson - What Happens When You Wake Up?

Nodpod BODY. The best thing that has happened to my nervous system.

Magic Mind. Helps me feel more creative and engaged.

Sirène in Oakland. For Bay Area folks. Go for dinner.

My February Playlist

A weekly TV dinner date with your best friend. My best friend and I are currently obsessed with Tell Me Lies.

Getting back to practices that once filled your cup, even when they start to feel normal. For me that’s buying myself flowers from my favorite florist. Walking the lake in silence or with a favorite podcast (mine is currently EXPANDED by To Be Magnetic). Morning pages. A true morning ritual (mine currently includes Kahani to support my recovery and bilateral/binaural beats and frequencies to do therapy processing sessions with e.g. OPENSTATE or Bryan Cumming). The things that feel small until you stop doing them.

MARO’s newest album SO MUCH HAS CHANGED

I wanted a runway–time to mentally (and melodramatically) prepare myself to be back in all our spaces. But the universe was tired of my avoidance and ripped the bandaid off for me.

I’d quietly exiled the pink sunsets and salt air the same way I turned away from the cornfields and small-town gossip of Indiana, and the smoky, snow-filled mountain days we spent in Park City.

When San Diego comes up in conversations, I still feel queasy. I lose my appetite. Some part of me remembers too much to eat.

Yeah I lived there before the Bay.

Will you move back?

Ah.. yeah I’m not sure… I’ll need a while before I can

Passively waiting for raw skin to scab over through situationships, teary therapy sessions, and rage-filled runs.

Too many ghosts. Too many versions of myself I wasn’t ready to face.

But now that I’m here, the first place I notice you is in the air– which, lucky for me, is everywhere

I’m staying at our friends’ place.

There are remnants of us, in every inch of this town

the lamp we left behind, now in their guest bedroom

the succulents we planted, now on their patio,

the marble side table we celebrated finding at a garage sale

our giant fig tree you spent three years meticulously nursing, now the statement piece in a coffee shop somewhere off the 101

Our fingerprints are scattered, our footprints faded—

on Ponto Beach, where we held each other knowing it was the end,

in our favorite coffee shop overlooking the cliffs,

Sunday mornings with a matcha donut and one cold brew between us,

at the Gelson’s we’d stop at after dinner for a pint of ice cream,

and the hills behind our house where we raced home after dark.

Everyone seems to have a piece of us.

Everyone except us.

I tell myself I won’t spiral.

But maybe unraveling is the most functional thing I’d do all year

I could just be in a low place when it comes to companionship.

too many almosts,

too many men who don’t care if I get home safe,

or who were undermentored by their fathers,

all with strong opinions about who I am and what I want.

I’ve forgotten what it looks like for someone to care.

Forgotten what it looks like for someone to simply take me as I am–and have that be enough

I tell people I’m happy for them. The houses, the pregnancies, the way life keeps moving forward.

And I am, mostly. I even mean it—though it catches in my throat when I say it out loud. It comes out a little forced, a little practiced, like I’m still convincing myself.

Part of me still aches that ours didn’t.

That I had to find a version of peace that feels too much like giving up.

They told me you’re seeing someone new.

I smiled and said good, good, good—

then cried once I closed the door behind me

I tell myself I only want to know you’re happy and healthy, but if I’m honest, I just want proof that you still exist in the same world as me.

If we can fall in love with the idea of someone,

we can grieve the ghost of them too.

It feels lonely knowing you’re the only one who ever knows what those 10 years looked like.

If we never speak again, I’ll be left with the stories we made—unsure which parts were real and which I’ve made softer over time.

The sole witness to a life that keeps replaying, carrying a world only we knew.

I still don’t sleep well.

You steadied me at night—your breath, the warmth, the illusion of safety that love can so easily disguise. You steadied me until the day you became the reason I couldn’t sleep through the night.

When can I stop punishing myself?

Just let me know and I’ll try–

but I’ll probably still come back around to it.

I’m not sure if I’m picking up Hurt and Guilt at the grocery store because they’re familiar,

or because I plan to cook with them.

Either way, they’ve been in my cart for months–every single week.

I don’t know how else I could have fought for us

I’m racking my brain trying to see it all from your lens, but it won’t click.

And you can’t see it from mine.

And maybe that’s the point of divorce—signing the dotted line and finally agreeing to stop trying.

If I avoided my grief all year,

I made up for it last night

I took an Uber to our old place.

My mom used to do that

drive by our first house in New Jersey,

sit out front, cry a little,

and wave to it like it was a person.

I’m here now, in our old driveway, standing in the version of the life we were building.

I picture you next to me—

just another Tuesday between work calls.

We take a beat, kiss in the sun,

barefoot, playing with our kitten,

laughing about something dumb from the morning.

Have you been back?

Maybe healing is just learning how to visit the places that made you

without trying to move back in.

I told our friends about the house in Vista we wanted and joked about meeting back there in 10 years.

They are hopeful for us.

I’m not sure if you are.

A black cat peeked through the curtain when I arrived

for a second, I thought it was yours.

I stood there with my luggage in the driveway,

the air thick with déjà vu,

wondering what I was even doing.

I must’ve looked crazy.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Will this place always haunt me?

Will I move back down and start over again?

On my own or with someone new?

Have you been back?

I wish I was exaggerating when I say therapy has genuinely changed my life over the past two years—but truly, especially this last year.

My first year in therapy was really just a breakdown of what had been a tumultuous five years prior. We walked through my identity grappling, my ex's Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis, his sister's death by suicide, our respective addictions, years of chronic stress, pushing my body beyond her limits, etc. The good old trauma dump that most of my friends over the past year+ have gotten in some form whether they asked for it or not.

You might think, "Well Elena, those big T trauma things impacted him, not you." And yes, I gaslight myself that way too. But here's the thing about me: I'm an Empath (capital E) (and a Cancer and an ENFJ — I've got all the emo girl cards stacked up against me). My ex's diagnosis became my diagnosis. Losing his sister felt like losing a sister of my own (which, in many ways, it was—I'd grown up with her and taken on a sense of responsibility over her mental health, evolving sexuality, and identity). His addiction was my addiction, right alongside my own personal collection.

I was internally running around the house of our relationship like a chicken with my head cut off — completely disembodied for years. Thinking that the more I pushed, the better. And he struggled to keep up with me (as most probably would). I was just so anxious. The more I did, the less he knew how, and the less he did, the more I felt like I needed to. The cycle continued. MS protocols, grief support, couples therapy, communicating with our families. I was doped up on a cortisol roller coaster and had no plans of getting off. Should we plan our sex? Did you listen to that podcast I sent you? Protecting, fixing, managing, repeat. The gripping and the grasping, feeding each other in perfect unrest.

So since May, my therapist here in Berkeley has introduced CRM work—Comprehensive Resource Model, which is basically trauma therapy that integrates with IFS (Internal Family Systems) work. What I've realized is that at thirteen years old, a part of myself stepped into the picture to protect me from moments that started to feel scary; moments I started to feel like maybe I don’t belong here, or is anyone listening?

That part formed as an eating disorder, and she's lived within me, ebbing and flowing, for the better part of fifteen years. When I met my ex at ten years old and officially started dating him at sixteen, he filled the role my eating disorder had been taking on. But she wasn't gone completely—she was just in the backseat, there for me if he ever was, you know, human, and let me down by not being able to protect me at all times. Like a really fucked up backup plan that never got filed away.

In therapy, I've created what's called a Sacred Place—mine is a willow tree in the backyard of my childhood home in Terre Haute, Indiana that my mom planted for me almost twenty years ago in 2006. She knew that I loved them. I sat under it when I felt overwhelmed and overstimulated as a kid (which was fairly often). I've always had a thing with willow trees since then, and still do.

When I think longer and harder about it, they offer a sense of protection I've always longed for. The leaves act like a coat, only offering glimpses where people can peek within and see only pieces of me (maybe I can even control when and what they see)—middle school me, wearing a dress with bunny rabbits on it, legs curled up to my chest, probably writing a poem about what it feels like to sit in grass and be among the trees, with a cornfield that spanned miles and a rainbow sherbet sunset to my left.

I'm realizing lately that longing has only persisted and grown and gotten angrier and formed teeth — because I've had just diluted, small visions of what that protection could look like. And because I didn’t have a foundation of having formed a relationship and sense of belonging within myself before anyone came onto the scene. Whether it was my own father, the spiritual father I used to believe in when I identified as Christian and was practicing in the non-denominational church, or my ex, no matter what they would do, it was never was enough because it didn’t start with me.

So today, my therapist asked me to go under that willow tree in Indiana, and we just asked this part of me some questions. I'll preface this with my personal live experience that hesitates when writing about this topic. I come from a culture that prefers to proceed through life with mental health kept tucked away and quiet. As much as I value privacy — I also believe in the power of voice and in the times I have felt the fear and spoken anyway, I’ve only been thanked. Also, most people at my age talk in past tense about eating disorders: Oh yeah, I had an eating disorder in high school.

It makes me feel tiny and stupid, like I haven't figured out something everyone else did fifteen years ago. Did I miss the stop to get off this fucking train? I also get a lot of It's your decision or It’s a choice—as if I can just choose whether to keep identifying with this thing. So then I feel stupid plus bad, like I'm victimizing myself and continuing to choose behaviors and a lifestyle that no longer serve me. When part of my identity is also being a Smart (capital S) person. And after learning lessons and realizing what no longer serves them, Smart (capital S) people don't usually continually make those choices. (My brain says).

But hunger—real hunger—is a primal need for food, for touch, for protection, for connection. To be heard, known, seen, appreciated. Hunger is the most honest thing about us. It's the part that can't pretend, can't cover up, can't perform, and can't hide. And Anorexia and Bulimia have been trying to tell me something about hunger this whole time. (I wrote more about this here). So, I'm going to describe it like I do in therapy and push myself to share this corner of my life, hoping it wakes someone up the same way it's woken me.

I learned that this part of me’s name is Elena (shocker). These days, I like to identify more with the nickname Lena (I'll probably unpack why I resist my natural name later—(therapy homework?)). And today she sat with me under the willow tree in Indiana; legs curled up to her chest, wearing a dress with bunny rabbits on it.

She is kind of a greyed-out version of myself. Her colors are less bright; she's a bit of a ghost. You can see through her the way I’ve seen through her for years. Ignoring or tuning in whenever I have the emotional and mental capacity. Her head is turned toward me consistently. She's just watching, waiting. Like a really good friend. I'll do whatever you need, mama. Eat or not eat. Shrink or expand. Tense up or relax. Listen to what we need to be loved or heard or seen, or ignore it all. I can go away or I can stay here. Whatever you need.

When you've been in the eating disorder space for a while, you learn all these techniques for how people try to help you overcome and move forward. Some personify the voices in your head—"the drill sergeant," "the nurturing voice." Some give it an ugly name associated with someone you don't know or maybe even dislike. The underlying premise is always: "This person is not you," "This person does not have your best interest in mind," "It's you against this person."

None of this has stuck with me. Why, if this voice and these behaviors don't have my best interest in mind, does it sound alarmingly similar to my own? Why does she sound like she's yearning and screaming and begging to help me, hear me, comfort me?

What I didn't know then is that she was trying to teach me something about belonging, and the ways we try to make ourselves feel safe and as if we belong in what feels at the time like an unsafe, foreign space or situation. The real work isn't learning to control this part of me. It's learning to listen to what she's been trying to say.

The takeaways from befriending this part of me aren't siloed. I feel like I'm meeting myself for the first time. Last spring, when I left my ex, I got off all hormonal birth control for the first time since I was twenty-one. This summer, I made the decision to stop taking an antidepressant I'd started last March. I am meeting myself for the first time all over again at twenty-eight. All these parts of me.

Coming home to yourself means coming home to all the parts of you that have just been trying to goddamn help. Coming home is a softening — it’s a radical act to stop dismissing the voice in the back of your head. A conscious decision to just get curious about what is revealing itself to you through these parts.

This week, I did a breathwork session with my friend Ari, who taught me that breath is not about forcing and pushing your body beyond its limits. It's actually in the softening, in reclaiming voice in our bodies, that we meet ourselves again. Or in my case, for the very first time. Ari said, we are our bodies and our bodies are us. And I released my grip.

I met someone at the end of June who gave me a glimpse of what romantic safety could look like. He opened me up in ways I didn't realize I wasn't ready for, ways that made me understand how much work I still have to do (sorry I also hate when people describe it as work — maybe we should call it play?) But here's what scared me more than anything: how quickly I wanted to hand over that sense of safety to him. How familiar it felt to look for protection, appreciation, and knowing in someone else's arms instead of my own.

The safety and belonging I've been longing for my entire life—that I thought I'd get from my father, from God, from my ex—I don't want to keep outsourcing that shit. It feels terrifying to trust or rely on a man, even to lean on friends for the assumed belonging I used to get from having a partner in a romantic love obsessed society (more on that later). Like setting myself up for the world's most predictable disappointment.

So here I am, trying to figure out how to cultivate that within myself. How to feel belonging, completely alone. How to feel heard, when no one wants to listen. How to feel enough or not too much when I’ve pissed everyone off by speaking up. Not because my therapist assigned it as homework (even though she did). But because I'm tired of being a 28-year-old woman who still feels like that 13-year-old girl, waiting for someone else to tell her she's safe, heard, loved, known, appreciated, and able to simply rest. Exactly as she is in this moment.

Ari played this playlist she handpicked for me after hearing my story — it broke me open. I hope it helps you crack just a bit in the ways you need to.

xx,

lena

I've learned this the hard way. For the past ten years I've experienced all the eating disorders on the menu — anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, orthorexia, etc. I even got to see each of them in a variety of beautiful hues; the nuances, quasi-recovery, dulled down, normalized, ‘I’m recommitting to recovery!’, disordered eating, remission, ‘No I'm really done’…la la la…

I was 17 and sent my ex a link for an eating disorder recovery support page on Tumblr. I remember feeling so ashamed to say it out loud so instead I shared it like I was slipping a dirty note under the door, just barely acknowledging it to him and myself.

What I didn't know then is that hunger — is a primal need for food, for touch, for pleasure, for connection. Hunger is the most honest thing about us. It's the part that can't pretend, can’t cover up, can't perform, and can't hide.

When we deny hunger, we deny the most fundamental truth of being alive: that we need things. That we want things. That our bodies have wisdom that we have been taught to distrust. We suppress turning towards and inviting flavor, color, sound, dance, laughter, silliness in the everyday — all elements that feed a pleasurable and vibrant life.

I spent years trying to control my hunger because I was terrified of my desire. Control is rooted in fear. And eating disorders can be distilled down to an addiction to control. I didn’t know how to access pleasure safely. I was terrified of what it meant to want food, to want sex, to want anything at all with the kind of rawness that doesn't apologize for itself. I thought if I could just get small enough, quiet enough, controlled enough, good enough — that would be enough.

But my hunger started to gnaw at me a few years ago. It didn’t disappear when I ignored it or pretended it didn’t matter. It didn’t disappear when I told her she was being dramatic or over the top or asking for too much. It just got louder, more desperate, more chaotic, more angry.

And desire? Desire became this ominous idea that just confused me. What do you mean by desire? That’s not really for me. I don’t really have a high sex drive. What I didn’t know was that desire and hunger are not just about food or sex. In Dying for Sex, Sonya says:

“Normal sex? Who decides what that means? You think sex is just penetration and orgasms. Why? Because that’s what Samantha said. Sex? Sex is a wave. Sex? Sex is a mindset. Sex is the nonlinear emergent phenomenon that arises when two or more beings, they touch energy fields.”

The same goes for the rest. All desires are energetic fields, desires are spiritual. Your desire, your creativity, your body, and your hunger is spiritual. You are spiritual. Simply by existing.

When you ignore or refuse to acknowledge hunger and desire, you invite in dysfunction and distrust and disconnection — you say yes when you mean no and no when you mean yes.

The real work isn't learning to control our hunger. It's learning to trust it. To listen to what our bodies are actually asking for instead of what we think it should want. To honor the intelligence of desire instead of fearing its intensity.

Your relationship with food mirrors your relationship with everything else. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. Sex, boundaries, pleasure, asking for what you need. When you can sit with hunger without immediately trying to fix it or fill it or make it go away, you learn something crucial about being human: that wanting is not shameful. That needing is not weakness. That pleasure is not something to earn.

Coming home to yourself means coming home to your body. Not the body you think you should have, but the one that gets hungry, that desires touch, that knows what feels good and what doesn't. The one that has been trying to tell you the truth all along, if you could just get quiet enough to listen.

Trust your hunger. Trust your desire. They know things your mind is still learning.

More musings on this topic and a non-exhaustive list of ways I have slowly integrated and welcomed hunger, pleasure, and play back into my life in the past year.

- dance classes (and not caring how I look while in them)

- holding the dichotomy of not taking life too seriously but also not for granted aka remembering to be silly and lighten up as often as I can or whenever shit gets heavy

- being honest in therapy

- being honest in my friendships / with my family

- choosing new flowers weekly based on the colors, textures, energy I’m feeling

- colorful produce with names I can’t pronounce at the farmers market

- quirky clothes that make me happy and feel like Jessica Day or a Modcloth superfan

- Geneen Roth’s Women Food and God; I picked this up at a thrift store for $2 in high school simply being intrigued by the title, not knowing her writing would still stick a decade later

- Hilary McBride’s writings: The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living and Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are

- Concepts on creativity being aligned with your spirituality re: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

My writing is a byproduct of the realizations and processing I walk through in real time. So I am writing today on the concept of surrender. Before this summer, I thought I had fully embodied whatever the hell surrender means. I left a 10 year relationship and marriage that I had fought long and hard for. I surrendered!

Turns out, there is a part one and part two to the whole shindig. Surrendering can be defined as the physical act of doing the damn thing — but it’s not complete without facing all the gorgeous and messy guts that people can’t see.

Surrendering is just as much, if not more, about facing the truth inside of you than it is about anything else. So anyway, I am a year out of asking for a divorce. I thought to myself: Well, I know I’ve had some distractions with school but I’m someone who’s ‘always doing the work’.

Sorry, just wondering, when did self-discovery and self-awareness become a badge of honor? And why the hell do I have so much shame wrapped up in realizing that my insides don’t exactly match the healed image I’ve curated to exist and step foot in the world? And WHY does that version of me not feel worthy to exist and step foot in the world?

I am frantically looking around the room for an instruction manual on how to grieve the loss of someone who became part of your identity…how to deal with the anger that the life you envisioned for yourself is now just ashes somewhere in the middle of nowhere Indiana, or Utah, or San Diego, or France. All places that I don’t know how to return to without avoiding eye contact — an uncomfortable kitchen sink feeling of apologetic and embarrassed (with just a sprinkle of security and deep knowing).

How do I do all of this in a way that doesn’t scare too many people, keeps me likable, and doesn’t fuck up my career and life trajectory?

Then, I am feeling shame that I even allowed myself to get to this point. How could you make a man (or someone outside of you completely) hold so much power in your life?

Well, because… doesn’t everyone? And especially when you’re with someone through formative years where your prefrontal cortex hasn’t even peaked her head out the damn door yet? We live in a society that normalizes co-dependency and dysfunction in relationships because xyz, etc. (probably more on that later).

So I started IFS and CRM work in May after transitioning to a new therapist. With her, I’ve learned that somewhere along the yellow brick road, when I expressed my confusion and wrestling around topics that were uncomfortable for the people around me to face (identity, food/body, anxiety), I was met with a response that made me feel like too much (of everything).

In order to ameliorate these apparently fatal flaws and make myself more digestible, I leaned into the healed girl identity. If I’ve read a book on it or listened to a podcast on it, I’ve learned (and changed, duh). If I go to therapy (A+ therapy student), then I’m good to go. But the ones closest to me see the nooks and crannies of my dark and untouched parts. And even though being ‘too much’ has sort of been a lifelong crucible (personal brand? fine, I’ll talk about it in therapy), my ex made me feel unconditionally loved in a lot of ways.

Sometimes he felt like the only person who truly did unconditionally love me—through body changes, unattractive behavior, all of it. He was steadfast. But so much so that he didn’t hold me accountable to the ways I wanted to change (also probably more on that later).

In the same breath, I was with him since I was 17, so I sometimes wonder if the nature of our dynamic and who we were as people (he being incredibly agreeable, low maintenance, and easy going) and me feeling like the quite literal opposite could have also contributed to my ‘too much’ narrative.

I know I’m not alone in this. Because if I were, then Adam Brody and Kristen Bell wouldn’t have gone viral in Nobody Wants This when she expresses fear of becoming emotionally dependent on a guy who would eventually realize she is too much and dips (I really resonate with that eye roll). To which Adam responds with “I can handle you” (still not sure I love that word choice but I’ll allow female hearts to melt for now).

Needless to say, I’ve tried my very best to rush that goddamn healing. It’s gone this way with friends too. Even though I’m technically vulnerable about my life — it’s never without a pretty bow, a deflection, and/or dry and dark humor. I share my reality and then regret it just a little. Sorry I know that was a lot, you don’t have to read/listen to all of that. When will they figure me out? When will they get sick of the range of all of me and decide it’s just too much?

I am an advocate of self reflection and awareness, absolutely — but when and to what extent does policing every word you say only create repression and withhold the fullest expression of who you are in this moment. Not the fully healed version (spoiler, that doesn’t exist), not the version of you that can see it all in the distance. How will we ever grow in intimacy if we can’t be honest? With ourselves and each other.

Through my surrender, I’ve realized that the universe is going to attempt to teach you the same lesson 365 times until you pipe up and listen to her.

My divorce was finalized this month and I found out this past week. Here’s two short poems I wrote shortly after.

Survival is the new Martyrdom

I’ve survived 365 days without you

I celebrated our first and second wedding anniversary, what would have been 10 years together, your birthday, and my birthday

all with you nowhere to be found

You feel like a ghost at this point

I voluntarily look at pictures sometimes to remember you existed

What is it that I’m processing again? My therapist reminds me

Why and where did I get that inside joke that lives in my head rent free whenever someone says a specific word or phrase?

I’ve survived 365 days without you when I didn’t think I could survive even one

I’ve slept 365 nights (some just barely) without you co-regulating me to sleep

now I get to circle in the ‘Single’ bubble on all my paperwork for the rest of my life

It feels like the biggest privilege I know not all women are gifted

A second lease on life

A chance to say ‘I’m so sorry but I need to leave for the both of us’

Sometimes with someone new (or old people), I still feel the need to recount all the ways I gave you every cell of my body

I fear they will see me as a flake or someone that isn’t intentional

But I know, now

Despite seeing it done millions of times before me

Despite seeing it revered and awarded over and over in society

that Self Abandonment is not a badge of honor

And Martyrdom has never been something I’ve strived for

Shades of Grief

Everybody is going to tell you to move forward

To forgive (yourself and them)

To accept, To soften

We live in a society that is allergic to emotions and particularly — the sharp and less attractive kind

Everybody is going to tell you to run fast and move forward in the pursuit of brushing it all under the rug, giving everything to Goodwill, locking it all up in your storage unit (calling myself out on that one)

Everybody but me

I’m going to lightly beg you to get a little more angry for a little bit longer

Or however long you need to

I’m going to beg you to scream and punch and cry and release your grip from being digestible or calm or pretty or seemingly sane

I’m going to beg you to stop contorting yourself in all these dysfunctional ways, just for the sake of other’s comfort and perception

But I’m not going to tell you what to do next Hayati

I’ll be here and you’ll meet me here in all your shades of grief

This week I’ve put together a playlist that speaks to the flurry of emotions that is earth shattering life transitions that allow you to return to yourself (a bit battered and bruised, but also proud and hopeful). Love well, Listen closely. To all of it.

xx,

lena

A pretty gloomy moment for Southern California. It was my 27th birthday. July 7th! A Golden one! My Saturn return! (Iykyk Kacey Musgraves).

My sisters and my mom made a dinner reservation at a special, trendy spot in LA. We were all trying to pretend that my life wasn’t falling apart, business as usual. Get dressed up, take a few pictures, wrap each other in love. Keep moving forward. I remember the tuna tartare appetizer was phenomenal. It helped to fixate on stuff like that at the time. They also had olive green velvet couches that my mom and I discussed. Should I get a velvet couch or polyester? Distraction, disassociation, distraction, repeat.

“Are you processing what’s happening right now, Elena?”

“Nope, help me pick a couch!”

The day after my birthday I woke up and packed my car with everything I hadn’t sold from my previous life.

A black tub of a decade worth of memories (we are talking long distance love letters from 16 years old, circa 2014) that would eventually go directly in my storage unit (until I built some resilience over the year), some clothes, my skiing gear (that I wasn’t planning on using without my ex keeping me from falling down a mountain), and a guitar from my uncle (that only my ex played).

A bunch of reminders! Some essentials.

My sister drove up with me from LA to Oakland. We stopped at In n Out and sent a picture to the family group chat.

“Almost there!”

Maybe if we kept acting fine, it would be fine? We both pretended that it was normal for her to be with me instead of my partner of 10 years.

We both missed him.

No, we both ached for him.

Sometimes one of us would make the mistake of saying his name. Joking that he was way better at moving and lifting heavy things than her. We would laugh, and then the silence would fall flat.

I didn’t let myself cry too hard so I could continue concentrating on the road. She held my hand. The first of what would be thousands of times over the course of the next seven months that I would stop myself from crying too hard so I could concentrate on the road.

On the way home from Target repurchasing move-in items for the first time without him.

On the way to class. On the way home from class.

On the way home from spending an evening with friends and all their significant others where I plastered a smile on my face for five hours.

On the way home from a date.

Sometimes it worked, most times it didn’t. Cue crying really fucking hard.

I am trying to write more about how to know when to leave, how to actually leave, and how to survive the fact that you left. I am trying to write because I feel strongly that my experiences and choice to burn my life down and rebuild it in a completely new way - might land in the lap of just one person who is confused, lost, and might need to hear them. I can’t tell you whether or when to leave the relationship, the job, or the party. But I can remind you to get really fucking quiet. So you can listen for the answer, from yourself.

Right now, I am in this really, ugly, messy, uncomfortable middle. I am waiting for my divorce papers to be finalized as we near Valentine’s Day (with my luck the courts will serve me on February 14th). Should I book a proactive appointment to a Rage Room? I resist the urge to text my ex and instead text my sister. Whether its to share a sad late-night memory, ask how he’s doing, or check on the paperwork; I know it would only make things hurt worse, for longer.

Anyway!

Random things that made me happy this week:

• My current emotional support hyper fixation sweater from Nuuly

• Getting my hair layered and learning how to work with my natural curls (thank you, Ryan at Scarlet Salon in Berkeley)

• Scarlett Longstreet’s non exhaustive list of places I've cried during my divorce

• Diving head first into Katie Baer’s poetry books, And Yet, and What Kind of Woman

• Starting Rachel Havekost’s Where the River Flows: A Memoir of Loss, Love, & Life with an Eating Disorder

• This quote shared by my friend, Ben (who is definitely reading this)

  At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.

  Heller responds,“Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”

• Meeting Kate Deciccio at yoga and supporting her efforts to donate funds for a teen in Gaza

  

• Buying myself roses (yes, I will be purchasing myself flowers every week this month simply because there’s no shame in the deflecting game).

• Starting a poetry portfolio! I really hate Instagram most of the time but sometimes it’s fun. Follow me on there if you want - @lenamnayarjipoet

xx,

lena

One of my favorite musicians, Trevor Hall released a song titled “all my lessons”. Throughout 2023, I constantly referred back to his lyrics to bow in gratitude for the pain, and all my own lessons that would allegedly (hah) allow me to experience peace in the days ahead.

A year ago in January of 2024, I saw the darkest year of my life in the distance. I was applying for grad school and excited for what I knew would be the start of a new chapter. A breath of fresh life after an arduous 2023 where I worked through several mental health battles and was finally coming out of a fog, and in a newfound peace with myself. I didn’t know, however, how much my life was about to change in ways outside my career and a move to a new city.

In April of 2024, my foundation, identity, and relationship started to unravel. I quickly needed to reassess and course correct in a way that would not only reshape the rest of my year but the rest of my future.

Fast forward a few months, the second half of 2024 ushered in liberation, joy, clarity, and belonging that I had never experienced before. I did things I thought I would never be able to do (like do a solo road trip), all on my own (painting my apartment), with no idea how to do them (getting lost in the Blue Ridge Mountains). But that didn’t come without the misery, confusion, and ache of rock bottom (did you know you can hit rock bottom several times?! AND there is indeed a bottom to rock bottom! I don’t make the rules honey, take it up with the karma gods.)

Looking back at my life before moving to the bay in the summer of 2024 feels like blowing dust off a chest up in your attic. Bracing yourself for discomfort, feeling the tightening in your chest making it hard to swallow and breathe. Then finally, FINALLY, feeling the gasp and hopeful, quiet questioning; can you handle whatever memories will come flooded your way?

Here, in my new home, overlooking my new city, I have gently and apprehensively stumbled upon a levity and inner peace that I had never crossed paths with in my adult life. The day I left my decade long relationship and marriage (July 20th, 2024) felt like the first day of my life. My first day meeting a new me that was and always has been so very eager to meet me too.

I overflow with gratitude for the life I don’t know if I deserve but I know I fought for. I am forever indebted to the people in my life who have relentless stood by me, offering me unlimited grace and understanding as I trip, and fall, and regain my balance. I am sure that I will find even more clarity and appreciation the next 12 months to securely and compassionately step more fully into the new person I am becoming.

TLDR; This year put me on my absolute ass. I would have been caught dead in a ditch without my sisters’ patience, my parents’ relentless support, my friends making me laugh daily, Bhakti yoga, weekly dance classes and so so much more.

I lost the person that had been my best friend for the last decade, my one and only partner, who I thought was the love of my life (questioning if that concept is even real anymore).

I fought to rebuild a completely a new life for myself. And while I may have lost him, I truly did find parts of myself I had never known. I had more help than I deserved along the way but this year made me believe again in a higher power simply because I couldn’t deny the reality I was living, being one of divine timing and guidance.

This January 2025 I am feeling genuine awe and gratitude for the beautiful horrific shit show that has been my life being blown up, only to be rebuilt in what feels like a more aligned and authentically me manner.

**I wrote the above almost a full month ago and have hesitated to put it out into the world. I’m realizing that the clearing that writing creates for me is two-fold; first, forming the emotions, thoughts, experiences into strings of words that mostly make sense only to me. And second, letting those strings of words leave my side, depart from my physical bubble and live somewhere brand new. I’m realizing that the most cathartic part of writing for me is letting the raw and unhealed and messy out into the world to be devoured and relatable and aged.

So here I am, pushing myself to do part two of the mind-bending emotional rebirth that is healing. Because I am fighting to rebuild a life I am proud of but that won’t come without honoring the worthy work that I am putting in to face my past. And I want all that worthy work to have a safe place to land, and gather as a testimony of my strength during this wildly unique time of my life. The only way out is through. Every day, completely imperfect, keep showing up to move through, through, through.

Recent things I have been loving:

• Leslie Stephen’s newest Morning Person Issue #178. I frequently felt guilty for “climb(ing) into the cradle of the slingshot” throughout my life - from convincing my partner to move across the country to Park City, Utah with me, then again to San Diego, the beginning and end of a marriage, new jobs, grad school. I thought I was alone in the compulsive search for the next new shiny thing. It’s an addiction we can all relate to. The practice is in the noticing and course correcting. It’s in dropping self judgement and expanding our self-compassion.

• Caroline Winkler’s newest Youtube video on life lessons she’s learned the hard way.

• Jen Hatmaker on the We Can Do Hard Things Podcast on Marriage, Loneliness, and Starting Over.. (every.single.word) and part 2 episode Forgiveness & the Audacity to Rebuild

• Recently finished The Fixed Stars: A Memoir by Molly Wizenberg and was again blown away by a woman’s capacity and willingness to

• Currently reading: Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

• A recent favorite quote by Elizabeth Gilbert… “The women whom I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out. They got that way because shit went wrong, and they handled it. They handled it in a thousand different ways on a thousand different days, but they handled it. Those women are my superheroes.”

• Recent addition to my never-ending breakup playlist…

Love always,

xx lena

I have stared at a blank page for about a month now. I have struggled to give myself permission to write freely here even though the space was intended to serve that very purpose when I created it almost a year ago. The past few weeks I have had a reoccurring thought that anything I would write would just continue to be agonizing, contradictory statements about what pain and loss and confusion feels like, tastes like, sounds like.

But in the spirit of trying, I will show up honestly if not for myself, for perhaps just one other that might stumble upon this the same way I stumble upon others’ messy but perfectly well and perfectly enough verbal processing.

I am currently re-reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron with Leslie Stephens’ Morning Person community. I started the book last year as I recommitted myself to intuitive eating, and coming home to my body, mind, and spirit in a completely new way, for the first time ever. Cameron’s words around creative recovery being integral to spiritual recovery, I then related to integral elements to my own eating disorder relapse and recovery. Her words rocked me then and they now rock me even harder, while also taking on new meanings.

Throughout the past year, my life has fallen apart and been rebuilt in ways I never expected. Namely, I ended a 10 year relationship that had been a large part of my identity since I was 17 years old.

As I rebuild a life on my own, the universe continually puts cinematic and haunting moments in my path that either remind me of my old life or affirm my decisions over the course of the past year. I am guessing these messages are intended to serve as a mirror, reflection, or reminder but most of the time they register simply as an uncomfortable chill to my body and brain.

Sometimes I write about them, sometimes I make a mental note. Most times I frantically look around my empty apartment both disappointed and relieved that no one is there to bear witness the intimacy of breathing through a rush of beautifully tragic memories.

I went to a dance class this week for the first time since high school. I stood next to a girl who looked alarmingly similar to myself. I asked her name and if she had been to the class before. Also her first, she explained that she was a high school senior and used to dance competitively, ‘just wanted to return to dance in a soulful, life-giving way’.

Something about meeting this 17 year old girl on a night where I too, was trying to return to dance in a soulful, life-giving way - a practice that was so integral to my identity, spirituality, and self as a 17 year old - felt like the universe holding up a big fat mirror to that time of my life. Not in the way that it was showing me “what could have been” (a more embodied, true version of myself the past decade) or the societally comforting, black and white categorization of grieving lost time.

But more so, the luxury of being a young person with the sole responsibility of paying attention to my desires, needs, and patterns. Less in a self-consumed way but rather a time to understand, self-identify, and reflect in order to thrive as a self-sufficient adult and ultimately have some kind of positive impact on the world and others.

I don’t regret a single moment of the past 10 years. I have a deep well of love and respect for the life my former partner and I built together - one where we supported each other relentlessly through what are often the most destabilizing and vulnerable times of life. We were dealt a challenging deck of cards, both individually and as a unit - with an immense amount of grief, hardship, and trauma we were forcibly asked to process. I have a deep pride and knowing that I have been guided every step of the way, including the steps of my marriage and now, my divorce.

At 17, I didn’t know that when I entered into relationship with my then partner, I subconsciously would exit relationship with myself. There is nothing and no one to blame here though - not me, not him, or even the nature of the relationship.

I am honest and accepting that the departure and decision I made away from being a single person to myself and in the world, has left me picking up fragmented pieces 10 years later - to rebuild whoever I was trying to be and couldn’t be when I was with him. In my rebuilding, I have not only returned to dance and embodiment but have returned to myself in a way I have never seen before.

There are hundreds of books I want to read, and thousands of words I want to write. I’m not sure how I’ll be using this space moving forward but I’ll pause here with some facts about what life looks like for me right now as I start to rebuild. Some of it may matter, most of it probably doesn’t. I cherish it all anyways.

I now live in Oakland, California completing my MBA at UC Berkeley. Most days I only want to read, write, and practice Bhakti yoga. I continue on the path I wrote for myself before my current life transition - trusting that what I’m working through spiritually, emotionally, and mentally will translate and manifest into something that I can scale to impact and serve others.

The past year, I paused the self-help, self-optimizing podcasts and leaned into using music to process my emotions, regulate my nervous system, and move stale energy that comes with the territory of grief, reawakening, and identity change. I’ve maintained weekly therapy for the first time in my adult life the past year and a half and can confidently say my therapist has both changed my life and saved my life. I spend most of my time (when not doing MBA things) walking the lake I live on, going to the weekly Saturday farmers market, and doing my best to settle into a community that has felt like a wildly undeserving soft landing and divine realignment.

Most mornings I start my day with a poem from Mary Oliver Devotions, an essay from Brianna Wiest’s 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, and a journal prompt from Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving Journal: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change.

I was particularly floored by Week Two of The Artist’s Way. And finally, Oliver’s I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable still stings with each read.

enjoy + take care.

xx,

lena

“The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain — the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutterably alone.” More than anything else, attention is an act of connection. I learned this the way I have learned most things — quite by accident.”

“Writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.”

I Don’t Want to be Demure or Respectable

I don’t want to be demure or respectable.
I was that way, asleep, for years.
That way, you forget too many important things.
How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them, are singing.
How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and the sky, it’s been there before.
What traveling is that!
It is a joy to imagine such distances.
I could skip sleep for the next hundred years.
There is a fire in the lashes of my eyes.
It doesn’t matter where I am, it could be a small room.
The glimmer of gold Böhme saw on the kitchen pot
was missed by everyone else in the house.

Maybe the fire in my lashes is a reflection of that.
Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy.
Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?
Listen to me or not, it hardly matters.
I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish.
I’m just chattering.

I’m barely sleeping 

you moved states 

it made me break 

I’m happy for you, I swear

my tears are warm against my skin, in the sun

I’m driving to try to get somewhere, anywhere

to do something, anything

my tears feel separate from me

waiting, watching me break 

probably laughing a bit,

the thought that I could have moved forward 

with the bones of the family we almost built 

never far behind 

I look over my shoulder 

there they are, right on my heels 

can I shake them off? 

even if I do, the dust will lay there 

It’s been two weeks too long of feeling this depth

someone help me crawl out, but don’t ask anything of me

please god don’t ask me how I am

can I just sit on my couch

and feel my warm tears

and not have to explain anything

am I allowed to be messy

oh so messy

on a Monday, Friday, Sunday 

I say today is the day I’ll come out of it

nothing yet

my friends wake up in their homes,

next to their own  

have coffee, and relax 

no plans, no faces, no small talk 

they are known 

like I was 

every failed distraction makes me 

fall harder 

hurt worse 

you ruined the idea of drinking myself numb 

so I write bleeding heart poetry 

I can see it coming, no mercy

how long? give me an end in sight

forever, they say

feel it all, no way out but through

shouting into a void 

I’ll still go to class tomorrow 

put a smile on

ask my friends how they are 

I won’t tell the truth about myself

can’t think too long

about the handle of vodka that made me say the words

I’m done 

didn’t realize my body was objecting to a life

my mind thought was my only option

my body, she spoke so loudly

giving up and surrendering and crumbling

two months later, my mind caught up, realizing

what those four letters really meant

drinking everything to ease your mind 

when the hell were you going to ease mine 

are these just moments? 

that I should hold my breath and hold on for?

no one here to hold me

don’t know anyone well enough

to comfortably unravel

am I allowed to be messy?

oh so messy

finally got myself on the ground

staring up at the sky,

mostly blue with a hint of pink

feels better here

giving myself permission to be messy

oh so messy

you moved states,

I’m happy for you, I swear