It will come to no surprise to you that I’m a bit of an anxious person. I think we all are, actually, and that anxiety just manifests in different ways. For me, it means that my brain is constantly about ten paces ahead of reality. I remember getting praised for this when I was first…

Since I moved to Nashville in 2014, the most consistent thing in my life has been Sunday Family Dinner.  My brother also lives here, and we both love to cook, so it started as an excuse to try new recipes or cook those big, superfluous-for-one meals that we’d never make just for ourselves. Then it…

I started meditating in 2020 because I was dating someone who did it every morning. We’d sit in my morning light-soaked living room, coffee steaming on the table in front of us, and listen to the dude with the Australian accent tell us to inhale…exhale…and close our eyes.  When the relationship crashed and burned, at…

I bought my first house when I was twenty-three and sold it for a $100,000 profit at twenty-six. This is what I learned—and what I wish I knew.  Sexy, clickable headline aside: let’s not bury the lede here. No two financial situations are the same. Mine, at twenty-three, was the result of immense privilege: I…

Gardening taught me I’m still allowed to like something, even if I suck at it. I’ve been attempting to be a gardener for the last six years. Despite the TikTok videos and how-to blogs and expert advice from my master gardener sister, my garden has never, not once, not ever had a perfect year of…

My inability to focus on a single task — unless I’m in a flow state — for longer than a few moments has bothered me for years. It wasn’t always like this; I used to be able to spend whole swaths of time researching and writing about democratization in the Middle East, for example (shoutout…

Admittedly more than 500 words on my weirdest hobby. Last year, when I told my friends that I had five baby chicks in a Tupperware container in my guest room, their faces smiled and nodded, but their eyes screamed: this bitch has finally lost it. Thankfully, none of their staged interventions worked, and I got…

3 steps to reconnect with your purpose at work. We’ve all been there. Those days when we close our laptops in the evening and think, what did I even do today? Those weeks and months when we feel like we’re stuck in neutral at work, while all of our friends seem to be getting promoted, or landing…