Before I get to The Fall, there is something I need to say first. I promise this is the long one, the one that touches everything, and not me edging you until the next chapter.

I am in another transitional season, and I keep thinking about how The Last Romantic held me together while I was coming apart at the seams. I never built it to monetize. I built it because I needed connective tissue: something to hold the passion projects, the therapy, the accountability, the community. It is where I tested every creative medium I could get my hands on, wrote love letters to cities all over the world, and manic-obsessively started an investigative journalism and biopic piece. It is where my day-to-day philosophy and my healing run on the same clock, often in real time. It is where I take the armor off in public and practice vulnerability.

This is, everything important to me.

I live in a capitalist country with a chip on my shoulder and a hamster wheel under my feet, one that somehow runs uphill and downhill at once, and I want off. On paper my career looks fine. Inside, it feels stagnant, and no critic is harder on me than I am. But I believe this: when we are in tension and in pain, we create. We go back to the craft. That is the only medicine.

It has been over a year since my first Substack post, A Letter to My Father. It has been ten months since he and I last spoke. Somewhere between launching thelastromantic.co and going deeper into the work, I deleted that letter. I want to put it back in front of you, because the news has felt like my heart being cut open: the Cornell rape case, the choreography of victim-blaming, how hard it still is for a woman to be believed, let alone to get justice.

I have mentioned this in passing before. I have been sexually abused. I buried most of it, and then I did what the culture trains girls like me to do. I audited myself. Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve. I filed myself under “damaged goods,” the way so many women with so-called Daddy Issues do, and I never noticed that the label itself was doing the abuser’s work for him. Here is the machinery, as plainly as I can state it. A father teaches his daughter what she is worth and how she should expect to be handled. The world then names the damage after her, not him. The name makes her a target. And when the next man finds her, the name is already there, waiting to explain why it was her fault.

So I am going to show you all of me: who I was when I wrote to my very first abuser, my father, and who I am now. Every time we normalize a woman’s self-abandonment, every time we applaud her for going quiet, we feed the larger injustice. And I need you to understand something before you read it. The woman who wrote that letter a year and change ago, no, the child consciousness that wrote it, is not the woman before you today. It is imperative that you understand that.

My very first Substack post, in full:

What the Letter Was

Within hours of posting it, people I love reached out. I had sent it to some of them myself, and I understand now what I was actually doing. I was trying to belong. The people around me are wholesome, many of them church-going and family-first, and frankly they have carried me through this life with a love I needed desperately and never got at home. A part of me has always wanted to fit in with them. It has been, admittedly, a lonely existence, being the lone wolf at other people’s family tables.

The intent was good. The impact was not. One of my mentors asked whether my father was truly “bad,” whether he had abused me at all, given how clearly I could trace the why and the how of what made him. I appreciate a mind that prods. But something cold started to open in me. Had I just written a public case for mercy on behalf of my abuser? Was this what self-abandonment looks like when it is articulate? Was this fawning?

I wince reading it now, because it is so obviously child-Suki on the page: mind-reading, pleading, saving, rescuing. It is a girl begging the man who abused her physically and emotionally, who taught her she had no worth beyond what she could produce, to please go heal his own shame so that she could keep the tatters of him. A man who could not see that his daughter was being sexually abused, by his own family, by her peers, by her partners, because seeing it would have meant looking in the mirror. That girl was begging for a piece of him, and a place in his life.

So that, she could settle for crumbs.

It is hard to describe how isolating it is to live inside that war, heart against head, every time I abandoned myself the way I was taught to. The pattern did not begin with the men I chose. It began in the apartment I grew up in.

Shame, is the most unhelpful emotion a person healing from cPTSD can carry. I carried the specific shame of Daddy Issues, with every way this culture turns it into a punchline, for a very long time. If I wrote a new letter today, it would sound nothing like that one.

There are more of us than the headlines will ever hold. I am praying for Jane Doe at Cornell, because part of me understands her exactly, and the rest of me can only imagine. It is the feeling of a woman who leaves her own body during the assault because somewhere she has already decided: it is probably best to let this happen and get it over with.

So in a dark season I have decided that women like me, lucky enough to have an audience, a path to healing, and real support, have a job. See the pattern that keeps us shackled. Say it out loud. Heal out loud, in community, instead of in isolation and shame.

Because the doctors and therapists told me, in careful clinical language, that what happened to me was horrific and not my fault, and cerebrally I agreed with them. A part of me believed them only halfway.

The other half had help. I once dated a self-described sociopath, a psychologist who specializes in treating antisocial personality disorder, and when I spiraled into shame after I was raped, he told me that yes, he thought it was partly my fault. I can only imagine how many men like him there are, planting that one seed of doubt in women all over the world. This man treats patients. For God’s sake. I believe he stalked me for a while, too. If you are reading this, Doctor: have you started looking in the mirror yet, or are you still too busy punishing women because you hate your mother?

So I am done protecting my father. I am done protecting anyone who has harmed me. When I started writing, first on Instagram and then here, he went through my brother. Have empathy, the message came. He was only doing his best. And before you tell your story, think about what it could do to his reputation. Notice what I was being asked to protect. With a heavy heart, I am still estranged from my brother. There was no healthy relationship available to me while he still idolizes the man, the way I was once wrapped up in that trance.

My mentor asked whether my father was truly bad.

The Fall

I was four, maybe five, when my parents’ marriage broke. Maybe it was always broken; four is simply as far back as my memory goes.

The story I was handed is this. My father, who traveled constantly for a management job at a good company, set up a small storefront in Seoul for my mother to run. They sold American goods, Disney mostly, and my mother, a visual artist, loved having a canvas. She started an affair with my father’s business partner, who ran another store in the same plaza and had a wife and two sons of his own. My mother was ten years older than my father, with marriages and children before me. A flighty, home-wrecking woman, cursed to repeat what her own mother had done to her father. That is the tale I was told my whole life, and I am passing it to you exactly as it was passed to me.

The first memory I ever brought into EMDR is the one I call The Fall.

From the start, my mother would not nurse me. She was busy with God-knows-what, my father was busy making money, and I was left with my grandmother, who was busy with my cousins and sometimes left me with other relatives. That is where some of the abuse happened.

One day my grandmother and I were walking up to our building, a high-rise in or very near the heart of Seoul. I remember being depressed, even at four or five. I remember feeling unlike other children and not understanding why my parents were never around. She mentioned that my mother and father were both home, and I ran for the elevator.

For some reason, she cried out after me: “No! Don’t go!” But my stubby fingers had already smashed the up button and the penthouse floor, and then, naughtily, the button that closes the doors, so she could not stop me. Vain as she was and is, you would never catch my grandmother without heels. So even on my short, stubby legs, I beat her.

The door to our apartment opened onto the family portrait, the kind wealthy Koreans hang front and center at the entrance: my father, my mother, and me in her lap. There was a gash running vertically through it.

I heard my father screaming and my mother crying for mercy. I turned right. There he was, with a kitchen knife straight out of a Jason Voorhees movie, feathers and the remains of our beautiful home all over the floor, and my mother on her knees.

“Please. Please have mercy. Please let me live.”

When she saw me, she saw an opportunity. She pulled me in front of her, between the knife and herself, the same arrangement as the portrait.

“Don’t kill us.”

My father screamed that she had never cared about us, that he would kill us all. He raised the knife again and again, centimeters from my face. I remember dissociating completely.

The next thing I know, he had snatched me out of her arms like a rag doll and was holding me over the railing of our balcony. Way before Michael Jackson did.

I remember floating for a while. It felt like I was flying. At some point there were lights below me, police cars and fire trucks, and I started counting them. The firemen unrolled an enormous tarp. A negotiator raised a megaphone and began pleading with my father, who was determined to kill us all.

“Mr. Song, please don’t do this.”

In my letter I praised my father for never giving up. We do not give up, I wrote. That’s a rule. I had forgotten where I learned it.

Vulnerably, I cannot quite remember yet whether he dropped me onto the tarp or collapsed onto the floor before they took him out in handcuffs. This one memory took multiple EMDR sessions, and then we paused for over a year, because I needed more scaffolding and support to hold it and process it fully.

Dear Reader, thank you for listening to a part of my story.

Transparently, the past few months asked me to practice something The Last Romantic isn’t known for: privacy. I was navigating changes that made discretion feel like the most responsible thing I had to offer, so I kept my routine and my circumstances close, the way you cup a match against wind.

But being The Last Romantic comes with a condition. My friend Michael has a phrase for it, and I’m stealing it here (Michael, I’m sorry if I’ve just blown your moniker and your cover): Forced to Observe.

It is a strange sentence to live inside. You don’t get to simply walk through a room. You watch yourself walk through it, and you watch everyone else, and you take notes for a reader you can’t see. And with the watching comes a weight I can only call self-imposed responsibility: to reach into other people’s hearts and crack a little light through them, however I can.

That responsibility is a double-edged sword. I’ve learned that many of us with cPTSD carry this overwhelming sense of justice, this outsized feeling of being accountable for how things turn out. I’ve decided to keep mine.

In my hardest years, accountability and agency were how I paved a road out, for myself and for a few people walking behind me. I am still learning where the balance sits. But I believe this trait is the fuel for my purpose, and I’m not willing to trade the fuel for a quieter engine.

My goal, then, is to get stronger, and become a big enough space with the capacity to hold more fuel.

Here is the other thing I understand now: the circumstances I’m navigating only hold power over me if I carry shame about who I was. I’ve looked. I’ve looked for seventeen months, with the lights on. I hold no regrets. About any of it.

That exhaustive excavation, trauma work that felt less like healing and more like archaeology, taught me something I had resisted for a long time: I was always exactly where I needed to be, using the tools I had in the box at the time. And when I wasn’t, I moved.

Nietzsche called that posture amor fati, the love of one’s fate, and I’ve never trusted a phrase that pretty. But at the very least, I’ve stopped arguing with the practice.

Which is why sitting still, in one place, for this long, has turned this into a Bourdainism piece on Austin. A Bourdainism, I realize, about not necessarily about going anywhere. I think most people assume wanderers like me travel because motion is how avoidance and escapism most often dress themselves. That’s partly true. I don’t think it’s the whole of it.

I started solo traveling a few years ago, in Peru, and learned quickly that there is no running from yourself. Distance is not a solvent. Holed up alone in a hotel room on psychedelics, I went down into the deepest layers of who I was and voice-noted what I found there: realizations I had neither the tools nor the capacity to integrate.

Those recordings are strange artifacts to me now, letters from a woman who knew things before she could hold them.

But it needed doing. Life becomes smaller when fear enters the room. And when the fear is of yourself, in any form, there is simply no room left to live in at all.

I used to think my defining trait was perseverance. It isn’t. Perseverance is what keeps you alive. Bravery is what lets you look. My most important trait, I’ve come to understand, is bravery.

Looking back, I can see what my subconscious was actually asking for the whole time I kept moving: community, and some sense of stability. Of course it took countries and countries to hear it. I too am human, and fallible, and built with the same needs as everyone else: connection, community, love.

The quality of our relationships reflects the quality of our lives.

For what is any moment, especially the beautiful, or the tender; the heartbreaking, if not witnessed and shared?

—An excerpt, from my journal.

I recently lived a few of those moments. The kind that blow the doors off the hinges of my soul, where a realization hits you hot and heavy, so devastatingly beautiful that you can’t look away and can’t quite look at it either. Moments of tenderness, of love, of vulnerability. Moments of being witnessed. I am keeping the details for now. But I want it on the record that they happened here, in the stillness, which is not where I expected to find them.

I titled this Bourdainism in Austin because I am not from here, and I write about this city the way Bourdain wrote about anywhere: as a guest who loved the house too much to lie about it. I don’t yet know where home is, or where it will land. What I know is that each day here feels like a clean Inhale.

On the East Coast there is no true Inhale. You exhale all of yourself, constantly, with no real pause, until you’re running on whatever air is left at the bottom of your lungs. I lived that way for years. I mistook it for being alive.

I’ve said before that I feel like a Ferrari trapped in the aisles of a supermarket. I meet a lot of people here in Austin who tell me they feel the same way.

They supposedly meant to leave. They supposedly meant to do something else.

But they got stuck in the Inhale. They got stuck in the ease of driving most of the day because it’s hot, and in having time for all the therapy and all the yoga and all the introspection and the workouts, and so they are perfectly-fine-here, thank-you-very-much. Sometimes they travel, and they bring back a piece of somewhere else to sell in a storefront. And they are Texan, so they like to be challenged, but not-too-much-because-we-all-have-guns.

Do you want to know what I think?

I think a lot of this place is complacency, and the best thing it has going for it is community. But that community can be a fleeting facade, and I have felt its insidious effects myself: people fluent in just enough therapy-speak to weaponize your feelings, and nowhere near enough to face themselves, daily, especially in the lonely hours when no one is watching.

As someone who exclusively does that, I have truthfully been feeling very alone here, surrounded by people.

And here is the part I have to be honest about. I have been here long enough to have done the therapy and the yoga and the introspection. I have the time. It is hot. I could become one of them and never notice, because the Inhale feels like health, and for a while it is.

Breath is the oldest proof that life is about balance. You cannot inhale forever any more than you can exhale forever; hold either long enough and the body makes the decision for you. I left a place that was all exhale and found a place that is all inhale, and I am beginning to suspect they are the same trap with different weather.

So when do I exhale, exactly?

There is a new chapter of work starting, and I am hesitant to hyper-focus on it just yet. In almost three months of building my consulting business, there is a taste of freedom I fell in love with: choosing the room, the people in it, the hours.

But the pen, it was always about the pen.

I’ve been asking when I get to exhale as though it were a place, somewhere I could drive to once the heat breaks. Maybe it was never a place. Maybe it’s only this: a window open, and the page in front of me slowly filling with all the air I’ve been holding, one line at a time.

So. Last time, in The Memoir: The Lesser of Two Evils, I mentioned The Fall, which maybe six people on this planet know about, and I promise we’ll get there. But first I have to tell you about my grandmother.

I know what you’re thinking: Oh Suki, you’re so slow-burn it hurts.

It is what it is.

Back in January, while I was in Paris, I became estranged from my entire family, but I’d already left my grandmother months before. She is single-handedly the most emotionally abusive person I have ever met, and the person who loved me the most. Both of those are true, and I have never once found the seam where one ends.

Here is what I’ve learned: sometimes they love you more than they’ve loved anything else in their life, and it still won’t be the right love. I have been loved by a lot of people. It’s just that most of it arrived in a language I don’t speak.

There’s a friend I decided to love recently from a distance after our first rupture. For weeks I kept seeing the same thing in meditation: rays of light coming off their heart, and inside the light, little pieces of razor-blade. The light still reaches you. It just simultaneously opens you on the way in.

These days I’m less interested in intent, less interested in the mess, less interested in the specific cruelty of the specific words. I just sit here wishing everyone could be loved. Could be healed. So that love could survive the translation. There is nothing to reason with when a chronically dysregulated person is weaponizing your traumas; your soul, and then throwing something at you, however badly my neurodivergent brain wants to make it make sense. The sense is not in there. I’ve checked. I’ve gone mad checking.

But I digress, as always, and I promised you the past. I promised you puppies.

You should get some. That’s the only actionable advice in this chapter.

By now you know my mother was abusive and elusive, in that order. My father I haven’t gotten to yet. But the main character of my childhood is my grandmother.

I have shivers going down my spine writing this, because she is very old now, and I don’t know if she’s still alive. Maybe that’s why my gut walked me to this chapter. Maybe she’s already gone. I’m not sure grief is the first thing I’d feel. She was not quite physically abusive to me. She was just dangerous enough that I don’t have the courage to find out how she’s doing.

I spent thirty years appeasing her. Paying her. Calling her. Anticipating her. Untangling her victimhood from the life she’d lived, so there’d be less of it left over to hold against the room.

But most importantly: before me, she had a dozen Shih Tzus.

Why is that important?

Well.

The moment I was born, she got rid of them. All twelve.

I was not allergic. Nobody asked her to. She did it herself, and then spent the next three decades making sure I understood what it had cost her.

As a Matter of Fact, I would have probably quite enjoyed those dozen puppies.

Those sweet, sweet Shih Tzus. Their perfect hair, which she braided. Twelve small heads, braided.

And then me. Adorable, apparently, and in the salon chair before I could walk, getting my hair fried and pulled and set into a hundred different shapes until one of them was the one she wanted. I wasn’t a child in that chair. I was the next coat.

And I would never, ever live up to those dogs.

They didn’t talk back.

For a long time, neither did I.

I am estranged from what’s left of mine, as I detailed in Bourdainism and Paris: Shamelessly Blocking My Entire Family on Social Media, Happy Holidays, and if I’m to be of utmost honesty, I would hesitate to believe anything they say. When answers change depending on what is convenient, the floor shifts, and the truth becomes a lifeline that is hard to find. I suppose that in retrospect, this is where my obsessive documentation began. And where the most important goal of my healing journey was set: the ability to validate and stay fully in my own experience, irrespective of the noise.

I’ve been feeling stuck. Not in the traditional sense of writer’s block. Rather, I placed so much weight on this memoir, of all the workstreams I’d spun up, that like training for anything, I kept finding myself shifting the goalpost: When I’m further along in my healing journey. When I can sit through the traumatic events of the past with no emotional dysregulation. When I’ve integrated, metabolized, processed (what does that even mean, really?).

Then, and only then, I will be ready to speak.

So I fell back into reading. Long before I reached the state of corporate apathy and burnout I have found myself in now, I used to devour a book a day. Entering someone else’s inner world was both an escape and a survival practice: the forging of an empath who had to acutely tune into her abusive family members’ needs, gauging the temperature of a room at any point in time.

And as I read, I found that the messiest poets moved me most. The unhinged. The unedited. The unfiltered. What a waste it would be, I thought, if I waited until perfection arrived. Because that is the actual trade. Every day I wait is another day I spend polishing this for the eyes that will eventually scan it, and the more I write toward those eyes, the less of my own precious and intimate and vulnerable magic survives the edit. It would not be tainted by the telling. It would be tainted by the waiting. And it would not be me.

So. Since the last time I wrote to you, in the prologue, I think the next piece that makes sense is my very first memory of my family together, and the first memory I worked on in EMDR: my free fall.

But before the free fall, you have to understand who we all were.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to recall who my mother was, from the little truths I could gather out of my own lived experience.

To my father’s side of the family, the side I ultimately ended up with after they divorced, she was every curse word in the book. Home wrecker. Slut. A woman passing on a curse she never cared to stop, because her own mother had cheated on her abusive father, abandoned her children, and wrecked another family on the way out. A gorgeous vixen and a manic artist. A man-eating, toxic wreck of a being.

What I have always found interesting, as I have grown older and turned this over, is the misogynistic hypocrisy of the recanting. Not my father, not his mother, not anyone else in that family could see that in their abuse of me, in their brainwashing of me, they were actively forging me into the very woman they described.

But that is something I’ll have to show you as this book unfolds, in the most organic of ways.

My father was ten years her junior and hard at work. From my recollection, he was rarely available and always traveling. I know that he set up a store for my mother to run, with his business partner, where they sold American goods and art from Disney. My mother was an artist and a painter, and it would make sense that she had her way with people. I was frequently left between my grandparents and my uncles, largely on my father’s side, though sometimes with my mother’s grandfather. We’ll get more into that.

My grandmother has made sure that I remember my mother as a cold-hearted woman who never held me and never breastfed me.

I can actually confirm the cold part to be true, because aside from the day with the flowers I outlined in Found on Facebook: A Letter to a Mother I Barely Knew, I have exactly one memory of her.

I was three, maybe four. I was watching TV with my mother and my grandmother, and I repeated what the comedian on screen said. The word was ba-bo. In Korean: idiot.

My mother was so outraged that she shook me until I threw up, and then she started slapping me. My grandmother begged her to stop. That I was just a child. That I was largely nonverbal as it was, and was only repeating something from the television.

She got up and went to the refrigerator, where the bamboo sticks were kept.

Back in the nineties, and in Korea especially, corporal punishment was acceptable, even in schools. And there, I remember my first lashings, until my arms and legs turned red and bled.

And right here, if my father, my grandmother, and anyone else on that side of the family were to read this, and as I suspect, they will read this, they would feel quite pleased. It would be the proof they wanted all along. The validation that they were indeed the saviors. The good ones. The lesser of two evils, at the very least.

And oh, would they be oh so wrong.

But I’ve been reading your messages. And I’ve been saving them in a log to get back to. And I’ve been seeing the subscribers join, and leave — and I understand. To the paid subscribers still here, I have something special for you soon.

So, that’s where I’ve been. Not gone. Just buried in the part of the process that doesn’t make for good content.

Yet.

Well, let’s actually scratch “that’s” where I’ve been. Here’s where I’ve been.

An incredible soul and badass filmmaker, who probably filmed that fancy doc you’re watching on Netflix, and is committed to creating something very, very special with me, at our first pop-up event/shop.

I have a few weeks left at my big tech job. Was I expecting it? Like many folks in tech right now, no. I was truly not.

I keep turning that sentence over in my hands like a stone I found on a walk, not sure yet if I’m going to keep it or set it back down. I had an assessment with another FAANG company and I left the exam on so long it timed out. I just stared at it, trying my best to tune into my gut; brain fogging, alerting my body that I was still simultaneously surviving and healing. Yeah, you need this job, but you must grieve. You must process.

Don’t judge my dusty computer. But this has been my reality for years. Working, then studying. As a minority in Tech who’s here with no degree, I have always had to work what feels like 5x more than my counterparts. But I never gave up. And there’s my dog, Love, waiting very patiently for me to take a break. (Or for her peanut butter ice cream treats that I make, I’m not quite sure).

There’s a particular vertigo to counting down the end of something — even something you’re ready to leave. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t start that way. I will miss my teammates more than I could possibly explain. The past few weeks have been non stop crying sessions — together; alone, and staring at the last words from my manager. “That’s just how the leaves turned out.”

And there’s not much left to say then, is there? As women, we can’t be emotional, or dramatic, or disruptive, or noisy, or human. We can be honest, but not too honest. We can be hurt, but only in perfectly scripted Times New Roman.

I had a lot of thoughts about those words after that interaction. I stared at that sentence for a lot longer than I’d like to admit: It’s kind of easy to say that from a distance. But a lot of things swirled in my head, and none of them were beautiful leaf imagery: Why am I even here, in Texas? How do I cover my medication and doctors without insurance? It’s not comparable coverage. I’m in between apartment hunting. Do I need a job to get a new place?

Wait, I have important dog-clothes-and-books-at-the-office-and-I…

Love then started crying (we are very much in sync), and we went on a walk, and I replayed the past two years.

Everything that I’d miss was the people; not the work. The laughs and late nights debugging. The inside jokes and silly ways I tried to gamify our progress. The shier folks that took me hours of 1:1s to crack open. The tougher folks that pushed back and made me go home and think, “Maybe they’ve got a point.” Earning trust to be the person to vent to and ask advice to. Opening my mailbox and finding Pokemon cards and thank you notes. Letting our dogs talk to each other through Zoom. The coworkers who watched my dog while I was traveling. The list goes on and on…

But most of all, this is a love letter to the sheer brilliance I was able to witness. And the validation that the brightest and most inspiring of them all were the ones who built up my courage to keep building. The ones who sensed my self-doubt as soon as I was shut down, and convinced me to do it anyway.

Me, with no degree. Me, talked down to by so many men and managers in tech throughout my career, I couldn’t even tell you in one sitting. Men who will likely never understand what it feels like to rehearse systems designs and figure out twenty creative ways to present something before doing so, just in case we come off a little too ~something~.

Memory lane even went a bit further back —

Wait, not that further back, but that’s exactly how I felt at this time, lol:

Me, as a Senior Sales Supervisor at 19, managing 40 year olds who laughed at me and made my life a living hell hazing me as I tried to figure out team bonding, KPIs and coaching — all while navigating being married to someone from a different culture, a decade older. I look back at that year with so much regret and laughter, now.

I made my first huge career mistake: I was leaning on the counter of our showroom, and said out-loud: “But we’re meant for more than this, right? Surely, we can dream bigger than this. A full career. You have it in you. We all do.”

And I got promptly written up (rightly so), because Who The Fuck Do You Think You’re Talking To? This IS A Career, You Aloof Dickhead. We Deserve Your Job, We Don’t Trust You. You’re a Horrible Leader. Just Because You Know Numbers And You Know Process Doesn’t Mean You Get Us.

I tried to explain that I’m numbers-driven because I can prove we’re the best team. But it was futile, and I messed up.

Years later, as a seasoned Technical Program Manager, I remember writing a letter to our CTO to fire me instead of three engineers, because I knew I could bounce back faster than them. They don’t know it to this day, but my peers and managers do.

In a matter of just a few years, I evolved into a completely different person, changed by the experience of time, and a sharper understanding of my values.

Love, absolutely ecstatic that I’m leaving.

In change like this, you start asking the big, embarrassing questions again. The ones you’re supposed to have answered by now. What is this all for. What am I actually for.

So I did what I always do when I don’t know the answer. I started writing things down. The good, and the bad. And the bad, was truly really bad. I paid with my health. I spent more time trying to prove myself for a job I already got. It was doomed from the start, and I couldn’t see that, even as my health kept declining.

I’ve been trying to take care of myself. Trying is the honest word. Change is hard for anyone, but for a neurodivergent brain it’s a particular kind of hard: the rerouting, the loss of the old scaffolding, the way every small transition costs more than it looks like it should. I won’t pretend I’ve got it handled. What I will say is that the community I’ve built has carried me through it in ways I didn’t know to expect. I am held, even on the days I’m barely holding.

Like quite literally, at the pharmacy. Lol.

I sat down and wrote out every problem I actually wanted to solve in the world. Not the impressive ones — the true ones. I wanted it to be a compass, something pointing me toward a purpose that sits closer to my values than a title at a company ever could. And the needle kept settling in the same place: indie business owners. Artists. Students. The people making the most original, alive work, who get locked out of the tools that would let the world find them. The people canceled over using AI and the people scared of AI, and scared of tech, and confused about data centers and furious about how communities were being destroyed.

That’s not a market to me. That’s personal. It’s why I offer very subsidized rates to artists, students, and indie entrepreneurs — and if I believe in you, I do it for free. Even at this position of my life, I am currently committed to two clients at zero cost. (If you want to see what the work looks like, or compare what things actually cost for my actual consulting prices and services, it all lives at sukisong.com.)

Doing it this way isn’t a discount strategy. It’s the whole point. I firmly believe that my life decisions, even the most difficult ones were easy to make because I have values that I can’t compromise on. And I believe that everything will work out, if I keep following them.

Now beyond this hurdle, the rest of the season has been louder, in the good way. I’ve been working with my artistic business partner on pop-ups, and we have a brand in the works. I’ve been doing new things: going to fashion shows. I’ve said “maybe” to modeling again.

I’ve been making tangible things — real books, real art, objects you can hold. And yes, also job searching, because the unglamorous truth is I need health care, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie. With less than two months left on my Austin lease, I genuinely don’t know yet where I’ll land next. I’m letting that question stay open a little longer than is comfortable.

But discomfort is something I’ve faced many times before. As a matter-of-fact, this photo was taken by Homeboi, in his then insane living situation amongst chaotic people. Alas, I managed to pick up book.

If you only know me on Substack, this is your invitation to come see the rest: thelastromantic.co. That’s where the worlds meet — the writing and the building, the romantic and the technical, the two halves of me I spent a decade trying to keep in separate rooms. The site itself transforms into its own experience. The shop is being loaded. It’s also where you can request a meet with me and see if you qualify for my volunteer or discounted help in launching a site that’s AI-ready, indexable, and revamp your SEO landscape for you.

To my subscribers: thank you yet again for your patience. For bearing with me through the quiet. There’s only one thing I’ll actually ask of you — if you’re willing and able, share my work with your network. A relocation (even overseas), or networking for any facet of the businesses I’m currently building: those are the unromantic things that make the romantic things possible, and a single introduction from the right person can change the shape of a year.

But mostly, just stay. Bear with me a little longer. Because here’s the one thing I know to be true through every hardship I’ve ever lived: art, writing, and the projects I build have always been my vice — the place I go, the thing that saves me. They’re not going anywhere. And I can’t wait for you to watch it all unfold.

Thank you. All of you. Truly.

This was shortly after The Craziest Incident of My Childhood and Possibly My Whole Life — the one that flipped our universe on its head and made every room in that house feel like a held breath. My grandmother’s grief had curdled into something volatile, something that swung between silence and eruption with no warning, and I was too small and too soft to survive it in the open. So I disappeared.

I crawled into the dark, pulled the door shut behind me, and sat with a crayon in my hand. Eyes closed. And I built a world. Not this one — a better one, drawn from nothing, held together by sheer will and Crayola. I hadn’t read Narnia yet; boy, was I in for a treat.

My grandmother called people. She called the police. They found me. They scolded me — this five-year-old sitting in the dark with a crayon — for worrying her.

I didn’t say a word.

There was a piece of hope I held in my tiny chest that day, something I couldn’t have named at the time but which I understand now with the clarity of someone who has spent decades circling back to the same truth: I was going to draw my way out of this. Not out of the closet — out of the story I’d been born into. The one where I was the problem. The one where my feelings were an inconvenience. The one where love came with conditions I could never quite meet.

Come to think of it now, I think that was me knowing — before I had language for it — that this story would be written. Not just written. Shared. That the testimony of a girl in a closet was worth more than the silence she was trained to keep.

But of course, I carried immense shame — misplaced shame that wrapped itself around everything I touched for decades. Shame is a shapeshifter. It doesn’t announce itself as shame; it shows up as the conviction that you are too much and not enough in the same breath.

Growing up, I filled an insane number of diaries and journals — the kind of compulsive documentation that, in retrospect, was my nervous system trying to create a witness where none existed. Close friends in school always wanted to peek inside. But those pages held too much pain, and pain without context is just spectacle. So I kept them locked.

And then, in fits of terror that the truth might find its way out, I burned them. I destroyed my own records. I negotiated with the past — traded my history for the illusion of a clean slate. And I spent a lot of my life trying to fit in. I think that’s where the gaps in my memory became semi-permanent. Not because time erased them. Because I did.

Freud would call this Nachträglichkeit — deferred action, the way trauma only becomes traumatic in retrospect, when the mind finally has the architecture to understand what happened. I didn’t have that architecture yet. I just had a match and a diary and the desperate hope that if I destroyed the evidence, maybe it never happened at all.

Nobody taught me how to feel my own feelings. I had to learn that from scratch — am still learning it, if I’m honest, in a therapist’s office at thirty, reverse-engineering the emotional education I should have gotten at three.

What I did learn, early and well, was how to think. I could analyze, dissect, take apart any situation and lay out its components like a mechanic with an engine block. I could read people the way some people read sheet music — every micro-expression, every shift in tone, every unspoken expectation mapped and catalogued before they’d finished their sentence. The why of everything. Because understanding why someone was about to hurt me was the only currency I had. Anticipation was survival.

But expressing what I felt? That got me hit. Or dismissed. Or told I was being dramatic, being difficult, being too much. So I learned to walk on eggshells — which, if you’ve never done it, is not a metaphor for carefulness. It’s a metaphor for making yourself so small that you stop existing as a person and become a function: the peacekeeper, the fixer, the one who absorbs impact so the room stays quiet.

I buried everything. Deep. In the kind of place you bury things when you’re not sure you want to find them again.

I’ll have to tell you about this lovely old couple who took a kid from the projects of Jersey City and spoiled her with books on Christmas at some point.

As recently as my last divorce, I was still doing it — still analyzing instead of feeling, still giving the benefit of the doubt to people who hadn’t earned it, still being generous about my own suffering as though generosity toward those who hurt you is a virtue and not a cage.

It took me a while to stop. To put down the scalpel, stop performing the autopsy, and just sit with the body.

And when I did — when I finally sat still long enough to ask the simplest, most terrifying question a person can ask themselves: What do I actually feel? — here is what I found:

Dismissed. Invalidated. Punished. Robbed. Exhausted. Depleted. Betrayed. Abused.

Eight words.

And then I asked the question that broke everything open: When did I first feel this way?

And it all rushed back. Every closet I’ve ever hidden in.

And I realized those eight words? They held thirty years of evidence behind each one.

Because here is what I need you to understand before we go any further: I hid in my closet during the worst fights of my last marriage.

I am a woman with a career and a dog and a Substack and opinions, and when my nervous system hit a wall it couldn’t climb, it reached for the same solution it found at five. I folded myself into the dark and waited for the danger to pass. Not because I chose it — because trauma doesn’t ask permission. It moves through the body like water through a crack in the foundation. Van der Kolk was right: the body keeps the score. But he left out the part where it keeps playing the same song on repeat, across decades, across marriages, across every version of yourself you’ve tried to become.

I still dream about that closet. The original one. And I think it holds more than I’ve been willing to admit: not just the memory of a frightened girl, but the entire architecture of how I’ve moved through the world — hiding who I am, dimming the fire I come from, burying the past. And the devastating thing I’ve come to understand is that I wasn’t doing it for me. I was doing it to protect the people who harmed me.

That ends here.

I know what it feels like to be a child who deserved unconditional love and got conditions instead. I know what it feels like to be an adult who still flinches at tenderness, who still scans every room for the exit, who still mistakes hyper-vigilance for intuition.

And I have met enough people like me now — forged from fire, rebuilt from rubble — to know that I am not alone. That there is an entire nation of us, walking around with closets in our chests, drawing worlds in the dark.

This book is for us. The scared children and the grown-ups who still reach for the shadows at the first sign of love.

I’m done hiding. And I brought a crayon.

Here’s the thing about building an entire identity around solo travel: eventually, someone shows up and ruins it.

I brought a friend to Puerto Rico. Oneisha Lee, aka. @shapeyourbliss— and if you’re expecting me to apologize for breaking brand, you can stop reading now. This one needed a witness.

But first — I owe you an explanation for the silence. I took a break. Not a cute, curated “I’m on a journey” break. I realized I had a codependent relationship with writing. The pen was my morphine, and trauma therapy doesn’t let you keep your favorite crutches. So I put it down to see who I was without the hit.

Turns out: peaceful. Weird, right? I had to sit with the terrifying possibility that a happy writer might still be a good one.

Anyway. Puerto Rico.

There is a safety in solitude. I’ve built a life on it, and I’m good at it — the endless hobbies, the self-entertainment, the ability to eat alone at a bar in a foreign country and feel like the most interesting person in the room.

But there is something else entirely about the Art of Being Safely Held and Witnessed.

I can’t count how many times I’ve written about loving a person’s idiosyncrasies. Oneisha has plenty, but my favorite is that she chases sunsets. Not photographs them. Chases them. She will reroute an entire evening for the light.

She reminds me of the color blue, and not the sad kind. The sky kind. The medium her sunsets get painted across. The ocean kind, with depths you feel all at once before you can name any of them.

Sharing a bed with someone for a week does something to your defenses. There were flashes of vulnerability I wasn’t planning on. I started sharing bits of my mind, the chapters I don’t usually read aloud, and Oneisha kept unraveling like she was waiting for the next page.

After spending over a year married to someone who made me feel like my emotions were either fundamentally flawed, deeply inconvenient, or amazing — nothing in between, ever — I had braced myself into a smaller shape since 2023. Shrunk the wingspan. Kept the interesting parts filed away where they couldn’t be used against me.

I held my breath, waiting for Oneisha’s judgment.

She just wanted more.

She wrote in her journal that night — about how resilient I was, how fascinating my mind was, how inspired she felt. I know this because she told me, unprompted, like it was obvious.

Reader, I think that took more out of me than any solo trip ever has. Being witnessed is exhausting in a way that loneliness never is.

On one of our walks, she said: “You had every reason to give up. And you just… refused.”

And I found myself laughing. “Yeah, well. I just love life too much to give up on it. This feeling, right here.”

I guess this was supposed to be a love letter to Puerto Rico, but it became one for Oneisha Lee instead. The island will forgive me. It’s generous like that.

One thing I will say: there is a cluster of bars, recommended by a handsome devil running the dumpling stand near our hotel, and I won’t name them here because I want them to stay local as long as possible. But friends — when I tell you it was the most alive block party I have ever walked into, I mean it. Speakers wired to the outside of houses. People dancing around cars that were driving straight through, neither party fazed. The kind of night that doesn’t need a plan because the street is the plan.

I suspect Oneisha and I will travel together again. The solo brand will survive.

There is a sentence I wrote weeks ago that won’t stop circling: “Freedom is available, yet you still bargain with the cage.”

Oneisha left before me, and I spent a day alone with my own thoughts. Exhausted, walking through Old San Juan in heat that felt personal, I nearly collapsed and decided — with the dignity of a woman nursing a mild hangover — to lay on a park bench, read, and sleep.

It reminded me of the days I was homeless, and I sat with that for a minute.

A family of four walked by. The mom leaned down to her kids — a girl and boy who looked like twins — pointed at me, and said in English: “Yes, she’s so cool, isn’t she? With her bracelets, and all of her tattoos, and wow — her hair too!”

The little girl said, “She’s so cool. I want to be like her.”

I think that’s about all I can wish for in this lifetime.

I got back to Austin safely. One of my childhood friends just moved here, and we’re sitting in a bar filled with books, daring each other to be creative, and I’m holding back words so I don’t tell you every beautiful thing that’s happened in the past two weeks, every goal already checked off the list.

In these dark times — what more could I wish for?

Thank you,

Suki

Before I get into Cartagena, a quick note on my Substack—because I have this habit (personally and professionally) of trying to over-explain myself (the remnants of being a neurodivergent traumatized by society). I’m deeply curious, and I love learning about a wide array of topics, which sometimes makes “staying organized” hard. But if there’s one thing life has taught me, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan—and maybe that’s not a flaw. Maybe that’s the point.

Right now, there are three parallel workstreams moving at once:

One: My memoir. The book I keep saying I’m writing—because I am. It’s the beast in the making, slowly coming together as memories return, sharpen, and rearrange themselves into meaning. Some days, revisiting the past is the only way I can understand the present—or make sense of the future.

Two: the messy middle—what I’ve been calling my “best journals,” The Four C’s. A wild chapter from 2020 (and yes, it was a wild year for everyone), but for me, it marks a very specific middle: the part of the story where everything cracked open.

If you’re new here, feel free to start with my “read_me” post to understand more about that.

Three: my favorite work-stream right now: the one that lives in the present and points toward the future: Bourdainism. Inspired by Anthony Bourdain, obviously. It’s where I am now: traveling, falling wildly in love with myself, the world, and rewriting everything I thought I knew about life.

With that said—this is another Bourdainism post, with a little memoir woven in.

On the plane ride, I published a raw version of this note. I’m keeping it intact here, the way I did on Instagram, because I felt compelled to share it exactly as it came:

“Traveling the world has been my dream for as long as I can remember. I recalled here, not long ago drawing myself in a cape as a child, in my ‘Suki Saves the Day!’ comic—my child consciousness wanting to save others and rewrite my environment as my first negotiation with life, in a largely traumatic upbringing amidst chaos.

However, like many who hadn’t yet faced their shadows and healed; like many who were yet to bring their whole soul to themselves, I served this idea… no; the fantasy and illusion that I would build the family I never had, the family that got to travel, and I did everything I could to continuously abandon myself and repeat a painful pattern: giving all of me to a marriage or a partnership to complete me, to accomplish my dream, which I only thought was possible as a unit.

I didn’t need this enablement. Throughout my World Tour, I found bits and pieces of myself I’d taken and given to others finding their way back into the gaps of my soul; completing me.

It’s allowed me to love more deeply, be more authentic, and individuate. My hope with this newfound confidence is that seeds are being planted for others that perhaps, I may never see bloom—but I still hope to be shifting progress for all and making it just slightly easier for the next person to grow and be a bit braver as well.

I don’t think this World Tour will ever end: there are simply too many corners of the world that I’ve yet to see. Each country, and its peoples’ unexpected kindness softens me, and makes me infinitely more aware of the work to be done. But I’m grateful: to God, the Universe, and the brave heart that I’ve been given.

I’ve become the hero I dreamed of all along.

I am in Cartagena, and I am blessed and infinitely grateful. Heart open, mind clear, I look forward for my time here to come.”

And so—there we are.

In Cartagena, I stayed at Hotel Capellán, genuinely one of the most beautiful hotels I’ve ever seen. I kept to myself most of the time, but I met a couple (pictured here) that I’ll carry with me. They have an adopted Korean son, and we ended up watching the Super Bowl together—of all things.

Ah, the Super Bowl.

Bad Bunny’s performance hit me harder than I expected. As a former illegal immigrant—and now a very concerned American citizen, honestly contemplating whether I’ll expatriate sooner than later (certainly sooner than retirement)—I can’t describe how much it warmed my heart. Not just his performance, but watching the whole bar erupt, strangers turning into a little temporary family for a few minutes. And walking out together once it ended. Love is truly the answer after all, and we must all stay united together.

To be fair, though… that might’ve been one of the most boring Super Bowls I’ve ever seen in my life.

Cartagena is a city with music on every corner. Families traveling together. People taking care of each other. And it made me think about something I haven’t broken much silence about: my second marriage.

We had more logistically in common—closer circles, the same high school, overlapping worlds. But the marriage itself was short. And anyone who’s been through divorce (or a true rupture) knows: there’s a strange amount of time for reflection afterward.

At first, the ego is loud. We point fingers. We narrate our pain like it’s courtroom testimony.

But if you’re lucky—and if you’re willing—you eventually practice metacognition. You get curious about your own mind. You notice the brain’s tricks. You remember you are the narrator of your thoughts… and that thoughts pass by. They are temporary. They are not always truth. And as masters of our own lives, we have to take responsibility for the story we keep repeating.

This is a long-winded way of introducing what I’ve learned about myself—my role, and why this marriage failed.

I believe we were fundamentally incompatible in what we needed and what we could give. But I also believe a major part of my responsibility was choosing someone who valued family above everything—and in Colombia, as admirable as that is, it’s not just a value. It’s cultural DNA. It’s stitched into the identity.

And as you may know… I didn’t grow up that way.

I wanted—so badly—to be chosen first. To be someone’s priority in the way I never was as a child. And I chose someone who was not built to meet that need. I lived a life trying to be “good”, and what’s more noble than being family-oriented?

It cost more heartbreak than necessary. And I believe it could’ve been avoided altogether.

Going forward, I’m making decisions based on one thing: my gut. What feels clean. What feels true. What feels good for me—and nothing else. I’ve spent too much of my life bending and folding, adapting to what I thought was “right,” even when it wasn’t right for me.

Right now, I’m enjoying my own company. I’m not interested in dating. I’m not interested in building a family right now. And I believe that if love is meant for me again, it will be with my best friend—someone capable of meeting me where I am, seeing who I am, and not forcing a future that only hurts.

After Cartagena, I came to Coralina Island. I have a feeling this will become a pattern—one island, one quiet reset, one chapter at a time. Pierre, the owner of the hotel, kindly let me extend two extra nights. I told him the truth: this is how I travel. I book the bookends—the flight there and the flight back—and then I let life fill in the middle. I talk to locals. I follow intuition.

I think of myself very close to a feral creature in this way, and I certainly attracted all the animals during my stay: chickens, cats, dogs, and even some dangerous ones, but I was ultimately protected by the dogs on the island.

Ah, and while I was on the island, something unexpected happened.

My ex-husband and I were speaking (more like arguing) about logistics, and an unexpected wave of kindness came my way. He took full accountability. He apologized.

They say you don’t need closure to move on—but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t matter. It was nice, even briefly, to be on good terms. To be seen. Heard. Understood. After years of tension and conflict, it unlocked something in me that’s hard to put into words.

It set me free.

My ex is nothing if not a determined, persistent man.

And I have this to say to you, Mr. Cerezo: What’s meant for us, surely cannot miss us. Live every bit of your life to the fullest, as the 5-year old you would be proud of. Keep growing and pushing the limits the world has tried to impose on you. Hold your loved ones close. Be grateful; be happy. I will always love you. But I am not the same person you were married to.

Tonight, I travel back to Cartagena. I’ll get a tattoo—one I think will represent this chapter of my life. And then I look forward to integrating all of this when I’m back home.

Yours always,

Suki

In time, I suspect I’ll be better at it. Like any skill, it probably just takes enough tries.

I’ve been taking some time to pinpoint exactly why El Salvador has been my favorite country I’ve visited so far.

I keep returning to one specific moment.

I was overwhelmed, stuck on something I was trying to learn, unable to tear myself away from it. Frustrated with myself for still being on European time. My body felt wrong. My mind was sprinting ahead of itself.

Then, almost hypnotically, I remembered my therapy.

I took my foot off the gas pedal.

Closed my computer.

Pulled myself out of the chair.

Walked to the ocean.

At first, I just wanted to dip my feet in. Then I remembered something.

When I first arrived in the U.S., there were a few months, maybe weeks, where it was just my dad and me against the world. Impoverished, struggling, but facing life together anyway. I remember being at the beach one of those days. My dad can’t swim well, and neither can I. So we just held onto each other through the waves. We were playing.

I think all of us need more of that.

I hate the haunted, exhausted look I see on my friends’ faces lately.

Before I knew it, I was in the water, floating. I went to my next meeting dripping wet and absolutely loving it.

There was a version of me before that moment, and a version of me after.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, maybe around the moment Japan invaded Korea, and love my war torn ancestors the way they should have been loved. But I do believe we are a collective consciousness. And I believe deeply in balance.

Without childhoods and lineages like mine, I don’t think there would be very many adventurers. Or seekers. I don’t think people would understand the value of uniting and healing.

And I don’t think there would be nearly enough stories to tell. Or words to write.

El Salvador welcomed me with open arms, with a warmth it didn’t owe me. People who didn’t have to be so kind to an American like me, but were anyway.

I gave the local Japanese spot in San Salvador a few giggles as I regularly dined there, unofficially certifying them as authentic, being the only East Asian person around for miles.

Near Tamanique, in Surf City, I met Cece, an older version of me. A true Golden Retriever uniting the beach. Her Black Cat husband was usually asleep. She keeps tagging me in photos I’m not in, and I’ve realized it’s because she wants me to see them. I appreciate that more than I can explain. I hope my friends start doing this too.

I met Lou, who dove into the ocean to retrieve my sunglasses, then helped me pack my suitcase so I wouldn’t miss my flight.

I ate enough pupusas to last a lifetime. And somehow found enough energy to start interviews again for The Four C’s.

Thank you.

I remembered who I was before survival taught me to forget.

Leg 1: Mexico 🇲🇽

I pooped my pants in Mexico.

I’m one of those Asians. I need Asian food at least once a week or my body files a formal complaint. So I found a hole-in-the-wall Chinese spot and thought, Surely I will be fine. I am a seasoned traveler. I have seen things.

The next day, I’m leisurely strolling through the city center, high on confidence and poor decisions, when I pass a perfume shop. The salesgirl is wearing BTS merch. I light up. I tell her I’m Korean. Instant kinship.

We’re mid-conversation, and I give her what I now realize was an impossible brief:

“Woody, smoky, a touch of tobacco—but still feminine.”

She nods solemnly. A professional.

Then my stomach speaks.

Not a “you have an hour” situation. Not even a “find a café” situation. This was P0. Code Red. Systems failing. No warning banner.

She’s mixing three bottles like an alchemist while my face goes from charming to haunted. I try to rush her, but she’s in her zone. Her coworkers gather. A symposium forms.

That’s when it happens.

As disaster runs down my leg, I panic and shout:

“I’LL TAKE THEM ALL.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Absolutely convinced.”

I wrap my sweatshirt around my waist and decide that a 16-minute walk of shame back to my hotel is still morally superior to sitting in an Uber and ruining a man’s livelihood.

And here’s the actual text to my poor boss:

(I wasn’t late!)

What a start.

Panama 🇵🇦

Some of you are thinking: She really thinks she’s magical.

Listen. I had a bad feeling the moment I got into the Uber. The driver was visibly stressed, and honestly—driving in Panama is not for the weak.

A few blocks in, an elderly woman in a Mercedes T-bones us.

I don’t have much to laugh about here because it was genuinely scary—except for the part where the replacement driver shows up, and I tip the first guy extra and say:

“I think he needs it more than you, mate.”

The new driver just shrugs and goes:

“Pfft. That’s every day here. Happened to me last week. Nobody tip me.”

Panama stays undefeated.

Greece 🇬🇷

Getting my hair braided in Athens was mostly wholesome—until it became a masterclass in why women run the world.

A husband-and-wife duo ran the stand. Only the husband was there when I arrived. I don’t think he was expecting customers. Definitely not someone with hair as long as mine.

He panics. He calls his wife.

She arrives like a Marvel entrance—on a motorcycle—takes one look at his work, undoes everything, and finishes my hair in record time.

Women are magic. Never forget this.

As a charming woman I met in Panama once said to me:

“Men are just decorations from God.”

These braids are here to stay.

Vienna 🇦🇹

I went to a café to do creative work before my corporate meetings kicked in, and I could not understand why it felt like everyone there hated me.

I tip. I say hello. I’m not feral. What was the problem?

By day two or three, I finally ask the waitress:

“Is… something I’m doing wrong?”

She leans in close and whispers, like she’s telling me a state secret:

“You’re ordering bottled water.”

Apparently Vienna prides itself on having the best tap water on Earth. I forgot. I also like bubbles. I am sorry for my sins.

Please forgive me, Austria.

Budapest / Slovakia 🇭🇺🇸🇰

My tour guide was a solid 6’4”, 230 pounds, and as stoic as an Eastern European philosophy textbook.

He picked me up first. I tried to make him laugh. Nothing. Then we picked up an American family. I turned to him and said:

“Well, you’re stuck with me, so you might as well get used to it.”

He took the tour extremely seriously. The family eventually branched off.

Then he looks at me and says:

“I like your tattoos. I have, too.”

He pulls up his sleeve. Zips down his sweater.

Covered. Like Yakuza-covered.

Turns out he used to own a tattoo shop. As I ask polite follow-up questions, he casually pulls out his phone. One of his open tabs is for purchasing a handgun.

I pretend not to see it. Growth.

He used to do a lot of things.

I eventually tell him I’m overstimulated and need food and a beer. He immediately offers to be my personal tour guide—hooks me up with his people, gives stellar recommendations. A gentleman.

I wander into a punk bar in Slovakia and text him:

“Come join!”

Turns out he had been standing close enough the entire time to keep me in his line of sight.

Good lad.

Rome 🇮🇹

I lost my wallet at the Roman airport and remained shockingly calm.

The airport lady was even calmer.

She said:

“Hey—you’re too beautiful to be worried. We will find it.”

She made a few phone calls. And somehow—miraculously—they did. They delivered it to a very defeated Romantic sitting on her enormous luggage.

Women rock. Again.

Paris 🇫🇷

I did not like Paris.

Happy New Year’s, friends.

I spent most of my time so far mildly offended by the economics of existing. Like when my hotel charged me 166€ for one load of laundry—as if they personally escorted my socks to the Louvre, interviewed them for provenance, and pressed them with philosophical intent.

Also: McDonald’s meals hovering around 20€.

And then there was my crown jewel: a 4-day museum pass that did absolutely nothing because everything was fully booked. Paris said, “Of course you can buy culture. You just can’t access it.”

So no, I didn’t fall in love.

But I will give Paris this: I healed the most here—because I finally integrated what Jung would call my shadow side:

Anger.

I warned you: kindness is not weakness. Love is freely given by me, because I believe that’s what human beings deserve. My family especially. I love them. I forgive them. More than they’ll ever understand.

But my respect?

Earned.

My support?

Earned.

I forgive and love my father. But I do not respect my father. It’s simple: I do not respect any grown man who can’t overcome his demons and lays hands on a little girl (me). I do not respect men who lead with control, domination, silence, withdrawal, punishment, and guilt. I do not respect men who outsource accountability to pride, or “that’s just how I am.” I do not respect men who refuse therapy like it’s a luxury yacht they don’t want to be seen on.

And I certainly don’t take advice from people I do not want to become like.

So. There’s that.

How did we get here?

Well, I realized something. My father has spent years complaining that my Narcissistic Grandmother controlled him with her trauma and victim mindset—and yet he’s managed to successfully pass the same spiritual malware down the family line. My poor brother has been trained to feel guilt and shame so deeply he’ll likely need years of therapy to uninstall it. It’s like he’s a brainwashed North Korean, just endlessly pledging support to my father, Kim Jong Un.

And here’s the punchline:

I can’t do anything about it.

Me being happy—posting on social media, traveling, building a life, going on this World Tour—despite me speaking openly about our immigrant experience, despite me messaging that I can’t wait to take them on a trip once their legal kinks are worked out, despite me sending gifts from wherever I go…

…somehow translated into resentment. Bitterness. Envy. More guilt-tripping, shaming, and vile little bursts of hate disguised as “concern.”

So what did I do?

I pressed my favorite button:

Block.

Because going into 2026, I’m listening to my gut like it’s the only honest man left in the room.

I want people around me who can celebrate my joy without choking on it. People I can text—like Homeboi, or Nug—who get genuinely excited to see me happy. Friends are our chosen family, and I’m choosing deliberately now. I want people motivated by growth, not addicted to grievance. People who respond to bids for connection instead of punishing me with silence, withdrawal, and secret contempt.

Homeboi and I journaling together

We are not in competition with each other. Any of us. Especially family, friends, colleagues, lovers. Connection does not have to be difficult. Safe people lean in with curiosity, love, and patience.

And I thank Paris for teaching me that—by robbing me blind and gifting me a spine.

The architecture is beautiful. I still have a New Year’s party to attend. I’ll try to sneak into galleries and museums like a romantic little criminal with excellent cheekbones and unresolved opinions.

But this—this was my highlight of 2025:

Oh, you done did it now.

I can’t wait to get back to the United States, and I can’t wait for 2026–with nothing dragging me down.

Crazy, right?

Crazy because statistically, spiritually, and according to every auntie who’s ever watched Eat Pray Love—I should’ve at least had one cinematic moment where a man presses me against a centuries-old wall and tells me I’ve “awakened something” in him. Actually, a woman at a perfume shop asked me if this was my ‘Eat Pray Love’ moment. And I said, “We can do better than that, sister.”

I needed some sort of routine. A loose one, but still…a thread to hold the days together.

So I chose a wonderful little restaurant in front of my hotel and dined there basically every day like I was a local woman of importance. Not because I’m predictable, but because I’m learning that consistency is, in fact, a form of self-respect. (Also: I hate packing and unpacking my nervous system.)

My order became a ritual: a bottle of sparkling water with lemon, pasta, and maybe a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. (I’ve defaulted to accepting I’ll drink while traveling—hey, rigidity never served me too well.) Then: my daily walk. Not a “steps” walk. A devotional walk.

And Rome… Rome is flirtation as a civic duty.

The way people flirt here should be studied. Getting hit on at a restaurant isn’t necessarily novel, but get this: one night, I ordered a lobster, and I asked:

“Is there any way I could get this cracked open when served? I’m afraid I’m not great at opening shellfish, not with these nails…”

And he said, “Tell me exactly, what is your dream? What do you want? You want it cut up for you?”

Now. I had no idea if he was being sarcastic, romantic, or simply Italian. But I said, “I mean, yeah, that’d be ideal.”

And guess what.

He did indeed cut the lobster into bite size pieces, then added Parmesan for me as well, and chili oil, and mixed the pasta up and served it to me on a platter.

The whole staff came out to wait on me. I felt mildly uncomfortable and very beet red. Maybe they felt bad because I was a single woman on Christmas week. Maybe they truly thought I was a K-Pop star. I dunno.

But I’ve gotta tell ya: Americans have a thing or two they could learn.

Italians know they’re charming, and they’re used to it working on foreigners. They do not take rejection too well, I’ll tell you that much. I think my block list expanded to double in my time here. I take back whatever I said about men in Central America.

But eh—truth is, a girl was too busy falling in love with rain.

And I mean falling in love. Not in a moody Tumblr way. In a real way: the kind where you stop fighting the weather and let it make a poet out of you. Rome in the rain doesn’t feel like “bad luck.” It feels like permission. Like the city is telling you: Slow down. Write. Watch people. Stop trying to conquer the day like it owes you something.

There are a few things that struck me about Rome:

The weather is perfect. Literally perfect. The air, perfect. The ambiance, perfect, too.

The style—oh, the style. Getting complimented in Texas? Easy. New York? Bit harder, but not far-fetched. In Rome? I felt like calling Vogue and asking, “Do you know me, yet?” It challenged me, and I loved it. Everyone looks like they have a secret life, a cigarette, and a lover who texts in complete sentences.

Food? Come on, now. Food is the one religion I practice without skepticism.

And for every pro, there is a con: the crowds in the city center made me feel like I was in Times Square on New Year’s Day, and that’s not fun. But my local friends made it clear: Roman locals don’t live anywhere near the center. To live like them, I’d need more time, and a car—and the kind of casual confidence that says, “Yes, I will drive through an ancient maze of scooters and near-death experiences, and I will do it in sunglasses.”

I actually spent the better of two days outside of dawn hours in my hotel, and happily so: listening to the rain, writing, working, drawing.

I wrote a lot in Rome.

Here’s one of my favorites:

“I love when every detail is intentional; I love when people remember details. I love being seduced by the depths of one’s mind; I love marveling at ancient wonders that were only possible without all of the distractions forced upon us now. I love knowing that we, as humans are collectively capable of achieving incredible things.

When friends of mine travel and they get home, they tell me they lament their lives. They want to keep just traveling, and I can’t help but think, ‘Of course…you spent several days enveloped in luxury, why would you want to escape the bubble?’ I travel a bit differently: I don’t plan anything at all. I don’t want to escape. I want to just be inspired. Usually, I just make conversation with people and they tell me what I should do. I’ve done a few tours here and there, but I usually end up canceling them or leaving prematurely. To me, it feels too packaged and fake.

My trips usually end when I can’t wait to get home and apply my new perspective to my current life. I do not travel to escape.

I met someone in Rome who asked me, “But the way you travel… you are getting biases; no? Surely the restaurant people will recommend their friends, and everything is marketing; everything is sales, don’t you want to research for yourself?”

And before I got into it and explained that by that same logic, research would only be the same, I just said, ‘Well, I’ve never had a bad time.”

And you know what? He smiled, then showed me the most incredible sight I’ve ever seen in my life, right up there with Manchu Piccu: Rome at night. And therein proved my point.”

That’s the thing about Rome: it doesn’t need you to be efficient. It needs you to be receptive.

And as an art-lover, I’m usually a fan of galleries…paintings, primarily. Of course, my father was an architect, as I mentioned before, and I do appreciate that too from time to time.

But in Rome, that was all I could think of. Architecture.

The galleries were beautiful, yes—but the Roman architecture, just out there, non-graffitied and all in the center of the city, blew my mind. It felt indecent. Like walking through a museum where the admission price is simply being awake.

Every building, sculpture, and column seemed to invite me to a rabbit hole:

“How do you think I got here?”

And suddenly I wasn’t just looking at beauty—I was looking at proof. Proof that humans, when not entirely sedated by distraction, are capable of building things that outlive empires… and relationships… and whatever petty little crisis we think is the whole universe this week.

Tonight is my last night in Vienna. I’m stuck in my hotel room with semi–food poisoning (a glamorous ending, as always), and somehow I’m still in love with this city. Vienna did something to me. Of all the places I’ve been so far, this is the one where I healed the most. I suspect it’s the art.

Tomorrow I’m off quite early for a day trip to Budapest. At least the long ride will give me some time to deep work. And hopefully, I don’t shit myself again.

After that—another country, TBD. Unfortunately, I’ve been receiving an influx of creeps on Substack, but that’s okay, because the block feature exists.

But before I keep moving, I needed to take inventory. I needed to re-cap my year.

Because when I look back now… yeah. I’m pretty fucking tired.

But I’m really happy. And I’m really proud of myself.

In 2024, I fell in love with someone who was still figuring out who they were. And I truly gave it my all, to a younger person I wanted to see fly. No matter what happened between the beginning and the end, I know our intent was good at the start. I’d spent years caretaking for others, and I still opened myself up to a second marriage. I’m proud of myself for that.

And when we split—when he had his family, and multiple properties, and a whole infrastructure to fall back on—I’m proud of myself for being brave. For packing up all my things from the ghost of our marital house, grabbing my Big Ass Dog, and taking a chance on myself to go to Austin, Texas… for a job opportunity that wasn’t even guaranteed.

I’m proud of myself for ending that chapter with a final act of forgiveness and kindness.

In Austin, I’m proud of myself for taking that Big Ass Dog on a seven-mile walk/run every day, promising to give her a better life. (And actually doing it.)

I’m proud of myself for going back to Pilates after years of no contact with any human being other than my ex-husband. I’m proud of myself for showing up every day—even on the days I felt like collapsing.

I’m proud of myself for filing that divorce and not missing a single deliverable on the way. I’m proud of myself for taking modeling gigs, working hard at that not-guaranteed job, and still growing at it. What was supposed to be a 3 month contract ended up being a year and a half so far. And I’m still absorbing, learning, and growing.

I’m proud of myself for walking into the doors of trauma therapy and admitting I had a serious sleep problem. I’m proud of myself for telling my story in front of veterans, even as my voice shook. I’m proud of myself for keeping up email relationships with the people I met in both Divorce and Trauma groups—because connection is medicine, and I’m learning how to take it without overdosing.

I’m proud of myself for using myself as a human guinea pig for PTSD healing—trying everything, paying for the expensive modalities, collecting the data, and still staying honest about what worked and what didn’t. I’m proud of myself for starting to write. For sharing what I learned with the people I met in those groups, even on the days I doubted myself. And every time I see one of those vets on Instagram, posting, enjoying their life, I tear: because even when one of those old-heads post 50 photos in a single day I get it, man. It feels real good to enjoy life again.

I’m proud of myself for getting my citizenship.

I’m proud of myself for finishing half of the certifications I set out to do this year. I didn’t do it all—but hey, I did my best. That’s okay. Perfection is just another nervous system habit pretending to be ambition. And I slowed down. I think having over 20 certifications is enough for a little while. Plus, we all have new AI tools to learn every day.

I’m proud of myself for taking the leap into sharing my story, little by little: first on Instagram, and now here—on Substack—where the truth has more room to breathe.

I’m proud of myself for putting myself out there in Austin as my full self. For sitting with stranger after stranger and building friend groups that will last a lifetime. For letting people see me without auditioning.

And I’m proud of myself for breaking up with all the friendships that didn’t work for me. I’m proud of myself for stopping to take so much responsibility for other people’s lives.

I’m proud of myself for all the volunteer work and donations I’ve done this year, even while I was struggling financially. I knew in my heart things would work out, and they did. I refused to let fear make me selfish.

I’m proud of myself for trying to date again—and giving that my all, too. And I’m proud of myself for realizing I deserved better than the people I was choosing. For walking away with kindness.

I’m proud of myself for flying to Greece and meeting Ali. I’m proud of myself for the Substack group I started with and Alison B. I’m proud of myself for never missing a day of therapy—even when there were days I physically couldn’t get out of bed.

I’m proud of myself for realizing neurodivergence was nothing to be ashamed of. For realizing I had to start speaking up about it, because me “avoiding the label” meant I was really, actually ashamed. And more people need to know we have so much to offer—under the right environments. For every person who’s ever heard, “But you don’t look neurodivergent,” I want to be the one who says: that’s called masking. And it costs us.

I’m proud of myself for starting this World Tour, because I’m not running from anything. It’s the opposite: I’m running toward myself. I’m proud of myself for crying at the airport when I got Global Entry—hugging the TSA agent that used to scare the shit out of me. Even when I got my green card, traveling was still deeply traumatizing. I never felt safe until I got my citizenship.

I’m proud of myself for going up to strangers in Mexico and Panama, and also, making Travel Friends that will hopefully last a lifetime, just by being as silly as possible.

I’m proud of myself for refusing to collapse when the world bet against me. I look back at this Memoir I’m stitching, I look back at this year—and last—and the years before that—and I see how every time something happened, I said, “Bet.” I picked myself up and went back at it the next morning.

But most of all?

I’m proud of myself for how much I’ve been crying while traveling. Properly grieving it all. My lost childhood. My failed marriages. The years and years of memories coming back to me that I refused to avoid.

Because wherever you go, there you are.

There are two things that are very true about me right now:

I am a work in progress.

I am a fucking masterpiece.

And no matter what happens next, I’m ready.

Depending on who asks on my travels, my answer is usually “yes”.

“Are you an artist?”

“Are you a travel blogger?”

“Are you journaling?”

The answer is really, “I’m a writer.” I’m a writer through and through. I’m a writer in a way that one can identify with their sex, sexuality, heritage, what have you. Not as a vocation. This certainly doesn’t pay the bills. I’m just a writer through and through.

Yesterday at a bar in Oberautal, I found myself writing this:

“I think this is the part of me that I am afraid of people seeing. It’s the…part of me only few people can handle in doses. The part of me that enters creative flow. The part of me that loves my art more than I could ever love a person—the older I get, the more I realize: deconstructing the ‘why’ doesn’t matter. It simply is. I wither if I can’t create.”

I didn’t write that to be dramatic. I wrote it because it’s true, and because sometimes the truth only comes out when I’m alone enough, cold enough, and far enough away from the social expectations of being “normal.”

And I found myself missing drawing for the first time in a while. Today I’ll head off to an art supply shop; the largest in Vienna. Life’s about the simple things, before we were programmed.

A doodle of mine

Let me ask you this: You work so hard, for decades and decades, dreaming of “someday”. Hunkering down for retirement. Focused on the next carrot. It’s a noble feat, and it makes sense, especially if you have children.

Now, when that magic number appears in your bank account, and “someday” strikes, what will you do? Have you given that part much thought, yet?

Because what I’ve noticed is that some people spend their whole life waiting to finally live, and then when they get there, they don’t know what to do with themselves. They don’t know who they are without a schedule, or a role, or a responsibility.

Whether it’s hopping couches, as I once was, or trapped in a golden cage, or in a studio apartment, or in a house, or in the Waldorf, or at Ali’s in Greece, or this cozy little Twin Bed in Vienna, after I make ends meet: I write, I draw, and that’s it.

That’s why my life is so simple.

Halstatt is a small town inhabited a few hundred people, that’s been photographed millions of times for its beauty. My photos won’t do much justice compared to that, but I can tell you the unexpected experience I had there.

The tour guide I had in the morning was quite interesting. He said: “I can give you all a tour, but you have free will. Join if you’d like, or wander off if you’d like. Whatever you want.”

For some reason, I’ve been waking up at 3-4 AM sharp every day here, and got most of my work done. I decided to wander and take a brain break.

And I wandered right into this little piece of history, which spooked me:

The people of Halstatt were, and are quite poor, and they could not afford to bury their people. So their bones sat here. The Soviets invaded and rummaged through this “Bone House”, looking for loot of sorts: guns, material, money, what have you. There was nothing, and so, it ended up in this pile.

It’s strange, isn’t it? How a place can look so stunning on the outside, like something out of a fairytale, and then you walk a few minutes in the wrong direction and life shows you what it really is.

At my age of 30, I’ve experienced a lot of loss. Before therapy this year, I really didn’t know how to cope well with it. At any point, I was just ready for my phone to buzz and let me know that someone else had just died. It granted me perspective.

Down the narrow corridor from this bone house is a church, and while everyone walked in, took photos, and walked out, I sat down, way in the back.

I’m not Catholic, but I do believe in God. I think negotiating with life and loss has brought me to the firm belief of an afterlife. Perhaps one’s mind, no, soul, would shatter otherwise.

What are we all without faith of some kind?

And I wrote:

“I’m scared of loving someone, mainly because I’m scared of them dying. There’s a lot of things I wish I got to say.”

And the unthinkable happened. I just started crying. Trauma therapy tries to connect you back to your body, and it’s been working on every front except one: my relationship with grief and sadness. The lengths I can go to suppress feeling that, and the tension released.

Then I continued:

“Well, getting emotional in a Church and being captured on a Chinese tourist’s Instagram Reel wasn’t part of the plan. Anyways. I think, even though my living family largely say they hate the dead that I still mourn (like my dad hating my dead mother and adoptive father), I don’t think they do.

Because Love and Hate are two sides of the same coin. There’s just complexities in the middle of those two that they can’t stand to feel: disappointment, grief, or the anxiety around the fragility of all of our lives, able to be shattered in an unpredictable instant.

If we distilled it down, there are really only two: Love and Fear, with not much in between.”

And I looked up, and all the tourists had left. One elderly woman remained, carrying a frame of what I presume was her husband. She sat at the front, just staring up at the giant Jesus.

She looked back, and we made eye contact, and there was this silent knowing. We nodded to each other.

I wrapped up with this:

“I haven’t figured much out yet, but I try to treat everyone as if it may be our last interaction. I think that’s “Integrity”, or maybe that’s my Compass. There are no Confessions to make at this Church, today. I think I would just ask the Church to approach God with Love, and not Shame. I think that’s what God would’ve wanted.”

Until they test my gangster.

I’m sorry, reader—but I did promise to be my authentic self, and I fear I have no eloquent way to convey this without just… telling you exactly what happened.

In our first Writer’s Group, I’d mentioned to Ali that I’d never been to Greece, and I’d love to visit someday. She said, “You should come sometime! I’d love for you to stay over. I’ve a spare bedroom.” Bless her heart—I hope she truly meant that, because in less than two minutes, while still on the call, I’d booked the flight.

That’s the thing about “sometime” with me. It has a timestamp.

You see, I’d spent the majority of my youth trapped (for lack of a better word) in one marriage after another. And now I realize something almost comical in its clarity: I am too free to be trapped in yet another one.

Unless my unicorn partner does exist, and they better my life, of course. But truthfully? I’m probably too independent for most, and that’s fine with me. Ali thinks it’s because I’m quite lucky with options now, but I suspect I’ve had enough of partnership (especially men and their impossible egos) for a lifetime. But who knows what happens.

Anyways. Ali lives in Varkiza, which is a quaint “suburbian” area of Greece. Make no mistake, friends: this is still far from the suburbs of the United States. The roads are narrow. The buildings, even the modern ones…look like they’ve had a Romanticism brushstroke painted right over them, like the country can’t help but be poetic even when it’s trying to be practical.

Citrus trees are everywhere, and the white buildings offer this picturesque contrast that makes you feel like you’ve wandered into a film you weren’t invited to, but the universe waved you in anyway.

(Also: I cannot imagine what the HOA meetings are like in Greece. If you think Latin women are fiery, you should see an angry Greek woman. As a matter-of-fact, as I sit here writing this portion at the Athens airport, I was screamed at by a lady working at RyanAir—and I promise you, I never want to be on the receiving end of that again.)

One of the first things I did in Greece was get my wedding dress tailored. Which sounds either devastating or unhinged depending on your mood, but for me it was… both, and also neither. It’s a pretty transformative time for me. Taking back my power.

You see, I grew up in an environment where women are expected to shrink to fit. All the interesting women are labeled “difficult,” and I certainly didn’t want that—not as someone who was an illegal immigrant, and certainly not one who was living in the projects, then bounced around people’s couches. I was taught to be quiet, agreeable, and thankful.

And gratitude has carried me a lot. I’m blessed to have a life filled with opportunities.

But I look back and cringe at the sheer imbalance of it all…the amount of giving versus receiving I’d done. My second marriage is a testament to that.

I will never wish anyone ill, no matter how poorly a relationship ended. But I can say this: it wasn’t equitable. And I also wasn’t about to let my fairy-tale dress, purchased from Woodstock, New York—go to waste.

So now it’s my lovely brunch dress.

And honestly? That felt like the perfect way to kick off my second leg on my “Bourdainism” world tour: Europe.

I met Ali’s twin sons: Twinsanity (please do check them out)—and I have not only been addicted to their music, but genuinely moved by their depth. Because here’s the difference between the world I came from and the world I keep insisting on building: in the States, it’s way too common to go down rabbit holes of “What do you do?” as if your job title is your soul’s LinkedIn headline.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to my colleague’s Christmas party, and I remember meeting a CEO of sorts, and I, in a (humorous) way, couldn’t help but ask: “Who are you, outside of your resume? What do you like to do?”

And it was taken quite well, surprisingly. I think we’re all sick of it; truthfully. We want to be more. We want to express ourselves. Why else do people go to these electronic festivals? I’m sorry, but it can’t possibly be just the music.

In Greece, no one asks you this. It’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they assume you’re a human being first. The “what do you do” isn’t a password; it’s just a detail.

I had a lovely dinner conversation with Ray (part of Twinsanity), and I was impressed by his wealth of historical knowledge—even on my own heritage. And I realized quickly in this group of friends: Ah. Creatives were the people I’d been chasing all along, for good reason.

I love what I do in Technology. I do. But I love exercising creative solutions, and I hate being put in a process-cage nightmare. I love being able to unite people. So any chance I get, I try and marry the two worlds—and I’m grateful to keep running into people on both sides of the fence.

Too often, especially in Austin, we’re insulated in a Technology Bubble. As “weird” as Austin is, it’s simply not as self-aware as the rest of the world. Most people I meet with think I’m some sort of alien. They’re simply insulated.

And I’d be remiss not to mention some eerie similarities between Ali and I, and some nice balancing qualities too. Ali is quite “on”, and I’m quite “off”, often.

But most of all: Ali is sexy as fuck. I know—she doesn’t believe me, not at “her age” or whatever society’s brainwashed her into believing.

I won’t embarrass her too much, but she’s a splitting image of Cameron Diaz.

Reader, do you think I was Punk Rock back in the day? (Remember my pixie/buzz cut grown out from: The Backstory: My First Marriage, Osama Bin Laden, A Punk Rock Coming of Age Story?)

Well, I want to end this digestible reflection with a nudge to the most incredible tour guide, Alison B, by saying this:

I’m sorry, Ali—but amongst all of the historical lessons you gave me, one memory is etched in my brain:

Ali shared the same air as David Bowie.

Alison, you must write that story—and I’ll keep writing my memoir, just for you. I know I lived a crazy life. And maybe I’ll give you a sneak preview of the Four C’s. And just maybe, we’ll do an in-depth dive into my love affair with souvlaki and Greek history.

That’s what I’m always circling back to with my fellow creatives: just keep going. It doesn’t really matter if you think you’re small. You might be. Most of us are. Eh, we are.

But maybe you’ll make a difference. Maybe not in your lifetime.
Maybe a line you wrote becomes someone’s favorite sentence.
Maybe a photograph you took gets saved on a stranger’s phone.

At the very least, your data will be scraped. You’ll train a model. Some future AI will half-understand your heartbreak and your humor and use it to comfort someone else at 3 a.m. Maybe it’ll be great. Maybe it’ll be derivative and weird. Who knows.

My point is: I’ve always erred on the side of, What’s the best that could happen?

If you run your life on that question long enough, you wake up one day and realize: that’s how I went from poverty to where I am now. Not from manifesting. From repeatedly choosing the slightly braver option.

In Panama, I stayed in three different landscapes:

• The polished “city-city” of Panama City

• Casco Viejo

• And the jungle, with the Embera people

Each one was a mirror. A different facet of myself held up to the light.

This whole Four C’s and memoir project…I’m realizing it’s a lot like trauma therapy.

Going backwards in time feels like EMDR or ayahuasca: a brutal excavation. The kind of healing that rips open the past and asks your nervous system to watch it, frame by frame, until it loses its teeth. Disruptive. Painful. Excruiciating.

Living in the present is more like NARM: tiny titrations of change. Gentle acts of honesty. Micro-movements away from shame and toward self-connection. A slow shedding of the ego instead of a dramatic exorcism.

And future thinking?
That’s usually escapism dangerously disguised as “planning.” Daydreaming dressed up as strategy.

Anywho.

In modern Panama City…the downtown, glass, steel, and “you’re important if you have a lanyard and a quarter-zip” energy, I felt the same nervous system static I do back in the States. So I did what any self-respecting, overstimulated autistic romantic would do: I hid at the spa.

The Waldorf hospitality was the best I’ve ever experienced. Impeccable service, the kind that makes you feel like a person again and not a walking inbox. And yet, I could barely last a day.

It wasn’t just a budget thing. It was the plasticky vibe. The sense that everything was optimized, polished, and airbrushed of any actual soul. Beautiful, but hollow. A lobby designed for LinkedIn profiles and conferences, not love stories.

Then came Casco.

Casco, Casco, Casco.

I fell in over with Casco. Not just in love—over. As in: over my head, over my expectations, over the version of myself I thought I had to be.

The old pirate-era ruins sit right next to romantic hotels, small shops, coffee houses, crumbling balconies, and achingly beautiful architecture. It feels like if Europe, the Caribbean, and a memory you forgot you had all decided to share a cigarette at golden hour.

I wrote constantly in Casco. I danced. I stumbled into live music. I made friends, the kind of brief, bright connections that belong to travel and late nights. Latin culture really is for me. My body understands it before my brain does. I’m working on my Spanish with more intent now, not because I “should,” but because my heart wants in.

A friend and colleague had warned me about Casco: the wealth disparity is stomach-turning if you pay attention. Right next door to a multi-million-dollar renovation, there’s a decaying building barely holding on. A luxury rooftop above what is essentially a trap house.

He was right. The contrast is jarring.

It felt fitting that I was reading Harari while staying there. His cool, macro, historian brain in my hands, while outside my window the future and the past were literally sharing a wall.

I kept thinking: AI is going to make this so much worse.

Then I went to the jungle. And my thought changed.

In the jungle with the Embera people, on Thanksgiving of all days, my nervous system finally went quiet.

No glass towers.
No spa packages named after Greek goddesses.
No loyalty points.

Just water, wood, fire, faces.

I realized how much we live inside the clutter:

We have too many things.
We’re tied down by too many objects.
We overthink everything—business, communication, love, family.
We optimize and oppress ourselves in the same breath.

We are moving too fast to notice we are lonely.

Out there, stripped of all my usual scaffolding—no fancy hotel, no laptop, no signal strong enough to constantly scroll through other people’s lives—I watched something simple and terrifying emerge:

What actually matters if everything else falls away?

And this is where AI came back into the frame for me.

AI is going to automate most of the technical problem-solving skills we have. The cleverness, the efficiency, the “I can do this in three clicks instead of ten” part of being human. That’s the direction of the curve, whether we like it or not.

What’s left, then?

What’s left is the intricate fabric of emotion, interconnection, artistry, and creativity. What’s left is the way we hold each other’s nervous systems. The way we tell stories. The way we still choose to make eye contact, even when we don’t need to for survival.

What’s left, truly, is Love.

Not Disney love. Not marketing love. The quieter thing: presence, accountability, devotion, curiosity. The willingness to let another person exist as they are without trying to turn them into a self-help project.

If we govern this technology well…if we’re courageous instead of complacent—we might actually buy ourselves time. Time to learn how to connect again. Time to make it profitable to be human, not just productive.

Maybe the people rewarded in that world will be the compassionate ones. The ones who can sit with grief without fixing it. The ones who can write, sing, cook, build, code, and love in a way a model can’t quite replicate, no matter how much of our data it’s eaten.

That, to me, is the future of romanticism and AI:

Not AI replacing poets, but AI forcing us to become better ones.
Not AI killing love, but AI stripping away all the performative noise until love is the only thing left that feels real.

Bourdain once roamed the world documenting how people eat, suffer, celebrate, and survive. I don’t know what he’d say about AI, or about my little Four C’s project, or about my time in Panama.

But I like to think that if he were here, watching all of this unfold, he’d raise a glass and say something like:

“Kid, the point was never the technology. The point was always the people. Don’t forget that.”

And I won’t.

He asked me if I was interested in a union. Don’t worry—this time, I said no.

However, I’m afraid all I got was confirmation of what I would call him throughout this recounting of this tale: “44.” It was a number he used for his GitHub moniker, and I thought it appropriate:

Take a look at the building number.

However, I fell in love with the architecture of Mexico City. Long before my father was a chef, he was an architect, and I imagine that bit of my ancestry flows through me as well.

I’ve largely spent my time here immersed in the present moment, absorbing all of the beauty the city and culture have to offer—and reflecting on some critical political tensions that stir a multitude of feelings in me, now that I’m an American. I’ll explore these thoughts at a later time.

Each morning, I did my usual writing, but with a different view and different food to taste. On one of these mornings—Revolution Day, to be specific—I accidentally ended up in the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México. The streets were blocked off by the police, and in Spanglish, I’d meant to ask if I could get a reservation at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant for breakfast. Apparently, I very confidently said that I did have a reservation, and ended up with this presidential view:

Anyway, I took out my notebook, took in one of the most breathtaking views I’d ever experienced in my life, and started writing. The thought that kept arising was, “How do I do this story justice?”

Allow me to provide you a snippet of a conversation between myself and one of the devs, Han (who, with his dark humor, wanted to be referred to as “Suffering” during this interview) that I worked closely with throughout this mind-fuck of an experience, so you can understand:

More than anything, I knew that this was an important story for all the characters of the Four C’s. But as I was pondering the execution and delivery of this story, I started entering flow, and wrote this in my journal:

“Life is masterful, once we accept that it is largely a movie that we are watching unfold. Now, we can control a lot of things. We can choose which movie theater we will watch the film in, the snacks we will or won’t have; the people we decide to sit next to—or, as is the case with me, perhaps you enjoy often watching it alone.

But we are here ultimately to enjoy this movie. And we can be so moved by one part of this movie that we call ‘Life’, and pause and replay this over and over again; enveloped in nostalgia, regret, or both.

But the movie keeps going. We can get up, switch seats and theaters, get company, and whatnot. But we are here to enjoy the film.”

I no longer fear letting down anyone I am interviewing; I encourage them to write their own narrative of the story, because writing your story yourself is the only way you will truly be satisfied (or as a writer may know, very not satisfied).

As I have been replaying the year 2020 in my head and writing down my thoughts and experiences, I realized this:

It was a period of madness. To replay it, and only it, would rob me of the wonder that is the present. And so, this is the way the story will be told: with my heart first, the present woven in, and as slowly as it comes to me. Now, I did have a little failsafe for myself to stay in Mexico City for longer. But I believe I am ready to leave—I will certainly be back soon. I just want to integrate a bit.

As always, thanks for being here.

IT IS. But there’s a parallel workstream humming in the background, and it’ll make sense why this intro lives here.

My North Star is Anthony Bourdain. I even got a tattoo for him—in Peru, naturally—after “accidentally” extending my trip because Barranco, and ceviche flirted with my soul.

I scribble things wherever I go. Here’s one in a notebook, in a museum, in Lima.

This year I did the mirror thing. Faced shadows, slayed a few boss-level demons, and looted the usual: humility, discernment, boundaries. As a reward/penance, I’m choosing the obvious next quest.

The holidays are a historically depressing time for me. Lots of loss, and, well, without close family, I was always super lonely. But usually, I was lucky enough to be around families; they just weren’t mine, and while I appreciated the invitation, it made me feel lonelier than if I was just alone.

Child me will always wish her parents and adoptive parents were all in one room, sipping hot chocolate and unwrapping gifts. It just didn’t pan out for me that way.

Between deep-tissue massages I get tarot reads—not because I need prophecy, but because it’s fun to hear the universe speak in emojis. I guess Austin’s also made me a little magical: my perfumes are now housed in cute little potions.

Last time, the reader said, “You’re the kind of person who takes life in her own hands, and makes things happen.”

I’m trying, and I’m glad the universe gave me some emoji-confidence. This spread taught me that my past was rooted in judgment: To me, it resonated with all of the changes I had to make about my life as I knew it. My present and future, was pointing to more healing and self love.

Other readers and psychics I’ve seen the past few weeks have told me that the love of my life is around the corner. I’d like to not turn that corner yet, please. But I’m open to life unfolding as it should.

I’m the healthiest I’ve been—mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Physically… look, 30 is already side-eyeing me, and my 20s athlete build isn’t returning my texts. We move.

So I’m done watching clips of Bourdain. I’m going to go live.

Over the next few months I’m hitting double-digit countries with a single backpack. Sometimes I’ll work from a hotel. Sometimes I’ll stay with strangers (the vetted kind). Sometimes I’ll sit at a kitchen table and write someone else’s story—my third workstream: I want to share with you, all of my field notes on the incredible people I’ve met as a bartender, and some of the remarkable souls I’ve crossed paths with in my life. Most importantly, I’m excited to meet new people who will inevitably transform me.

First stop: Mexico. Because that’s where the main character of the Four C’s lived. Tentative last stop: Serbia. I’ll ping-pong home between legs because I’ll miss my dog more than I’ll miss any skyline. I’ll miss friends, colleagues, and yes, my plants. Nurturing the life I’m building is part of the trip. Building roots is part of my growth journey.

Why alone? Because coordinating group travel in your 30s is a doctoral dissertation in logistics and disappointment.

Fuck that.

Thank you for your patience. I’ve been integrating—truly sitting with the work—so I can speak from the body, not just the page.

When I started this project, it was the end of summer. I was looping my second divorce and navigating finances, running on survival. I coped with alcohol, a busy schedule, and over-exercise.

Then came the pulled back and the foot surgery. Bed rest. I pushed even harder: finished a certification, met with authors, started writing like mad, and wrote like it was a deadline I owed the world. If my body couldn’t move, then my mind would have to take over.

I borrowed Picasso’s “one piece a day” method, romanticized it and turned it into pressure. I loved every minute of that anxiety-induced flow state and challenge. But I needed balance. I wasn’t kind to myself. It was the survival strategy I defaulted to: If something went wrong in my life, I was 100% at fault. I would punish myself, and it was a way to keep myself from making the same “mistake” that hurt me again. Little did I know, that self-flagellation was the mistake to address all along.

I’m largely out of survival mode now. The air is clearer. It’s crazy how healing works. It truly does get ugly before it gets better. And now, it’s like whatever filter I saw myself and the world has, has seismically shifted. I feel peaceful. Shame has lifted. I have immense hope for the future. There is no more tension. I feel like doing what I set out to do daily is as light as simply reaching for fruit off a tree. I’m not resisting and fighting myself in my mind anymore.

Now, almost everything; existence itself is flow.

I’ve recently gone back to being more involved politically, speaking up again about change in the workplace, and most importantly, being really grateful. I want to take a moment to talk a little bit about that. I’m not trying to advocate toxic positivity. Trust me, I know more than most when it’s appropriate to be disappointed and channel that frustration to advocating for change.

But I’ve been wrestling with some deep questions as of late:

1. Why am I here?

2. Do I truly forgive my parents?

The first question is something that fundamentally, I believe strikes us all in the quiet moments: existentialism. We need to create hope and meaning. After all, that’s what differentiates us from animals, who can live on auto-pilot.

It’s hard to find the balance of tying our identity, or giving weight to one pillar of our lives over another. For instance, for me, now, as a single woman: My day-job, versus writing, versus other creative endeavors. And holistically, do I have a North Star? Do I truly need one to go on? The dangers of being married to any one of these things is that if I have a bad day at work, I may feel more discouraged about life in totality than I need to be. I never liked living disgruntled, negative, and pessimistic. I attach a lot of meaning into most things I do, work included, because I’m a passionate person.

Thinking of it as just a paycheck just isn’t possible for me, although I’ve said it a bunch of times to try and delude myself and come off as nonchalant as possible.

I also believe that we create routine, structure, and add more responsibilities to manage the anxiety that surfaces for us all (unless you are a sociopath, I guess) when we lack direction.

Perhaps my North Star is to simply continue being curious and learning. I think often, what comforts me is the fact that there is so much unexplored, that I simply don’t know. I’ll never be bored, that’s for sure.

On the second question—

I will be honest: I do forgive my parents. But I hesitate to share that, because I also don’t want to advocate victim-shaming/blaming.

Let’s be very honest, here: They abused me. Mentally, physically, emotionally. That’s not right.

But I do see that in the grand scheme of things, they were in survival mode. My mother is dead now, but my father is still trapped in survival mode. Same with my Grandmother. Narcissism is usually bred from immense trauma. Over 30 years of my life, I’m 100% certain I’ve acted out in narcissistic ways. We all have. I believe that most people do not set out to harm us. It’s a capacity issue.

The solution is turning empathy inward first to heal and radiate it outward, but that requires a safe space.

My father does not have the opportunity to regulate his nervous system, and reflect. He simply does not have the tools to face his demons. How could he? He is an illegal immigrant working 6-7 days a week, with no benefits. As a Greencard holder (Permanent Resident), I was still referred to as an “Alien”. So what is he?

Particularly so in this political climate, he is a Second-Class, if not Third-Class citizen. Reminded of it every day.

I talked about overcoming Shame in my first ever post, which was appropriately for him: A Letter to My Father, and Every Dad Who Still Has Time.

I’d been turning it over in my head loads. Healing has taught me that boundaries are necessary for my well-being. So, I don’t really interact with him as much as I’m sure he’d like. However, there is no resentment left in my heart.

It took me a personal loan, moving away from everyone I know, and all of the expensive, painful and time-consuming solutions I’d detailed as my “Healing Cocktail” to reset my nervous system.

And when I fell into victim-hood, which happens to the best of us from time to time, I realized: I get to have this set of problems.

There will always be a set of problems for us to face and work through. That is life. Existentialism and inner child healing? Where I want to travel to, or live next? What career pivots I may want to make in the latter half of my life? If I want a partner and family, and if so, when? If I would rather bartend, model, or write outside of work? If I want to go back to school with more intent?

These are not things my father, and most illegal immigrants can ponder. He doesn’t have the luxury to.

And as insane as it sounds, I really didn’t know better as I made many life decisions before this year. I ran on empty; on survival mode, because that’s what survival does. It’s why I got married both times.

After writing about Wulf, I paused on purpose. In that space, an important memory resurfaced.

I have a friend back East—Yves (real name), whom I endearingly refer to as Mr. Saint-Laurent. He’s engineering-minded; I’m the emotional free spirit who somehow still lands on her feet. We’ve taught each other a lot over the years: he slowed me down and protected my peace; I asked him to lean toward feeling and spontaneity.

He imparted well-earned wisdom he’d collected over the years about the fragility of peace, and numerous times challenged me to revisit the connections in my life. I convinced him to jump out of a plane with me.

When he first met me, he was moved: How was it, someone living so against the grain ended up living in the same apartment as he? Was his prescriptive way of living truly the way? Or was there another way? What even is success? Were we both in survival mode, but executing different strategies?

Over a year ago now, after he ended a whirlwind relationship, he said something to his ex that has followed me into sleep:
“I know you need a puzzle piece to feel whole. This could work if I gave that to you, but I can’t take a piece of me to complete you.”

I understood it in my head at first. After almost half a year now of intense trauma therapy, I understand it in my bones.

So, reader I care about: I can’t give you a piece of me to complete this Memoir—not right now. I won’t open further the details about Wulf and me. Our pets are tender. The deaths in our families stay private.

I haven’t spoken to Wulf in a while; it may stay that way. I’m not upset with him at all, and I will always be here for Wulf. I just think it’s time to not only process the past, and let it stay there.

I realized I’ve been handing out puzzle pieces from my body my whole life. I’m done. I’m resting, integrating, and planning a softer life that actually belongs to me—travel, goals with my name on them, and picking up old hobbies I put down. Most importantly, more time to simply be.

The cost? Almost my entire previous orbit.

I sat with every connection I had. Some I ended cleanly, because I knew that staying in that connection meant that I would have to be stagnant. Others I tested for repair. If a relationship couldn’t become equitable or emotionally safe, I let it go.

My filter was simple:

1. Is this equitable?

2. Do I feel emotionally safe?

I moved in May to Austin with a promise to myself: nothing comes before my healing. Not money, not momentum. Safety first. Any trauma therapist will tell you cPTSD loosens in safe environments and safe relationships.

Where conversations with people failed, I didn’t. It hurt, but I know what I bring to the table. If roles were reversed, I would meet the other with empathy and a willingness to look at myself. When that wasn’t returned, I chose me—without resentment. I let go with love. I didn’t allow myself to be guilted to stay; to give; to understand. To give so much leniency and space for the other party to be messy, and live in a small corner, accepting scraps.

Some relationships are chapters, and I honor them.

That’s adulthood: as children we needed people (our caregivers) to stay, in order to survive. But as adults, we have the luxury of choosing who stays and goes, and what kind of connections we foster.

We do not own people; we simply experience them.

What’s next: interviews for the Four C’s begin this week. As I weave the complexities together, I may share personal essays when they’re ready to stand on their own.

Peace is fragile. I won’t break off a piece of myself to complete anyone else. I’m going to move slowly, keep what must be kept, and not miss this life. I can’t look in the rear-view mirror and cry for the times I’ve lost; I have so much life left to live. I have so many people I’ve yet to meet, transform, and be transformed by.

I won’t break off a piece of myself to complete the Memoir faster than it can organically materialize. Just as a healthy relationship of any sort can’t happen without me being healthy, the Memoir, the physical, tangible representation of my life, needs space to breathe. It’ll take years and years for me to do my life justice.

I won’t break off a piece of myself to promise you a cadence. Art will bloom as it should. I want to say a post a week is doable. What if I have a bad week? Or even more appropriately, what if I’m too busy living my new life, now?

I’m so grateful that I did this project as 1:1 as I can: When I started, I said I’d bleed on paper if I must, and that truly reflected who I was at that time, even if it was just a month or two ago.

Reader,

I never believed in “finding yourself”—perhaps that’s a symptom of cPTSD: My whole life, was not fully mine. But I do believe in building myself from where I stand today.

Thank you for being here. I’m excited to start telling you the story, for real now, next post.

But I will say, while I dearly love Austin, I think I need a change of scenery soon…

PSA: If you are a new reader, and you would like to get the most out of this Art Project/First Book, please start with this post, read_me: How to Read My Substack and Get the Most Out of This Free Book: The Four C’s: COVID, the Cartel, Conspiracy Theories, and Cryptocurrency.

Dear Reader,

I promised to keep this as 1:1 as possible. Until there’s a chip in my skull, this is as close as we get—but yes, I did say I would surrender.

I need to interrupt the book cadence for a minute to breathe. Two reasons.

First: I hate leaving threads hanging. I’ve teased Opal (see: Opal, a Blanket, and My First Real Therapy Session) and the handoff to Rose. It’s been gnawing at me. On my way home from the office this week, it slid into the edge of my mind: Opal deserves a farewell. She and I had a blast. Honestly, she started my healing.

So that story is yours today. Happy Friday.

Second: my last post dug deep into memories I’d never accessed. As I stitch the Four C’s, I see it clearly: the main characters were haunted. It’s made me hesitate before reaching out to some critical characters for interviews. Am I triggering something here I’m not ready for? Am I disturbing their well-earned peace?

Don’t worry, I will not abandon this project—I just need to build myself into a big enough container to carry it. Strategy takes time, and I don’t want to rush this.

We in the Four C’s were all blindly running into spirals the main character gladly shepherded us through. To give us grace, it was during 2020 lockdowns and riots. The world was anxious, depressed, unmoored.

I see now I was running from the pain about Wulf and me. And myself, too.

I escaped into work, video games, studying tech, and first-time dating. Nothing serious came of it. I was so avoidant, I never even went on a second date the majority of the time. Wulf processed everything upfront, while I didn’t.

Trusted people weighed in on my last post. One said it was hot and heavy. Homeboi said it was a lot to process. Others loved the thrill. All acceptable realities. That rapid-fire passion is what happens when I write 1:1—the way my memories jump between those little dividing lines? That’s literally how my brain files them. I’d always wondered as I read books: What was the first draft like, before the editor and the world told them what to say, and who to be?

And even at 19 minutes of reading time, that post barely scratched the surface. Fortunately, I only promised you the snippets; the prelude, not the actual memoir. When I stitch that beast, it won’t be forgiving. It will take years.

It will demand I sit in each pang, silence, and fragile moment. It will remind me we take everything for granted. It will also honor the beauty of survival strategies: how they bury pain until you’re finally equipped to feel it. The body is truly miraculous, isn’t it?

Conclusion for today: I need to sit with the Wulf chapter a little longer. I’m close. I just realized how much love and respect we had—and I didn’t know it then. Not until I lived through a second divorce.

Snakes grip and tighten as they trust you. If they feel safe with you, they may never let go.

My second marriage? Not the same species. A rushed, whirlwind projection. We placed each other on pedestals and worshiped what we needed most. We were tired. We needed escape. We thought we met because we were soulmates, but we only met on the same pain frequency. We did not love ourselves; we only knew how to achieve and perform. When we couldn’t meet the fantasies we invented, we punished each other with the skills we’d already mastered.

Wulf and I didn’t do that. I could sit here today and try to re-write the story over and over, but I won’t. There were ugly parts of it, for sure—and we were ultimately not right for each other, but the love was heart-breakingly real.

I believe you don’t know if you love each other until you face the moment you potentially have to part. It’s easy to love when you’re getting something. Afterward is the test.

Wulf told me to keep writing (see: Marriage 1 Bonus Chapter) even if I called him a groomer, a pedophile, an abuser or the worst thing imaginable, if it set me free. If that was my truth, he would stand by me, proudly (and he’d extort me for money if I ever got famous, ha). That’s love.

I stood by him when he had nothing, when his health cratered, when even his teeth checked out (I recently dreamt of the time I held his hand in the dentist’s office as they pulled the last of his back teeth out), when he dwindled to bones…120 pounds at over six feet—while he poured poison into himself. That’s love. Incorrectly done, and enabling. But it was the only love I knew how to give at that time.

Sometimes the deepest love doesn’t last forever. It makes you become something greater than you were. I won’t rush past that to force the next chapter. I won’t force a daily deliverable.

I admit now: This project demands something of me that I want to rise with serious intent to. It’s demanding patience, deliberation, and a true test of my emotional capacity.

Artists know the feeling: it overwhelms. You marinate, then cook. Time suspends.

It’s love that transcends attachment and possession. I picture Wulf spending Christmas with his new partner this year—recent, but real. It makes me happy. For years I feared he’d end up alone. While I was with company, I gave him secret phone calls wishing him well, only to hear him “just fine” sitting with our two dogs and cat, watching TV. “Just another day”, he’d say. And I’d wipe away tears in the bathroom, and go out to meet my friends, family or whomever my partner was that given year.

Imagining someone else caring for him the way I did brings me comfort. Imagining her bringing him some hot chocolate and putting on a movie makes me tear with joy.

As for me?

I want to be alone. For the first time in my life, I feel safe in my body, and my life feels peaceful. Please, don’t get me wrong—I’m not going back to being lone “aliferous” wolf. The beautiful friendships and community I have built have allowed me to heal, and I need people: My Lotus Girls, Brilliant Coworkers, Divorced Chicago Boys, PTSD mates, Creatives, they all keep me grounded.

But in terms of romance, maybe someday, but not today.

I’m not The Last Romantic pining for it. I’m retiring Lover-Girl, and leaving her in the past. I’m The Last Romantic falling madly in love with life itself, and all its little intricacies.

And now: Opal, and the Best Medicine of All, Humor:

What I loved about Opal is that she let me be funny in therapy. Other therapists labeled the jokes a coping mechanism.

Did I fend off bullies with humor?

Did I crack jokes to diffuse family tension?

Was I dodging feelings with puns?

Maybe sometimes. But they missed something essential:

With all the feelings available, why would we voluntarily sit here and be sad the whole time?

Laughter belongs with the hedonistic greats. The serious, belly-shaking kind. One a day is my apple.

When we started, Opal and I named the work: abandonment and rejection wounds. I’d neglected myself for years to avoid them. I tried every survival strategy: avoidant, anxious, drowning sorrows. I didn’t know how to work through it.

Even Autistic Suki can’t interject here and break the fourth wall to fully explain the hypnosis/IFS session where I met my soul. I told Opal she must be a witch. I don’t know what she did, but something healed.

How do I know?

About two months in, I was loving therapy so much I’d booked twice a week and stretched every session. Opal became solemn toward the end of one of our sessions:

“What’s wrong?” I said. “Business slow? Not enough psychos? Don’t worry Opal, I can refer… me. We haven’t even gone through all of it yet. I have more stories up my sleeve!”

She laughed. Then: “I have news. The timing is awful because you’re making so much progress—you’re a rockstar, really—but… I’m leaving therapy.”

“Leaving?” She looked maybe a few years older than me. “Opal. You won the lottery?”

“No. I’m going to work on a farm. As a beekeeper.”

“What the fuck, Opal?”

She smiled. “I think someone here can carry the work if you want to continue. But honestly, you could also take a break. That’s how much I trust your progress. You don’t need me anymore.”

I cocked my head.

“How do you feel?” she asked gently.

“Like you’re abandoning me,” I smirked. Then I stood, didn’t ask for permission and hugged her, tight. What I felt wasn’t abandonment. It was joy.

“Opal, you just proved witchcraft is real and demonstrated that it’s legal to change your life mid-stream. I want you happy.”

She teared up and thanked me for trying therapy. We can’t keep in touch—laws are laws. Fucking ethics and compliance. Else, we would’ve grabbed a beer. Well, I guess a non-alcoholic one, now (I’m still sober, biddies, and still more fun than most).

And before I left, I told her something I’d never said out loud to a therapist: that in dating, I often felt either objectified or quietly dimmed. Like certain people didn’t actually want me to shine in my own skin. My gut knew it, even if they didn’t overtly express it. It knew it in every text or affection withheld when I went out in a nice dress or socialized. In one session I blurted, “Fuck it—I want to do it anyway. I just want to be me.” Shine, that is. Be fully seen. Allow myself to feel sexy and confident. At least for myself. Opal didn’t flinch. She smiled like a coach who knows you just crossed a line you can’t uncross.

It warms me to imagine her now, with her mushroom tattoos, a halo of curls, humming among bees on a farm somewhere. A break from the looneys like me. Focusing on herself. As she should.

Therapy taught me to love myself. Only then could I love others without clinging.

On my way out she said, “Don’t forget you’re a badass.”

And I told her, “Yeah. A real sexy one.”

There’s sexy me getting that sexy apple. Don’t forget to laugh today.