self worth
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Autumn isn’t just a season you experience. It seems to create a different version of you. You become more introspective, nostalgic, romantic, restless, sentimental—perhaps even a little haunted. But every autumn, I don’t become someone different.I become more and more myself. I embrace my desire for old books and late-night fires. I stare too long…
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Picture yourself standing at the edge of a cliff. You feel the wind pulling at your clothes. Your heart beats a little faster as you peer over the edge, imagining what it would feel like to leap. For a brief moment, every possibility exists. You picture the rush, the freedom, the exhilaration of flight. Then,…
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Memory moves like in quiet streams threading through the underbrush of the mind, or they are swollen rivers carving the soft earth of who we become. Some days it trickles. Other days it floods, rising without warning, swallowing whole landscapes we thought we had left behind. We like to think of memory as fixed and…
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One of life’s unavoidable truths is that people move on. What hurts most isn’t that someone hates us, forgets to call, or even chooses another path, it is the realization that their story continued without us. They turned the page, and suddenly we are left wondering whether we mattered at all. The terrifying possibility the…
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Everyone knows of you, but they do not truly know you. Perhaps because you never gave them the chance. And that is not necessarily a failure. Sometimes hiding parts of yourself was the safest thing you could do. Perhaps it was easier to become the quiet one, the strong one, the agreeable one. The version…
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We spend so much of our lives being haunted. By people who left. By versions of them that no longer exist. By the quiet question of what did I do to make them go? We replay their words and our favorite moments over and over, flipping through a stored memory book we know we shouldn’t…
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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy One of my favorite lines in literature, but we are often more alike in our unhappiness than we realize. Each family’s pain manifests differently, in varying intensity, yet these truths exist in nearly every household. The saddest part…
Black Ink and Parchment 