Personal essays, reflections, general musings
The most unexpected thing astrology gave me was not a prediction. It was relief. For years I carried the question of my career as though it were a verdict on my character. Then I found a different explanation — and it changed something.
If I could give my daughter one gift — not a thing, not an experience, but something that would stay with her through every season of her life — it would be financial independence. Her own money. Earned by her own hands. In her own name.
There is a kind of exhaustion that does not show up on your face. You still show up. You still manage. But somewhere beneath all of that is a heaviness that has been there so long you have stopped noticing it. Like furniture you have walked around for so many years you no longer remember choosing it.
She worked in my home for six years. Every time I see her — cheerful, unhurried, arriving with a smile that has no business being there given everything she carries — I think the same thing. Would I have her grace?
I kept trying to photograph the yaksha. Every time I pressed the shutter, Devi appeared instead. It took me a while to understand that she had been there all along — and that I had been dismissing her because she was not what I came for.
Some dreams you wake from and immediately begin to forget. And then there are the other kind — the ones where you lie still after waking, afraid to move, afraid that moving will shake something loose.
After eighteen years of relocations, motherhood, caregiving, grief, and putting everyone else first, I began tracing the quiet thread back to myself — through writing, memory, and the parts of me that never fully disappeared.
I believed in the straight line. Graduate, work, build, grow. Life had other ideas — and it took fifteen years of starting over across three countries to understand that the detours were never wasted.
A lifelong anime fan watches Bleach for the first time and finds six life lessons from Ichigo Kurosaki worth writing about — on purpose, friendship, and the power of will.
