I’m back from the best coast. The dreamiest coast. California is special. I would visit the Bay Area as a kid.
At least 3 relatives on my mother’s side of the family lived there until their deaths. Even my mother resides there now. I learned that we could’ve easily been American citizens before she married our father, but she decided against it.
This trip reminded me why they wrote all those songs about it. Joni’s California.
Sadly, they still won’t give peace a chance, even today in 2026.
It’s a time to be, and a time to share. To give a piece of yourself to your purpose. On this path, you must therefore let go of people and things that do not align with that purpose.
“Not all [blank]…,” he said.
You are in service of others. You feel and think deeply for others. If you cannot feel deeply about someone in your midst and that you cannot envision them as part of your purpose… then why venture forth. It’s time to say goodbye. It’s time to go.
“What do you secretly wish for?
Perhaps, this isn’t a question for me, but for him.
“Please add these songs to the wedding playlist,” your sister wrote.
That wedding is long gone so you deleted the draft reply where you suggested songs from The Parent Trap soundtrack—the one with Lindsay Lohan.
There is also a letter to your ex-boyfriend’s family.
“Thank you for everything. You will always have a place in my heart.”
You thought this would remain true, but it is a truth that has taken a different shape.
There was another letter questioning an old flame.
“In retrospect, I should've. We've been very up front about everything, what makes this part any different?”
This looked like it was meant to be a blog post:_
“Three years is hard to “separate into pieces”. It's difficult to splinter yourself from a person who has affected and influenced your life and outlook for more than a thousand days. Yes, a thousand days. I calculated. Three years is a long time. That's about 24,000 hours.”_
From having 84 dead drafts—the Drafts folder is now empty.
Death (Water) — What am I meant to let go of? What of my habits, or what part of my ego, should I allow to die? I sense this has something to do with my materialism and past attachments to ideas, things, life. Especially as I have been moving in such a swift way with my objects and letting go. I intuit that this is the correct path.
Valour (7 of Wands) — The momentum for me to put my all into this transformation and shift is here. What will I do with it? What could prevent me from my ascension or advancement towards my goal? I am being asked to give it all I got and to fight.
Queen of Disks — How do I begin to value myself? Today, I spent $20 on my food for the rest of the week. I made myself a lovely fried rice with my favourite shrimp. Am I remembering to take care of my body in other ways? How will I fulfill and enact my transformations if I don’t take good care and consider my body?
The Fool — Here I am. With so many hopes and dreams. Renewed. Re-energised. I am a Fool. I begin again. I have so much potential for growth. I have so much to learn. I will shed what I must in order to grow through life and be where I need to be. There is hope because I have faith
The Prince— There are no limits. I have the passion. I need to remember to rest and be able to sustain this creative fire to get me through. This is not a limitless energy. It is finite. I must put it into the right moment and the right effort. Trust in my unlimited creative potential. Go for it. There is impatience here so I must seize the moment!
The Princess — What are my next steps? I need to be brave and bold to move all of this forward and enact creative change. There are a few things going on but I can handle them with all this energy as long as I am mindful and not overly carefree. There’s the house maintenance stuff. Current work stuff. Future work stuff and all the other future-building I need to complete.
I have now done a handful of readings for friends in the last weeks and I marvel how natural it has all come about.
There is a demand for intimate self-knowledge and deep knowing.
We are surrounded by dire fires and it’s not too late to thirst and ask for water.
We don’t just need cups, we need buckets.
We need vessels for all these feelings we suppress and repress.
We need love, and more love still.
I am grateful to be in a place where I am so at ease talking about the feminine and the yin. Unapologetically feeling and female. Silent in my determination, to love.
I look over my shoulder and I see old and younger versions of me, so full of joy for the woman I’ve become.
My storage room haunts me. It contains my skeletons, metaphorically speaking. If my life were to be cut short and my home exposed to my family and friends, they will learn for themselves that I was not that okay. They would see that I have way too many suitcases for a household of one and that I also have way too many clothes. At least, that’s how I fear they would judge me, however, mindfulness reminds me that these thoughts are merely thoughts and therefore an add-on to my suffering.
Besides, it is more likely they would be in their feelings and more focused on my death, than whatever post-humous life statement I leave behind.
This is my motivation to get my life in order. The prospect of sudden death and my beloved friends and family having to deal with what I leave behind. I plan to lessen and remove things from the storage, a few times a week—let’s say three—but so far since quitting one of my part-time jobs at the end of January, I have only managed to do two legitimate excavations of mostly clothes, since there is a thrift store conveniently located across the street from me.
I feel no guilt about this. I am just stating facts. I promised myself to rest all of February and to only really “plan” and make bigger moves in March.
Friends have complimented my style, but many don’t realize I tend to love to repeat outfits. When I went away for my silent meditation retreat, I brought enough underwear but only 3 outfits for the ten-days. That time was the most “myself” and liberated I have ever felt.
February came close to that feeling. I slept so much last month and feel so clear-minded. It is quite absurd and ridiculous that rest is an exception and not the norm.
Happy 420am as I write this. I’m sitting crossed legged on the floor with the laptop propped on the edge of my bed. An AI-generated Spotify playlist is playing in the background while I type. On Instagram, I was served an ad with a catchy tune by an American indie band that wrote some songs in Spanish and I got hooked. The playlist was generated from that track.
I’m awake because I slept through the first of February. No regrets, except I’m wondering, what time I should actually nap later or should I just stay awake until early evening tomorrow?
I announced this sabbatical very privately within my work network, but not all my friends know about it yet. I still have access to my work email and can see the different colleagues and clients responding to my goodbye. I had forgotten to cc my personal/work email.
This feeling of “emptiness” that I don’t have to think about a company’s goals as I putter and idle in my house, feels extra luxurious. I still have my other part-time work, but the lightness is incredible. Miraculous.
I look back on the month and so much happened. I haven’t wrapped my head around the happenings of the year, either. I’m poring over my journals and various notebooks. How do the days pass so effortlessly and fleeting ? In August last year, our local indie theatre closed and now, it’s February and they’re opening again. They chose to hit reset, which is what it feels like I’m doing. I intended it to be a mental break, but it’s only my second day and I actually feel the “reset”. A little before my card pull, I started to “feel” and “vibe” certain things. Goosebumps as I went about my day and noticed things.
I feel the alignment and clarity, again.
It’s crazy how we all need to pause, take a step back, in order to feel this present and well in our bodies. Most of us feel shackled and chained like we aren’t allowed to catch our breath or have a moment to ourselves. I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to be.
It is a sweet and beautiful thing to be introduced to a lover’s love. I hope you get to come close that feeling at least once in your life. It felt like a divine hug from the Universe/God/Allah. Other-worldly and spiritual. Rewind to last November: Someone I dated very briefly visited the city I live in and introduced me to his partner.
I had really liked this person at some point in my life. We met at a networking event the year before the pandemic. I would have been lying to myself if I said I could see a real future with him—we were just so different—he was more corporate (definitely the kind who would use the word “liquid” to refer to money), I was more hippie-dippie, but I liked him. He was someone whose company I enjoyed and whose thoughts and opinions I welcomed openly and even, warmly. I liked that one of our hang-outs consisted of a really long un-glamorous sweaty walk.
When we were chatting at the coffee shop he and his girlfriend/fiancee(?) turned to me and said something along the lines of “Taking inspiration from you and your digital nomad life, we are both consultants now and only working part-time.”
Hearing that though, was funny, like an old timey gag where someone slips on a banana or someone’s face gets pied, and then the sad trombone plays. In my body, it felt more like a punch in the gut plus sad trombone womp womp womp echoing in my head for a long time. Because at the time of their visit, I was not only working full-time for one company, I had also been working part-time for another. I was exhausted. I wasn’t in my usual headspace. And I did not feel inspiring.
What a wake up call to get! A former lover and his partner telling you that you somehow inspired them. The two reminded me how hard I had worked to shape my life before I had allowed anyone/anything to derail my vision. It led me to face the current truth that whatever life I was living, did not allow me to be ‘myself’. Whomever I preferred to be.I felt suffocated and stuck.
Less than a month later, I handed in my resignation.
Seeing how helpful Write Together (WT) was for my mind/life/spirit: I am starting over here. I had conflicting feelings about writing again on Livejournal, but the ghost town vibes were not it. There was some promise of life when I saw old friends still updating, but here, there’s anonymity, which I enjoyed on the WT website.
I don’t know if there are any features to this thing, but what I liked about Write Together was it had a slightly gamified feel so you felt some gratification when you managed a diligent writing streak. I suppose, I can tally the streak myself.
I am in the middle of a life excavation. I have a bomb shelter turned closet/storage space full of stuff that I have been meaning to reduce. Instead of dedicating weekends to sorting through what I’ve accumulated and minimizing as I had hoped and initially planned, my weekends in 2024 were spent either sleeping or fulfilling social obligations that allowed me to forget that most of my days were spent in the whirlwind of blurry corporate shadows.
I have finally quit that job (2 more weeks to go), but I have nothing to show for it. Nothing but exhaustion. Nothing liquid either. I wrote that last sentence so confidently as if I am the type of person who would care about money in the way that someone who would sincerely use the term “liquid” to refer to money does. But, I don’t. I care for money the way I care for air. I know I need it to live, but it’s there and there’s plenty of it to go around, but we do not all have the same bodies/access or opportunities for it.
Okay, off I go. I need to get ready for an art exhibition opening—only a tiny part of who I am being in the world.