Category: Personal

In the latter half of 2025, I took on a role that required me to leave home. At the time, it felt more like an adventure than a plan—my first real step beyond what I knew of myself, taken with openness rather than certainty. I didn’t know where it would lead. I only knew I wanted to go.

But life has a way of deepening the things we begin lightly. The change didn’t arrive dramatically. Instead, it unfolded gradually, through new routines and unfamiliar streets. And somewhere along the way, the move stopped being about where I lived and became about how I lived.

Working on a project rooted in farming taught me to see growth differently. Progress no longer felt like something to rush toward. Rather, it became something to tend. And as the work took shape, a few principles—borrowed from the land itself—kept surfacing as steady reference points: suitability, resilience, and sustained cultivation.

The first had to do with environment. In farming, effort alone cannot compensate for misalignment. If the conditions are wrong, nothing thrives for long. That truth extended beyond the fields. I became aware of how much energy I had previously spent adjusting myself to fit. Here, that friction eased. I could focus more fully and think more clearly. The challenges didn’t disappear, but they made sense. They had edges and limits.

That awareness naturally extended to how I dealt with difficulty. Resilience, I learned, is rarely about force. Crops survive disease through attention, timing, and prevention—not panic. Applying this way of thinking meant noticing patterns sooner, responding with intention, and conserving energy. Problems became signals instead of threats. Not something to conquer, but something to understand.

And finally, there was sustained cultivation—the quiet work that happens daily, often invisibly. Showing up. Refining small things. Repeating what works. Trusting that growth accumulates even when nothing dramatic seems to be happening. Over time, consistency became less of a choice and more of a state.

When progress was no longer something I felt the need to chase or defend, it began to resemble growth in a field rather than movement toward a finish line. My days took on a rhythm. Decisions followed the season they were in. What once felt unfamiliar and effortful settled into something workable. The same openness that first led me away from home—taken without certainty, without a map—slowly became attentiveness, and attentiveness, over time, became commitment.

That commitment was never driven by urgency. It grew from staying, from tending what I had stepped into, and from allowing time to do its quiet work. What began as an adventure became cultivation. And I came to understand that this is how anything enduring is built—not through intensity, but through persistence, learned over time. Because as seasons turn, what stands strong is what was cared for when growth was slow.

There’s a strange dissonance in being surrounded by everything you think you should need, yet still feeling untethered, like a wandering star forever orbiting but never landing. I’ve sat at countless tables, felt the warmth of laughter ripple through me, seen faces turned toward mine with care and recognition—and yet, there is always that distance, invisible but insurmountable. It’s as if my soul exists a step removed from the world, suspended in a space that no one else can enter. I’ve tried to explain it, even to myself. But how do you describe the feeling of being a stranger in your own life?

I’ve learned how to move through it, of course. I’ve become an architect of my own belonging, building bridges of conversation, laying foundations of shared moments. People see me as adaptable, present, connected. And maybe I am, in fragments. But beneath the surface, there is a quiet yearning that I can never ignore. It whispers to me when the laughter fades and the rooms grow still: You are not where you are meant to be. I don’t know if it’s a call to somewhere else or simply the echo of my own longing, ricocheting endlessly within me.

For so long, I believed this ache was a flaw to be fixed, a wound to be healed. I searched for answers outside of myself, thinking that a place, a person, a purpose might finally anchor me. But as the years pass, I am beginning to realize: the ache is not a void to fill, but a map to follow. It is the part of me that refuses to settle, the part that knows I was not made to fit neatly into the spaces the world offers. I am not untethered because I am lost—I am untethered because I am still becoming.

Maybe this is what it means to belong: not to a place or to others, but to the endless, unfolding journey of yourself. To hold your own contradictions with tenderness, to make peace with the fact that you are both whole and unfinished. I am learning that the distance I feel is not a flaw; it is space, vast and full of possibility. Maybe the greatest act of belonging is not finding where I fit, but creating the world where I am enough, just as I am. In that, the ache does not vanish but softens, transforming into something almost beautiful, something like hope.

On turning 28…

Twenty-eight comes quietly, without the urgency of the years before it. The future no longer stretches endless, and the past is no longer close enough to touch. You stand at a middle distance from yourself, watching the person you used to be recede while the person you are becoming remains just out of reach. The dreams you once held with certainty now feel pliable, bending under the weight of reality. Some you let go of without regret. Others linger, unfinished sentences waiting for an ending.

The world is no longer a place of absolutes. Friendships, love, ambition—things that once seemed fixed reveal themselves to be shifting, unpredictable. People drift, not in sudden, dramatic exits, but in the slow erosion of shared time. Even you are not who you thought you would be by now, and yet, there is no clear sense of loss, only the quiet understanding that change was always inevitable. You begin to accept that some answers will never arrive, and that waiting for them is its own kind of paralysis.

So you move forward, not because you know what’s ahead, but because staying still is no longer an option. You learn to live in the questions, to make choices without guarantees. You stop waiting for the moment it will all make sense. If clarity comes, it will not be sudden. It will happen the way the seasons change—imperceptibly at first, until one day, you look up and the world is different.