There are still rooms where people sit together and properly listen: no phones lighting up every thirty seconds, no one talking over the music, no one reaching for the next song before the last one has finished introducing itself. Just a room full of strangers, a record spinning, and a silence that turns into conversation.

Over the past couple of evenings in London, I wandered into two listening sessions. Different artists, genres and people. One evening drifted through jazz, guitar solos, bossa nova and flamenco; the next stitched together Latin rhythms, hip hop, soul and blues until the songs felt less like categories and more like passports.

After each piece, the room talked about what it stirred up, what people heard, what surprised them.

I found myself sitting there thinking: when was the last time I listened to anything with this much attention?

Years ago I owned hundreds of CDs, shelves of them, cassettes before that. I happily disappeared down musical rabbit holes long before Spotify made it socially acceptable. Music has always been one of the great loves of my life.

Sitting in that room, I realized how little I actually know: how many extraordinary musicians I’ll probably never hear, how many stories are tucked inside songs I’ve never stumbled across. There’s something strangely comforting about that. The world is still bigger than my playlists.

What struck me even more was the room itself: people of every age, from different countries and cultures, different lives, strangers who probably would never have crossed paths outside that space. Then someone pressed play, and for the next two hours, we all spoke the same language...art.

It made me laugh because I’ve somehow become the new kid at school again at forty-six. A sentence I never expected to write.

There’s a peculiar awkwardness to arriving somewhere new at this age. Everyone else seems to know each other already. I hovered near the biscuits for slightly longer than necessary, pretending to be deeply fascinated by the snack selection and debating whether four biscuits is too many to eat at once.

Eventually someone said hello. We talked about the music, then about books, then about life, and an hour later I’d forgotten I ever arrived alone.

Art removes the pressure to impress anyone. There’s no need to invent clever conversation. The painting starts it, or the film, or the song. I arrived with my own experience and left carrying a little of someone else’s.

As I walked home along the canal that evening, I kept thinking about my own work. The musicians weren’t trying to squeeze themselves into neat little boxes; they borrowed from everywhere: jazz wandering into flamenco, soul dancing with hip hop, Latin rhythms shaking hands with blues. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about what shelf the music belonged on. They were only trying to make people feel something.

It made me wonder if writers spend too much time worrying about genre — travel, memoir, history, personal essays, humour. Maybe those are only shelves in a bookshop, and on the page, they get to dance together.

London keeps handing me these tiny classrooms disguised as ordinary evenings. A Japanese film in a small cinema room. A painting revealing its truth without hurrying. A room full of strangers listening to songs all the way through.

Each one leaves me with the same feeling. I didn’t move to London only to write more stories. I moved here to become a better listener.

And that’s where every good story begins.

Tell me…

When did you last listen to something all the way through, no skipping, phone or distractions?

London has a habit of rewarding curiosity.

I turned down a street I’d never noticed before and found a tiny bookshop. Wandered through a mews and found someone tending roses outside a centuries-old cottage. Pushed open an unassuming set of doors and ended up somewhere that left me standing there, whispering, “Well… I wasn’t expecting that.”

That’s how I found the Wallace Collection.

Tucked inside Hertford House, an elegant eighteenth-century townhouse, it somehow feels both grand and welcoming. Once home to aristocrats, it’s now filled with paintings, sculptures, armour, porcelain, furniture, and chandeliers so enormous they deserve their own postcode. Better yet, it’s free, one of the many things I already love about London, where an ordinary afternoon can turn extraordinary without any warning at all.

I wandered from room to room, taking my time, peering into display cabinets, tilting my head at portraits, reading every little placard about the house’s history like I might be quizzed on it later, partly for the paintings, partly for the armour, mostly for the air con.

London was mid-heatwave, the kind where the Tube turns into a slow cooker and strangers stop making eye contact out of collective shame. Hertford House, God bless it, had working air con, and I clung to that cool air like it owed me money. I would have read the plaque about a chandelier’s provenance eleven times if it meant staying in that room a little longer. My imagination was having a lovely, climate-controlled afternoon.

My feet were not.

My back had started sending strongly worded complaints to management. Underneath it all, perimenopause didn’t care about London’s air con. Some truths just show up whether you invite them or not.

Then I spotted a chair.

It was, without question, the most beautiful chair I’d seen all day. I sat down, let out the sort of sigh that women over forty understand without needing subtitles, and lifted my eyes.

Directly in front of me hung a painting by François Le Moine.

Time Revealing Truth.

I laughed out loud. Life has a wicked sense of humour.

The painting shows Time lifting Truth into the light while Falsehood slinks off beneath them, caught mid-exit. It was painted almost three hundred years ago, and the message hasn’t aged a day.

Time reveals truth. Simple, profound, and completely unavoidable, even when I’m just trying to find somewhere to sit down.

I sat there for quite a while, looking at the painting and then, somehow, looking at my own life.

I thought about all the questions I’ve carried over the years. The moments that made no sense while I was living them. The relationships I spent far too much energy trying to understand. The dreams that insisted on taking the scenic route instead of the direct flight.

Time has been doing its work patiently all along, asking no permission and missing no deadlines.

The years have peeled back layers I couldn’t see at the time. They’ve shown me people for who they really are, parts of myself that had been waiting, rather politely, for me to notice them, and dreams that never actually left the building no matter how many practical reasons I gave them to.

They’ve also brought me here, to a city where I can spend an afternoon wandering through a magnificent old house, sit beneath a masterpiece because my hormones demanded a tea break, and leave carrying far more than I arrived with.

That’s why I love museums. They’re filled with other people’s lives, questions, and attempts to make sense of things. Sometimes, if I’m paying attention, they help me make sense of my own.

I stood up. My back had gone over management’s head. My feet were already talking to a union rep.

Fair enough. Truth had somewhere to be, and so, eventually, did I.

I smiled at the painting anyway, then wandered back out into the London streets with a reminder I hadn’t gone looking for: some things never need to be forced.

Truth has excellent timing. It has all the time in the world.

Tell me…

Did you have a time where truth showed up uninvited?

I moved to London and the first film I watched was about a man cleaning toilets in Tokyo.

Which feels about right, spiritually speaking.

There I was, newly arrived, sitting in the cinema room of the building where I now live (yes, I’m bougie like that; I have a cinema room… wild!), still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this is my life for the next six months. London outside. Suitcases upstairs. A nervous system somewhere between “new dawn” and “where the hell is my other bag?”

And the universe, with its usual flair for subtlety, handed me Perfect Days.

It was the least cinematic arrival I could have staged: a cinema room in the building where I now live, a suitcase stuck in Toronto, and a film about a man in Tokyo who wakes up, brushes his teeth, waters his plants, buys a coffee from a vending machine, drives across the city, and cleans public toilets with the focus of a monk.

And somehow, I sat there utterly captivated.

There was something in the stillness of it that got under my skin. The light through the trees, the shadow across his face, the same route and the same lunch, repeated day after day until repetition started to look like devotion.

It made me think about how much of my life has been spent chasing the dramatic turn. The big change, the next city, the new identity, the moment everything finally clicks and I become the woman I’ve been trying to meet.

I arrived in London with so much hope folded into my bags. Along with doubt, fear, pressure, bras, socks, and apparently not enough summer clothing, because one suitcase decided to remain in Toronto like a stubborn eejit with separation anxiety.

I came here wanting this chapter to matter. I want the writing to grow here, the city to open something in me, a life that feels creative, alive, expansive, and mine.

No pressure, London. Make me a genius by Tuesday.

And then this film appears. This is a film about days. Small ones. Ordinary ones. Days with work, lunch, music, books, sleep, light, dust, repetition, loneliness, beauty, the kind we dismiss while we’re busy waiting for life to become interesting.

I think I needed that.

A version of me arrived in London thinking I needed to make these six months extraordinary. Every day had to become material, every walk had to lead to insight, every café a scene, every encounter meaningful.

Good grief, woman. Have a cup of tea and calm down.

There is ambition in me, yes. There is hunger. There is a fire in my chest that has not gone out, even after the last two years tried their absolute best to pour a bucket over it.

There’s a stiller part of me now too. The part that no longer wants to sprint through her own becoming. The part that wants a morning routine, a place to buy fruit, a walk by the canal, a notebook that comes with me everywhere, a cinema room downstairs where strangers gather in the dark to watch someone else make sense of the world. The part that knows peace arrives as clean sheets, a cup of tea by the window, the same path walked so often it starts to know my feet, a song at the end of a film that stills my whole body.

At the end of Perfect Days, Nina Simone sings “Feeling Good,” and there I was, freshly landed in London, one suitcase down, feeling the whole thing settle somewhere behind my chest.

More a question than a declaration: what would it mean to feel good right now — career unfinished, bank balance shaky, half the doors still shut, the linen-and-emotional-stability version of me nowhere in sight?

Turns out: still good. Here, in this small room, this strange beginning, in the shadow and the light.

That is what the film seemed to whisper. A perfect day is one where I’m awake enough to notice it, difficult or not. Because I see the tree, taste the food, do the work in front of me with care even when nobody’s watching, and stop treating the mundane like something to escape.

There is a sacredness in routine that I think I am only beginning to understand. After years of chaos, routine can feel almost suspicious. A steady morning can feel like it’s hiding something. Peace can feel like someone left the room and forgot to tell me why. When my body has lived with disruption long enough, calm arrives wearing a false moustache, and I eye it from across the table, thinking, “What’s your game, then?”

I know that feeling well. There were days in the last two years when I truly did not know my arse from my elbow, and getting through one felt like a spiritual qualification.

Now I’m here in London, in a new room, a new rhythm, a new chance to build the ordinary on purpose. This is the real work of this act. The work is learning to live inside the day I’m actually in, showing up for the ordinary Tuesday in front of me. To write in the morning, walk when my mind gets loud, buy groceries like someone who plans to stay, notice the light on the canal, let the city reveal itself slowly, and stop demanding every chapter announce its meaning in the first paragraph.

Rude, honestly, when life refuses to provide a clean plot structure.

There is something comforting about a film that trusts repetition. It lets the man wake, work, eat, read, sleep, and begin again, without ever rushing to explain itself or shout transformation at anyone. And slowly, without fanfare, I begin to understand that life isn’t hiding somewhere beyond the routine.

The routine is the life. The care is the story. The noticing is the prayer.

This is what I’m building here. Perfect days. Or, more honestly, days I can meet with presence, days when I’ve stopped trying to outrun myself, when the shadow is allowed to sit beside the light without either one taking over the room.

There is grief here. Of course there is. There is fear here too. There is uncertainty, financial pressure, loneliness, excitement, awe, and the occasional minor domestic drama involving luggage, phone settings, and the ongoing mystery of British plugs.

The full buffet.

And still, there is something beautiful unfolding. In the hush of it, the mundane of it, the small rituals I’m beginning to choose. Maybe I’m here to make peace with ordinary days until they become perfect in their own understated way.

Somewhere between the new dawn and the missing suitcase, that’s where I landed. Me, in the dark of a London cinema room, finally listening.

Tell me…

What’s your version of cleaning toilets in Tokyo, the unglamorous thing you'd secretly love to master?

Dear Viv,

I didn’t expect my new life in London to begin in the underwear aisle at Marks & Spencer.

The funny thing about fresh starts, Viv, is nobody tells you they’re incredibly inconvenient. They arrive looking all cinematic in your imagination. You picture yourself stepping off the plane, breathing in London air, wheeling your suitcase across cobbled streets like you’re the lead character in a Richard Curtis film. You do not picture standing under fluorescent lights buying emergency trousers because Air Canada has apparently decided your wardrobe needed a holiday in Toronto.

Of the three suitcases I checked, they managed to lose exactly the one containing every piece of clothing I own. Every shoe. Every jacket. Every “I’ll wear that when I get to London” outfit.

The only reason I’m not writing this wrapped in a hotel towel is because, in one rare moment of travel competence, I packed extra underwear and socks in my carry-on. Past Tanya deserves a medal. Or at least a nap.

Yesterday I learned the suitcase never even made it onto the plane. It simply… stayed behind. Imagine moving across an ocean, Viv, only for your clothes to decide they’d rather spend a few more days in Toronto. Honestly, the betrayal.

So my London wardrobe currently consists of one Marks & Spencer T-shirt, one pair of trousers, one pair of shoes, and the optimism of someone checking a baggage tracker every forty-five minutes like it’ll suddenly say, Surprise! We’ve been hiding your suitcase behind Big Ben.

Then there’s the flat. The studio. The one I’d imagined overlooking the canal — tea in hand, watching Mister and Missus Swan hold court on the water while the boats drifted lazily by. What I’ve got instead is rooftops and traffic.

There are a few other issues I’m trying to sort out, and I’m hoping they’ll move me into the room we originally discussed. At the moment I’m living in that strange space where nothing feels settled enough to unpack. Which is ironic, because I literally can’t unpack.

Everything I’d imagined for my first weekend in London has been replaced with customer service emails, phone calls, waiting, and trying not to buy an entirely new wardrobe out of mild panic. This weekend was supposed to be about beginning. It turned into admin. Life really does have a wicked sense of humour. I knew London would have hard days waiting for me somewhere down the line. I didn’t expect one to show up on day one. The frustration’s real, Viv, I’ll say that plainly.

I’m sitting here thinking about the last two years, Viv. Nothing has gone exactly to plan. Not the marriage, the house, the nomad years, the rebuilt career, none of it arrived looking the way I imagined. Somehow, every detour led somewhere I couldn’t have planned.

Maybe London is introducing herself properly. Through patience, adaptability and reminding me that a city isn’t built in a weekend, and neither is a life.

Besides, one day this will become one of those stories, the one I’ll tell you over dinner. “Remember when I moved to London and owned exactly one outfit?” It’s already funny. Well… Almost. Ask me again when my suitcase arrives.

XO,

Tanya

I am sitting at my mom’s dining room table, crying into an ordinary morning, sunlight flat across the table, my nervous system behaving like someone opened every filing cabinet in my body and tipped the contents onto the floor.

Old life. New life. Money. Marriage. Writing. London. Independence. Fear. Hope.

All of it scattered around me like paperwork after a burglary.

I keep asking myself, “What is this? What am I crying about?”

And the honest answer is, I don’t fully know.

That may be the most honest sentence I have today.

I don’t fully know.

I am one day away from getting on a plane to London. I’ve committed to six months. A new chapter, a brand new season where I am the star of the show. And still, today, it feels enormous.

Last night I had a wobble. A proper wobble.

I questioned everything: London, the timing, the money, the version of myself I keep insisting I’m becoming. The woman who packed that suitcase and booked that flight suddenly felt like a stranger I had to talk down.

At one point I laughed, because what else could I do when my brain started hosting a committee meeting at midnight with no agenda and too many opinions?

I thought, “What if I have to get a job again?” Then immediately, “Would I even know how to work for someone else anymore?” Then, “Would I want to?” Then, “Would anyone hire me after a year of full-time travel, writing and trying to become a person who doesn’t know her arse from her elbow half the time?”

It would make for an excellent LinkedIn headline.

The financial pressure is also very real.

I can dress it up in beautiful language. I can call it a growth edge, a portal, or an abundance initiation. I can put a candle beside it and make it smell like sandalwood.

It is still money. It is still the cold little spreadsheet goblin tapping on the glass at 3 a.m. asking, “And how exactly are we funding this rebirth, Tanya?”

I have a runway. I am grateful for that. Deeply grateful.

Yet a runway is still a runway. It ends somewhere.

I don’t want to eat through the money I’ve put away or burn through the safety I fought hard to create. I want money coming in. I want the writing to become income, the pitches to turn into yeses.

I catch myself dressing up the waiting in linen and smelling of patchouli, talking about trusting the timing of my life, checking my bank balance three times before breakfast. I want it now. That’s the truth.

I am tired of limbo, tired of being between things: between countries, between the old life and the new one.

There is a part of me that is ready to go. Properly ready.

It is standing at the edge of the runway in red lipstick, waving both arms, shouting, “Come on then, let’s have it.”

And there is another part of me sitting on the floor, pale as a Victorian ghost, whispering, “Are we sure?”

I am both women today.

The one who knows, and the one who wants someone else to take the wheel for five minutes because, Christ alive, she is tired.

Friends have told me not to be nervous. I know they mean well. I know it comes from love.

I do want this. I really do.

Also, telling someone not to be nervous is a bit like telling someone who is furious to calm down. It’s a bold strategy, rarely successful and occasionally dangerous.

Nerves don’t disappear because someone gives them a polite instruction. Fear does not pack its wee bag and leave because someone says, “Don’t worry.” Fear sits down beside me. It pulls up a chair, it asks for tea. It points out everything that could go wrong and asks, “Shall we review the material?”

Today, I am reviewing the material.

What if London is not the right place? What if I don’t make enough money? What if I spend six months trying to build a new life and end up back here at my mom’s house at 47?

That one lands hard.

Then, because I am a Libra and apparently incapable of having one clean thought without immediately cross-examining it from the other side of the courtroom, another voice pipes up.

What if London is the best place, the place where something in me finally exhales and says, there you are? What if I make more money than I know what to do with, almond-milk flinching be damned? What if six months becomes another six months, and I stop saying I’m going to London and start saying I live there?

So yes, fear is reviewing the material, and so is hope. They are both sitting at the table today. One has a clipboard. The other has a plane ticket.

Because I know I will always have somewhere to go, and I know that’s a privilege.

I have lived independently for a very long time. I had a marriage. A life. A version of myself that knew where the tea towels were, what bills were due, which cupboard held the good plates. Then it all went: the job, the marriage, the home, the certainty, all at once.

The scaffolding came down so fast I can still hear the crash some days.

For the last two years, I have been moving. Thailand. Madeira. Peru. Spain. France. Mexico. England. Ireland. Canada. Borrowed homes, rentals, suitcases, keys that weren’t mine, beds I had to learn in the dark.

So yes, in the simplest terms, I’m moving again. Except this time I’m staying longer. This time I’m building something.

Maybe that’s why the pressure feels different. London has stopped being just a place in my mind. It has become a symbol. A test, a doorway, a question I keep asking myself.

Can I make a life, and a living, from my own voice? Can I trust myself enough to keep going when the bank account, the grief, and the old ghosts start whispering at the same time?

Being back in Canada before leaving has stirred up more than I expected. There are reminders here. The land remembers me. The roads remember me. The grocery stores remember me. The social media algorithm has clearly noticed my location and decided to become a nosy aunt at a funeral.

Old friends, old community, old names and photos. Echoes of a life I’m no longer living.

Then my ex appears in the periphery again, the way things do when people mention them unprompted. His life drifts into view like smoke under a door.

I don’t want it back. I need to say that clearly.

I know that what happened, as brutal as it was, may have been the thing that saved me.

That is a hard sentence to write.

Harder to live.

Grief can hold on to something without wanting it back.

Sometimes grief is the body walking through the rooms one final time, touching the walls, seeing what used to hang there, and knowing I am not staying.

That is what this feels like.

One last walk-through, one last sweep of the old house inside me.

The version of me who belonged to that life is still somewhere in the walls. She is tired and has given everything she has.

I want to gather her up before I go and tell her she’s allowed to leave now. She did not fail.

There is a strange grief in being free. Nobody mentions that going in.

Freedom can be breathtaking. Freedom can also feel like standing in a wide-open field with no map, no fence, and no one to blame if I choose the wrong direction.

Freedom asks more of me than captivity ever did. It asks me to decide, to stop outsourcing my life to other people’s expectations.

Some days that feels magnificent. Other days, it scares the absolute shit out of me.

I keep thinking about that quote I wrote about recently. Clarity does not come before action. Clarity comes from action.

I want clarity before I get on the plane. I want the universe to send me a detailed itinerary with footnotes, financial projections, and perhaps a small choir singing, “Yes Tanya, London is correct.”

No such luck. Rude, frankly.

Instead, I have this: a suitcase, a plane ticket, a six-month lease, a body full of nerves, a heart that still wants beauty, and a steady knowing underneath the fear.

London may be hard. Of course it may be hard. It is busy and expensive and raw and beautiful and dirty and alive. It is polished in places and completely wild in others. It has history stacked on history. It has theatres and bookshops and parks and rain and strangers who may become part of the story.

I do not know who I will meet, or which version of me will emerge there.

I have already seen what can happen when I go. In the last two years, I have met extraordinary people. I have stood in places I once dreamed about. I have cried in cities that healed me without asking for anything in return. I have been cracked open by mountains, oceans, cafés, conversations, temples, rainbows, and the unglamorous dignity of getting up again when no one is applauding.

Why would London be any different?

The real work is putting that pressure down entirely and letting London be a place where I get to practice being more honest and more willing to be seen trying.

It is where I learn how to turn motion into momentum. Maybe it is where the writing deepens because I finally have a desk, a rhythm, a neighbourhood, and a place to buy the same almond milk twice.

Look at me, dreaming wildly. A consistent grocery store. Some women want diamonds. I want a local walk, a decent yoga class, a café that knows my order, and income that does not require me to have a minor spiritual crisis every time I open my laptop.

There is magic in ordinary stability after years of rupture. There is magic in choosing a place and saying, “I will try here, for now, for this chapter.”

Maybe that’s what I’m crying about: the size of the choice, and the tenderness of wanting something to work so badly I can barely say it out loud.

Because I do want this to work. I want to feel like I didn’t come this far, through all that wreckage, only to stand at the edge of the next thing and apologize for wanting more.

Life is hard. Some days it’s a proper fucking shit show, no clean lesson anywhere in it. Just me at a dining room table, crying into my tea, wondering how many times a person can start again before they become nothing but starts.

And then life is beautiful. Ridiculously, unbelievably cinematic. A red kite circling over Mallorca. A rainbow at Machu Picchu. Then the ordinary magic: a stranger who becomes a friend, a sentence that arrives when I thought the words were gone, a future that hasn’t happened yet, still walking toward me with its hands full of surprises.

I am determined to keep creating magic in my life. And I am learning that magic asks for something first: a risk, a goodbye, a decision made without full certainty, a suitcase packed while my heart was still trembling, a plane boarded with wet eyes.

Courage is wobbling at my mother’s dining room table, crying, questioning everything, then standing up and folding another jumper into the suitcase.

So here I am. One day before London.

Tender. Terrified. Excited. Overwhelmed. Ready enough, and still shaking. Going anyway.

The old life isn’t waiting for me, and some doors only open when my hand is shaking on the handle.

London, here I come.

Please be kind. Please have good matcha.

And if all else fails, please at least have a decent corner shop, because apparently I am rebuilding my entire life and still need almond milk.

Tell me…

Fear or hope, who's got the clipboard in your life right now?

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. Clarity doesn’t come before action. It comes from action.” — Rumi

I would love clarity to arrive first. Wouldn’t we all.

I picture her well-rested and smug, clipboard under one arm, colour-coded tabs, a pastry she’s not even going to offer me. I would like clarity to knock politely on the door and say, “Tanya, darling, here is the plan.” Here is exactly where you’re going, the precise route, the emotional forecast, and documented proof that you will not make an absolute bags of it.

Lovely. Clarity, unfortunately, appears to have other plans.

Clarity, I’m learning, is a slightly feral travel companion who only speaks once you’ve already bought the ticket. You move first. Then the path starts whispering. It’s small. A sentence you write that suddenly feels true, or a conversation that opens a door you didn’t know existed. A place that feels right in your bones before your mind has had time to build a spreadsheet about it.

The last two years of my life have had almost no clarity.

None. I have been living in a fog so thick it’s like someone handed me a pair of glasses, smeared them with butter, and said, “Off you go, best of luck.” I left a marriage, a home, a career, an entire identity I understood, and walked directly into not knowing where I’d live, what I was building, or whether any of it would work — or whether I’d look back in five years and realize I’d made a spectacular and very public mistake.

It has been, at times, genuinely terrifying.

I am not someone who finds the unknown comfortable. I like a plan. I like to know what’s coming (most of the time). The not-knowing has been the hardest part of all of it, harder than the heartbreak some days, because at least heartbreak has a shape. Fog just sits there, refusing to lift, while you squint into it, hoping to make out something solid.

For a long time, I stood still in that fog, waiting to feel ready, to feel confident, to become the version of myself who knew exactly what she was doing.

That woman never arrived. Rude, honestly.

So I started walking without her.

I wrote one thing, then another. I booked the flight. I sent the pitch. I opened the document I’d been avoiding for weeks. I followed the strange little pull in my chest, the one that kept saying “this way”, even when this way looked like a dimly lit hallway with questionable lighting.

Something started to happen though. Evidence, of all things. I learned what gave me energy by actually doing it. I learned what drained me because I stayed too long and felt my soul quietly pack a bag and leave before the meeting even ended. I learned what sounded like my voice by writing the awkward version first and letting it be terrible. I learned what I wanted because I finally stopped asking my fear for directions, which, for the record, is like asking a pigeon in a car park to plan your future.

The clarity came from contact with the work, the world, the choice in front of me. Never once from sitting still and thinking hard about it.

All that moving made me think of water.

A river is powerful because it moves. It’s vibrant and alive and full of minerals, and life is drawn to it. Fish, animals, people, everything gravitates toward moving water because it’s healthy, abundant and clean. There’s a reason we’re pulled toward the sound of a rushing river. It’s alive in a way you can feel.

Stagnant water does the opposite. Still for too long and it starts to smell. It grows bacteria; nothing wants to go near it or live in it. You avoid it on instinct.

I don’t want to be stagnant water. Even in the fog, even when every cell in my body is begging for a guarantee that isn’t coming, I would rather be moving. Because movement is life, it keeps you vibrant, humming, and open to whatever wants to find you.

Stagnation is just a slow death with better excuses.

So if you’re standing in your own fog right now, squinting, waiting for the plan to arrive on a clipboard, here is the only thing I actually know for sure.

You don’t need to see the whole way. You need the next honest step. That’s it. Just one. Then another.

I would also have preferred a five-year plan delivered by a spiritually evolved project manager with excellent boundaries and a tote bag full of snacks. But the way doesn’t appear because you think hard enough about it. It appears because your feet are on the ground, your hand is on the door, the draft exists, and you’ve finally given the universe something to respond to.

The path isn’t hiding from you.

It’s waiting for the sound of your own footsteps.

So move forward. Even when scared.

Be the river.

Tell me…

What's something you started before you felt remotely qualified?

Dear Viv,

The other day, I came across one of those quotes online. You know the ones. A celebrity may or may not have said it, half the internet is sharing it, and the other half is busy turning it into a motivational poster with a sunset behind it. This one stopped me cold in the cereal aisle of my own head.

It said: “I didn’t talk badly about you, I talked about what you did to me.”

I sat with that for a long while.

When my marriage ended, I heard a phrase over and over. “I’m not a bad guy.”

He said it to me again and again, like a man patting his pockets for his keys. “I’m not a bad guy. I’m not a bad guy.” And every time, I’d think, “Love, that’s a fascinating thing to reach for right now, because I never said you were.”

I was standing in the smoking crater of our life trying to work out what in God’s name had happened, and somewhere across the rubble, he was checking his reflection to make sure he still looked good.

Identity over impact.

He was so busy auditioning for the role of Decent Man that he never once read the scene he was actually in. It’s a neat trick, putting your own behaviour to a vote and then being the only one who turns up to the polls.

A lot of women do this, and I've done it with full marks, Viv. We start telling the truth about our lives and immediately feel responsible for how that truth might be received. So we edit, soften, and sand down the sharp edges; we add footnotes; we supply context; we provide a balanced reading of the opposing view; and by the end, we’ve handed in a fully cited dissertation defending the person who hurt us. Peer-reviewed.

Meanwhile, our own experience is sitting in the corner the whole time, waiting to be acknowledged. The poor creature has been there for years. Probably knitting. Definitely muttering.

I know this because I’ve done it. I’ve contorted myself into shapes a yoga instructor would flinch at trying to be fair, to see every side, to make sure every last person in the room felt understood. A lovely quality, right up until you clock that you’re the only one in the room nobody’s extending it to.

The truth is, I haven’t spent the last two years talking about a man. I’ve been talking about grief, about losing a future I thought was a sure thing, about standing in the rubble wondering what comes next. About rebuilding. Those things belong to me. They’re my story, my scars, my lessons.

Telling the truth about your life is a way of honouring your own reality. A way of saying: yes, this happened; yes, it changed me; yes, my experience matters, too.

Some people will be uncomfortable with that. Some preferred the version where you stayed silent, the one that made their life easier. And sometimes the truth only sounds harsh because someone benefited from the silence.

That’s not yours to carry, Viv. Your job was never to be the keeper of everyone else’s image, or to guard a story that cost you your own peace. Your job is to tell the truth. Gently, honestly, in your own time. And then to let it belong where it belongs, out in the light, where it can finally stop being a secret and start being a story.

XO,

Tanya

There should be a customer service desk for women in their mid-forties.

A little kiosk. Maybe at the airport, beside the pharmacy, staffed by a lovely Irish woman named Maureen, who hands out hormone patches and emotional-support snacks.

You’d walk up and say, “Hi. My marriage ended, I lost my job, sold my house, became a nomad, and now I think my ears are itchy from the inside.”

And Maureen would nod. “Ah yes. Perimenopause. A fierce little gobshite.”

Nobody prepares you for this chapter. People tell you about hot flashes. Nobody tells you that one day you’ll walk into a room and forget why you’re there. It’s a hostage negotiation. You’ll stand there staring at the wall like a Labrador that’s seen a ghost. The mission is gone. The objective has vanished. The brain has left the chat.

I was halfway through a conversation recently when I lost a word. Not an unusual word. Not something complicated. A normal everyday word, gone, evaporated. My brain looked at me and said, “Sorry, love. Best of luck.”

So I did what every woman in perimenopause does. I described the thing. You know the water zoo. The place with the fish. The fish museum. The swimming animal building.

Aquarium. The word was aquarium. Honestly, if I had a brain I’d be dangerous.

One of my favourites was a woman online trying to explain where she wanted a light fixture installed. “The upside-down floor.” The ceiling. She meant the ceiling, and every woman watching knew exactly what she meant. The upside-down floor. Perfect. No notes.

Then there are toes, or as one woman called them, “feet fingers.” Correct. Technically. And champions? Apparently they’re now “the winning people.” We’re all out here speaking fluent Perimenopausal. A beautiful new language built almost entirely from gestures, panic, and confidence. You forget the word, you point aggressively, someone eventually translates. Community. It’s what women do.

When this all started, the first thing I noticed was my body sneakingly redistributing itself. Wait, scratch that, loudly redistributing itself, mostly around the middle. Suddenly there was a belly that hadn’t RSVP’d. Nobody invited it. It just moved in, unpacked, and started paying no rent.

Now, if you’re looking to shed that perimenopause belly, I do have one tip. It’s very effective. Find your husband with another woman on your home security camera. You’ll lose ten pounds in a week. True story. Nothing kills an appetite like reviewing the footage. The shock of a marriage falling apart is, medically speaking, the most efficient weight-loss program I’ve ever been on. I don’t recommend it. The aftercare is brutal and the gym membership is your entire life. But the results? Immediate.

Meanwhile your body is running its own science experiment. One minute you’re freezing. The next you’re hotter than a rotisserie chicken, kicking off blankets, putting them back on, kicking them off again. At 2:14 in the morning you’re lying there wondering if you’ve developed a rare tropical disease. Nope. Just ovaries acting the maggot.

Then there are the heart palpitations. Nothing prepares you for lying down peacefully at night only for your heart to audition for the Kentucky Derby. I wasn’t sleeping. I was hosting horse races in my chest.

And the dry skin. Sweet suffering Jesus, there wasn’t enough moisturizer in Canada to soothe that itch. I could have bathed in it. I could have rented a tanker truck full of it, and my face would have absorbed the lot and politely asked for another.

Then came the creepy crawlies. A sensation like tiny, invisible insects crawling beneath my skin. Nobody tells you about that one. You mention it casually to another woman and she immediately says, “Oh yeah, I had that.” Like she’s discussing parking. Women are unbelievable. We can be actively falling apart and still remember someone’s birthday.

Then there are periods. Or whatever interpretation of periods we’re doing now. At this stage my cycle feels less like biology and more like weather. Forecast: partly cloudy with a chance of betrayal. There are maybe three and a half minutes each month where I trust white trousers. The rest of the time we’re all gambling.

And don’t get me started on sneezing. Ladies. You know. One violent sneeze and suddenly you’re evaluating your life choices. Nobody warned us that pelvic floors were apparently built by the lowest bidder.

The thing that amazes me most is that women navigate all of this while running businesses, raising children, caring for aging parents, managing households, surviving heartbreak, leading teams, maintaining friendships, booking dentist appointments, remembering birthdays, and somehow still replying, “Good thanks, how are you?” We’re extraordinary. Absolutely knackered. But extraordinary.

And in the middle of all this chaos, HRT arrived like a calm woman carrying a clipboard. For me, it changed everything. Nothing about this chapter is perfect. I’m still travelling with creams that require more planning than some international military operations.

I’ve organized flights around hormone refills. I’ve crossed borders carrying enough medication to look mildly suspicious. At one point I felt less like a writer and more like an international hormone smuggler.

But I’ll take it. These little creams helped me survive a season where almost everything familiar disappeared. The marriage. The job. The house. The certainty. The version of me who thought she knew exactly how life would unfold.

Somehow, while my whole life was being rebuilt from the foundations up, my body was rebuilding itself too. Maybe that’s the cosmic joke. Women spend our whole lives evolving. Puberty arrives and turns us upside down. Love changes us. Heartbreak changes us. Some of us grow babies or businesses. Some of us grow entirely new lives from the ashes of the old ones. And then, one day, our hormones gather everyone in a boardroom and announce another software update. Mandatory. Non-negotiable. Just vibes.

Honestly, I’d like a word with management.

Still, I look around at the women in my life and I’m in awe. Every one of them carrying something invisible, adapting, finding a way through. Even when we can’t remember the word for aquarium. Or ceiling. Or toes. Or whatever we were talking about.

Hang on.

What was I saying again?

Tell me…

What's your "upside-down floor"? Drop the word your brain replaced it with.

Two weeks in Mallorca. Orange trees, church bells, mountain air, and an alarming volume of hazelnut gelato. I regret nothing.

That’s a lie. I regret not adopting the Spanish siesta a decade ago. Whoever invented the afternoon nap deserves a Nobel Prize, or at the very least a parade with a brass band and a commemorative stamp.

Every afternoon, sometime after lunch, the whole town exhaled. Shops shuttered, streets emptied, and the heat settled over the stone like a linen blanket somebody forgot to take off the line. And I, a woman raised on productivity and colour-coded to-do lists, would lie down in the middle of the day thinking, “well, this feels wildly irresponsible.” Ten minutes later I was unconscious. The Spanish are onto something.

I spent the fortnight in a small town tucked into the mountains, staying with friends I love dearly. Friends who don’t require updates, who already know the story, who never once asked, “So what do you do?” for the nine hundredth time. I didn’t have to become anyone. I just arrived.

For someone who’s spent the better part of two years moving through airports, co-livings, hotels, and borrowed homes, that landed in a surprisingly tender place. For once, a place asked nothing of me. I rested inside it.

Mornings started with coffee for them and tea for me. Orange trees outside the window, mountains rising beyond. Some days we’d pick the oranges straight off the branch and squeeze them for breakfast. There’s something deeply satisfying about eating food that has travelled approximately six feet. An orange so fresh it never met a label or an ingredient list as long as a Harry Potter novel. An orange, off the tree. Done.

The town looked painted. Narrow streets, green shutters, stone warmed gold by the sun, orange blossom drifting through the evening as if someone were perfuming the place on purpose. Lemon trees buckling under their own fruit. Swallows stitching the air overhead. And above the peaks, red kites circling, slow and effortless and patient, every single day. I watched them for long stretches. Not searching for meaning in it. They were just beautiful, and sometimes that’s the whole job.

That’s what the fortnight handed me. Space. It arrives when you finally stop trying to solve your own life for five bloody minutes.

Somewhere between the siestas, the mountain views, and the long conversations around the table, I caught myself looking back with the steady gaze of a woman who’s stopped running long enough to clock how far she’s actually come.

These two years have asked a lot of me. I've lost things, built things, grieved things, carried more than I was sure I could carry. And sitting on that terrace, surrounded by people who know the whole messy story, I felt something I hadn't felt in a while. Pride. It sits beside you as the sun drops behind the mountains and says simply, "Well done." The plain recognition that I've survived things that could have broken me, and somehow stayed open. To new places, new people, dreams I haven't named yet.

As I write this, I can feel another chapter coming. Movement. A shift in the air I can’t quite explain and won’t try to. The details can wait.

For now I’m grateful for the pause. For the mountains, the oranges, the friends who made room for me to simply be. And for a small Spanish town that reminded me of something I’d let myself forget.

Life isn’t always asking you to move. Sometimes it’s asking you to stop. Lie down, take the nap, order the gelato, watch the birds. Let the chapter end before you go scribbling the next one.

Tell me…

When did you last catch yourself looking back and feeling proud instead of panicked?

Dear Viv,

What caught my attention wasn’t the bird. It was the sound.

I was stretched out by the pool with my book, doing a grand job of nothing at all, which is still a novelty I haven't stopped marvelling at. Then this cry came ringing down from somewhere above me, sharp and strange and like nothing I'd ever heard, and it lifted my eyes clean off the page.

I looked up like an eejit, hand over my eyes, squinting into the sun. Two birds, circling high over the mountains, not a care between them. Big things, broad in the wing. My first thought was a hawk of some sort, then maybe an eagle, though what would I know. The closest I’ve come to a bird of prey is a dodgy chicken fillet taco in Mexico, that didn’t go well. For the next few days they had me. Every time that call drifted down I’d stop whatever I was at and tip my head back to find them, looking, I’m sure, like a woman who’d misplaced something in the clouds.

A bit of digging, and a friend who actually knows these things, set me straight. Red Kites. Rust-gold underneath when the light hits them right, wings stretched the whole width of the sky, floating up there like they’d made some private arrangement with gravity that the rest of us weren’t offered. Naturally, I went down the rabbit hole because this is apparently who I am now: a woman who turns up in Mallorca and, within the week, knows more about a bird of prey than she does about her own pension.

Here’s the fascinating part, Viv. There was a time these birds had all but vanished from parts of Europe. Their numbers fell away to almost nothing and for a long while you’d have been lucky to clap eyes on one at all. Then people stepped in, years of careful protecting and patient minding, and slow as anything, they came back. Now they own the sky over valleys like this one, swanning about as if they were never away.

I'm not going to sit here and compare myself to a bird, though if I come home from Spain introducing myself as a majestic bird of prey you have my full permission to stage an intervention. It's their comeback I can't stop thinking about.

What happens after all the rebuilding?

These last two years have been their own kind of rehabilitation, haven’t they? Learning to trust myself again. Learning to hear my own voice under the racket of everyone else’s. Learning to put down the life that looked grand on paper and pick up the one that actually feels right in my bones, even when it’s terrifying and when half of it makes no sense to anyone watching.

And the strange thing, lying here with my books and my siestas and my dinners that don’t get going until half the night’s gone, is that I don’t feel like I’m healing anymore. I feel like I’m getting ready. There’s a difference in it that I landed on this week. Healing has you tending a wound, careful and slow with your eyes down. Getting ready has you standing at the lip of something with the wind coming up to meet you.

Every time those kites come wheeling over the mountains, I feel it land in my chest. This low hum of excitement I haven’t felt in years. A sense that the whole lot of it has been carrying me somewhere. The hard conversations nobody got to see, the writing, the thousand small decisions made alone in borrowed rooms, all of it leading toward something bigger than the life I left.

Somewhere that’s going to ask me to use my wings.

That’s what’s so remarkable, watching these majestic creatures. They’re not flogging themselves stupid up there. No frantic flapping, or white-knuckling it, no masterclass called Seven Steps to Soar Faster and Monetize Your Altitude. They open their wings and let the wind take a turn of the work, which, for a woman who spent her whole adult life treating urgency like a personality, is a fairly revolutionary thing to sit and watch from a sun lounger.

So if you’re feeling restless lately, love, if you’re wondering when it’s your go, if everything’s gone strange and slow on you, I don’t think slow means stopped. Sometimes we’re standing still and calling it failure, when really we’re just gaining altitude. Learning the wind. Building our wings out of sight, long before anyone sees you fly.

Somewhere up above all the noise, there’s already a sound calling your name. You’ll likely hear it before you ever see its shape.

They came back, Viv. So will we.

XO,
Tanya

The first time it happened, I thought I’d slept funny.

I woke up one morning completely stuck. The pain that makes getting out of bed a complex engineering project. Every movement required planning. Looking left was ambitious. Looking right felt reckless. Dropping something on the floor meant accepting it now belonged there.

For years, this became part of my life.

Every three weeks I’d find myself back on a chiropractor’s table. Same reception desk, same magazines fanned out on the coffee table, same conversation.

“How’s the neck?”

“Not great, Sharon, seeing as we’re both here again.”

I’d get adjusted, feel human for a while, and carry on until my neck decided it had another dramatic episode. The explanation was always physical: wrong pillow, too long at a computer, the wrong sleeping position. I also happen to have a very long neck. People commented on it when I was younger. My mother preferred to frame it more positively.

“You’ve a swan’s neck.”

Which sounds lovely until you’re forty-five and your swan neck is seizing up every few weeks like an old photocopier.

When my marriage ended and I started travelling, one of my biggest concerns wasn’t only money or figuring out where I’d live or navigating life on my own.

It was my neck.

I was already seeing a chiropractor every three weeks. How exactly was I supposed to manage that while sleeping in hotels, co-livings, guest rooms, and whatever mattress happened to be waiting for me on the other side of the world?

Every new bed felt like a small experiment. Would I wake up refreshed? Would I wake up crooked? Would my neck once again declare bankruptcy and refuse all cooperation?

For the first few months, things were surprisingly fine. I travelled, I adjusted, I carried on.

Then I was in Madeira.

At the time, my ex and I were still communicating, if communicating is the right word. His messages always seemed to be about him, his life, his thoughts, his problems. I can’t remember him asking how I was, where I was, or whether I was safe.

One evening a message arrived that landed sideways. I read it, put my phone down, said nothing. I knew I was angry. I also knew I wasn’t ready to respond. So I went to bed.

The next morning I woke up in agony.

I couldn’t get out of bed or turn my head. I lay there staring at the ceiling of my room in Madeira, wondering how I’d managed to become temporarily immobilized on a volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

In the middle of a divorce, thousands of kilometres from home, spending my morning calling chiropractors.

“Do you have availability today?”

No. Tomorrow? No. Next week? Also no.

Grand. Excellent.

I was beginning to think my recovery plan involved lying flat on my back until further notice.

Then by some miracle I found the name of a chiropractor on the other side of the island. He also practiced Traditional Chinese Medicine. At that point I wasn’t asking many questions. Could he see me? Yes. Perfect.

Somehow I managed to get into a Bolt (the equivalent of an Uber) and spent 25 minutes crossing the island, trying not to move my head. Every bump in the road felt personal.

His clinic was in his house. He spent over an hour with me without once making me feel like the next patient was already waiting, working through my neck, my shoulders, my hips, my back, the whole architecture of a body that had been carrying a significant amount of unspoken stress for years.

I’d spent years with chiropractors who approached my neck with the confidence of a man trying to start a lawnmower.

This was different.

He started asking questions. What was I doing in Madeira? Where was I from? What was happening in my life?

Eventually I told him. The divorce, the travel, the message, the frustration, the things I hadn’t been saying.

He listened. Then he pointed at my throat.

“You’re not using your voice.”

I remember staring at him. Of all the things I’d expected to hear that day, that wasn’t on the list.

He told me the neck connects to the throat chakra, to truth, to what we say and what we don’t. He said I needed to speak. Say what I feel. Say what’s true. And most importantly, stop letting others speak for me.

I left with those words rattling around in my head alongside the first full movement my neck had made in a very long time.

Then life started presenting the opportunities.

The divorce moved forward. The house sold. Conversations happened that I would previously have avoided. For the first time in a very long time, I started saying things I would have swallowed before. I told people when they crossed a boundary. I said no without writing a dissertation to support the decision. I stopped making myself responsible for everyone else’s comfort (this is still a working progress).

And a few months after this chiropractic session, I started writing. Writing in a way that feels liberating. The truth as I experience it, including the parts that would once have stayed trapped somewhere between my chest and my throat.

My neck stopped hurting.

The episodes simply stopped arriving. I still do the exercises he taught me every morning, in London, in Toronto, in Spain, in borrowed bedrooms and temporary homes. Full movement and zero pain. It’s been over a year.

For years I believed my neck was the problem. It was trying to deliver a message. A fairly aggressive one, admittedly. My body had practically hired a marching band to get my attention.

I simply wasn’t listening.

These days I use my voice. On the page first, then in conversations, then in the boundaries I’d spent years swallowing.

My neck, thankfully, seems satisfied with the arrangement.

There’s a book called You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay that maps physical symptoms to emotional causes. Hay believed throat and neck problems are often connected to repressed emotions, to the things we swallow instead of say, the voice we mute to keep the peace, the truth we’ve been storing in the body because saying it out loud felt like too much.

I read that and thought, “Ah, so my neck wasn’t broken. It was just waiting for me to start talking.”

We are not just minds dragging bodies around. We are whole systems, and when one part goes unheard, another part starts filing complaints. Mine filed them in my cervical spine, apparently, with the persistence of someone who had left seventeen voicemails and was absolutely done being ignored.

If something in your body has been shouting at you lately, it might be worth asking what it’s trying to say.

It might not be about your pillow.

Tell me…

Has your body ever tried to tell you something you weren't ready to hear? Tell me in the comments; I'd love to know what it was trying to say.

The older I get, the less interested I am in talent.

Charm I can admire from a distance. Charisma is entertaining for about forty minutes. Potential is the word people use when they want credit for something they haven’t done yet.

Give me character.

I’ve been thinking about the people who have passed through my life — the ones who chose a comfortable lie over a costly truth, who disappeared when a difficult conversation was the only decent option, who said cruel things while hurting and wanted someone else in the room with them while they burned.

For a long time I looked at those experiences through the lens of what they did to me.

Now I look at them differently.

Every single one of those moments required a choice. Tell the truth or construct a more comfortable version of it. Stay in the room when things got hard or find a reason to leave. Take responsibility or find someone else to hand it to.

None of those choices are easy. That’s exactly why they reveal everything.

When I was younger, I confused strength with confidence. I thought strong people were the loud ones, the certain ones, the ones who could command a room without visibly breaking a sweat.

Life has spent the last few years correcting that assumption quite aggressively.

I know people who could command a room but couldn’t tell the truth to save their own lives. People who built impressive careers and had never once looked directly at a mistake and claimed it. I’ve been up close with that particular talent and I can confirm it ages very poorly.

Strength is more inconvenient than advertised and a lot less impressive-looking up close.

It’s honesty when a lie would be easier. Accountability when your ego is filing a formal objection. Staying in the room when every instinct points to the exit. Looking directly at yourself and saying, “that’s on me,” cleanly, without the footnotes.

For years, I was the designated adult in rooms full of people hoping someone else would deal with the mess. I carried relationships that only worked because I was doing the structural work of two people. I carried the weight that kept getting offloaded onto me by people who had decided, somewhere along the way, that this was my job.

It is exhausting work.

Nobody asked me if I wanted it either.

There’s a difference I’ve been working out slowly between the vulnerability that comes from being human; the grief, the fear, the days when you genuinely don’t know your arse from your elbow and the weakness that refuses to face itself. The first one I have enormous patience for. We all have those days. I certainly have mine, regularly, sometimes before 9 am.

The second one I’m done carrying.

The weakness that hands its responsibilities to whoever is willing to take them. The weakness that mistakes avoidance for peace and silence for resolve. No more time for that one. The weakness that expects everyone else to manage what it refuses to look at directly. Finished.

I’m building something now, slowly and in real time, and I’ve become very deliberate about who I let close to it.

I’ve learned, the expensive way, that we absorb the standards of the people around us. Their courage or their avoidance of it. Their honesty or their carefully constructed alternatives. The way they handle the moments that cost them something, or the way they don’t.

Who sits at your table shapes what you believe is normal.

I want people around me who are brave enough to face themselves. Who can hold joy without immediately looking for someone to diminish it, and hold pain without distributing it to everyone in the vicinity. Who can say they were wrong in a sentence, without a footnote, without a “but”, without making you feel responsible for the discomfort of their accountability.

I want people with character.

Not perfection. Nobody’s looking for that and frankly it would be exhausting company.

Just people who, when the moment costs them something, choose the harder and more honest thing.

Those are my people.

That’s the table I’m building.

And I want to return that to the people around me too. I know this goes both ways. The table I’m building asks something of me as well: to be the kind of person someone else might one day point to and say, she stayed in the room.

That feels like something worth building toward.

Tell me…

Who in your life embodies real character, the kind that shows up when it costs something? And what does your table look like right now?

There’s a woman in the Swiss Air lounge clearing plates with a smile usually reserved for people who’ve recently fallen in love or found twenty dollars in an old winter coat.

I’m in Zurich with a five-and-a-half-hour layover on my way to Spain, standing out on the terrace watching planes take off into a pale grey sky while warm early-summer air moves through my hair.

Airports are extraordinary when you stop behaving like a traumatized commuter and actually look at them.

The terrace sits right beside the runway, so close you can hear the engines roar to life before takeoff. The wind carries the smell of jet fuel and rain. Tiny airport vehicles zip around the tarmac like caffeinated ants. Little carts towing mountains of luggage, fuel trucks weaving between aircraft worth more than entire neighbourhoods, ground crew in neon jackets performing what appears to be an aggressively choreographed dance production called Delayed Flight to Frankfurt.

One tiny mistake and the whole thing turns into a Netflix documentary.

And yet somehow it works.

Planes reverse out of parking spots. Humans arrive from every corner of the earth carrying neck pillows, duty-free Toblerones, emotional baggage, regular baggage, oversized hiking backpacks, screaming toddlers, and occasionally one man wearing sandals with absolutely criminal toenails.

Airports are humanity in compression socks.

I’ve spent the last hour outside on this terrace listening to planes thunder overhead while soft jazz drifts out from the lounge behind me like the airport hired a mildly divorced pianist to emotionally regulate us all.

And I keep noticing this woman.

She’s clearing plates. Wiping tables. Restocking cups. Smiling at people. Present smiling. The sort that lives in the eyes first.

I earned my way into this lounge.

Gold status sounds glamorous until you remember it’s mostly achieved through exhaustion, delayed flights, airport sandwiches that cost as much as a small appliance, and dragging yourself across time zones wondering what day it is. A lot of work built this. A lot of movement. A lot of mornings hauling luggage through terminals on four hours of sleep, telling yourself it’s all going somewhere.

I left behind the life I spent years building. The marriage. The house. The routines. The version of myself everyone understood. Now I bounce between countries carrying enough electronics to start a small media company from Gate C17.

Some mornings I wake up excited. Other mornings I wake up wondering if I’ve accidentally become a woman whose entire personality is now “airport.”

There’s something mildly unhinged about knowing the layout of Heathrow better than your own future. Home is still a question I’m carrying rather than a place I can point to.

Standing out here though, watching planes disappear into clouds beside people who have also spent years chasing arrival; status, success, better seats, the sacred hierarchy of airline privilege, something clarified.

Human beings really said, “What if we made boarding groups into a personality test?”

And then this woman clearing plates cuts right through it.

She looked more peaceful than half the businessmen inhaling breakfast sausage and stale croissants while staring into laptops with the emotional range of drywall.

There’s a sentence for LinkedIn.

I don’t know exactly what I’m building yet. Writing feels expansive one day and like entering a creative haunted house the next. Some nights I feel deeply aligned. Other nights I’m googling rental prices while eating airport cheese cubes like a woman preparing for economic collapse.

You can arrive somewhere beautiful internally long before your life fully makes sense externally.

She reminded me of that. A woman clearing plates in an airport lounge, with tired eyes, a genuine smile, completely in her own moment.

Maybe happiness isn’t always hiding inside the giant milestones. Sometimes it’s standing between flights, with the wind in your hair, listening to planes scream across the sky, watching a woman with a gentle smile live inside her life so fully that it stops you mid-thought.

This terrace. This strange in-between.

Another plane lifts off the runway and banks hard into the clouds. I watch it until it disappears.

I keep waiting to arrive somewhere that will finally feel like enough. And then a woman clearing plates in an airport lounge smiles like someone who has never once confused happiness with destination, and I remember.

It’s already here. The awe. The joy. The small unremarkable moments that turn out to be the whole point. Not something to chase, earn, or wait for. Just something to notice when you’re standing still long enough to look.

Tell me…

When was the last time a small, unexpected moment stopped you in your tracks? Tell me in the comments. I want to hear about the ones that sneak up on you.

I have been drinking matcha for almost twenty years.

Before it became trendy. Before every person with a linen tote bag and suspiciously tiny sunglasses decided that a green drink was a personality. Before influencers started holding it beside their face in cafés with exposed brick and one lonely fern in the corner, looking contemplative about absolutely nothing.

I was there first. Whisk in hand. Slightly smug. Deeply hydrated. Possibly unbearable at dinner parties.

My relationship with matcha began the way most of my obsessions do, with me researching something entirely sensible and then sliding down a rabbit hole until I could no longer see daylight. I loved green tea. I was fascinated by Japan. I was reading about Japanese food, health, and longevity, and how certain cultures treat food as something with ritual, history, and genuine care, the preparation as important as the eating.

Then came matcha. Beautiful, bright, earthy matcha. A powdered green tea made from shade-grown leaves, traditionally whisked into hot water until it becomes this vivid, frothy, slightly ceremonial little cup of calm.

Then I trained as a holistic nutritionist, which did not help matters. Suddenly I had information.

Dangerous thing, information.

I learned about antioxidants, catechins, L-theanine, chlorophyll, and the way matcha delivers a steadier energy than coffee, less of the heart-racing panic goblin, more of a gentle internal orchestra tuning up for the day.

Matcha feels like someone opening the curtains and saying, “Right, love, let’s be useful without ruining the nervous system.”

Matcha is not for everyone, and I respect that. Some people taste it and look personally betrayed, which is a completely valid response. Done badly, it tastes like someone mowed a lawn and then charged nine dollars for the clippings. Done well, though — soft, creamy, grounded, a drink with actual manners — it’s genuinely wonderful.

Everywhere I go, I find the nearest café and assess whether anyone behind the counter knows what they’re doing with green powder.

Some people visit museums. Some people find churches, ruins, markets, men with accents, whatever their soul requires.

I scan menus like a detective in a cardigan.

My standards are straightforward. The matcha should not be bitter. If it is, the water was too hot, or the powder has been there so long it has its own loyalty card. It should have an earthy elegance, and if I see syrup being reached for, I begin to withdraw in real time.

If they pull out a bamboo whisk, I relax.

If they scoop powder into a bowl, add warm water, and whisk it properly before adding milk, I become loyal in a way usually reserved for childhood friendships and excellent hairdressers.

A good matcha takes a few minutes. You cannot rush it. Well, you can, but then you end up with clumps, bitterness, and emotional damage. Ask me how I know.

When I still had a house, a kitchen, and all the little tools of domestic life, I made an exceptional matcha latte. I say this with no humility because false modesty helps no one.

I had the whisk, the bowl and the good powder. I knew the water temperature. I had the whole morning ritual down to something approaching a spiritual practice. Sometimes I added grass-fed butter, a little coconut manna, and MCT oil, because there was a season of my life when I was very committed to becoming the sort of woman who could say “healthy fats” before 8 am without irony.

It worked, though. Warm, creamy, grounding. It made me feel less like a woman answering emails and more like a monk with WiFi.

Then I became nomadic, and matcha became a global treasure hunt.

Peru surprised me.

In Miraflores, Lima, I found a little organic café that made a beautiful matcha latte. Smooth, earthy and properly made. A matcha that made the world feel briefly less complicated. They also had fantastic pancakes, which is unrelated but spiritually relevant.

I kept going back. This is what happens when I find a good place. I become a regular at alarming speed. By the third visit, I’m walking in like, “hello, it’s me again, your green-tea-dependent woman from abroad.”

Bordeaux delivered magnificently.

Horace Café deserves a small standing ovation. They had one of the best carrot cakes I’ve ever eaten, and the matcha was beautiful. Carrot cake and matcha are a pairing so emotionally supportive it should be covered by insurance. I tried several places in Bordeaux because obviously I was conducting important field research, and Horace won. The matcha tasted like someone cared. The carrot cake tasted like someone’s grandmother had a secret and had taken it to her grave.

Then there was Ibiza.

Ah, Ibiza in January. Beautiful. Quiet. Slightly empty. Lots of sea air. Lots of space.

No matcha.

Not a whisper. Not a fleck. Not a single green dusting anywhere on the entire island. I spent a month there and arrived in France having gone five weeks without it. Five weeks. I was not well. I was wandering around like a woman in a Victorian novel who needed sea air and a fainting couch, except what I actually needed was a bamboo whisk and someone who took powder seriously.

Ibiza, I love you. But you let me down, and I want you to sit with that.

Ireland was also tricky, which, as an Irish woman, I say with the specific disappointment of someone who expected better from home.

I love Ireland with my whole heart. Ireland can do tea. Ireland can do bread. Ireland can do butter so good it makes you question every life choice that led you to margarine. But matcha? On that trip, I found maybe one, and it was not great. We’re just not fully sucking diesel there yet. The island gave us Guinness and soda bread and I suppose we can’t have everything, but I remain hopeful that some enterprising person on the island will sort this out before I’m back.

London is improving, though I’m watching it with cautious optimism. There are places doing good things, but too many are still leaning into syrup, sweet, pre-mixed, sugary green drinks that taste less like matcha and more like a cupcake went through a wellness phase and started a podcast.

Canada has had some wins. There is a local café near my friends that makes a good matcha. They whisk it, which immediately earns my trust. It says: “We know what this is. We respect the leaf. We are not acting the maggot with a pump bottle.”

I also have strong opinions about milk; if you’ve read this far, it shouldn’t surprise you.

For a matcha latte, I prefer regular cow’s milk. I know. Controversial in the age of oat everything. But cow’s milk gives matcha the creaminess it deserves without hijacking the flavour. Almond milk changes the taste completely. Coconut milk can work, but then coconut takes over and the matcha ends up sitting in the back seat wondering what happened to its moment. Oat milk can be fine depending on the brand, but sometimes makes the whole thing too heavy and sweet, like it’s trying too hard.

These are personal preferences. Not commandments from the green tea gods.

Matcha drowned in sugar stops being matcha entirely; it becomes a dessert pretending to be a wellness drink, and we’ve all met enough people pretending to be something they’re not.

Matcha has followed me from the nutritionist with the whisk to the newly untethered woman hauling luggage through airports, hunting cafés in cities where I can’t even ask for what I want, let alone find ceremonial grade.

It has been there in Lima, beside pancakes and heartbreak. In Bordeaux, beside carrot cake and notebook pages. In Canada, tucked into ordinary mornings. In London, still under cautious investigation. In Ibiza, tragically absent, like a character killed off too early in season one.

It’s the ritual of it, the search, the small moment of familiarity in places that don’t know me yet. When you’re travelling full-time, you learn quickly which small things make you feel like yourself again. A café table near a window. A warm cup held in both hands.

For me, it’s matcha.

My little green anchor. My calm-in-a-cup with a superiority complex.

So if you ever find yourself in a new city and spot me through a café window, there’s a strong chance I’ll be there watching the barista like a suspicious aunt at a wedding.

If the whisk comes out, I’ll relax.

If the syrup bottle appears, pray for me.

And if the matcha arrives smooth, warm, earthy, and beautifully made?

I’ll take a sip, soften my shoulders, and think:

Right.

We’re home for a minute.

Tell me…

Everyone has their thing, the one they seek out wherever they go, the small ritual that makes a new place feel survivable. What's yours?

I have developed, in my mid-forties, a completely unapologetic dislike list. Nobody asked for this. Here we are.

Women are supposed to be understanding, compassionate, evolved, soft around the edges, full of grace and emotionally intelligent while drinking herbal tea.

Meanwhile, I’m developing the spiritual gift of walking into a room and knowing within fourteen seconds who’s going to drain the absolute life out of me.

My body simply issues an internal memo. Absolutely the feck not. And I trust that instinct now, because I spent years overriding it.

I adapted myself to environments, people, expectations, marriage, productivity culture, emotionally unavailable men, emotionally chaotic family members, loud personalities mistaken for depth, and people who performed authenticity as if they were auditioning for a TED Talk nobody asked for.

I smiled through things my nervous system was begging me to run from.

These days, my body rejects things faster than a toddler rejects olives.

Which is fitting, because I also reject olives. Vehemently. Europe has taken this personally.

The older I get, the less interested I am in pretending. Pretending I enjoy certain conversations. Pretending I want to stay longer than I do. Pretending someone’s energy doesn’t feel like being trapped beside a man on a plane who wants to explain cryptocurrency before takeoff.

I used to think adaptability was maturity. Turns out a lot of it was self-abandonment in a nice outfit.

Now, before anyone panics, this isn’t me becoming bitter. I still love people deeply. Probably too deeply. I cry at old couples holding hands while walking. I’ve had entire emotional experiences over strangers laughing together in cafés.

But I’ve become deeply intolerant of certain dynamics. Manipulation. Liers. Passive aggression. People who confuse chaos for personality. People who leave you feeling like you need a nap and a priest afterwards.

And public spitting.

Sweet suffering Jesus.

Public spitting needs to end immediately. Straight to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

I don’t know when society collectively decided we should all calmly witness grown men launching bodily fluids onto the pavement like malfunctioning llamas, but I reject it entirely. Every time someone does it near me, my soul leaves my body and starts walking home without me.

My dislikes have become very specific lately. Networking events where everyone says “circle back.” People who brag about how busy they are like they’re competing in the Exhaustion Olympics. People who take phone calls on speaker in public as though the rest of us gathered specifically to hear about Karen’s situation with the landlord.

I used to override myself constantly. Stayed longer than I wanted. Said yes when my entire body was screaming so loudly it could be heard in the Himalayas.

Women are trained into this strange performance of agreeability. Be easygoing. Don’t be difficult. Smile. Don’t say you dislike things too loudly, or people might think you’re negative. Meanwhile, half of us are internally screaming in tapas restaurants while chewing olives we never wanted in the first place.

I’m no longer available for that.

The older I get, the more immediate my body becomes. Before my brain catches up, my body already knows. It knows when someone is lying, when a room feels off, when I’m abandoning myself to keep the peace, when something looks good on paper but feels dead in my chest.

For years, I ignored those signals.

Now they arrive like a very stern Irish Mammy standing in the kitchen doorway saying: “Absolutely not, Tanya, catch yourself on.”

She’s usually right.

I think this is what happens in the second act. Your tolerance shrinks, your intuition sharpens, and your body gets so loud that pretending not to hear it becomes its own kind of exhausting. Things you once ignored now feel unbearable. This is just what honesty looks like when it stops being polite about it.

Sometimes growth looks like saying: that dynamic is unhealthy, that person exhausts me, that lifestyle is overrated, and I no longer want to abandon myself to participate in it.

There’s a freedom in that. Slightly ungovernable.

Also, olives still taste like salty little betrayal buttons.

Some things simply are what they are.

Tell me…

What's on your unapologetic dislike list? Public spitting? Circle back? Someone explaining cryptocurrency before takeoff?

Creativity after heartbreak feels different because it stops asking permission.

At least, that’s what’s happening to me.

Somewhere inside my marriage, creativity slowly stopped belonging to me. It happened gradually, the way most significant losses do. Before I got married, I was an actor. That world is where I met my husband. We were both creatives. Rehearsals, productions, late-night conversations about art and storytelling and meaning. Very insufferable theatre-kid energy, honestly. If there had been scarves and cigarettes involved, we could’ve charged admission.

Then life shifted.

He became an artistic director. His work expanded. His creativity took up more space in the room. Mine folded inward slowly, like one of those camping chairs that looks stable until suddenly you’re on the ground holding a cider, wondering what happened.

I stopped acting. I stopped writing little plays and half-finished scenes in notebooks. The creative part of me didn’t disappear — it started looking for side doors.

Furniture, weirdly enough, became one of them.

I became mildly obsessed with refinishing old pieces. I’d wander through thrift stores looking for battered side tables and chairs that looked like they’d survived several divorces and at least one smoker named Brenda. I loved it. Sanding wood. Repainting pieces. Reupholstering chairs while watching YouTube tutorials from men named Gary who definitely owned seventeen clamps and referred to oak as if it were a sacred religion.

It felt grounding and creative. It was something for me.

Dance kept finding me too. I was always dancing as a kid, always moving around the kitchen, the sitting room, anywhere with enough floor space to avoid taking out a lamp. In 2019, before the world collectively lost the plot, I took myself to New York for a weekend dance intensive with a choreographer I admired.

I remember standing in that studio feeling completely out of place. Everyone looked cool in that very specific dance-world way where they somehow appear both exhausted and intimidating at the same time. Meanwhile, I was standing there trying to remember if my hips had always made that noise.

The second the music started, something woke up in me. Something that had stopped asking how it was being perceived and just needed to come out. I’d spent a long time living in the first version of myself. This felt like the second.

COVID arrived not long after and the world shut down before I got to explore any of it further. Then heartbreak arrived with a flamethrower and took out the remaining walls.

And writing came back.

Real writing. Writing that arrived because something inside me refused to stay buried anymore. I spent years shaping myself around stability and survival and somebody else’s vision of what mattered. Then everything fell apart and underneath all the rubble was this woman holding a pen again.

She’d been there the whole time.

Now I feel creativity everywhere. In writing, in voice notes, in strange ideas at 2 am, in the way I observe people in airports and cafés like a woman accidentally training to become an emotional support documentarian.

And I’m exploring again. Really exploring. From curiosity rather than the need to become excellent at something immediately, which feels mildly revolutionary for a recovering perfectionist.

I’ve found myself sitting with tiny notebooks, doodling little sketches like an unsupervised child at a restaurant table. I’ve fallen down rabbit holes watching videos about paintings and art history, people discussing brushstrokes with the intensity of sports commentators. Recently, I somehow ended up standing in a fabric store, staring at wool and crochet needles as if they were calling to me spiritually.

One minute you’re healing. The next you’re watching a woman named Sally teach blanket stitching on YouTube while contemplating whether your entire future identity involves linen overalls and owning seventeen baskets.

I’m still deeply pulled toward writing; that’s the clearest thread running through all of this. But I also want to act again. Maybe take another dance class. Maybe make terrible art for the pure joy of making it.

That’s what this whole chapter cracked open for me. The understanding that creativity is a life force, and somewhere along the way, many of us stop feeding it.

We get practical and efficient. We answer emails and sit in meetings that could’ve been a three-line voice note and a strong cup of tea. Then one day, we look around and realize we haven’t touched the parts of ourselves that feel alive in years, because life slowly pulled us away from ourselves while we were busy surviving it.

This is actually where the P.L.A.Y. Papers came from.

Purpose. Liberation. Authenticity. You.

Something I lived my way into rather than workshopped in a notebook with colour-coded tabs. The realization that placing creativity at the centre of my life, given the same weight as everything else, changes everything about how that life feels from the inside.

I’m learning this in real time. Following sparks. Paying attention to what lights something up. The fabric store I probably shouldn’t be allowed back into unsupervised.

Sometimes creativity is simply the act of returning breath to yourself.

A story you haven’t written yet.

A version of you that’s been waiting for an invitation.

You’re still allowed to begin again and still allowed to P.L.A.Y.

And I, for one, am excited to.

Tell me…

Where does your creativity go when life gets heavy? Does it disappear, find side doors, or show up somewhere completely unexpected?

I have become different women in different cities.

Not in an Eat, Pray, Love way. Nobody handed me enlightenment in linen trousers while I journaled beside a waterfall, looking moisturized and spiritually together.

Most of it looked considerably less glamorous: crying alone in rooms with questionable lighting, dragging a suitcase over cobblestones like a Victorian ghost, Googling eSIM cards while emotionally unravelling, trying to heal and also find decent WiFi.

Still, certain cities pulled certain versions of me to the surface.

And somewhere over the last twenty-two months, while my life was falling apart and rebuilding itself in strange corners of the world, I realized the woman I became in one place was never the same woman I became somewhere else.

Miraflores, Lima was where the grieving woman arrived.

That version of me walked along the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean with a heartbreak so heavy it felt stitched directly under my ribs. The marriage was over. The old life was gone. The paperwork had started. The future looked like static.

I spent a lot of time alone there, staring dramatically out windows like I was auditioning for an Irish independent film called Woman Processing Near Ocean.

And that woman, shattered as she was, still chose somewhere beautiful to begin.

There’s strength in that, even when you’re running on fumes and sheer Irish stubbornness.

Thailand took me all the way down.

I got so sick there that my body essentially called an emergency meeting and decided we would now be communicating exclusively through exhaustion, fever, and what I can only describe as a full system shutdown. Very spiritual. There’s nothing quite like attempting a profound awakening while simultaneously wondering if your stomach lining is dissolving.

Weeks of staring at the ceiling questioning the entire architecture of my existence alone.

Rock bottom gets romanticized sometimes; people talk about it like it’s a breakthrough moment with good lighting and a cinematic soundtrack. Rock bottom is ugly crying in humidity so intense your grief develops condensation.

But something happened there. I stopped performing strength and finally allowed myself to fully fall apart.

The woman who came out of Thailand was harder to rattle than the one who arrived.

Madeira was where colour returned.

Madeira grabbed me gently by the shoulders and said, enough now, pet. Put on something sparkly and go outside.

So I did. I danced at Carnival beneath confetti-filled skies with strangers who felt like old friends. I hiked cliffs that looked photoshopped by God himself. I watched sunsets from my room that made me question whether the universe was trying to flirt with me.

And the rainbows. Jesus Christ, the rainbows. Everywhere. Like the island was trying to remind me that magic still existed and hope wasn’t as far away as it had felt.

It genuinely felt like my life had switched from psychological thriller to hopeful indie film. Madeira held the version of me learning how to play again.

Ireland was nostalgia wrapped in solitude.

I arrived after selling the house, putting my life into storage, signing divorce papers, and feeling like someone had picked me up by the ankles and shaken me like loose change.

And yet Ireland felt like coming home to something essential. It was my birthday while I was there. There’s something deeply humbling about wandering around your home country in the middle of reinvention, realizing you don’t know your arse from your elbow anymore.

Ireland has this way of holding all your versions at once: the little girl, the woman before heartbreak, the woman standing in the rubble of what came after. It remembers you even while you’re changing.

France was where the writer emerged.

Bordeaux. Normandy. Nachamps. A château that felt like it had been waiting for someone to arrive and write in it. A farmhouse over a hundred years old, where the walls held more history than I could properly absorb. Cafés where I sat pretending to be mysterious when, really, I was aggressively eavesdropping on nearby conversations and ordering pastries with the commitment of a woman rebuilding her identity through butter.

France reminded me I was still capable of making something beautiful from the mess.

Very annoying news for my inner critic, honestly.

Canada became the emotional Costco of the journey.

I’d return to regroup. Catch up on life admin. Hug friends. Spend time with family. Buy practical footwear and protein powder like some deeply spiritual raccoon preparing for migration season.

Canada was where I rested. Where things I’d been carrying finally got a chance to settle somewhere quiet long enough to be looked at properly.

London.

The city that puts a trench coat on your trauma and tells it to network.

Every time I land there, something switches back on. I suddenly believe I should probably write three books, host intimate literary salons, and become the kind of woman who says things like, “I have a guy for that."

London feels like possibility. And after everything that happened, possibility is no small thing.

People assume all this travel healed me.

It didn’t work like that. Travel isn’t a magical personality transplant. You still bring your grief with you; it follows you through airports and checkout lines and tiny apartments with decorative cushions nobody actually wants to sit on.

What travel did was give different versions of me room to emerge. Some cities introduced me to women inside myself I hadn’t met yet. And it’s still doing that. Every new place still asks something of me I didn’t know I had to give. I’m still mid-sentence, really.

And now, nearly two years after my life fell apart, I’m excited again.

Financial spreadsheets continue to humble me spiritually. But underneath all of it, there’s movement again. A current running through things that wasn’t there before.

Two years ago, my world collapsed.

Now I’m sitting here meeting a version of myself I actually can’t wait to know.

Tell me…

Has a city changed you, or shown you a version of yourself you didn't expect?

Dear Viv,

Something shifted in me over the past year and a half. I didn’t notice it happening. And then one day I did, and I couldn’t unsee it.

I’ve developed what I can only describe as an internal bullshit barometer. It goes off almost instantly now. A look. A tone. Something slightly off between what someone says and what their energy is actually doing. My body catches it before my brain has even finished processing the conversation.

I used to override that feeling. Constantly. I’d explain people away, give the benefit of the doubt, and stay quiet when something felt wrong. I had the emotional intelligence the whole time. I just hadn’t learned to trust it yet.

I trust myself now.

And Viv, there is something wildly liberating about that sentence.

This second act feels less like reinvention and more like graduation. Like I survived the group project from hell and finally received the emotional degree I paid for in cortisol, tears, and several deeply questionable relationships.

Expensive education, really.

There’s a steadiness in me that didn’t exist before. I don’t feel the same pull toward emotionally chaotic dynamics I once did. I don’t feel the need to chase clarity from people who thrive in confusion. Something in me has stopped reaching for things that were never going to hold me properly.

And I’ve stopped calling it emotional availability, because I’ve realized that phrase doesn’t quite cover it.

Some people are emotionally available in the sense that they spray their feelings around like an unsecured hose pipe in a Krispy Kreme parking lot. Everyone gets soaked. Nobody asked for it. That’s not availability. That’s a weather event.

What I value now is emotional intelligence. The ability to communicate honestly, to regulate yourself, to take accountability without performing it, to handle a difficult conversation without emotionally detonating across the room like a gender reveal party gone wrong.

That’s the energy I want around me — in friendships, relationships, work, and family. Every part of my life.

This isn’t just about what I want from other people. It’s about who I’m becoming.

Emotional intelligence, I think, is knowing when something deserves your full presence and when silence is the most powerful response available. It’s recognizing when to stay and when to remove yourself from the table entirely, without needing anyone to understand why.

I look back at parts of my marriage now and I can see the moments my intuition was speaking. Small discomforts. Feelings I swallowed instead of explored. I sat in silence more than I spoke up, not from weakness but from the belief that keeping the peace was the same thing as keeping things together.

It isn’t.

My nervous system, meanwhile, was in the corner waving red flags like it was directing planes on a runway.

Emotional intelligence also means having the confidence to set a boundary without immediately apologizing for having one. That one took me longer than I’d like to admit.

Boundaries feel different now too, Viv.

They used to feel like something I had to justify, defend, soften at the edges so nobody felt too uncomfortable. Now they just feel like information. Here is what works for me. Here is where I stop. Clean and simple.

I don’t need everyone to understand. I don’t need to twist myself into emotional origami to fit inside spaces that were never built to hold me.

That version of me has graduated too.

These days I pay attention to how I feel after I leave a conversation. Whether I feel seen or just managed. The body always knows. I’m finally listening.

Learning to trust the thing that was trying to tell me the truth all along, even when I was doing everything I could not to hear it.

XO,

Tanya

There are currently seven half-empty paint cans in the hallway.

Three mattresses leaning against the walls like exhausted relatives. Enough tangled charging cables to resurrect a small electronics store from 2007.

Somewhere under a pile of old blankets, I found a charger for a Nokia.

A Nokia.

Nobody in this family knows how to throw anything out. We are deeply, committedly sentimental about objects that haven’t been relevant since dial-up internet.

I’m back in Canada for a little while, staying at my mum’s house while she’s away in Ireland visiting friends. My siblings recently moved out, and before she left, we made grand plans.

“A bit of a purge,” she said. “Freshen the place up. Maybe paint a few rooms.”

You know. The lies people tell before opening the hall closet.

Now here I am, standing in the middle of a house I’ve never lived in, sorting through the physical remains of other people’s lives.

And Christ alive, there is stuff everywhere.

The deeply random archaeology of family homes.

Single shoes with no known partner.
Expired batteries kept for reasons lost to time.
Forty-seven reusable shopping bags stuffed inside another reusable shopping bag, like some sort of environmental Russian doll.
A decorative bowl on the kitchen counter that I have been informed, with some urgency, nobody is allowed to touch.

Every drawer feels emotionally loaded.

I pick up an old receipt, a chipped mug, or a béarnaise sauce packet from 2015, and suddenly it’s not about the object anymore. It’s about the life around it. The version of someone who bought it. The season they were in. The things they kept meaning to deal with and never did.

Over time, a home becomes a trail of unfinished decisions.

I’ve also noticed how differently people leave places. Some carefully clear themselves out like respectful little ghosts. Others disappear and leave behind seventeen tote bags, a broken lamp, and what feels like the emotional residue of several unresolved arguments. No judgement. Humans are messy creatures. We leave fingerprints everywhere.

Standing here surrounded by piles of things people no longer wanted, I kept feeling this tightness in my chest. The walls themselves felt like they were shouting.

For almost twenty months, I’ve been travelling with very little. A suitcase. A few clothes. My laptop. Books. Tiny pieces of home tucked into temporary spaces across countries and continents.

And somewhere along the way, travel changed my relationship with ownership in ways I’m still working out.

When you carry your life through airports often enough, you start asking different questions.

Do I need this?
Do I even want this?
Why does having more feel heavier instead of better?

The truth is, I don’t miss most of what I used to own. The extra dishes. The decorative storage baskets. The ten thousand useful things we convince ourselves are essential because adulthood apparently becomes one long side quest for better drawer organizers.

A few days ago, I went to IKEA with a friend because she needed flower pots and a couple of bits for her place.

Now, historically, IKEA was never a casual outing for me. It was an Olympic event. You’d go in for tealight candles and somehow leave four hundred dollars poorer, clutching sixteen storage baskets, a plant named Sven, and a sudden unshakeable belief that a bamboo bathroom shelf was the missing key to inner peace.

Classic IKEA delusion. I fell for it every single time.

But this visit felt different.

We were halfway through the marketplace section, surrounded by fake kitchens and couples silently arguing over lamp shades, when she stopped, looked at me and said, “You’re glad you don’t have to buy any of this stuff anymore.”

And without even thinking, I said, “God, yes.”

Because for the first time in my adult life, I walked through IKEA and felt absolutely no desire to own any of it. No urge to upgrade my life through throw pillows. No fantasy about becoming the kind of woman who alphabetizes pasta in matching jars. No emotional pull toward a side table called something impossible to pronounce.

I left feeling lighter than when I walked in, which has never happened to me at IKEA and honestly felt like a spiritual achievement.

What I remember from the last twenty months are moments.

Dancing at Carnival in Madeira.
Rain on a French café window while eating the best pastry of my life.
Meditating with Monks in Thailand.
Laughing with strangers who became friends faster than made any logical sense. Conversations that arrived at exactly the right time and cracked something open.

That’s the stuff that stayed.

I kept things from my dad after he passed. Small pieces of him, objects connected to memory and love that I will carry forever. Those matter in a way that’s beyond explanation.

But the rest of it — the unconscious accumulation, the keeping things because nobody taught us how not to — that feels like noise. Like filling emotional space with physical objects because it was easier than sitting with the space itself.

There’s something clarifying about standing in the middle of someone else’s accumulated life while your own fits in a suitcase in the corner.

Because one day, someone will have to go through my things, too.

That thought alone makes me want to own about six items and a really good coat.

My mum’s generation kept things because security meant ownership. A full house meant you’d made it. You saved the good china for occasions that never quite arrived and held onto things for a later that kept getting postponed.

For me, right now, freedom feels more luxurious than a full cupboard.

The freedom to move. To leave. To wake up and book a flight without wondering what to do with three cupboards full of serving platters and a decorative bowl nobody is allowed to touch.

Tonight I carried another donation bag out to the car while the sun dropped through the trees.

Standing in the driveway, sweaty, dusty, slightly exhausted, questioning every life choice that led me to sorting through twenty-seven mystery cables on a Tuesday afternoon, I thought about what I actually want my life to look like.

Lighter than this.

With a lot more room for living in it.

Tell me…

What's the most unhinged thing you've ever found while doing a purge? The béarnaise sauce packet needs company. Share in the comments.

I’ve been trying to teach myself how to rest lately.

Properly rest.

The other afternoon, I lay across my bed listening to music while rain tapped against the windows. No laptop. No tabs multiplying in the background. Nothing on fire. Just me, horizontal, doing absolutely nothing productive.

And within minutes, the guilt arrived.

It’s fascinating, really. How quickly the brain panics when a woman becomes still.

I spent years in corporate life where the unspoken rule was simple: if you weren’t visibly producing something, you were falling behind. There was always another email, another task, another goalpost quietly wheeled further down the field while everyone pretended this was just how ambitious people lived and not, in fact, a shared psychosis.

Somewhere inside all of that, resting started to feel lazy. Suspicious, even. As though sitting quietly on a Tuesday afternoon was evidence of some moral failure I needed to account for.

Meanwhile, my body was practically sending smoke signals.

Women are expected to move through life like machines while our hormones perform interpretive dance routines behind the scenes every single month. We bleed regularly from an actual body part and still feel guilty for needing a nap. The audacity of our own biology, honestly.

I once answered work emails from a bubble bath and genuinely thought: look at me, thriving.

An absolute clown.

Something has been shifting in me since I started writing seriously.

Because writing, I’ve learned, is not only fingers on a keyboard. Writing is lying on your bed listening to a song that cracks something open. Writing is sitting in a café, watching a man stir his coffee as if he’s processing a genuine personal crisis. Writing is the conversation on the train, the bookshop you wandered into without a plan. The half-formed thought that arrives in the shower three days after the thing that caused it.

Writing is living. Absorbing and staying open.

You cannot stay open when you’re running on fumes and guilt, performing productivity for an audience that largely exists inside your own head.

That realization has cracked something open in me, and I’m still working out what to do with it.

The guilt is the interesting part. Because it’s not rational and it doesn’t respond to logic. I can know, intellectually, that rest is necessary. I can read every piece of research about recovery, creativity, and the nervous system.

The moment I stop moving, some deeply conditioned part of me starts listing everything I should be doing instead — writing, pitching, building the thing — as though stillness is a crime I need to talk my way out of.

Behind what, exactly? Behind whom?

The goalpost is nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Rest, I’m learning, is a doing in itself.

Rest is the tiny hotel shampoo bottle of human experience; the thing you save for genuine emergencies, ration carefully, and feel vaguely guilty about using. I’m trying to stop treating it that way.

An actual practice. A necessary part of how a creative life functions.

The ideas that arrive when I’m staring at the ceiling. The scene that clicks into place on a walk I almost didn’t take. The sentence that comes not from forcing it but from leaving enough space for it to show up on its own.

Hustle culture convinced a lot of us that only visible productivity counts. That rest is the gap between work, something to be rationed, justified and earned.

For women especially, that message gets reinforced by a world that has historically rewarded us for endurance; for pushing through, showing up, keeping the whole thing moving regardless of what’s happening in our bodies.

My nervous system is still filing the paperwork on that decision.

So this is the chapter where I try something different. A slow, deliberate unlearning of the idea that my worth lives somewhere inside my output.

I lay on the bed. I let the music play. I watch the rain and don’t immediately turn it into content.

The guilt still shows up. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. But I’m getting faster at recognizing it for what it is, an old story running in the background, not an instruction I need to follow.

Some afternoons, I lie there long enough for the rain to stop and the light to change and realize I haven’t thought about my to-do list in twenty minutes.

Twenty whole minutes.

For me, right now, that counts.

Tell me…

What’s your relationship with rest these days?
Has slowing down become easier for you, or does the guilt still sneak in too?