On one end was my dad’s house.

On the other end was Gran’s.

I spent a lot of years on that wire. Tax on one side, token on the other. Accredit it to my old (tired) soul, but the difference was clear to me even then. I’ve always been able to understand things without even having the language for them.

My Gran’s house was the safe end. It was the place where I exhaled. The kind of place that has a particular weight when you’re a child. The smell of it. The quiet of it. The sense that nothing bad has jurisdiction there. She was the reason for that. She was, for a long time, the gravitational center of an entire world.

When my dad moved us to another town, that center began to fold. There was no single moment to point to. Life was just moving on. The street just got further and further away. And then, slowly, so did everyone on it.

The neighbors. The church. The people who had known me since before I knew myself. The year after my dad moved, I transferred into a different school system in a different county altogether. By the time those two things had settled (the move, the school) the connections were gone. Not because I had let them lapse or chosen something else. They were taken with the relocation, the way furniture disappears into a moving truck and you don’t think about it until the room just doesn’t look right.

I came back to that street at eighteen, during college. To move in with Gran and Pop-Pop for a stretch of years that I’m still grateful for. But six years is a long time at that age. Long enough that the people you grew up alongside have become strangers with familiar faces. Most of my friends weren’t around anymore. The street felt the same and nothing about it was. It reinforced something I have always known to be true, that you can return to a place and still find it inaccessible.

What I also learned, though not right away, was that I had been told I didn’t belong there. Not just made to feel it - actively told it. The people on that street, in that community, in that church belonged to someone else. They were “their family,” “their community.” Those phrases staked into the ground to establish who had seniority, who was deserving of loyalty, who was the rightful heir to those relationships. The message was efficient: you are a visitor here. Act accordingly.

I’ve honored that. I’ve let him have it. I’ve seen some of those people at weddings over the years. I saw a lot of them at Gran’s funeral. And then I didn’t hear from them again, and that was fine, because I had stopped hoping and expecting for anything different.

What I didn’t expect was how much I’d still think about the place itself.

My mom called a few weeks back with a little news from that corner of the world, updates from people in our orbit. Some were Gran’s people. Our neighbor. She always relays these updates with a unique sense of giddy surprise.

It reminded me that I had been sitting with some regret since Gran passed. I told her about it: There was a man Gran spoke of often. A priest, from our church at the top of the street, who had been an important presence in her later life. He deepened her faith. He saw her through hard seasons. He became, in the way of certain rare friendships, someone she genuinely loved.

He left the church in the nineties. For a higher and truer calling. For love, the story went. After that, he was gone from the directories, the archives, the publicly traceable record of a life that I consider myself somewhat of a sleuth at uncovering.

Gran had hoped, I think, that they’d find each other again. The way you hope for things without saying them directly. I tried but they never did.

After she died, I decided I would try to find him again. Not to reach out necessarily. Just to know. To complete something I felt she would have wanted completed. I went back to the Archdiocese directories and whatever else I could find online. Still nothing.

My friend Megan suggested the church secretary. She was the only person who might know the name. She might have filed the paperwork. Might remember the face. Might have kept a record of a man who quietly left a life behind.

I was resistant. Not rationally. Energetically. I knew that reaching back into that corner of my history, even for something this small, could activate a whole network. That’s how those things work. You pull one thread and the room rearranges.

The night I messaged the secretary on Facebook, a family friend (someone I hadn’t spoken to in years, someone orbiting the same quiet galaxy) reshared an old photo of me. No real context. Just the photo, surfaced and put back into circulation.

I wasn’t surprised. I was confirmed. This is how it goes when you go back there, even at a remove. But I went anyway, because it mattered.

The secretary remembered. She gave me the name. And eventually, I found him.

Over the last thirty years, he has built a life that looks, from the outside, like everything my Gran would have wanted for him. Community. Depth. A sense of having arrived somewhere that fits. And the all-encompassing love that comes with that. She always spoke of him with quality in her voice. With a particular warmth in her tone, reserved for people she would have watched struggle toward something good. She wanted his happiness the way you want things for people you’ve seen be brave.

It gave me peace, seeing it. More peace than I expected.

I’ve been trying to understand why going back there, even remotely, carries so much weight. I think I named it once, in a different conversation: a place I lost. That street. Those people. That church. They were the last place where the life I was supposed to have still looked possible. The last reach toward something that felt like hope and faith and community before those things became inaccessible. I wasn’t ready for them to become inaccessible. I don’t think any kid is.

But here’s what occurred to me recently: Gran left that street too.

She moved, later in her life, and hoped to return and never did. She carried the same world I carry. The same cast of characters, the same gravitational memory of that place. And, she never got back to it either.

There’s mutual grief in that. I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner. Maybe because she held it so lightly. Maybe because she held everything lightly by the end, the way people do when it’s decided that where we are matters more than where we’re going.

She raised me in the image of a man who traded certainty for love and built something real from the pieces. I don’t know if she did that consciously, or if that’s just who she was. Someone who recognized a certain kind of life when she saw it, called it out, pointed toward it, and drew a map.

I wonder sometimes if the mirror I keep finding myself in front of is one I’ve propped up myself, or one she gave me. I don’t know. I’ll never know. Those are just the kinds of things that nobody is supposed to resolve.

“I’ve been giving myself permission to…”

That’s an opening line that would puzzle most of the world. In Italy, you take a two hour lunch break and do whatever you want with it. And nobody asks. In Ireland, you sit in the pub on a Tuesday afternoon and no one documents it. In Vienna, you move at the pace the day asks for. Nobody’s underscoring anything. Nobody’s announcing it. You’re just… living.

Here, we name it. We build frameworks around it. We post about it and recommend books about it and build entire coaching practices on top of it. We turn the ordinary act of taking a day to yourself into a concept that requires granting. And somewhere in that underscoring, something gets lost. Or at least distorted.

I’ve been thinking about why that is.

America has a specific relationship with rest and need and self-regard. One that makes even ordinary acts of maintenance feel like they require justification. Taking a day away from client work when the road ahead is uncertain isn’t something you should have to earn. Taking a bed day when you need one isn’t a moral failing to overcome. Nourishing yourself, even when you don’t feel good in your body, is just a basic necessity. It’s the floor. But we’ve built a culture that frames these things as achievements, and then build industries and platforms and products and services and subscriptions to help us perform them.

Self-care. Boundaries. Permission. The vocabulary is everywhere, and the vocabulary is distinctly ours.

I don’t think the language is cynical, exactly. I think it emerged from something real: a genuine need to push back against a “hustle culture” that had made productivity the measure of a life. But somewhere along the way the announcement became the act. You post the walk, and something in your brain files it under done. You call it self-care, and the naming creates a distance from the thing itself. The permission is granted, loudly, and the rest somehow doesn’t quite happen.

I’ve watched people in other places rest without any of this apparatus. In Italy, the afternoon closes. Shops shut. The culture creates the condition and then simply inhabits it. No gratitude journaling required. In Ireland, slowness isn’t a practice. It’s just a pace. The pace, honestly. You don’t earn the pint. You don’t document the walk. You’re not being intentional. You’re just there.

I’ve spent enough time moving through those places that the contrast isn’t theoretical for me. I’ve felt the difference between rest that just happens and rest that you have to build a case for—to yourself, first, and then to everyone watching.

What I’ve been sitting with lately is the question of what the underscoring actually costs us.

My working theory is that it keeps the thing at arm’s length. As long as permission is a concept (something you give yourself, something you practice, something you’re working on) it stays located in the future. You’re always on the way to it. The goalposts remain out in front of you, which is, maybe not coincidentally, a very American place to keep the goalposts.

What if you just took the nap? What if you just stayed where you wanted to be, without framing it as something you’d finally allowed yourself? What if ordinary self-regard was just… ordinary? Not a practice. Not a journey. Not content.

I’m not sure we know how to do that here. I’m not sure I do. I grew up in this country, shaped by the same culture that made permission into a concept that needs granting, actively contributing to hustle culture through its climax, and that formation doesn’t just fall away because you’ve spent time somewhere slower. But I think naming the mechanism is at least a start; seeing it for what it is.

Most of the world doesn’t need to give itself permission.

It just lives.

I had been looking forward to the train from Florence to Verona for weeks. The ride into Florence earlier that summer had undone me in the best way. Fields of sunflowers. Small farmhouses scattered across Tuscan hills like someone had placed them there by hand. That train felt like a promise. I wanted to see what the other side of it looked like.

There was also Venice waiting in between. A weekend I had once considered a lifetime trip. I moved through it with awe and disorientation and saved the processing for later. Verona was different. Verona felt like the place I had been moving toward all along.

The moment I stepped off the train, something in my body registered. It was subtle but immediate. A tightening in my chest that did not feel like anxiety. A quickening. A recognition. I did not wander through the streets to my Airbnb. I moved with purpose. I felt pulled. As if the city had a hand at my back guiding me forward. I remember hurrying to unpack, to grocery shop, to settle in. It felt urgent. As though I could not afford to waste a single day of it.

The apartment was almost comical in its perfection. A top-floor one-bedroom that felt newly restored and waiting for someone who would notice the details. Direct elevator access into the unit. A double oven. Skylights that flooded the living room with white afternoon light. Two air conditioning units. After months of adapting to less-than-ideal circumstances, it felt indulgent. Safe. Designed.

I worshipped it.

Once the bags were unpacked and the fridge was stocked, I did what I always do. I walked into town to get my bearings. I need to understand where I am geographically before I can understand how I feel emotionally. I look for the place that will become my place. The evening destination. The anchor.

For years now, I have ended my days the same way. A long walk toward a fixed point where I can rest, read, and people-watch. In Philadelphia it was Washington Square. In other cities it has been a church step, a harbor bench, a quiet park. In Verona it became the southeast side of Ponte Garibaldi, or sometimes the stone steps near the visitors center beside the Arena. The bridge was technically too close to the apartment, so I would extend the walk. An hour or more through narrow streets, past wine bars and couples and tourists clinking glasses, until I felt ready to land.

Verona does not feel real at first. It feels like a set. The stone. The arches. The way the light hits the river at dusk. I had never fully connected the city to Romeo and Juliet, but much of the world had. The line into the courtyard beneath Juliet’s balcony stretched endlessly most days. I remember standing off to the side, looking at the bronze statue, watching people wait for their turn to touch it. I Googled it on the spot. Were they real? No. Shakespeare had never even been there. It did not matter. The myth was enough.

I skipped it. Even when friends came to visit from Philadelphia and wanted to see it, I stayed outside the courtyard and let them have their moment. Verona offered me something quieter. Something less crowded.

My days felt normal there. That might sound small, but it was not. After months of movement and uncertainty, Verona allowed me to drop into routine. Morning yoga. Real yoga, on a proper mat for the first time since leaving the States nearly six months earlier. Grocery shopping at the same market. Coffee. Writing. Client work in the afternoons. Dinner. The long evening walk. Reading before bed. It was the first place in Italy where my nervous system softened.

I had a serendipitous visit from friends during that month. We had met shortly before I left Philadelphia and somehow our timelines overlapped again in Italy. They came up from Florence for the day. We wandered through the streets without agenda. Ate lunch slowly. Shopped for handmade jewelry. Laughed in that full-bodied way that only happens when you feel known. There is something about being seen in a foreign place by people who understand your origin story. It steadies you.

But Verona was also the launch point for something much larger.

I booked it partly because of its proximity to the Dolomites. A friend of mine had always dreamed of seeing that mountain range. I carried a quiet hope that she would meet me there. She did not. That weekend became mine alone.

It began with inconvenience. Europcar oversold their fleet and my reservation was canceled. A full day lost to rerouting. The replacement vehicle was an electric crossover. Northern Italy is not built for efficient EV road trips through mountain terrain. Charging stops doubled the travel time. Then Google Maps led me directly through the center of a town along Lake Garda. Diners moved their chairs. Pedestrians pressed themselves against storefronts as I crept through narrow streets, mortified. Later, in Brixen, I scraped the entire side of the nearly new vehicle trying to squeeze into a compact parking space. It had less than nine hundred kilometers on it when I picked it up. I stood there staring at the damage in disbelief, I’d be bringing it back with 900 scratches. Thank God for full coverage insurance.

Externally, it was chaos. Internally, something else was happening.

In Brixen, after the scrape and the charging stop, I sat for a late lunch and a coffee to regulate myself. That was when I noticed the couple standing in the middle of the walkway. An older man with bandages across his face and a cast on his arm. His wife beside him, steady and attentive. Then came the sound of cheering and clicking from what sounded like hundreds of freehubs. Dozens of bikers rode into the square, circling them with affection and pride. I learned that the man had started the riding group years earlier. He met his wife through it. The annual summer meetup brought friends from across Europe. He had fallen off of his bike the day before and been injured badly enough that, at his age, meant he would likely never ride again.

He held back tears as he said it. I did not.

I left that square and sobbed in the car. Not for him alone. For something larger. For the fragility of identity. For the way we anchor ourselves to the roles we play. For the inevitability of change.

The drive into the mountains shifted after that. The chaos fell away. The scrapes on my car seemed to disappear. The trees grew denser. The peaks more dramatic. The air thinner and cleaner. I arrived in Cortina d’Ampezzo at dusk and checked into Hotel Serena Cortina. A small mountain hotel with floral window boxes and preserved architecture that felt deliberate. This was my first true European mountain town experience. I walked through it in awe. The care. The respect for place. The sense of continuity.

I had planned a hike for the following day. I did not make it. The lost time, the car issues, the late arrival. I pivoted instead. I made it my mission to return to one of the glacial lakes I had passed on the drive in. It was nearly flush with the road. Opalescent. Still.

I arrived just before eight in the morning. The lake was in shadow. A few cars in the lot. A shared quiet anticipation. We were all waiting for the same thing. The sun was preparing to crest the mountain in front of us. Slowly. Patiently. The parking lot filled. Camper vans opened. Families spilled out with bikes and backpacks. The sound of morning chatter rose around the water. It felt like the first day of school. Reunions. Excitement. Familiarity.

A man parked beside me told me this was their annual family gathering. Switzerland. Germany. France. Italy. They came from everywhere for this long weekend at the end of summer. Biking by day. Eating together by night. He spoke about it with pride. Belonging.

My stomach flipped. Not in jealousy. In clarity.

This is who I want to be, I thought. The one excited to gather. The one prepared for the terrain. The one grounded enough to expand.

I felt a brief wave of self-pity for not having packed better. For not being properly prepared for mountain weather. For missing the hike. Then something steadier replaced it. Gratitude for being there at all. For the shift that had already taken place.

As the sun finally reached the peak and light spilled across the water, I thought about my Gran. It had been weeks since we had spoken directly. The nurses answered the phone. Updates were vague. Family communication was thin. Standing there, watching the light reach the lake, I felt a calm I had not allowed myself in months. Permission. To stop forcing updates. To stop trying to manage what I could not control. To accept that I was where I was meant to be. That she knew I loved her. That the outcome was inevitable whether I hovered or not.

I drove back to Verona with a stillness that surprised me. The city received me differently then. Not as a backdrop for routine, but as a container. I walked the bridge that night with tears on my face. Verona did not ask anything of me. It simply held me.

The morning after my return, Gran died.

Most of my time in Italy had felt circumstantial. Ninety-day visa limits. Apartments falling through. Deadlines dictating geography. Verona was the only city I chose without urgency. I placed it last on purpose. Something in me believed that if Turin or Florence failed to give me what I needed, Verona would.

It did.

I left feeling grateful and fractured. Italy had shifted me. Losing Gran would shift everything else. Her funeral was two weeks away. My life felt both fully activated and suspended in midair. Verona became the place where those two realities overlapped. Where grief and routine coexisted. Where I felt most like myself while preparing to become someone new.

That is what this place did to me.

It steadied me before the ground moved.

Browse the Gallery

If You Find Yourself Here

If you ever find yourself in Verona, and only if you want to, these are a few doors I would open again.

Arena di Verona

Piazza Bra, 1

There is something about sitting inside the Arena at night that collapses time. I attended Viva Vivaldi. The Four Seasons Immersive Concert performed by Giovanni Andrea Zanon. The projections were beautiful, but the true experience was the stone itself. The scale. The fact that people have been gathering here for centuries. Go in the evening if you can. Let the music carry you. Let the architecture remind you how small and how connected you are.

Pasticceria Flego

Corso Porta Borsari, 9

This is the place you go when you want to feel a little undone by sugar and craftsmanship. The pastries are precise without being sterile. Beautiful without trying too hard. It fits best in the late morning. Order something you cannot pronounce. Sit with it. Notice how much care went into it.

Elk Bakery – The Garden

Via Cappello, 39

Tucked behind the main cafe is a garden that feels slightly outside of Italy in the best way. The menu blends Mediterranean, Asian, and American influences without apology. It was the only place in town where I found proper iced coffee. That mattered more than I expected. Go when you want something familiar but still thoughtful. It is a soft landing spot.

Detour (Outdoor Shop)

Via Goffredo Mameli 5

Detour is the kind of shop I look for in every city and rarely find. An outdoor recreation store that feels intentional rather than transactional. Thoughtful brands. Technical pieces without the big-box energy. Staff who actually use the gear they’re selling.

Museo Archeologico al Teatro Romano

Rigaste Redentore, 2

If I could guide anyone to one museum, it would be this one. The walk up is part of the experience. Ancient relics. Terraced views. A cemetery that feels reverent rather than eerie. It holds layers of time without spectacle. Visit when you want to feel the continuity between what was and what remains.

Osteria al Duca

Via Arche Scaligere, 2

This was my favorite dinner. Roast chicken with vegetables. Pasta arrabbiata on the side. A gin lemon that appeared from somewhere in the back of house as if by magic. It is intimate without being precious. Go hungry. Stay longer than you plan to.

Gelateria La Berta

Lungadige Sammicheli, 25

A few steps from the river. Ideal after an evening walk. The kind of place where you can linger on the edge of the water and let the day settle. I often paired it with a stop at L’Accademia nearby for a drink. The crowd leans young and artistic. It feels local. Unpolished in a way that I trust.

None of these places are secret. None are definitive. They are simply the ones that met me where I was.

Verona is not loud about what it offers. It does not chase you. It waits. If you let it, it will become a place of rhythm. Of routine. Of quiet recalibration.

It was for me.

“As soon as” and, “If only.”

A friend and I were on the phone a few weeks ago, talking about the lives we’re building. Or more honestly, the lives we keep meaning to build. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, we started naming the ways we stall ourselves out. The mechanisms are almost always the same. As soon as I finish this project… As soon as the money is right… If only I had more time… If only I’d started sooner…

We set horizon lines for ourselves and then we swim toward them. And most of the time, we drown in the way out. From the boredom in wading. From the weight of the self-imposed grief. From the self-doubt that serves as the current that keeps pulling us in different directions. Or worse, looking back to shore (How far am I?), we form an identity. I’m almost there. I’m the person who almost did that. And all the while the horizon keeps moving, because it was never a real place to begin with.

I hung up the call and walked to my laptop and published something big that I’d been sitting on. No plan. No runway. No waiting for that kismet inquiry or for the stars to align. And just like that, the things I’d been turning over for weeks months suddenly moved from the column of eventually into the column of done.

Something shifted in that conversation, and I think it was this: I stopped needing the thing to be permanent before I let it exist.

I caught myself thinking, at the end of the day, if it doesn’t stick, it could just be a campaign. And that was enough. That small framing (almost offhand) released something. Because a campaign has a beginning and an end. It doesn’t have to become anything other than what it is. It can be a real thing, a complete thing, without needing to be a forever thing. And if it turns into something more, great. But that’s not the condition of its existence.

I’ve started thinking about this as a kind of pro-temporary lifestyle. Finding comfort in letting things live as projects, as campaigns, as ideas in motion. Until they’re not. Until they either materialize into something real and lasting, or they run their course and fade. Both outcomes are fine. Both are honest.

I didn’t always feel this way. Two years of continuous travel has a way of adjusting your relationship with permanence. You stop expecting things to hold still. You start noticing how much time you spent waiting for permission. From circumstances. From readiness. From some version of yourself that was always just around the corner. The world moves. Seasons change. Cities feel different the second time around, and you realize it’s not the city that changed.

What I know now… What I really know now, in the way you only know things after you’ve lived them, is that there’s no time or reason to wait. Things are either going to be or they’re not going to be. That’s not nihilism. It’s actually the opposite. It’s the most honest argument for doing the thing right now, today, with what you have, that I’ve ever come across.

The horizon line doesn’t move any closer no matter how long you swim. But the water right here, where you’re standing, that’s real. That’s yours.

Might as well start here.

I was moving from the sofa to the bed when something stopped me. Not literally. But something inside registered, and I recognized it just barely before it passed.

A pull. Soft and familiar, like something from a long time ago. I don’t want to leave.

I almost didn’t know what to do with it.

I’ve been in Austin for a few weeks now. Officially housed for the first time after a long stretch of living out of bags in rooms that belonged to someone else’s life. The move went well. Better than well, actually. There was a weekend early on where I did nothing but run what I can only describe as new home errands, and it was one of the more quietly satisfying weekends I’ve had in recent memory.

New sheets. The right pillows. A duvet I’d been thinking about for longer than I’d like to admit. Cookware. Kitchen things that have no business mattering as much as they do. I moved slowly through those days. There was no urgency. Just the small, accumulating pleasure of making a space feel like mine.

The last two weeks have felt like a kind of dream. Organizing. Finding places for old routines in a new geography. Discovering which coffee shop works for mornings and which neighborhood is best at dusk. The ordinary business of arriving somewhere.

Austin’s summers are a known quantity. Brutal in a way that makes the city’s charm feel almost conditional. A potential landlord told me “if you don’t have to stay, people usually leave” with the casual certainty of someone who had watched it happen enough times to stop being surprised.

I had told myself I wasn’t going to think about it yet. That I’d give myself at least the first few weeks to just land. To be present in the arriving before I started plotting the next departure. I’ve gotten good at that particular anticipation. The mental staging of what comes next before what’s current has even settled.

But the thought crept in anyway. It always does. And I was working through the options in the back of my mind. The places I could go. The places that made sense. The places that had been pulling at me when that sofa-to-bed moment happened.

And the pull came.

I hadn’t felt it in close to a decade. That’s not an exaggeration. It took me a moment to even identify what it was. That soft, almost embarrassing flutter that comes from realizing you are comfortable somewhere. That you are safe. That you are finding pleasure in the ordinary texture of a place. The feeling that precedes the thought: I don’t want to go.

It surprised me. Not because I thought I was incapable of it, but because I had stopped expecting it. Travel becomes its own orientation after a while. Movement starts to feel like the natural state and stillness becomes the thing you’re moving toward rather than the place you already are. You get very good at leaving. You get good at wanting to.

This was different.

I’m not even going to tell you where I was thinking of going. That’s how it felt. Like even naming the alternative would be a small betrayal of something I wasn’t ready to let go of yet.

I don’t know what I’ll do with the summer. Probably something. The heat here is real and I’ve never been someone who forces himself to stay somewhere out of principle. But I know that what I felt the other night wasn’t nothing. It was the quiet signal of something that had been missing for a long time: a place that feels worth staying in.

That’s rarer than it sounds. And I’m not in a hurry to dismiss it.

I’ve been talking about the work itself for weeks. Strategy shifts, role clarity, bandwidth, and expectations. All of that is real. But what I hadn’t fully acknowledged is how much it’s affected me personally. My energy was thinner. My patience felt shorter. My imagination, tighter. I wasn’t just tired from work. I felt dulled by it.

That’s hard for me to admit because I’ve built a career on resilience. I’ve navigated clients across time zones, legal battles that dragged on for years, full relocations across continents. I know how to endure. But endurance has a cost when it’s pointed in the wrong direction.

These last few weeks have felt like slow deterioration. Not explosive. Not catastrophic. Just a steady grind that makes you question how long you’re willing to tolerate misalignment before it reshapes you.

What surprised me most is that my instinct hasn’t been to blow anything up. It hasn’t even been to run. It’s been to create.

The more I sit with the discomfort, the more I want to write. To build something of my own. To refine Hooch. To nest. To bring something into the world that feels alive and intentional. It’s less about proving a point and more about reclaiming authorship.

Travel taught me this. When I left Philadelphia for Europe two years ago, I didn’t just change cities. I changed proportion. Work stopped being the entire frame. There was movement, novelty, language, different light. I made time for the world beyond the work.

And when that happened, things opened. New clients came in. A decade-long legal matter finally resolved in my favor. Personal relationships that had been suspended in ambiguity reached clarity. I wasn’t forcing outcomes. I was expanding the container of my life.

When the container narrows again, when every conversation revolves around output and deliverables, it doesn’t just limit time. It limits identity. If all you’re doing is maintaining someone else’s structure, eventually you start to feel structurally confined yourself.

That’s the part I’m not willing to ignore anymore.

The suffering isn’t just about workload. It’s about creative stagnation. It’s about letting work become the only arena where your energy goes. And when that happens, you stop building the parts of your life that actually feel like yours.

So instead of fantasizing about escape, I’m choosing construction.

March isn’t about a dramatic exit. It’s about building alongside whatever still requires my attention. Writing consistently. Advancing the shop. Designing systems that feel like infrastructure instead of reaction. Protecting space for the world beyond the work, the way travel forced me to.

If I don’t build something that feels aligned, I will slowly be shaped by what doesn’t. That’s not a threat. It’s just reality.

If you’ve felt that low-grade professional drain (the kind that doesn’t justify a meltdown but quietly reduces you) consider this: what could you make right now? Not to monetize. Not to perform. Not to signal a pivot. Just to remind yourself that you are more than the role that’s exhausting you.

Sometimes the most direct response to misalignment isn’t quitting. It’s creating.

Florence did not want me at first.

Or maybe it did, and I mistook the resistance for rejection.

The timing matters. Late July through late August. Peak season stacked on peak season. Heat pressing down like a physical thing. Americans everywhere. Loud. Oblivious. Hungry in that particular way we get when we think we’re entitled to wonder. I hadn’t seen so many of us in one place in years. I had forgotten how we move through the world when we travel. Not gently. Not curiously. We scrape. We consume. We take photographs of things we don’t know how to look at.

I arrived already tired. Already defensive. Already convinced that Florence was going to ask something of me I wasn’t sure I had to give.

I was there on deadline. Most of the month was spent applying branding to an international wellness travel group. It gave me an excuse to stay inside. A justification for hiding. I told myself it was the Americans. The crowds. The heat. But really, it was the intensity of being seen. Florence does not let you disappear. Not even when you try.

The apartment was impossibly central. Two blocks from Piazza della Signoria. Down a narrow alley behind Via dei Neri. A stone’s throw from Santa Croce, which is to say, a stone’s throw from the center of the human swirl. The building dated back to the thirteenth century. Towering. Medieval. Dramatic in that way that makes you feel small but also strangely held. Four stories. Twenty-foot ceilings. Doors and staircases built for bodies larger than mine, or perhaps for history itself. The windows were handmade. The glass uneven. Light bent as it came through.

By midday, the city was unbearable. Grocery shopping felt like a strategic operation. A peaceful walk was out of the question. You would rather wait. You would rather starve. The sun sat directly on your shoulders and the crowds pressed in from all sides. Florence at noon is a test of patience and surrender. I failed it regularly.

Evenings were different. The tours thinned. The sun softened. The city exhaled. I learned the back ways quickly. Winding alleys that skirted the piazzas. Routes that traded beauty for efficiency and sanity. I chose the grocer farther away because the walk was calmer. Centrality, I was reminded, is often the bane of a carless existence. Access is useful. Proximity is expensive.

I had just gotten back on the dating apps at the tail end of Turin. Thank God. Loneliness dissolves faster when connection is a swipe away. When everyone you meet is quietly aware of the same thing: this has an expiration date. There is a freedom in that. A tenderness. A permission to be honest without needing a future.

I told myself I only wanted friends. That wasn’t true. I wanted love too. Or the shape of it. The movement of it. I love love. I love the way it aligns things inside me. The way it moves through, rearranges, leaves something better behind even when it goes. Especially when it goes.

My days found a rhythm. Morning food shops. Endless coffee. Yoga when I could bear the heat. Work in long stretches. And then evenings walking the piazzas slowly, looking into restaurant windows, watching families and couples and friend groups savor a moment they might never get again. A week. A weekend. A day. I was swimming in something most people only touch briefly.

Every night, without fail, I ended up on the stone wall along the Arno. Kindle in hand. A few feet in either direction from Gelateria Morè, on Lungarno degli Archibusieri. I would sit for hours looking at the Ponte Vecchio, listening to musician after musician sing into the night. The songs blurred together eventually. What stayed were the fragments of conversation from passersby. Laughter. Arguments. Confessions. Florence is the site of many firsts. Honeymoons. Empty nest trips. First passports. It is also home to an alarming amount of conflict.

People bickered constantly. Couples fought through dinners. Sometimes screamed. I was struck by how many people allowed small, provincial suffering to eclipse a once-in-a-lifetime moment. I couldn’t tell who was choosing it and who needed it. Maybe both. Some people don’t know how to accept the manifestation of their dreams.

People loved to tell me how lucky I was. To do this. To work from anywhere. To spend a month in Florence. I always complicated it for them. I talked about the time difference. The deadlines. The strain. Then I’d soften. My clients are great. I couldn’t do this without them. I wasn’t deflecting. I was trying to make the truth livable for both of us.

Another evening home was the stone bench beneath Loggia dei Lanzi. Bronze statues watching from the 1500s. Perseus holding Medusa’s head as if it were an afterthought. Tour groups flooded through during the day and returned at night for aperitivo and emotional reckoning. I spent hours there with gin lemons, wondering why I struggled to accept this version of myself. There was no question that I was doing exactly what I had always wanted to do.

I took my first international trip at twelve. Ireland. Something lodged itself in me then. A restlessness. Ants in my pants that never left. I grew up without much consistency. Ten places to call “home” before ten years old, but all of them family. A community of grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents who took turns raising me and welcoming me in. There were schedules instead of roots, but there was care. There were containers. Florence made something click. This wasn’t chaos. This was familiarity.

I was made for this.

Nomadism didn’t feel brave or novel. It felt practiced. Inherited. The ability to belong quickly. To leave cleanly. To find intimacy without permanence. That recognition landed heavily.

Some moments softened it all. Every Saturday morning, I walked to Piazzale Michelangelo. Twenty-five minutes. Through San Niccolò. Residential. Hilly. Calmer. Tourists who thought they knew better gathered there, which made it paradoxically peaceful. Florence rewards slow starts. Quiet mornings.

One morning, a stranger offered me his bike in Giardino dell’Iris. No agenda. No collateral. “It’s free,” he said, handing me his address. “Bring it back when you’re done.” I almost didn’t take it. Old stories surfaced. Not worthy. Too much. Just pretend you went. Then I chose differently. I rode the fucking bike.

The city fell away quickly. Toward Baronta. The roads shook beneath me. Less prepared. More honest. Giovanni, my host, had told me the countryside was right there. He wasn’t exaggerating. In fifteen minutes, everything changed. Cypress trees. Open sky. My body caught up to itself. Then I got scared. The heat. The hunger. A man tapped my shoulder and handed me water. He owned a small restaurant nearby. Opened it because his father did. Hoped his son would want it too. He made me breakfast. No menu. Eggs. Spinach. Bread from the night before. A cheese that could be currency.

Life rushed back into me. I rode home the long way through Isolotto.

Over the course of the month, I met architects. Designers. Makers. People who showed me Florence quietly.Antique shops on Via dei Serragli. Opera singers practicing in chapels at night. The place on the Arno where you can sit on a ledge at sundown if you know where to look.

I was in Florence because I had to be. That’s what I thought. A non-refundable Airbnb. Logistics. Momentum. Now I know better. Florence is not about spectacle. It’s about timing. About restraint. About letting yourself take up space without demanding anything back.

I spent weeks looking for the magic in obvious places. Halfway through the month, someone told me Florence would find me when it was ready. It did. On a bike. In an omelet. In bells ringing me home.

Florence is magic. If you stop chasing it. If you wait.

If you let yourself be found.

Where to Find Yourself in Florence

Ristorante Boccadama

Piazza di Santa Croce, 25/26r, 50122 Firenze FI

Early morning. Quiet square. A cappuccino and an apricot croissant that did exactly what it needed to do. Nothing more. Nothing less. This was my version of breakfast in Florence, and I never tried to improve it.

Casa Buonarroti

Via Ghibellina, 70, 50122 Firenze FI

My favorite museum anywhere. Undersold. Intimate. Michelangelo’s work without the crush. His home. His hands. His presence. If you do one cultural thing in Florence, let it be this. Everything else can wait.

I Fratellini

Via dei Cimatori, 38/r, 50122 Firenze FI

Over-marketed. Crowded. Still worth it. I resisted listing it. Then I remembered honesty matters more than credibility. The sandwiches are excellent. Eat standing. Move on.

Serre Torrigiani in Piazzetta

Piazza dei Tre Re, 1, 50123 Firenze FI

An outdoor speakeasy tucked into a pocket of the city. Green. Inclusive. Perfect for a weekday aperitivo when the heat breaks and the city softens.

Trattoria 13 Gobbi

Via del Porcellana, 9R, 50123 Firenze FI

The best dinner I had in Florence. Partly the food. Partly the company. I ordered the Tuscan chicken as a second meal. No regrets. Let yourself linger here.

Honorable Mention: Antico Ristoro di Cambi

Via Sant’Onofrio, 1R, 50124 Firenze FI

If timing or fate had shifted slightly, this would have been the one. Old walls. Loud praise. Food that travels across the room before it reaches your plate.

I want stability.

Not as a phase. Not as a hedge. Not as something I tolerate until the next chapter announces itself. I want it plainly, deliberately, without wrapping it in justification or future-facing caveats.

That’s new.

For a long time, I felt the need to soften that desire. To explain it away. To pair it with ambition so it wouldn’t sound like settling. I wanted stability, but—I’d say—I still planned to move, to travel, to keep things loose. I wanted stability, as long as it didn’t mean getting stuck.

What I was really doing was apologizing in advance.

Somewhere along the way, stability became synonymous with giving something up: momentum, possibility, identity. As if choosing steadiness meant forfeiting growth. As if wanting a reliable base signaled a lack of imagination or courage.

But the last few months have been instructive in a quieter way.

Living without a firm structure doesn’t make me more alive. It makes me more occupied. More inwardly noisy. More focused on maintenance than meaning. When too many fundamentals are unsettled at once - housing, income rhythm, timelines -everything else has to work harder just to compensate. Even good things begin to feel heavy.

I don’t want to live like that anymore.

What I want now is deceptively simple:

A life with a cadence.

A sense of where things live.

Enough predictability to let the deeper questions surface.

That doesn’t mean I’m done evolving. It means I’m done pretending that uncertainty is a virtue in itself.

There’s a particular kind of honesty that arrives when you stop trying to be impressive with your choices. When you let yourself want what actually supports you instead of what looks expansive from the outside. For me, that honesty sounds like this: I do my best thinking when I’m not braced. I do my best work when my foundations are boring. I live better when not everything is provisional.

And I don’t need to defend that.

I’ve noticed how much softer my body feels when I imagine a longer lease. How much calmer my thinking becomes when plans extend beyond a few weeks. How creativity feels less like a scramble and more like a current when it has something solid to run alongside.

That’s not fear speaking.

That’s discernment.

I’m not retreating from my life. I’m choosing to inhabit it more fully. I’m not shrinking my world. I’m giving it a shape that can hold me as I grow.

So yes, I want stability.

I want it because I know what it gives me.

I want it because I’ve lived without it long enough to feel the difference.

And I’m done apologizing for that.

March doesn’t need to be dramatic to be decisive. It just needs to be honest. And this—this clarity, this willingness to choose what actually sustains me—feels like a claim I can stand behind.

Quietly. Firmly. On purpose.

It was the thing you circled back to once you’d explored enough, tried enough, proven enough. A reward for finishing the real work. Until then, movement mattered more than steadiness. Optionality mattered more than roots. Freedom lived somewhere just beyond commitment.

That story served me until it didn’t.

Lately, I’ve been noticing how deeply that belief shaped my choices. How often I equated flexibility with aliveness. How quickly I bristled at anything that looked like permanence. How instinctively I treated stability as a narrowing instead of an opening.

But what I’m learning now is quieter, and harder to argue with.

Instability takes a lot of energy.

It takes energy to keep scanning for exits.

It takes energy to manage uncertainty.

It takes energy to constantly recalibrate your footing.

And that energy has to come from somewhere.

Over the last few months, I’ve felt the toll of living without a reliable base. Not in a catastrophic way, but in a cumulative one. Housing that never quite settles. Work that’s functional but provisional. Plans that remain perpetually penciled in. None of it is wrong, exactly. But together, it creates a low hum of vigilance. A sense that I’m always slightly braced.

That posture leaves very little room for freedom.

Real freedom - the kind that lets you think clearly, create honestly, and move intentionally - requires support. It needs structure beneath it. A floor that doesn’t shift every time you change direction. A sense that not everything is up for negotiation at once.

I used to think commitment closed doors. Now I’m seeing how often it opens them.

When certain things are decided—where you’re sleeping, how you’re working, what’s steady—your attention is released. Your nervous system softens. Your imagination has somewhere to stand. You stop spending your best energy maintaining optionality and start using it to build something real.

That’s not confinement. That’s capacity.

I’m not interested in a life that’s rigid or small. I still want movement. I still want expansion. I still want to be surprised by what’s possible. But I’m no longer confusing instability with freedom, or motion with growth.

Stability doesn’t eliminate choice.

It clarifies it.

It doesn’t trap you.

It holds you.

And from there, freedom becomes less about escape and more about direction.

I’m not giving anything up by wanting steadiness. I’m making room. For deeper work. Clearer decisions. And a life that doesn’t require constant self-management just to stay upright.

That feels like progress.

Fix something. Clarify something. Resolve something. Get something moving. I can feel the impulse to make this month pull its weight. To justify itself by producing answers. It’s subtle, but it’s there. A low-grade insistence that if I’m patient and observant and disciplined enough, February will hand me a plan.

But that’s not what this month is for.

February is a holding pattern.

I don’t love that phrase. It sounds passive. Temporary. Like something to endure rather than inhabit. But the longer I sit with it, the more accurate it feels. Not everything needs to move forward right away. Some things need to hover. To stabilize at altitude before deciding where to land.

January cracked something open. I can see that clearly now. It wasn’t dramatic. It was decisive. Something shifted in how I relate to work, to pressure, to the pace I’ve been keeping. There was a moment—sitting alone in a hotel room, far from home—where everything in me wanted to throw it all away. Start over. Burn it down. Opt out.

That impulse wasn’t wrong. But it wasn’t a plan either.

February isn’t here to answer January’s questions. It’s here to keep me steady while I learn how to ask better ones.

This month has been about watching myself in real time. Noticing what actually drains me versus what just feels uncomfortable. Paying attention to where I’m expending energy managing uncertainty instead of living inside it. Letting things feel unresolved without immediately trying to solve them.

That’s harder than it sounds.

We’re trained to mistake stillness for stagnation. To assume that if nothing is changing on the outside, nothing is happening at all. But a holding pattern isn’t inactivity. It’s containment. It’s restraint. It’s choosing not to descend too early just because the air is thin and uncomfortable.

There’s been relief in that realization.

I don’t need February to deliver clarity. I need it to give me enough stability to hear myself think again. Enough space to notice what wants to continue and what’s quietly asking to end. Enough consistency to rebuild trust with my own timing.

Some things are moving. Work is getting done. Systems are tightening. Relationships are revealing their limits. But I’m no longer demanding that these movements add up to a final answer. I’m letting them exist as data points, not verdicts.

This month is not a decision.
It’s a buffer.

A place to stand without being pushed forward or pulled back. A pause that isn’t avoidance. A season that doesn’t require resolution to be meaningful.

March will ask something of me. I can feel that already. But February doesn’t need to carry that weight. Its job is simpler. And harder at the same time.

Stay. Observe. Don’t rush the landing.

That’s enough for now.

I told myself I had ten minutes.

Ten minutes to write about the work situation that had resurfaced in my head just before bed. The one I thought I’d already put down for the night. Ten minutes to get it out of my system. Ten minutes, and then I’d park it.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, I lay there for hours, replaying conversations that hadn’t occurred yet. Imagining how things would be said. Anticipating responses. Adjusting tone. Testing outcomes. It wasn’t dramatic or emotional in the way people usually describe sleepless nights. It was procedural. Methodical. Almost responsible.

Which is part of the problem.

I don’t often lose sleep to worry. When I do, it feels foreign enough that I start to question myself. But that night, the rehearsal had a rhythm to it. A strange sense of purpose. As if staying awake was doing something useful. Preparing me, protecting me, getting me ahead of whatever was coming next.

The next morning, I came across a line that stopped me cold: Stop rehearsing conversations that will never happen. The person you’re trying to convince. The outcome you’re chasing. The vindication you think you’re owed. None of it matters as much as what you do right now with what’s in front of you.

It wasn’t revelatory so much as accurate. Annoyingly accurate.

Because the truth is, I’ve gotten very good at rehearsing a life I’m not currently living.

I rehearse exits before I’ve fully arrived. I rehearse clarity before it’s been offered. I rehearse decisions as a way of soothing uncertainty. Mistaking mental motion for forward movement. It looks like strategy from the outside. It feels like diligence. But somewhere along the line, rehearsal crossed the line from preparation into avoidance.

Planning has a purpose. Rehearsal, I’m learning, has a cost.

The cost shows up quietly. In lost sleep. In a distracted morning. In the inability to enjoy neutral moments because my attention is already committed elsewhere. It shows up in how little space is left for new connections when so much energy is being spent managing imaginary futures. It shows up in the way I move through a day half-present, half elsewhere. Trying to outthink a timeline that hasn’t fully revealed itself yet.

This season has made the habit louder.

I’m in a city that still feels unfamiliar. I’m living in a temporary space that hasn’t quite settled into me. Work is stable enough to breathe, but not stable enough to stop scanning the horizon. Housing, finances, timing. None of it is in crisis, but all of it is unresolved. The kind of unresolved that invites constant mental check-ins, subtle vigilance, and the low-grade belief that if I just think hard enough, I can control the landing.

But control is not the same thing as care.

Somewhere along the way, rehearsal became a way of stepping out of my own life while telling myself I was being responsible. A way of living slightly ahead of myself instead of where my feet actually were. A way of postponing presence until conditions felt clearer.

The irony is that clarity rarely arrives that way.

It arrives in the day you actually live. In the conversations you allow to unfold instead of pre-writing. In the trust that you can respond when something is real, not just when it’s imagined.

Lately, I’ve been practicing something simpler. If not easier. I’m trying to stop rehearsing conversations that haven’t been requested. Stop narrating March while still standing in February. Stop borrowing stress from outcomes that don’t yet belong to me.

This doesn’t mean I’m avoiding hard decisions. It means I’m letting them come to me honestly. In context. In time.

I don’t need to know how this ends to live today well.

I just need to stop living everywhere else.

I didn’t mean to land in Turin.

That feels important to say up front.

I had planned for Rome. I had imagined Rome. I had oriented myself toward Rome in the way you do when you think you know what a chapter of your life is supposed to look like. Then, very close to the moment of departure, Rome fell through. The apartment disappeared. Prices spiked. Summer surged. I was standing in Ireland, already unmoored by bureaucratic delay, staring down the reality that I had to choose something quickly or lose the thread altogether.

A friend I barely knew said, casually, that Turin was cool. Creative. Gritty. Worth experiencing.

So I booked it.

The entire month. Sight unseen.

I didn’t research the city. I didn’t research the apartment. I didn’t even look closely at photos until the weekend before I left. When I finally did, Google Maps served up images taken on what must have been the single worst day of the year. Gray. Wet. Heavy. Rain slicking the stone. Fear set in immediately. I remember thinking, What have I done? Was I about to spend July inside, sweating, lonely, and stuck?

That fear was wrong. Completely wrong.

Turin was bright. Elegant. Lively. It was quieter than Rome, yes, but not asleep. It moved with intention. It felt lived-in. It felt like a place that wasn’t performing itself for visitors. And almost immediately, it asked something of me.

Language was the first friction point. Italian was everywhere. French followed closely behind. English was rare, or at least it felt rare to me. I had done six weeks of Duolingo. I had not taken it seriously enough. I felt that acutely. Ordering coffee became an exercise in humility. Grocery store interactions required focus. Small exchanges carried weight. And layered underneath all of it was shame.

I’m in their country. I should speak the language.

That voice was loud. It followed me through the day. It made everything take longer. And yet, slowly, it did something else too. It slowed me down in a way I could not avoid.

The heat enforced this. People warn you about an Italian summer, but you cannot understand it until you step into it. I left Ireland in seventy-degree weather and landed in ninety-degree heat. There was no air conditioning in my apartment. None. At first, it felt impossible. The air was thick. Sleep was light. The days stretched. And then, somehow, my body adjusted.

You really do get used to it.

Rain came often, but it did not cool things off. It only added texture. I used to laugh when it rained because it seemed to bring more people out into the streets, not fewer. Maybe everyone just wanted to confirm that the moisture on their skin was, in fact, rain and not sweat.

The heat dictated everything. My days found a rhythm quickly because they had to. Grocery shopping early. A stop in the park. Coffee. Yoga. Journaling. Work until dusk. And then, as if summoned, the entire city took to the streets.

From six to eleven every night, Turin walked.

Families. Couples. Teenagers. Elders. Everyone. I am not exaggerating when I say the city emptied into itself. I joined them. Night after night. I developed a route without realizing it had become one. From my apartment near Massimo and Pio, up toward the Royal Palace. Zig-zagging back through side streets. Down into Piazza San Carlo. Window shopping along Pietro Micca long after the stores had closed. A stop at Gelateria La Romana. Then home.

The people-watching was unmatched. I felt like a camera in a film. Silent. Observant. Absorbing. I learned how to kill time in Turin because I absolutely had to. There was nowhere to rush to. Nothing to conquer. The city didn’t reward urgency.

This was also where something heavier landed.

I was in Turin when I accepted that I could not save my grandmother.

I had been carrying a kind of false hope with me. A belief that if I stayed organized enough, strategic enough, relentless enough, I could control the outcome. I spent days soliciting doctors. Interviewing lawyers. Mapping scenarios. Building a plan to remove her from an abusive and neglectful living situation and bring her home to Ireland.

But reality does not bend simply because you want it to.

The moment it broke open for me is etched into my memory. I was standing under one of Turin’s porticoes, those massive stone coverings that line the city center, built centuries ago to protect royalty from the elements. It was pouring. I was leaning against the wall, too hesitant to cross the street. One ear filled with the sound of rain slapping pavement. The other pressed to my phone.

The lawyer was being kind. Direct. Unflinching.

“What’s the end goal here?” he asked.

Then, quieter. “We cannot save people.”

I stared at a crack in the cement. A small, triangular break in the stone. I listened.

“You can rescue her from this situation,” he continued. “You can protect her from the harm and neglect she’s been receiving. But the people doing this are not going to stop. It sounds like, to me, ‘four years of this’ you said, they’ve made that clear.”

I didn’t interrupt him.

After a long pause, I asked the only question I had left.

“Okay. What can I do?”

He waited. Then said, simply, “It sounds like you both need to find peace.”

That sentence followed me everywhere after that. Finding peace became the intention of my days in Turin. Not productivity. Not resolution. Peace. First for my nervous system. Then for my spirit.

There is an irony I still think about. One that feels too perfect to ignore. My life has always been shaped by a quiet tug-of-war between my two inheritances. Italian-American on my mother’s side. Irish-American on my father’s. As a child, my mom had primary custody, but my grandmother’s house on my dad’s side was where I always wanted to be. It was where I felt aligned. Accepted. Welcomed. At home.

So I left America to pursue life in Ireland. Thinking, perhaps unconsciously, that I could guarantee that alignment if I just placed myself close enough to it. And then, due to bureaucratic delay, I had to leave Ireland. And I landed in Italy. For a summer that would end, three months later, with the loss of the most steadfast pillar of support I have ever known.

And also, strangely, with the deepest sense of self I’ve ever had.

Turin showed me another side of myself. One that mirrored my mother’s lineage. The way people moved. What they valued. What they did not waste time on. The city was clean. Orderly. Intentional. Trash was taken out daily. Sometimes multiple times a day. You bought only what you needed. Nothing lingered without purpose. It was a culture of lightness that did not feel careless.

When the weight of my grandmother’s situation became too much, I fled for a weekend. I went to Milan to see Taylor Swift. This surprises people. I am a closeted Swiftie. She lives high on my Spotify Wrapped every year. Always in the top one percent of listeners. I needed to be inside something collective. Something loud. Thousands of people singing All Too Well badly and together.

It worked.

Milan felt electric. Fashionable. Connected. I saw the Duomo for the first time. I do not think I will ever see another cathedral like it. The hotel had air conditioning and I luxuriated in it to the point that returning to my apartment in Turin felt like punishment. That part makes me laugh now.

When I left Turin, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude. Moved by the surprise of it. I remember telling my friend Omar how lucky I felt that Rome had fallen through. How lucky I felt to have trusted a stranger. To have trusted myself. To have stayed. To have walked. To have chosen more whenever I could.

Turin was not my introduction to Italy in the way people usually mean. But I am endlessly grateful that it was mine.

Where to Find Yourself in Turin

If you find yourself in Turin, and only if you want to, these are a few doors I would open again.

Sweet Lab
Via Principe Amedeo, 39, 10123 Torino TO, Italy
A small café across from my apartment that saved me more times than I can count. Reliable coffee. A genuinely good breakfast sandwich. Comfort without fuss.

Via Roma
Central Turin
A grand, open-air shopping corridor lined with porticoes. Think American mall scale, but entirely outdoors and woven into daily life. Even after hours, it is worth walking.

Valdo Fusi Skate Park
Via Accademia Albertina, 10123 Torino TO, Italy
A surprisingly grounding place to sit with a book. People of all ages gather here. Skateboarding. Talking. Existing. It felt communal without being performative.

Caffè San Carlo
Piazza San Carlo, 156, 10123 Torino TO, Italy
An ideal afternoon pause. Coffee. Something sweet. A chance to sit still and watch the square breathe.

Real Chiesa di San Lorenzo
Via Palazzo di Città, 6, 10122 Torino TO, Italy
Architecturally striking and quietly powerful. Worth stepping into, especially if you enjoy noticing how light moves through space.

Royal Palace of Turin Art Collections
Piazzetta Reale, 1, 10122 Torino TO, Italy
The collections here are expansive and humbling. They tell a story of accumulation, power, and preservation that feels uniquely intact.

Monumento a Casimiro Teja Area
Behind Piazza delle Erbe
This small corner of the city held my heart. Casa Broglia offers sprawling patio seating and food that encourages lingering. Pizzum next door is a fast-casual fallback when things get busy. The magic is in the cluster. Stay awhile.

Passion Sport
Corso Regina Margherita, 22/f, 10153 Torino TO, Italy
A locally owned specialty retailer for hiking, camping, and outdoor gear. Knowledgeable staff. Thoughtful selection. A reminder that good retail still exists.

Osteria Al Tagliere
Via Corte d’Appello, 6, 10122 Torino TO, Italy
Casual. Cozy. Old-world in the best way. Known for cured meats, cheeses, and Piedmontese specialties. The kind of place where time stretches.

Gelateria La Romana dal 1947
Via Santa Teresa, 6/B, 10121 Torino TO, Italy
This became my go-to not just for the gelato, which is excellent, but for the warmth of the staff. It is the kind of place where service itself feels like a small kindness, and that mattered more than I expected.

The Beach Nightclub
Murazzi del Po Gipo Farassino, 22, 10124 Torino TO, Italy
In summer, this is where the city gathers after dark. Packed. Sweaty. Alive. A DJ worth listening to and a crowd that feels present.

And finally, the independent booksellers.
They line the major streets. You will find them if you walk. I can’t give you an address. That feels right.

Most of the time, it arrives quietly.

As a nudge.
A repetition.
A coincidence that doesn’t quite feel like one.

Two years ago, when I left Philadelphia for Ireland, my life didn’t just change. It cracked open.

I didn’t know that’s what was happening at the time. I just knew I couldn’t stay. I knew something in me had reached the end of its usefulness, even if I couldn’t yet name what was next.

And then, almost immediately, things began to move.

New clients came onboard with ease I hadn’t experienced before.

A decade-long legal matter (one that had been quietly draining my energy, attention, and hope) finally settled in my favor.

And several personal relationships reached unexpected closure. Not the kind that ties things up neatly, but the kind that releases you from false hope. The kind that says, gently but firmly: you’re not meant to keep waiting here.

At the time, I didn’t call those moments “signs.” I just felt guided.

The message wasn’t subtle, but it wasn’t dramatic either. It was simple: Go. You’re free.

What I’ve learned since is that guidance and affirmation feel different in the body.

Guidance tends to arrive when you’re standing at a threshold; when something is ending and you’re being asked to move, even without clarity. Affirmation arrives once you’ve already stepped through. It doesn’t push. It steadies.

And that’s what I’ve been noticing now, as I settle into Austin.

The energy feels familiar. But different.

A producer for one of my favorite journalists and media personalities reached out recently about a potential interview. It didn’t ultimately happen. But the conversation opened a door that led to an upcoming article in their lifestyle magazine. Not the thing I imagined, but still a signal. Still movement. Still momentum.

Then there were the quieter moments.

In my last Airbnb, there was a tree just outside my window that suddenly filled with Blue Jays one morning. My Gran’s favorite bird. All of them were chirping like crazy. The thought of them stayed with me all day.

That same evening, I noticed a wooden placard above the bedroom door I hadn’t clocked before. It read: Bedposts & Broomsticks. A reference to a movie my Gran and I loved—one I hadn’t thought about in years. And later, while reading This Time Tomorrow, that same reference appeared again. In the same day. In the same emotional register.

You can call that coincidence if you want.

I don’t.

What struck me wasn’t the sentimentality of it. It was the timing. The tone. The feeling that nothing was asking me to go anywhere or become anything different.

The message felt clear: You’re doing what you need to be doing. You’re right where you need to be. You can breathe.

This is what alignment sounds like for me now. Not a grand reveal. Not a roadmap. Just small, steady confirmations that the ground beneath me is solid.

I think we sometimes miss these moments because we’re waiting for certainty. For proof. For the “big sign” that makes everything undeniable.

But alignment rarely shouts. It hums.

It shows up in patterns.
In things repeating just enough to get your attention.
In opportunities that don’t force themselves, but linger.
In symbols that land not because they’re impressive but because they’re personal.

And here’s the thing I’m holding with care: I can feel a season of change approaching again. I can’t see it yet. I don’t know what shape it will take. But my body knows before my mind ever does. So instead of rushing to define it, I’m preparing for it.

“Strong back. Soft front. Wild heart.”

Listening more closely.

Clearing space.

Letting alignment speak in its own language.

If you’re in a similar place (between what was and what’s next) my encouragement is simple: pay attention to the small things. Not the ones that convince you. The ones that confirm you.

Some signs are invitations to move.

Others are reminders that you already have.

And sometimes, the most powerful message isn’t go or become or figure it out.

Sometimes it’s just:
Stay. Trust. You’re here on purpose.

This week, I faced one I couldn’t soften or delay. Staying in Austin year-round no longer made practical sense, so I adjusted the plan instead of forcing it.

I realized I’d passed the tipping point where signing an annual lease was worth it, knowing I’ll be leaving for the summer. Once I saw that clearly, the decision itself was straightforward. I’m excited to share that I secured short-term, furnished housing through June and let the rest go.

There’s relief in that choice.

There’s excitement too.

And there’s grief.

I had hoped Austin might be a one-stop spot for the next year or so; a place to fully unpack, plant something stable, and build from there without interruption. Letting go of that version of the plan wasn’t nothing. It required honesty, not just optimism.

But the truth about summer here clarified more than it disrupted. Almost everyone I know or have met has told me they leave. The heat reshapes the city. The rhythm changes. Ignoring that reality would have meant clinging to an idea instead of responding to the place as it actually is.

So I didn’t stay to prove a point.

What I chose instead was presence. Time to really see Austin. To explore its neighborhoods, edges, and everyday texture. To move slowly enough to understand where I want to land when I return in the autumn; when an annual lease will align with how I actually live.

That reframing shifted something deeper.

This isn’t a failure to settle. It’s a seasonal way of grounding. Austin doesn’t need to be everything at once to be meaningful. Right now, it’s a home base. A place of familiarity. A place I’m learning, rather than locking down.

And the same clarity that reshaped my housing plans also opened something else up.

The reality of Austin summers creates twelve-plus weeks of space each year. Not as an escape, but as an opportunity. A built-in permission to integrate travel more intentionally—something I’ve envisioned for a long time but never thought would come as easily.

Grounded living, I’m realizing, doesn’t mean staying put.

It means staying in alignment.

It means letting seasons inform structure instead of resisting them. It means choosing plans that can flex without breaking.

Even Hooch is beginning to take shape this way. Loosely, creatively, without unnecessary pressure. I’ve opened an Etsy shop as a place to release personal overstock and small finds from travel and from settling into Austin. Objects with stories. Useful, curious things. Austin, it turns out, is a trove of quirks when you’re paying attention.

None of this feels rushed. None of it feels unfinished in a way that needs fixing.

I’m not forcing permanence where it doesn’t belong.

I’m building familiarity first.

The rub of a grounded life isn’t that it asks you to give things up.

It’s that it asks you to be honest about what fits (now) and to trust that what comes next will meet you when the timing is right.

Not avoiding it exactly—just walking around it. Slowly. Like you do when you’re not sure whether you’re ready to name a thing out loud.

I’m gearing up to share more about my travel experience. Not the where-to-go lists or the postcard moments, but the interior shifts. The way movement rearranged me. And if I’m honest, that feels both necessary and terrifying.

None of this was planned. I didn’t set out to “find myself.” I didn’t declare a grand experiment. I just left Philadelphia one day and kept saying yes from there. Sometimes that makes me feel like I don’t quite deserve the depth of awakening that followed. As if intention should have preceded transformation. As if the universe needs a proposal before it offers a gift.

But here we are.

At a dinner party this week (new friends, new city) we laughed about it. About how people always want to know the story. How I want to write it. How I’m scared to write it. We jokingly called it Eat. Pray. Love. and passed around other one-word titles like wine glasses. Nothing stuck. But the conversation did.

It found me again on the trail this morning.

What surprised me was how simple it became when I stopped trying to make it impressive. That first year of travel wasn’t one story. It was three movements.

Ireland grounded me. Italy taught me how (if not outright forced me) to marvel. And losing Gran cracked me open into grief. Grief that could only naturally be rooted back in Ireland, not home, not America, but the place that held me when I needed somewhere to fall apart.

Ground.

Marvel.

Grieve.

It occurred to me that those aren’t just chapters. They’re acts of devotion. Nourishment. Prayer. Love. Whether I intended them to be or not.

So maybe that’s where this begins. Not with expertise or authority or a perfectly packaged narrative—but with honesty. With trust. With the quiet belief that if I tell the truth about what moved me, it might move someone else too.

For now, that feels like enough.

I’ve been on over a dozen apartment tours now. Downtown, just outside of it, places that look great on paper and make total sense in conversation. And yet—none of them have been it. Close, maybe. Convenient. Nice. But not right.

There’s a subtle pressure that creeps in when you’re between places. When your stay is temporary and the clock is visible. I felt it recently, almost gave in to it. I put in an application just to be “done with it.” To check the box. To quiet the noise.

And then I withdrew it.

Not out of fear. Out of trust. A decision to do this properly. To wait for alignment instead of settling for relief.

That’s been the through-line lately: choosing what’s true over what’s fast.

What’s grounding me is the sheer amount of validation I’ve been receiving—quiet, steady reminders that this is the right place for me right now. Personally. Professionally. Energetically. Too many moments of confirmation to ignore. Too many small doors opening, conversations flowing, ideas clicking into place.

So I’m anchoring myself in that trust.

Settling into Austin, for me, doesn’t look like locking everything down immediately. It looks like learning how to live more sustainably. Slower mornings. Fewer impulsive decisions. Letting things unfold without forcing them into shape.

I’m realizing that this chapter isn’t about building a life that looks impressive. It’s about building one that feels honest. One that I can maintain. One that leaves room to breathe.

There’s something deeply reassuring about knowing I don’t need to rush anymore. That I can let my life take form at the speed of integrity.

So for now, I’m here. Getting settled by not settling too quickly. Trusting the timing. Listening for the quiet yes.

And letting Austin meet me where I actually am.

I went home for the holidays. I had fewer conversations, fewer obligations. It brought forth the kind of stillness that only shows up when the calendar loosens its grip and no one expects much of you beyond being present.

I always forget how much that kind of silence reveals.

There’s something about the stretch between Christmas and New Year’s, when the world pauses but doesn’t quite reset, that invites a different kind of reflection. Not the urgent, goal-setting kind. More like a gentle inventory: What stayed with me this year. What quietly asked for more attention. What I kept postponing because it was easier not to look too closely.

Now New Year’s Eve has passed.

No countdown pressure. No champagne-fueled promises. Just the aftertaste of it all.

And sitting here, I keep circling the same question:

What actually needs to change?

Not what sounds good.
Not what photographs well.
Not what makes for a compelling arc later.

What needs to change now.

I’ve spent a lot of time in preparation.
Getting ready. Researching. Reframing. Redesigning. Refining.
I am very good at becoming almost-ready. I’ve made it my job.

And if I’m honest, preparation has been a comfortable place to hide. It looks responsible. Thoughtful. Strategic. But sometimes it’s just fear dressed as polish. A way to delay the moment where something leaves my hands and enters the world—unfinished, imperfect, real.

In the year ahead, I don’t want to live there anymore.

I’ve also grown attached to transition itself. To the identity of the in-between man. The one who is always arriving somewhere else, always on the cusp of the next chapter.

That identity once protected me. It gave me permission to explore, to stay light, to not overcommit. But lately, I can feel how it’s begun to cost me something too; depth, continuity, a sense of being held by my own life.

I don’t need to abandon freedom.

I just need to stop confusing motion with meaning.

This next year feels less about expanding outward and more about tightening the container. About deciding what (and who) actually gets access to my energy. I’ve been generous to a fault. Open loops everywhere. Doors half-closed so I don’t have to disappoint anyone.

But clarity, I’m learning, is its own kindness.

I don’t need to explain myself as much as I think I do. I don’t need every decision to be affirmed by consensus or signs or timing that feels cosmically endorsed. Sometimes the work is simply choosing (and staying) with the responsibility that follows.

My body has been trying to tell me this for a while now. I can hear it more clearly when I slow down. When I stop treating physical care as something I’ll circle back to once everything else is figured out. There’s intelligence there. Wisdom I’ve been overriding with thought and ambition.

I want to listen better. I also want to say things sooner. Before they calcify into resentment or regret. Before they become beautifully articulated but uselessly late.

Boundaries. Desires. Invitations. Disappointments.

Clumsy honesty beats perfect silence every time.

And maybe the hardest thing: I want to let myself be seen in the middle. Not just in hindsight, not just once the lesson has been neatly integrated and packaged into something shareable. But here. In process. In draft form.

That feels vulnerable in a new way.

This year doesn’t ask me to reinvent myself. It asks me to commit. To myself, to a few chosen things, to fewer exits and fewer disclaimers.

To root, not retreat. To stand somewhere long enough to feel it.

So now that the calendar has turned and the noise has settled, I’m not making resolutions. I’m closing a few escape hatches.

And that feels like a beginning.

These last few weeks have been rough in that very specific “life is happening but nothing’s happening” way. I’ve been recovering from the flu and dealing with the less glamorous side of creative entrepreneurship: trying to find clients, pitching, waiting, refreshing my inbox. It’s been a lot of me with myself.

And honestly? I’ve been feeling really alone.

There’s a thin line between solitude and loneliness. Not metaphorically. Literally. One day being by myself feels clean and spacious, like a reset. The next day it feels tight and echoey. It’s wild how the same conditions can land so differently depending on where my head is.

Ireland always does this to me around the six-week mark. The novelty burns off. I’ve seen everyone, been everywhere, had the pints, done the drives. And then it quiets down. Too much. Suddenly, the only thing left to do is work. So I work. I write. I design. I ideate. I create. Last weekend, I rebuilt my entire studio site from scratch because there was literally nothing else demanding my attention. No one to meet. Nothing left to drink. Just me trying to stay busy so the quiet doesn’t swallow me.

And yet I keep reminding myself: solitude is okay. This is where I make my best stuff. This strange little pocket at the end of the year. Right before the world sprints into the “New Year, New You” frenzy. It’s the last clean window I’ll get. A moment to tie up the threads I’ve been saving, and maybe even make some new connections, before everything speeds up again.

I guess I’m just in that in-between place where being alone is both the gift and the ache. Where I can feel loneliness in my chest and clarity in my hands at the same time. Where I’m trying to trust that this quiet stretch isn’t punishment. It’s preparation.

Never the same but always myself.

It felt like someone had cracked open the last five years of my life and summed them up in seven words. That’s what this stretch has been, like small evolutions happening in real time. Little shifts I’ve noticed in the way I look, in the way I move, in the way I meet myself in the morning. I’ve been watching myself grow, almost the way you watch the tides: slowly, steadily, without ever fully realizing how much has changed until you look back.

Birthdays have always been a quiet kind of ritual for me. A long stretch on the yoga mat. A lunch that feels less like fuel and more like a thank-you to my body. A few slow hours getting the house ready. And then we gather. People come by. We talk. We laugh. We wander through conversations the way you wander a garden path. No hurry. No real destination. Just seeing what unfolds. I’ve always loved those nights. They remind me that even in a life with so much movement, I’m not untethered.

But this year’s reflection feels like it’s sitting closer to the bone.

It’s been a strange year, full of moments that felt like they asked more of me than I wanted to give. When my biggest client disappeared in March and took a big chunk of my income and months of my work with them, I felt fear in a way I hadn’t in a long while. Not the kind that pricks at you, but the kind that settles in the chest, heavy and insistent. And in that heaviness, I kept hearing this quiet reminder: trust. Trust yourself. Trust that even when the ground shifts, you don’t have to collapse with it.

Ever since my Gran passed last autumn, I’ve been trying to strengthen my forgiveness practice; circling this idea of forgiveness as a pathway to freedom. Not forgiveness that excuses, but forgiveness that allows you to stop carrying what isn’t yours anymore. And then I heard the quote, “Freedom is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different,” and something clicked. It softened something I’d been holding far too tightly. If I hadn’t stayed focused on letting go, on loosening my grip on resentment, I think the bitterness might have swallowed me whole.

Spring brought me into a different kind of lesson. I went on a spiritual retreat. One I still don’t feel ready to talk about in detail. But, I can say this: it made me realize how sensitive I am to the emotional weather around me. How easily I absorb other people’s storms. I found myself needing to pull inward, to set a boundary that felt almost spiritual in nature, just to protect my own peace; I walked away knowing that my presence carries weight and that I’m allowed to choose where I place it.

And then there was the lesson that arrived quietly, almost unnoticed, until suddenly it wasn’t. With everything unfolding on the family front and the grief I’ve been wading through since last year, I finally saw the shape of my own mind’s habit: catastrophizing. I’d always told myself it was caution, preparation, strategy. “Let me imagine the worst so I never have to be surprised.” But the truth is, that kind of thinking doesn’t guard you; it narrows you. It dims the lights before you’ve even stepped into the room. It steals joy in the exact moment joy could be forming. Seeing that for what it is… that changed something for me.

So now I’m here, on another birthday, with all of that behind me and whatever comes next rising gently ahead. And for the first time in a long time, the future feels like a place I can walk into without bracing.

What I want most in the year ahead is simple, really: consistency. A soft landing. A place where my nervous system can finally take a long exhale. Austin feels like the right setting for that—somewhere I can build a rhythm, fill a home, find my people, and let myself settle after years of being everywhere and nowhere at once.

I want to feel the weight of grief start to lift, even just a little. To reach back toward the things that used to spark joy. To reorient myself toward possibility again. To find the good that sits quietly in the wake of everything I’ve had to let go of.

And more than anything, I want to begin creating from a grounded place. Not from fear. Not from hustle. Not from the frantic need to survive. But from steadiness. From clarity. From a deeper sense of who I am becoming when I’m not trying to outrun anything.

So that’s where I find myself this year: a little softened, a little steadier, and maybe more myself than I’ve ever been.

Never the same, but always myself.

If that’s the theme of this next chapter, I think I can live with that.

I think I can live well with that.

It’s strange, considering where I come from. The idea of settling anywhere long-term makes something old and protective flare up in me. Like permanence is a risk I’m not sure I’m allowed to take.

But when I think about the life I actually want, all that noise falls away.

I picture slow mornings. The kind where time doesn’t startle you awake. I brew coffee for two in a warm kitchen. I lean into a little yoga to shake off the night as early morning sunlight moves across the walls. It feels like the house itself is in conversation with the day. My garden needs tending in all the predictable, grounding ways gardens do. My dog is waiting at the door, impatiently, for our first walk.

The life is simple, but it doesn’t feel small. It feels deliberate.

Future me still works. Of course he does. I’ve never seen a version of myself without projects, active ideas, or some thread pulling me toward the next creative leap. But the work takes a different shape now. My neighbors know me as the guy who owns the general store on Main Street. It’s just a little shop full of “alternative provisions,” cool gear and everyday goods with intention behind them. The kind of place people stop into just to feel connected to something.

The agency still exists, too. It’s a creative and strategic practice that pulls me into global conversations and worlds bigger than the one I live in. And then there’s the philanthropic fund, the quiet backbone of it all. I founded it the very first time I felt like was severely overpaid. My work feels like giving back to the people who dare to try.

The house is modest, it’s just off Main Street, and the floors creak to prove its maturity. There’s three bedrooms, a perfect-sized kitchen, and a long wooden table in the dining room. Because dinners always end up with more guests than expected.

There’s a garden that produces too many tomatoes, herbs, and whatever else I’ve convinced myself I can grow. Some weeks I show up at the farmer’s market with baskets of vegetables; other weeks it goes to community dinners at the shop just because food has a way of gathering people.

There’s still travel, but it’s no longer the center of my life. It’s seasoning, not substance. There’s a beach house or a cabin at a lake, somewhere. Whichever balances the main home. There’s a cottage in Ireland and a flat in Italy (probably Verona); places we return to with less urgency now.

This version of my life is full, but not frantic. Busy, but not overloaded. Wide, but still anchored in something real and warm and repeating. And every time I sit with it, it feels less like a fantasy and more like a truth I’m slowly growing toward; a life that finally feels like mine, like home in the way I never had it but always wanted.