I noticed this in myself early. Six, maybe seven years old. I remember sitting with a particular kind of quiet certainty, watching my parents, thinking: I know you better than you know me. Not as a judgment. Just as a fact I had arrived at without trying. Something in me was already in the business of connecting dots.

I didn’t know what to do with that and, for a long time, I thought the right thing to do was question it. And there was good reason for that.

When you’re growing up inside of the dysfunctional systems I did, the people around you have a stake in what you believe. Not always out of malice. Sometimes survival just requires a certain story, and children who see clearly are a threat to that story. I spent years having my own read on things quietly rewritten. Things I knew were wrong got explained away and, before I could fully form the thoughts or words, things I felt would be quickly dismissed. If you internalize that often enough, you start to wonder if the instrument is broken. You stop trusting the signal.

Getting out helped. Turning eighteen and getting distance from the day-to-day helped. But unlearning something that was built in over years doesn’t happen on a clean timeline. I still found myself second-guessing. Still caught myself rehearsing the ways I might be wrong before I allowed myself to act on what I knew. The practice of trusting your own perception is a practice in the most literal sense. It requires repetition. It requires patience with yourself. And it requires, at some point, deciding that your read on things is worth more than the discomfort of acting on it.

That is what I mean when I tell people intuition is a spiritual practice. Not spiritual in any formal sense. But in the sense that it asks something of you consistently, over time, with no guaranteed return. You sit with it. You test it. You watch what happens when you follow it and what happens when you don’t. Slowly, a kind of internal authority builds. You stop needing outside confirmation as much. You start to trust the shape of things before anyone else names it. But it comes at a cost.

When you develop the ability to get a finely tuned sense of who someone is, you arrive early. You are already three steps into understanding them while they are still in the introduction. You see the constellation before they’ve finished placing the stars. And because you’ve done the work to trust what you see, you don’t dismiss it. You don’t talk yourself out of it. You accept it. Sometimes you feel something close to love before the other person has even decided whether they’re interested.

That’s the curse. Not the clarity. The timing. Because now you are waiting. And waiting, for someone like me, has a particular shape. It doesn’t look as frantic or as scared as you might think. It doesn’t look like there’s an appetite or an anxious need in it. It looks like patience. But underneath the patience is a very old pattern: I see you clearly. I’m giving you time to arrive. I’ll be here when you do. It is the same posture I learned in from the backseat of my childhood, watching and knowing and staying quiet about it. I have shed much of my inheritance. Except this.

The honest version of it is this: I don’t feel the pull other people seem to feel when the dynamic is lopsided. When I care more than someone clearly cares back, I don’t chase. I don’t lobby for myself. I sit and I wait for them to come around, to ask questions, to show up. Which sounds like dignity, maybe even like self-respect. But it is also a losing strategy. Because some people… Because most people these days don’t come around. They just take the patience as permission to stay where they are.

What I’ve come to understand, slowly, is that when I’m ahead of someone else, I’m not really in the relationship yet. I’m in my own assessment of it. The other person’s continued introduction isn’t the story unfolding for me. It’s data. I’m watching for confirmation of what I already believe. Using their behavior to close the loop on a read I’ve already made. That is not intimacy. It’s surveillance with good intentions.

And so the question I’ve been sitting with lately is whether the arrival with another person is ever really about them, or whether it is always, primarily, about me. Whether what I’m feeling when I think I understand someone is connection, or whether it’s just the satisfaction of the constellation clicking into place. The pattern that recognized itself. The instrument confirming it still works.

I think there is something worth building in the space between those two things. Between clarity and closeness. Between seeing someone accurately and actually letting them in. The practice I’ve gotten good at is perception. The practice I’m still learning is staying in the room once the picture forms. Not stepping back to assess it. Not waiting at a patient distance for them to catch up. Just being there, in the mess of it, with someone who is still mid-sentence.

Because as beautiful and complex and grounding as they might be, we’ve got to remember, constellations are also just light from things that are very far away.

There are some connections and conversations that exists entirely at the surface.

You can feel it when someone answers a vulnerable question with a joke just polished enough to redirect the moment. Or when two people begin circling something honest before one of them casually changes the subject. Or when someone says, “I’m just figuring things out right now,” and both people instinctively understand that the sentence means more than it says. And everyone agrees to agree not to press further.

I’ve started to notice how much adult life is built this way.

We learn how to keep things moving. How to stay warm without becoming vulnerable. How to remain emotionally available enough to experience connection while still preserving the shape of our lives. We become experts in controlled depth. In calibrated intimacy. In knowing exactly how much of ourselves to reveal before the conversation risks changing form entirely. And increasingly, modern life rewards this.

People move cities. Change careers. Rebuild identities. Spend years becoming more independent, more self-aware, more mobile. We meet one another in transition now. Halfway through healing. Halfway out the door. Halfway into some future version of ourselves we haven’t fully committed to yet.

Sometimes the connection is real. The timing simply isn’t. And I think that creates a strange kind of emotional choreography between people. A mutual, often unspoken agreement to keep bringing the conversation back to the surface before it drifts too far downward. Because depth asks something of us.

It reorganizes things. A deeper conversation changes the emotional temperature of a room. A deeper connection changes the way people think about distance, time, possibility, risk. It creates gravity. And gravity, for people carefully constructing lives around freedom or movement or independence, can feel complicated.

So we become careful. And then someone does the unthinkable and asks one more question than the moment was prepared for.

“How did you feel after that conversation with your mother?”

“What made you decide to leave?”

“Do you actually see yourself staying here?”

And the other person answers. Honestly, even. But only briefly. Just enough to acknowledge the opening before gently steering the conversation back toward safer waters. Back toward flirtation. Back toward humor. Back toward the ease of the present moment.

I don’t think this always comes from fear. That’s the part I’ve been reconsidering lately.

For a long time, I assumed surface-level connection existed mostly because people were emotionally unavailable or unwilling to be vulnerable. And certainly sometimes that’s true. But I’m beginning to think there’s another version of it emerging now. One rooted less in avoidance and more in self-preservation.

Modern adulthood produces a lot of almosts. Almost the right timing. Almost the right city. Almost enough permanence. Almost enough emotional availability to let something fully unfold. And when two people recognize that reality at the same time, restraint can start to look a lot like emotional intelligence.

Not every meaningful connection arrives at a moment where it can become a life.

That’s difficult to admit because we’re often taught to think of depth as something that should naturally progress toward commitment, certainty, or permanence. But some connections seem to exist in a more temporary emotional architecture. They appear in transit seasons. Transitional cities. Between larger decisions. At moments when both people can feel the pull toward something deeper while simultaneously recognizing the instability underneath it.

What fascinates me is how quickly people can sense this without ever explicitly discussing it: a conversation slows itself down, certain questions stop getting asked, and people instinctively begin protecting the present from the weight of the future.

Sometimes that protection is mutual. There’s a certain kind of intimacy in knowing exactly how much not to ask. (That sentence sounds sadder than I mean it to.)

Because, I don’t actually think there’s anything inherently wrong with surface-level connection. Some of the most enjoyable relationships in our lives exist precisely because they are light.

Not every person we meet is meant to become foundational. Not every connection needs to carry the full emotional weight of permanence in order to matter.

But I do wonder sometimes whether we’ve become so fluent in ambiguity that we rarely stop to acknowledge when something deeper is trying to emerge underneath it.

As curiosity. As attentiveness. As one more real question than the moment required.

I think about how many forms of connection compete for our attention now. Notifications. Dating apps. Group chats. Flights booked months in advance. Careers that ask for flexibility. Cities that no longer feel permanent. Entire social lives built around movement and optimization and optionality.

There are endless ways to remain connected now. But meaningful depth still asks for the same thing it always has: presence. Attention. A willingness to let another person affect the shape of your inner world. And that’s harder to maintain in a culture built around motion. Especially when both people know motion may soon resume.

Maybe that’s why restraint has become such a defining emotional skill of modern adulthood. Not because people are incapable of intimacy, but because they’ve become increasingly aware of its consequences. Real intimacy creates attachment. Attachment creates consideration. Consideration complicates freedom. And freedom (particularly hard-won freedom) can become difficult to negotiate against.

I understand that tension more now than I used to.

I also understand something else: There’s a difference between people who cannot go deep and people who consciously choose not to, despite being capable of it. The first feels empty. The second feels strangely human.

Two people noticing something. Two people understanding the circumstances surrounding it. Two people quietly deciding not to pull too hard on the thread.

And still, I can’t help but wonder what gets lost when everyone becomes this careful with themselves? What possibilities disappear before they’re ever fully named? What kinds of relationships might exist on the other side of one more honest conversation? Or how many people move through each other’s lives feeling something real while convincing themselves that timing alone made depth impossible?

I don’t know that there’s a clean answer to any of this.

Maybe some connections are meant to remain partial. Maybe not every meaningful moment needs resolution. Maybe adulthood is partially learning how to recognize depth without immediately demanding permanence from it.

But I do think it’s worth paying attention to the people who make you want to ask one more real question. And I think it’s worth noticing when someone does the same for you.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”
—Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

I have always thought we underestimate how much of our lives are shaped by ruin.

Especially the quieter versions of ruin. The relationships that lose their alignment. The service that starts to feel like work. And the work that starts to feel heavier than it should. The structures we’ve built that no longer hold in the same way.

We tend to resist those moments. Or rush to replace them. But most of the places we admire carry their history in what’s been broken down and rebuilt. Old cities. Natural landscapes. Even the stories we return to. What remains isn’t untouched. It’s weathered. It’s shaped by what didn’t last.

Ruin isn’t the opposite of progress. It’s often part of it.

Sometimes it happens to us. And sometimes, if we’re paying attention, it’s something we have to choose to actively opt-in to.

I recently stepped away from one of the most meaningful collaborative relationships I’ve had in recent years.

It was a client that, for a long time, acted as a kind of safety net, especially while I was traveling. It filled in the gaps. It made things feel more stable. But over time, something shifted. The reliability I had built a life around started to erode. And gradually, without calling it out directly, I found myself adjusting to compensate.

At a certain point, it stopped feeling like support and started feeling like drag.

So I let it go.

There wasn’t a replacement waiting. There still isn’t, in any clear or immediate way. Just a stretch of open space where something consistent used to be. And if I’m honest, that kind of space comes with a level of uncertainty that doesn’t fully go away, no matter how many times you’ve been through it.

But I’ve seen a version of this pattern before.

A few years ago, I packed up everything I owned in Philadelphia with the intention of moving to Ireland. I sold what I could, let go of the rest, and booked a one-way ticket with less than $1,000 in my account. After the flight, I had less than half of that left. It wasn’t reckless in my mind. I remember thinking, very clearly, “I know it’ll be okay.” Not because I had a plan but because I trusted my ability to respond once I got there.

And something shifted almost immediately.

Clients I had been in conversation with for years finally committed. Retainers came through. Almost everything I sold moved quickly, often at or above what I had paid for it. It felt like the moment I created space, things started to move toward it.

I’ve experienced some version of that more than once. Not every time or even with perfect destruction or severance. But enough to recognize the shape of it.

You let something go. There’s a moment (or stretch) of emptiness, uncertainty and the unknown, where nothing has filled in yet. And then, sometimes unexpectedly, things begin to arrive: opportunities, support, momentum. Critical things. Not always in the way you imagined, but in a way that meets the space you created.

I don’t think that pattern is guaranteed. It probably depends on how honest you’re willing to be with yourself in the first place. What you’re actually letting go of. And, why. But I trust it enough to pay attention when I feel it starting again.

For me, it’s not just about the work itself. It’s about how the work is done. The rhythm of it. The mutual respect. The sense that both sides are showing up in a way that makes the whole thing better, not heavier.

When that starts to slip, it doesn’t usually correct itself on its own.

So you make a call. You create a little bit of ruin where something no longer fits. You clear it out, even if you don’t know exactly what’s going to replace it yet.

And then you sit with the space.

Right now, I’m there.

Over the next few days, something will take shape. A new client could come in. One of the projects I’ve been building quietly could land. Or I could feel the full weight of the decision financially before anything replaces it.

All of those are real possibilities.

And still, this feels like the right move.

There’s a difference between something being difficult and something being wrong. It’s easy to confuse the two, especially when stability is involved. We hold onto what works. Until we realize we’re the ones doing the extra work to keep it working.

At some point, you have to decide what you’re willing to build around. Not everything fills in immediately. But that doesn’t make the clearing wrong. If anything, it might be the part that makes whatever comes next possible.

“You’re in a race against AI.”

I remember the words landing strangely. Not because they stung. Though they did, a little. But because my first instinct wasn’t defensiveness. It was something closer to relief. I looked at the screen. I thought: I’m so glad people have access to this. So I don’t have to do all of that rushed, silly stuff anymore.

Those two reactions arriving almost simultaneously told me something: I’m just still working out what.

I didn’t respond well in the moment. I said I didn’t think of it that way. They said, “You look surprised.” I said I was.

The truth is more complicated: I have located my value in the output for most of my professional life, actually. Designs. Deliverables. Things you could point to, pull up, send over. I know how to do that. I’m good at it. And for a long time, being good at it was enough of an identity to carry me through.

What I’m sitting with now and what I have been sitting with for a while is the recognition that it’s a fragile place to stand. When clients, partners, or even I stake the majority of my value in creative output, it flattens the work I care most about: the connection-making, the thinking, the architecture. The conversation and soft skills that come to serve as the mortar for what we’re actually building. The relationship stops being interesting and, from there, I start going through the motions until the pleasure drains out of it. Slowly, completely, and all at once.

I’ve been trying to retrain myself away from needing the output to be the proof. It’s slow work. But the comment landed in the middle of it, which is maybe why it landed the way it did. So I took it to a handful of other clients just to see. The responses ranged from shock to flat disbelief. Not one of them outright agreed with the framing.

All of this took me back to working retail in high school. Self-checkout was being installed and the two dozen cashiers on staff were convinced it was going to replace them. Nobody wanted to bring it up with management. So I did.

After that conversation, I was the only person in the room who raised their hand to learn the system. To run it.

I think about that version of myself sometimes. Not because I’ve always been fearless around change. I haven’t. But because that instinct is still in there somewhere, that is who I am, underneath the performance anxiety and the need to prove. Something in me knew then that what I was attached to wasn’t going anywhere. The machine wasn’t the threat.

I’m trying to find my way back to that clarity.

Here’s what I actually thought, watching the Canva ad this morning: Thank god this exists. Because now I can build my own things the same way everyone else is.

That’s the shift I’m reaching for. The technology isn’t replacing the work I value. It’s releasing me from the work I don’t. Hours of production that kept me from thinking. Deliverables that kept me from creating. If there’s a race I’m running, it’s the same one everyone is—or should be—running: figuring out how to use what’s available to do more of what actually matters to you.

People often ask me how I use AI across the different ways I serve as a co-founder, creator, and coach. The honest answer is that the use cases are completely different in each context, but the intention is the same: I use it with guardrails to support the things that interest me. I’m also paying attention to what it’s doing at a larger scale. To the culture. To the quality of what we make and say and gather around.

Because here’s what I keep coming back to: the more creative output gets automated, the more human involvement is going to mean something. The more people try to use AI to shortcut connection or manufacture impact, the more real presence is going to stand out. The signal gets clearer as the noise gets louder.

To lead is to always be subtly pivoting but, right now, I’m pivoting with pride. Toward less creative output, more strategic partnership. Less building websites, more real-world gathering. Less deliverable, more presence.

I don’t know if that’s wisdom or just exhaustion talking. Probably some of both. But it’s where I’m pointed — and for now, that’s enough.

The first thing Germany gave me was cold.

Not the polite, soft kind you ease into. The kind that meets you on an exposed train platform and doesn’t negotiate. I had flown in from Donegal, missed my connection, and was standing on the upper deck of Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof waiting for the last train south. It reminded me of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. That same semi-exposed, industrial grandeur.

I finally boarded the train.

If there’s one thing Germany gets deeply right, it’s trains. The Deutsche Bahn felt less like public transportation and more like a moving hotel. Warm. Smooth. Quiet. I remember sitting back and watching the dark countryside scroll past the window and feeling the cortisol finally drain out. I had made it. I was moving. The train would do the rest.

By the time I checked into Motel One in Stuttgart it was nearly midnight. Cold, tired, hungry, and the kitchen had already closed. The bartender looked at me the way bartenders look at late arrivals. Unbothered. Competent. Slightly amused.

“I’ll take a gin and tonic,” I said.

Liquid dinners are underrated.

My friend Mike’s company is headquartered in Stuttgart. He had been trying to get me over there for years. It’s hard to say no to travel when you’re already moving. And yet I had managed. I had no real expectations for the city. No real interest, if I’m being honest. I wasn’t sure I could have found it on a map six months earlier.

He was in back-to-back meetings all of the first day. So I did what I always do in a new place. Found a reliable omelette. A good cup of coffee. A bookshop. An outdoor retailer. Another coffee, this one “a roadie” as I watched the city move.

Stuttgart is organized around Königstraße - a long, wide pedestrian corridor that everything else seems to orient itself around. Not unlike the central arteries you find in other European cities. But there’s something grounded and gritty about this one. Less performative than some. The stores were prepping for Christmas but nothing had been fully switched on yet. The city felt caught between versions of itself.

What surprised me most was how many people were out on a regular Thursday. Moving, shopping, sitting in the cold. Not tourists. Just people. Living their day in their city.

The Globetrotter in Stuttgart deserves its own sentence. It’s the German experiential equivalent of REI. Multi-level, immersive, slightly overwhelming in the best way. The staircase is lined with thousands of photographs from customers, from expeditions all over the world. I stood there longer than I planned to. Something about that wall caught me off guard. All those places. All those faces. I bought a set of SealLine dry bags I still haven’t used. No regrets.

That first full day ended with schnitzel and a Dinkelacker. Both earned. Mike and I walked off dinner through the Christmas market, cups of mulled wine in hand, as expected in late November in Germany. Then he mentioned a speakeasy he’d heard about.

We found it. We stayed too long. At some point we were outside a McDonald’s at an hour that should not be named, attempting to bribe the staff into making us a burger before they closed. They declined. Diplomatically. We walked home.

Day two started the way most days start anywhere — breakfast, coffee — and then opened up. The Altes Schloss. The Markthalle. The art museum a friend in Italy had recommended.

There’s something that happens around the second day in a new city. The initial disorientation settles and you start to actually see the place. Stuttgart did something to me that second day. I found myself genuinely attached to it. In the “I could stay another week” kind.

I still want to go back. Dürrbachklinge and Wernhaldenpark are said to be beautiful hikes. The Mercedes-Benz Museum has been pulling at me since I left. There’s still so much there I didn’t get to.

The drive back to Frankfurt did not go as planned.

Mike had been excited about the Autobahn. The legendary highway. No speed limit. The kind of road you hear about in other countries. We sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for what felt like the entire route. I think we peaked at 50 kilometers per hour. The train I had originally booked, the one Mike had talked me out of, whipped past us in the other direction at what looked like lightning speed.

We laughed about it. What else can you do.

Mike flew home early the next morning and I had Frankfurt to myself for two days.

The first one followed the usual pattern. Omelette. Coffee. Bookshop. You know how it goes by now. Then late in the afternoon I took a notion and wandered into the Städel Museum. The crowd was surprisingly thin. I had the corridors mostly to myself. The Städel holds world-class work and to land a quiet Saturday afternoon, that kind of access feels like something you’re getting away with.

That night I ate a burrito alone in my hotel room and watched terrible television. No shame. No apologies. No regrets.

Day two: breakfast at Café Hauptwache. At the next table, a group of guys in their 20s were piecing together the previous night. Proper breakfast talk. A stag party. The details were chaotic. Probably illegal. I appreciated the preview of what lay ahead for whoever was getting married.

After breakfast I walked up to Grüneburg Park and back through the city, stopped at Coffee Fellows before the Frankfurt Archaeological Museum. Then I looped through Römerberg and found a bench in Nizza Park. The river was there. The light was good. Retirees were being directed off cruise ships and corralled toward the old town for dinner and drinks. They looked content. Or at least prepared.

That evening I went back to Römerberg and had dinner at Alten Limpurg, a traditional German restaurant right on the square. Busy. Loud. Exactly right.

One thing stayed with me from the whole trip.

We were out one night in Stuttgart, the three of us, when someone mentioned the flags. The way you don’t see German flags the way you see American flags. Not on private homes. Not hanging from porches. Not on bumper stickers.

Mike put it plainly. Germans don’t do that. Not after what their nationalism produced. There’s a shadow side to pride, to power, to any big beautiful plan that goes badly enough. They’ve lived inside that shadow. They built their culture in the aftermath of it. So the flag stays folded.

I sat with that one for a while. Still am.

This was my first proper “quick pop out of Ireland.” My friends there talk about it like it’s nothing. Hop over to Germany. Pop to Barcelona. Be back Sunday. It didn’t feel especially convenient to me. Not for my lifestyle, anyway. But it gave me something I wasn’t expecting: a genuine taste for the German cities, a warmer feeling for the people, and a fuller picture of a country I had only held in the abstract.

What it also clarified was something I had been quietly sitting with for a while. A long weekend is a preview. A postcard. What I actually wanted was more time on the European mainland. Something with real roots. Somewhere I could stay.

But that’s a different postcard.

Where to Find Yourself in Stuttgart

Cafe Hegel Hegelplatz 1, 70174 Stuttgart

A breakfast place in the truest sense of the thing. Unhurried. Reliable. The kind of morning anchor a new city needs. I came here both days and left each time feeling settled. If you need somewhere to start the day before you’ve figured out what the day is, start here.

Leonidas Chocolate Shop (inside Königsbau Passagen) Königstraße 28, 70173 Stuttgart

Belgian chocolates inside a beautiful old arcade. I came in looking for gifts and stayed longer than I needed to. Worth a slow browse even if you leave empty-handed. The building alone earns a step inside.

Altes Schloss (Old Castle) Schillerplatz 6, 70173 Stuttgart

A mid-day activity with no agenda required. The castle sits at the center of the old town and holds a regional history museum inside if you want to go deeper. I spent most of my time in the surrounding square. There’s a pace to that part of the city that slows you down in a good way.

Carls Brewery Stauffenbergstraße 1, 70173 Stuttgart

A proper dinner spot. Good beer, good food, the kind of atmosphere that earns a long evening. Go with someone. Order more than you think you need.

Jigger & Spoon Calwer Str. 21, 70173 Stuttgart

A speakeasy that delivers on the premise. Find it late. Bring someone you don’t have to explain yourself to. It earned us a very long night.

Where to Find Yourself in Frankfurt

LUME Boutique Hotel (a Marriott Autograph Collection Property) Wiesenhüttenplatz 36, 60329 Frankfurt am Main

Boutique feel without boutique anxiety. Comfortable, central, well-staffed. A better base than I expected and one I’d go back to without hesitation.

Café Hauptwache An der Hauptwache 15, 60313 Frankfurt am Main

Start here. The building anchors the pedestrian zone and the breakfast is dependable in the best way. Good light in the morning. Worth arriving before the city fully wakes up.

Nizzawerft Nizzawerft, Frankfurt am Main

A footpath running along the Main river. I walked it twice and it was different each time. Quiet in the morning. More leisurely by afternoon. Worth the time in either direction, with no particular destination in mind.

Städel Museum Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

One of the better art museums I’ve spent time in. The collection is world-class and the building doesn’t get in its own way. Go on a quiet day if you can. Lunch at Cafe Wacker afterward held up.

Römerberg Römerberg, Frankfurt am Main

The old town square. Go in the evening, after the tour groups have cleared out. Walk the cobblestones without a plan. The architecture earns a slow look.

Alten Limpurg Römerberg 19, 60311 Frankfurt am Main

Traditional German food on the square. Busy in the way that means things are going well. I ordered the obvious things. They were the right call.

Sullivan Cocktail Bar Seehofstraße 30–32, 60594 Frankfurt am Main

A good room, a well-made drink, a place to end the night without needing an occasion.

I’ve been letting myself look at it more directly lately.

It’s morning. My department heads know well where to find me. No standing meeting. Just a window in my day they know to look for. By the time they walk in, I’ve already gotten my own day started. We give ourselves an hour. Coffee. We talk the way people do when they trust each other and have work in common: new groups that need outfitting, a brand looking to collaborate, a maker who just moved to town in search of studio space, a yoga instructor interested in the morning slot. We look at what’s moving and what’s stalled. Nothing urgent. Everything considered.

Formal meetings fill the afternoon. In between, I work through the things I should be doing. By three or four, I let that go and move toward the things I want to be doing: checking in with collaborators, unboxing and testing new gear, passion projects, housekeeping. The day slows. People start heading out, a quick check-in on their way through the door. See you tomorrow, we say.

What I keep returning to, though, isn’t the rhythm of the day. It’s what’s underneath it.

Matchbox Twenty, Fleetwood Mac, Sublime, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Oasis, and other familiar friends over the speakers. The smell of cardboard in the mornings. That productive, particular smell, the one that means something arrived and needs attention. During operating hours, the store’s signature scent settles in: oaky, smoky, something masculine with a quiet note of rose water. By evening, whatever’s keeping the lights on shifts everything. A food truck in the parking lot, a baking class in the kitchen, a bonfire out back. I can feel the day moving through my body. My back and arms and chest and legs, stronger from a more active life. I can see the people helping bring it to life. The way my office looks. The way the it all feels.

I don’t usually let myself go there that specifically. But only for the sake and power of visualization. There’s something that happens when you stop approximating the future. I tend to hold it loosely. Describe it in general terms. Leave enough room to avoid being wrong about it. That version stays soft. And soft things are hard to build toward.

This one didn’t feel soft. I knew what the morning smelled like. I knew what four in the afternoon felt like. I knew who I’d say goodnight to on the way out the door. And every time I sit with it, it feels less like something I’m imagining and more like something I’m slowly growing toward; a life that, when I picture it clearly enough, already feels like mine.

Yesterday, Anna, a new friend here in Austin, and I were sharing a coffee (and people-watching) in a neighborhood hotspot. “I love traveling,” she said. “I’m so much more intentional on vacation. Where I go. Who I’m with. I don’t even feel guilty if I don’t want to do what someone else wants to do or have a particular person with us.”

I giggled, and that giggle quickly turned to laughter with a quiet recognition.

“What?” she asked.

“That’s just my life,” I said.

She looked at me for a second. Then said something I’ve been sitting with since: “That’s probably why people love you. Because they know you’re doing exactly what you want, exactly how you want to do it.”

We stayed on the subject for the better part of an hour after that. She kept asking how I got this way. Like there was a practice, or a philosophy, or a book. I didn’t know how to tell her it was mostly wreckage.

What she probably meant as a compliment (and it was) points to something that took a long time to develop and cost more than I expected. I didn’t grow up feeling like my presence was wanted. As a kid, as a teenager, there was a persistent low hum of feeling like I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. I don’t need to over-index on that here. But it’s worth naming, because it explains what came next.

As a young adult, I figured out a workaround. If I couldn’t simply belong, I would earn it. I treated people to meals. I went overboard on birthdays and holidays. I showed up for things I didn’t care about, just to keep certain people in my life. I compromised—chronically, quietly—and told myself it was generosity. I remember the specific feeling of that period. Pathetic is the right word. Not because generosity is pathetic. It isn’t. But I wasn’t being generous. I was paying a toll.

When she asked when it changed, I was honest with her. “I’m still a little performance-driven when I get an invitation,” I said. “What can I bring? What do you need? Almost always comes before the Yes.”

But the real turning point wasn’t a realization. It wasn’t therapy or travel or a particular moment of clarity. It was simpler and harder than that. I lost everything.

From 2012 to 2016, I lived in deep poverty, ultimately losing my apartment in 2014. What followed was a four-to-six year process of rebuilding. Financially. Psychologically. And something harder to name. Spiritually, maybe. Things that, at 24, you don’t even know need housekeeping let alone how to rebuild.

I want to be careful here. I’m not interested in packaging it into a lesson. But there’s something about that kind of loss. Something clarifying about it. Something that makes certain things undeniable. Nobody was going to fix it for me. That was obvious. But the more honest thing is this: I was never going to let them.

Some older, more stubborn version of myself had already decided that before rock bottom became a sort of home. The poverty didn’t produce my independence. It just removed everything I’d been using to avoid living by it.

The recovery was slow. Incremental. There’s no clean arc to report. But the more I reclaimed—stability, hope, something resembling the life I wanted—the more fiercely I wanted to protect it. Not out of fear. Out of respect. In the exact same way you save for months or years for a trip and then actually show up for it. You don’t let it slip by. You don’t give away days to things that don’t matter. You’ve worked too hard for that.

Anna had described traveling that way. Every choice deliberate. No guilt about wanting what she actually wants. By the end of our conversation, I think she understood that I just never came back from that mode. And it’s that foundation that supports where I am now, give or take a few pressure-testing guilt trips from family.

It’s not that I stopped caring what other people think, or that I’ve crossed some threshold into pure selfishness. I still want to bring something. I still ask what you need. Some wiring doesn’t fully rewrite. But when I accept an invitation now, I actually want to be there. When I spend time with someone, it’s because I chose them. When I book a trip, I book it the way I want it. The places. The pace. Who’s in the room.

She laughed when I explained it that way. “So you just applied vacation logic to your entire life.” “More or less.”

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.