She looked deep into my eyes. She really saw me, or what I mean is, I felt seen by her. “Thank you for sharing that with us. It’s not easy to tell a group of strangers something so vulnerable.” Somara breathed deeply and kept her gaze. “And by informing us…

She said she would come pick me up at 1pm. At noon I was still in the shower, letting bothersome thoughts swirl around like a psychedelic yin and yang. Am I sad? Am I okay? Am I functioning correctly? I’m so fat. But I’m healthy. I could be so pretty…

And Why I Haven’t Decorated My Room — She waited patiently for my tears to subside. “What’s going on?” She asked with kind eyes. “What,” I sniffled, “What do you mean?” She held her gaze intently. “If your tears could talk, what would they be saying?” I couldn’t look her in the eyes. I couldn’t stop sobbing. Most…

“I need to adult, I need to figure out my Roth IRA and all that stuff. I have my TSP, you have TSP too, you don’t touch it right?” “Umm…” Kristina glared at me. “I may have dipped into my TSP.” I grimaced. “What? How! Why?” “It was after my…

Life is good, I thought to myself. I smiled at the sky. The sun was trying to make its way past the canopy of leaves. In cinematography, this is called dappled light. I was laying down on my back in the grass, enjoying the soft spring breeze. We were sitting…

Coming Back to America, A Side Hustle Compendium — Remember The Plan I wrote about? The one that would get me from broke damsel in distress Christina to thriving successful badass Christina? Step 2 of The Plan was get a job, any job, and get it fast. So I signed up to be a dog walker on this app…

In 2018 I sold everything I owned, left Austin for Bali and declared, ‘I’m never coming back.’ After living in Indonesia the past four years, I came back. Those four years in Indo were filled with so much love, comfort, and entrepreneurial creativity — until it all came crashing down…

I Thought It Would Be Different — I moved back to America in March 2022 and the first thing I did was download a dating app called Hinge. Within one day my phone was overflowing with pings, and my feel-good hormones were going through the roof! …

A Case Study. “I don’t know how to do this Dey! Packing and moving and all the organizational skills that come with it — my little brain wasn’t built for this, this skillset is above my Sagittarius pay grade!” “Yeah, true, yeah.” Over in Australia at the other end of the call, Deya…