Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash I did not realize how much I depended on being close to nature until I moved away from it. For most of my life, nature was never something I had to intentionally seek out. It was simply there, woven into the fabric of everyday life. In Winston-Salem, trees lined the roads and wooded trails were never far away. Even in Fayetteville, there were places where you could step away from the noise and find a patch of quiet. Nature was not a destin

For most of my life I carried a kind of weight that I didn’t really talk about. I struggled with depression from a young age and a lot of it came from my family life. I felt rejected early on by my biological father and that stuck with me more than I understood at the time. Growing up, I heard more things that made me feel unwanted than I did things that made me feel loved. My mom told me she hated me and that she wished I wasn’t born, and it wasn’t a one-time thing. It was c

I keep trying to figure out if I actually belong here, or if I have just been showing up long enough that my presence has become something people expect, not necessarily something they want. There is a difference, even if it is subtle. One feels like being invited without the words, and the other feels like no one had the heart to tell you not to come. I cannot tell which one this is. I go multiple times a week now, to the point where it would probably feel noticeable if I di

Photo by Djim Loic on Unsplash There are people I can’t go back to. Some of them are gone, and some of them only existed in versions of me that don’t exist anymore. They lived in very specific seasons of my life, versions of me that needed something different than I do now, versions of me that tolerated more or less, that loved differently, that survived differently. I don’t miss all of them, but I remember them clearly, and I remember who I was when they mattered. There was

There’s a very specific kind of disorientation that comes with becoming an adult you never expected to be. I saw something recently that said: if you were suicidal as a kid and feel lost as an adult, it’s not abnormal it’s because you didn’t plan to be alive today, And that stuck with me, because it explains something I haven’t really been able to put into words before. When you grow up in survival mode, you’re not thinking about five year plans, careers, or where you want t

I think that’s where the pressure comes in, because it’s not loud and it’s not panic, it’s just this low feeling in the background that time is passing whether I’m doing anything with it or not. Like it doesn’t care if I’ve figured things out yet, it’s just going, and I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be measuring against which somehow makes it worse. It’s not like I can point to something and say this is where I should be by now, but it still feels like there’s somethin