I’ve spent a good chunk of my life attempting to recreate the magic of fleeting moments. A few nights ago, one of my best friends and I visited our alma mater.

Here was the precursor to adulthood — walls that once felt like freedom. We ended up leaving around 10:00 pm because a man kept staring at us.

Nostalgia is tricky. It makes you romanticize a time in your life you can only experience once. When we look into the past, we view segments of life filtered through an emotional lens. …

“We are all bodies of water, guarding the mystery of our depths, but some of us have more to guard than others.”

― Deborah Smith, Alice at Heart

Before the year began I was approached by three witches in a dream. They offered to heal me and I eagerly complied despite not knowing what the process would entail.

As one witch dangled a protective pendant over my head, another one braided my hair. I became lucid as waves of warmth and comfort radiated throughout my body. Slowly, my eyes shut and my field of vision became tinted red. …

I am prone to unrest and occasionally like to invite chaos into my life. So when two of my girlfriends and I were simultaneously going through heartbreak, I devised a plan: we would cut and dye our hair, burn the scraps in a firepit, and speak our goals into existence over the flames while passing a bottle of Snoop Dogg’s 19 Crimes. Like phoenixes, we’d rise from the ashes as brand new women — or something like that.

Reality had me squatting over a firepit with an electric lighter, attempting to set flame to a pile of hair symbolically doused…

When I look into the past to pinpoint where it all went wrong, hindsight brings me back to the floor of my ex-boyfriend’s bathroom.

I was a junior in high school who spent the bulk of my time on Tumblr when I wasn’t hanging out with my boyfriend. Like most teenagers, I didn’t understand my emotions nor did I have a healthy way of processing them — so I released my frustrations into the digital void with a private Tumblr account.

“No, stop! Give it back to me,” I pleaded repeatedly as my ex ripped my phone from my hands.

…

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” — Maya Angelou

There are plenty of things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. Like most people, I carry the burden of mistakes I made when I didn’t know better. But for me, shame was more than a moment of embarrassment or guilt. Toxic shame attacked my sense of identity and poisoned my inner dialogue.

I learned at an early age that pursuing wants over needs was selfish. Putting yourself first is out of the question when your family is struggling to…

Days before I submitted my two-week notice, a coworker told me “I think you need to find yourself.” I was back at my parents’ house right after graduating college, working a job that had no relation to my degree. Meanwhile, all my friends were flourishing in new cities with the same morale as Emily in Paris — or so it seemed.

If we’re a combination of the people we surround ourselves with, I became a heterogeneous mixture of a middle-aged couple that escaped communism, an angsty teen with a newfound edge for defiance, and coworkers twice my age who reluctantly…