A reflective essay on freedom, attention, and why choice collapses when we’re not
taught how to direct our own thinking.
Freedom Without Formation Read Post »
NOTES FROM BECOMING The part no one warns you about I thought choosing myself would feel like relief.Freedom.Lightness.A sense of rightness settling into place. Instead, what arrived first was grief. Not sharp grief — aching grief.A sadness that surprised me with its depth.A quiet, persistent sense of failure that stayed far longer than I expected.
After Choosing Yourself Read Post »
The first time I chose myself, I lost my footing — and gained agency. A reflection on divorce, misfit, and learning to trust your own knowing.
A quiet year-end reflection on reading as orientation rather than accumulation — and the pause between texts where meaning continues to unfold.
On the Pause Between Texts Read Post »
From childhood, most of us learn to confuse adaptation with aptitude. We become reliable, useful, compliant — or rebellious, difficult, “the problem one” — and call it “who we are.” This essay is about the quieter truth underneath: the work that has always fitted our hands, the aptitudes that never left, and the small, honest steps back toward a life that feels like our own.
It Is Love Made Visible Read Post »
A quiet reflection on how life shapes us before we choose — and how leisure, pace, and attention form the kind of person we become.
On Being Formed · A conversation with Adler Read Post »
Some texts arrive before we know why they matter.
This passage from John Dewey is one I’ve carried for years — returning whenever questions of work, aptitude, and meaning resurface.
Texts I Carry — Dewey (Aptitude & Occupation) Read Post »
From childhood, most of us learn to confuse adaptation with aptitude. We become reliable, useful, compliant — or rebellious, difficult, “the problem one” — and call it “who we are.” This essay is about the quieter truth underneath: the work that has always fitted our hands, the aptitudes that never left, and the small, honest steps back toward a life that feels like our own.
The Work That Fits: Returning to the Aptitudes We Lost Along the Way Read Post »
A quiet reflection on leisure, and the modern struggle to use our freedom well — what it asks of us as ordinary people living ordinary days.
From the moment we arrive, we’re being shaped by blueprints we never consciously agreed to. This Notes from Becoming essay explores the hidden curriculum of our lives — what we absorbed without knowing, what it’s still teaching us, and how we begin to rewrite it, one small shift at a time.
The Hidden Curriculum Read Post »
