Hi there Reader,

It's been a while.

Maybe you noticed the quiet, maybe you didn't, maybe you forgot you'd even signed up for these emails in the first place. (I'm one of those people who gets an "I'm back!" email from someone and thinks, wait, you were gone? So if that's you reading this right now, I get it 😉)

But it wasn't an "out of sight, out of mind" absence. Much of the time, I had things I wanted to say, notes I was taking. I just didn't have the space to sit down and do anything about it. And I wanted to fill you in, instead of just showing back up like nothing happened.

The short version: this past year asked more of me than I had to give. I'm not going to unpack all of it here — much of it is still settling, and some I'll share more about down the road. But the silence wasn't nothing. And I didn't want to pretend it was.

What I will say is this: I kept choosing the next most urgent thing, over and over, for months — because that's what survival mode asks of you — until there wasn't room left for much else. Including this.

Why tell you this? Well... if you've ever gone quiet on something that mattered to you, dropped a thing without ever officially deciding to drop it, I don't want you holding on to guilt for it.

I think more of us do this than ever admit it out loud. We don't quit the things we love — we just stop, one unremarkable day, because something else needed us more. And then the stopping becomes its own kind of quiet shame.

You weren't lazy. You weren't careless. You just had nothing left over.

The haze has lifted over here and I'll go into what's started to lift it (nothing dramatic) next week.

For now, I just wanted to say: I'm here. No grand re-launch energy, no pretending the last stretch didn't happen. Just glad to be back in your inbox.

Yours in showing up,