Dear Friend,
Before I share something personal, I want to acknowledge what many of us woke up to yesterday: the headline that the United States, in coordination with Israel, has bombed Iran. I can’t stop thinking about it, and I can’t just hop straight into a normal substack, so I do want to share a few things that are helping me navigate this moment before switching subjects.
For some, this is immediate and embodied. For others, like me, it arrives through a screen. Even so, the weight of it is real.
When news breaks at this scale, I feel the pull to react quickly. To have a position. To say something coherent before the algorithms decide the narrative. But I have learned that my clearest thinking comes more slowly.
So I am reading. Listening. Trying to widen the frame before narrowing it into opinion. So far, I have found depth in:
Van Jones’s Substack, laying out arguments for and against the war side by side
The Narges Mohammadi Foundation, offering the lens of human and women’s rights inside Iran
Michael Wolff’s reporting on what may be happening behind closed doors in Washington
If you are reading work that expands understanding beyond easy binaries, I would be grateful if you shared it. We don’t need more heat. We need more clarity.
Friend, there is no graceful way to pivot from headlines like that to something personal. And still, I want to bring you into what is unfolding in my own life.
I am writing to you from a cafe on Sunday morning.
Today is moving day.
In 2 hours, a man with a van will arrive to transport my entire life - all 12 boxes of it - from what I have lovingly called The Nook to a new apartment.
12 boxes. That is the current architecture of me.
Inside them: clothes, of course. But also the things that probably reveal more about me than any wardrobe could. The Nespresso machine and milk frother that make a kitchen feel claimed. Stacks of notebooks thick with handwritten to-do lists and Substack drafts. The full canon of David Whyte, traveling with me like scripture.
And then the objects that always move, no matter the postcode: cards from my besties, brightly colored taper candles, the jewelry I rotate according to my inner weather. This season, a snake ring coiled around my index finger and a small gold embrace circling my thumb.
If you have joined me recently, here is the short version.
In September, I left Los Angeles for London, intending to stay a few months to help launch a new company. Two months in, my eight-year relationship ended. Four months in, the founder invited me and our other partner into co-foundership. Six months in, this chapter is closing and another is beginning.
This apartment feels like the physical echo of that arc.
The Nook, as I have called it since September, has been many things.
It was my landing pad after Heathrow Airport, when Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Grove were still indistinguishable names on a map. It became refuge in the aftermath of heartbreak. A place to study late into the night for my inter-faith seminary training. A place to pray. A place where new and old friends came to witness and support the life I am building here, and where my business partners gathered around the dining table to sketch out the future of a company that we’ll now launch in September.
It held grief. It held ambition.
It held the long, unglamorous middle of becoming.
It also taught me something about solitude. About how loneliness can be the wisest companion. About how aloneness can reveal new forms of invisible help. About how silence can carry the soundest conversation.
And when I found myself circling the question of this new apartment - it is an upgrade, and yes, a tad more expensive - I hesitated.
One of my besties, the very very wise Jaycee Gossett, said simply in a text, “The home you accept is the life and love you accept.”
I have not stopped thinking about that!
Lately, I have been turning it over from another angle.
