H/*present day📀present time* updates

A Brief-ish log📠

I have to be honest… Last week was kind of hard. I didn’t know exactly how difficult it was, until the week itself had ended. Sometimes people don’t know how stressed out they are, until their nervous system switches back off again… or simply drops into a lower gear. I’m kind of one of those people. I think a lot and I always need something to do. Even if that just means going out to sit on some grass quietly. Featured below is a picture I took on one of my many walks with Loomis.

Sometimes I’m not so good with people. I don’t really know what they want. They don’t know what I want, at times I’m confused…then they’re confused. It’s not really anyone’s fault specifically. I find myself confused in the real world a lot. Not conveying myself the way I would like to. Having things come out wrong… stuff like that.

I feel the most lonely when I’m surrounded by a crowd of people. But I like crowds for the most part. Or when I’m in the middle of a really big place... sometimes I get this weird anxiety, because I feel a bit lost. I don’t feel as lonely or overwhelmed when I’m just by myself.

So sometimes, when I can’t really figure things out or I’m frustrated— Or maybe I just need a break, I’ll find myself wandering. I used to do this a lot before I was put on bedrest. Now I get to begin the tradition all over again as I’ve healed. Sometimes wandering is just taking a walk to somewhere you haven’t gone to yet. Somewhere right outside your back door, that you just never quite noticed, or had the time to look around.

I like going to random restaurants too. Just to feel the ambience of a different room I’m not familiar with. I do it to conquer the loneliness. To make things feel more ok. More normal. Honestly, maybe it’s just to make myself feel a little more normal.

On Sunday, I told the person that I was with, that I was going to go grocery shopping. I very obviously had no food at my house. I had procrastinated… I did other things instead. I focused on doing things outside of the house this past week, now that I have a working vehicle again. But I didn’t go get the shopping done. I think I ate oatmeal for dinner…(is that bad lol?)

So like I said, I decided to go to the store. And I ‘did’ go to the store. I drove in the direction of it… I parked in the parking lot. I sat in front of it. And then I went to get Chinese food… Do I regret this slightly? I want to. But yeah— no, I don’t regret it.

On the way to the store… And also while doing errands throughout the past weeks, I’ve indulged in quite a bit of Substack posts! And every time I read something, you guys show up on my dashboard now! The picture featured below, is when I was listening to Aidan Alan talk about his fifa World Cup thoughts. I still have part two for this, on my list to read! I really enjoyed part one, as someone who’s a little less invested in the world of football. ⚽️

I had never been to this particular Chinese food restaurant. But it was everything that I had hoped it would be. Small, intimate, relatively empty— it was quite beautiful actually. An introvert’s dream. There were boxes of soda stacked up on one of the walls. And an entire booth taken up by extra silverware, cups, plates, and boxes of plastic utensils.

The kitchen was small. The restaurant seemed to do more take outs than ‘dine ins.’ There was a younger couple sitting across from me. Two nerdy goth looking kids eating orange chicken in the corner. People occasionally came in to pick up their previously purchased orders. But for the most part, it stayed quiet.

There was one waitress and two cooks. And I sat at one of the booths along the walls in front of the kitchen. The waitress was nice and fast. Too fast honestly… so I told her to come back twice, because I had no idea what I wanted to order.

The TV was playing dateline. Or maybe it was 20/20. I had seen this one once before… It was Kenia’s case. She was really beautiful. She was nineteen, and didn’t need to die, and her family loved her. The way she died scared me to my core, when I watched her episode in the dark with a bowl of cereal… at 3 o’clock in the morning, huddled on my old couch. Featured below is a picture of her.

It still scares me… Wow, yeah that happened in 2011… I forgot it had been so long. That was kind of a long time ago now… even though I don’t want it to be. But I still remember. I’ll always remember. The man who killed her isn’t worth remembering… because he is evil.

I watched the TV and I read. I thought about life. I thought about death. I ordered tofu because meat scares me sometimes. But I’m not a vegetarian because my body craves more iron than I can give it.

I thought about the things that I’m putting off a lot, and the fact that I don’t know how much time I’ll have left after today— after this week, this month, this year… in this body. I thought about the way that my body will age over the coming hours. And in that moment, at that Chinese food restaurant.. on a random sleepy night, I’m technically the youngest that I’ll ever be from here on out.

And I thought about that man. I thought about the white creepy van. I thought about the concept of luck. The idea that everyone has a fate that they don’t know about, and they will never understand it until they leave this earth. Sometimes they’ll never be there to understand it at all.

I packed up what was left of my tofu into a box and paid the bill. It was cheap and the service was excellent. I read my fortune cookie before I left the restaurant just for kicks: “First to start does not mean the first to cross the finish line.” I liked that fortune. It was fitting for my current tasks at hand.

I went home and tried to finish my work so I could post something. When I failed to do that, I tried to edit what I had. And when I got impatient, I started to free-write. When I write, I jump from one thing to the next. The goal isn’t to find productivity anymore. It’s to find a sense of flow. Because I want my words to be just as good as this sesame tofu featured down below. 👇

Later on, I had a conversation about this concept of ‘flow’ with Rich, which made me feel like I was on the right track. I really enjoy talking to other people that are currently exploring their own creative processes. And Rich always has the best words of wisdom to throw down when I seem to need them the most.

I had a little bit of my leftovers as a midnight snack. And when I woke up to start this week, I drove a few hours back to my hometown. I didn’t want to stay there for very long. I was simply coming to pick up stuff from the shed and to check the mail. The drive was beautiful though. I forgot how great it feels to be out on an open road with no one around. It’s just you, and the asphalt, and the mountain air rushing in through the windows.

The drive was uneventful for the most part. Which was a good thing. I pulled over to take some pictures a few times. I saw some deer on the hill as I drove by, but I didn’t stop for them. I just wanted them to have their own moment I guess. And I decided to stop for a little while, to walk Loomis around one of the towns I’d be passing through on the way.

When I finally got to my childhood home, it looked sad and depressing… and small. It didn’t look well maintained anymore. It looked like no one had cared for it in a very long time. It had lost the energy it once had, back when my family tended to its walls and lived within it.

The new renter was weird. He came out to try to talk to me. He asked me if I needed help, but I didn’t want him to touch anything, and I hated how he smelled… so I said that I was fine.

“—yeah, your mom said that too when she came up to move her stuff. I was just offering..”

I expected him to go back inside of the house, but he watched me from the sagging deck instead. My grandmother had built that deck for us, with my mom in 2005. He watched me go in and out of the shed, as he smoked a cigarette. The more he watched, the more I regretted wearing shorts that day.

After I had loaded everything into my truck, he tried to talk to me one last time, “Be careful on the drive back. Oh— also, I saw what you wrote in that one cupboard… to your mom? That was funny.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, until I realized that I had wrote that I hated my mom in colored pencil, behind one of the cupboard doors in the kitchen. This also happened in 2005. And when I realized that, I hated myself. And I hated the fact that some weird dude was probably living in my childhood bedroom. And maybe that’s selfish and unrealistic… but my heart still hurt for a while nonetheless.

I came to my hometown for a lot of different things. But the thing that I couldn’t live without the most was my bike. My bike was once my most coveted possession. Before I tried to speed run through life, with a car, into adulthood. My bike was everything!

Guys you don’t understand, it was the vibe. I didn’t buy it. It was a gift for one of my birthdays, and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever received. It was like… I don’t even know how to describe it, ultimate kid freedom basically! I wanted a cruiser so badly. I didn’t want just any bike. I wanted a cruiser! And there aren’t a lot of times in life, where you get exactly what you’re asking for. So when it happens, and it’s a good thing, you have to really appreciate it.

My newest goal this summer, is to get my old bike to work again. Because it still fits me! It still works for the most part, but it has a flat back tire and a rusty chain now. I don’t even really know if the handbrakes still work. And I don’t know the combinations anymore, to the locks that are still very securely attached to the handlebars. But I don’t even care at this point! Because it is now sitting in my kitchen! And I’m going to find a way to ride this bike again! Featured below is the bike in question.

I mean, honestly, who really needs a kitchen table when you can have a sick sunflower themed bicycle storage space instead!

This week has been really hard in some ways, sure. And I thought that I would bounce back more quickly than I have from all my previous IRL BS. But I think that the lesson in all of this is that things just take time sometimes. If you rush things, you miss out on the fine details. Thinking through your decisions and evaluating all of your options is super important, when deciding what your goals are going to be going forwards.

And even when things aren’t done exactly when they’re supposed to be done— All that matters is that you make a plan and you execute it at some point. There have been some rough patches that have gone on in the past week of my life. But simultaneously some really amazing things have been happening as well. Which tells me that I’m slowly figuring things out. And I’m focusing on just taking things day by day. 2026 is all about making peace with the past and having healthy boundaries for the future. My 2026 is about solving problems, not running away from them. Which can be hard sometimes.

This isn’t so I can survive. This is so I can be more present and in the moment. I want to allow things to unfold more organically. And I’m more focused on going at my own pace than ever before, instead of being in such a rush all the time. Just to get to a destination I haven’t even decided on. Because even when you’re doing hard tasks; If you don’t stop and enjoy the scenery… You’re less likely to check in with yourself.

Last week I was offered a chance to submit something that could’ve ended up being featured in Ral Joseph’s publication. I thought that I royally screwed up the submission process in every single way. It was the first/second time that I’ve ever been invited to do something like that, since I’ve joined substack.

It was supposed to be 200 words and I sent in 1400… I couldn’t get the email to go through at first. I had to resend my submission multiple times. And honestly I was really hard on myself about it for a second. But then I just decided to leave everything up to the universe, and I made peace with the fact that I tried my best with what I had. I didn’t really expect anything to come of it. And I told myself that was ok.

But when the publication finally did come out for real, and I saw myself featured; It literally made me shed a couple of happy tears. Because some of my effort is paying off, and I get to share my thoughts with people all around the world now! Since I’ve joined this platform, so many cool things have happened to me and I’m really excited for what’s to come. For what I get to create, and for what I get to see other people create!

I have a lot of things that I’m working on behind the scenes. At the same time, I have to maintain a balance between my IRL responsibilities and my writing schedule. I’ve had things in the works that I thought were going to take a certain amount of time. And that didn’t work out so well for me. So now I’m just slowing down and making sure that whatever I put out, is something that I’m proud of. Because like I’ve told a lot of people on here already; When I first started posting, I was posting for myself. I didn’t think people would want to read my less than final drafts. And I just wanted to create a time capsule so the things that I wrote in pencil didn’t have to fade away.

When I was editing the night before traveling to my hometown, I realized the problem that I’m having with Stoned to the Max is that I came up with an ending, but I’m having trouble writing “to the ending.” And I’m only going to start releasing the final parts, when I’m satisfied with the flow and conclusion of the story. So instead of focusing so much on the technical side, I’m just focusing on making my chosen plot make the most sense chronologically. Because I write to practice! And I practice when I write!

My coming-of-age story is going to take some more time, but it is still the thing that I’m mainly focused on, when it comes to Long form content coming out on my account right now.

Thank you to everyone who has been patient with me throughout the process of me relearning to write again!

I really appreciate everyone who stops by to read my work! And I also appreciate all of the people who are putting out content that I get to consume on the Substack sea 🌊!

There are more things to come. But I’m not here for the numbers or the accolades. Those are really cool, but not the main priority. when people tell me they like my work, it means a lot! Hopefully the next post will be Stoned to the Max part 10. But if it’s not ready by then, there’s always more work to be done. And that’s ok because it will come out eventually! Featured below is one of the many songs I listened to on my mini road trip!

I’ve come to realize in the last couple of weeks, that life is a ride. And though we are all our own drivers… At the end of the day, we are simply at the mercy of the road ahead. And that road is beautiful to be on!

Subscribe to see what’s coming next! 🌱🚀

But only if you want to! I hope that the seas are steady for all of the substack captains that are out there on the waters!

🫡🛥️🫡🛥️🫡🛥️Happy sailing everyone!⛵️