Millennials in Tiaras
Four weeks into living in a new city and I'm finding myself having to actively gentle-parent my inner monologue because otherwise it sounds like an unhinged pageant mom. I literally have to consciously decide to give myself grace for not having a fully formed community, routine, and local ecosystem yet. Otherwise the inner pressure is to have everything done immediately. If it isn't in place by now, what's your excuse?
That's the thing about moving through transitions. You don't get to dictate the timeline. The more open you are to acknowledging the experience, the easier the transition passes, but you don't get to tell yourself how long your healing takes. Healing takes exactly as long as it needs.
This past December was deeply painful. There were emotional dynamics that shook me to my core despite my best efforts at remaining centered. And now here I am in a new city, consciously letting myself rest and recover from that. Which sounds nice in theory, but in practice it's uncomfortable. My inner voice wants this chapter to be over. It wants resolution now.
But resolution doesn't RSVP. It doesn't send reminders. It is the worst kind of party guest. You never know when it's going to show up and you don't know what it's going to bring with it. All you can do is set a place for it and stay present while time passes.
So I'm paying attention to the quieter signs. The fact that I finally know where to buy my fruits and vegetables. I've located a neighborhood café where friendly encounters can happen. That I'm intentionally building small anchors of stability after upheaval.
I'm not sitting around refreshing my phone waiting for some notification that my life is resolved. I'm making a conscious, practiced choice to remain present with the slow accumulation of ordinary moments. Stability is settling in. From that, the rest will come.
For now, grace is enough. Showing up is enough. Being here is enough.
Both Hands Open
When I was younger, I had this gnawing obsession with time at special events. Birthday parties. Holidays. Any moment that felt important. I would start mentally counting down the time until it was over. Two more hours until we have to leave. One more hour before this ends. That quiet clock in my head kept ticking all the while I was supposed to be enjoying myself.
That anxiety about time passing robbed the moment of its fullness. I wasn't actually present. I was already mourning the ending while still standing in the middle of the experience.
I don't judge that version of myself. That's a juvenile relationship with time. And juvenile doesn't mean wrong. It means untrained. You don't scold a child for not knowing better. You support them as they grow into awareness.
Getting older has taught me how episodic life really is. We move through chapters. We change identities. Eras open and close. There may be overlap, there may even be sequels, but each phase has its own container. Some people call it Saturn cycles or transits. Others just call it growing up. Either way, the pattern is the same.
What matters is not turning those chapters into fixed identities. Not romanticizing past versions of ourselves. Not demonizing them either. I'm grateful that I don't cling to any former version of my life. I don't live for a past relationship, a past city, or a past sense of self. You can look back with reverence. You can reflect and learn. But it stays where it belongs.
A recurring image for me over the past few years has been sitting with my hands open, palms up, letting time pass over them like a river. You can feel it moving. You can notice whether the current is calm or chaotic. Whether it's carrying debris you need to dodge or if there are any fish passing gently too. But you can't grab it. You can't hold it. You can only witness it.
Now when I arrive anywhere, emotionally or physically, I know the only thing I truly have is the present moment. I meet it with open hands. I allow it to be whatever it is. Beautiful. Difficult. Quiet. Intense. Knowing it will pass. Knowing something else will eventually take its place.
That awareness doesn't make life smaller. It makes it honest. And strangely, it makes it easier to stay.
Third Eye What?
My meditation journey started with an eight-week mindfulness retreat in New York where we were required to meditate ninety minutes a day, every day, for two months. My partner at the time had read that it was helpful for people with ADHD, and because of said ADHD, I was immediately willing to try anything. Why not?
The practice helped in its own way. It gave me tools. It taught me how to slow down. But at that point in my life, meditation was just something I pulled out when I felt stressed or overwhelmed. It wasn't yet a way of listening. It was more like a coping strategy for the more difficult times.
Years later, when I began exploring spirituality more seriously, I started pushing meditation further. I wasn't looking for calm anymore. I was looking for direction. I wanted answers. I wanted some external signal that would tell me what to do next.
So I tried everything. Guided meditations. Visualization exercises. People talking about opening their third eye. I would sit and reach outward, waiting for something to happen.
After a particularly underwhelming trip to the Panhandle in North Texas, where I spent three nights under the stars staring at the sky and feeling absolutely nothing, it finally clicked. Not out there. Not in the stars. Not in some cosmic transmission.
It hit me later, alone in my bed.
Whatever voice I was searching for was always going to sound like my own.
Not dramatic. Not booming. Not mystical. Just familiar.
That was the moment I understood that intuition isn't something you download. It's something you uncover. It lives underneath layers of external noise, conditioning, disappointment, self-doubt, and all the subtle ways we're taught to stop trusting ourselves.
Every missed opportunity. Every small failure. Every crack in confidence tries to convince you that someone else knows better. That authority lives outside you. That you should outsource your inner compass.
Learning to hear your own voice again takes time. You still have to sit with the quiet. You still have to sort the signal from noise. But once you recognize it, everything shifts.
You stop waiting for the sky to part.
You start listening to what has been speaking to you all along.
Meaning-Shaped Holes
I went out for a walk this morning with the intention of finding inspiration. Just a simple jaunt through the neighborhood, witnessing Puebla wake up, seeing what might surface. And honestly, not much of anything happened. The excursion was nice. The air was calm. The streets of the Centro Historico were quiet. But there was no big realization waiting for me around the corner.
It's annoyingly ironic how when you walk with the explicit goal of finding meaning, the only thing you find is its absence. And yet therein lies the important bit.
Sometimes the point is that there is no point. Not in a nihilistic way. But in the recognition that truth and depth can't be forced. You can't manufacture sincerity. You can't demand insight on a schedule.
The things that actually carry meaning tend to arrive in their own time. And there's something comforting about that. Because when they do eventually show up, you know they're real. You know they weren't extracted or coerced. They weren't produced for performance. They came because the space was open.
So today's walk didn't give me anything dramatic. It just reminded me that presence doesn't always result in fireworks. Sometimes it passes as quiet, ordinary movement. And sometimes that's enough.