One small puddle… my entire foot went freezing and I didn’t have warm toes until hours later. I’d already been in a weird place mentally. I wasn’t vibing with where I was at, I knew I needed a change, and a cold foot at 5:30am is what finally sent me over the edge. Since it wasn’t reasonable to act on my emotions at that hour, I waited until proper blood circulation reached my toes and my braincells before I told my boss, “I’m ready for something new. Anywhere in the south. I do not care.”

I tell you this first because it was the calmest decision I’ve ever made, and it happened during the loudest and most chaotic time in my life. My brain is loud. It always has been (shoutout ADHD). I’ve come to recognize the few places it goes quiet, and what I’ve learned from listening when it does.

Hi! I’m Syd, and I write The Honest Optimist. If you just found me, welcome. Let me back up.

I grew up where most people now fantasize about living out their Hallmark dreams. In small town, Louisburg, Kansas, USA, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Multiple generations of families who all know each other. Mixes of “in town” neighborhoods and wide open spaces. A community who rallies around their people and has so much pride in where they’re from.

I’m the second of four kids, two sisters and a brother, and have two parents who are just the BEST. Our childhood was second to none. We had a dad who built us a treehouse over several weeks while we were at school or asleep. The backyard was whatever we said it was that day. An obstacle course that ended in a 40-yard sprint to the hose. A restaurant. Some weeks one of us would plan family dinner, type the menu out, print it, and shop for every ingredient with Mom.

We grew up in the same town as both sides of my family, so it was cousins GALORE. My sisters, our cousin Maddie, and I put on living-room concerts that we could’ve sworn were taking place in front of 20,000 people. Our moms and grandma sat through every. single. one. (The Best Days I Have No Pictures Of). Last spring, we found that same joy again in Sonoma… and I learned I’m not near as flexible as I once was. Nonetheless, growing up the way we did instilled a joy in me that I have to purposely call on every now and then. It also laid the foundation for what I expect out of this life (The Return of the Living Room Dance Floor).

Like I said, my brain is in 5th gear, pushing me to my limits, with background music from the moment I’m awake until I say my prayers at night. Ever since I learned to read and write I loved doing both. What do you MEAN I can talk out loud AND on paper?! BET.

I remember vividly, in 2nd grade, my teacher picked out my paper as the example for the whole class on how to do creative writing properly. Looking back on it, this probably felt substantial because I was usually getting in trouble for running my mouth, not being praised by the teacher in front of the class. You couldn’t tell me shit after that (and I continued to get in trouble).

Some of the chaos in my life has always been self-made. It’s also always felt like something I could handle.

Volleyball and basketball were the first things I set my mind to and put real reps into. I ended up choosing volleyball as my main sport and trained year round from the age of 12. By college, the schedule, the structure, and the routine had my body feeling the best it ever had.

That was until I continued to play through an injury that kept getting worse until I couldn’t anymore. In the last game I ever played, I subbed myself out and never went back in. I took my kneepad off on the bench and it swelled up.

“Go rehab it for a few days, keep taking 1500mg of an anti-inflammatory, and get back out there.” That was my own chaotic voice.

Swelling wasn’t unusual for me. The pain this time was not normal. I had surgery after that and I was done.

I was devastated because I knew that was it. Relief came too since I was no longer in agony every day I played. The loss was bigger: my identity as an athlete and a sport I had loved my entire life. Calm doesn’t always feel good. Sometimes it’s just knowing even when you aren’t ready.

A couple years without a schedule someone else wrote for me, getting into the real world, and finding a sense of belonging outside of sports? YA RIGHT. I was lost. I was in Kansas City, making $30,000/year, the most out of shape I had ever been, and I was looking for purpose anywhere I could feel it (I’m Finally Back in My College Body).

At 23 I made a job pivot into what is my career now. This pivot came with a whopping $10k pay increase (that’s $40k/year if you’re bad at math) and a sense of direction. I was still attempting to find purpose everywhere else, but at LEAST it seemed like I had a career ahead of me. While that has proven to be true, it hasn’t been without a battle. That change at 23 evolved into me selling to world-class surgeons, and every day felt like a test I hadn’t studied for. I was a young woman in rooms full of people who had been doing this longer than I’d been alive (The Enemy Loves Beginners). Working through this imposter syndrome has been a recent accomplishment that I still build on. It’s allowed me to be in my current job that I love, making a great living, and YES it’s corporate. Don’t sue me for that, Substackers!

SQUIRREL!!! Ok back to the puddle…

After I told my boss I was ready for the next steps, I interviewed for positions in El Paso, Atlanta, Orlando and Boca Raton. I never had a longing to live in another place like some people do. I knew that I didn’t want to be living in Kansas, but when your home base is in the middle of the country, you really have unlimited options. My boss was so helpful, connected me with the people who had openings, and I took it from there. Some of the hiring managers pushed me toward Boca. My soul was already leaning that way.

Before you say, “well no shit, Syd. You’re comparing Boca with El Paso.” I understand THAT… but my soul really was already leaning that way, toward a place where I’d never vacationed and didn’t know a single person. The dreams of Florida living came at night in my subconscious, not in a daydream.

The decision itself didn’t feel stressful. Hindsight, that was the clue that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

All I took with me was what fit in my car. My job gave me an “atta girl” and a high-five to get moved in, so all I could afford at the time was a 1-bed 1-bathroom that I shared with Kate, my roommate from Kansas City, who decided to come too. Over the next few years Madeleine and Alexa, along with her family, all followed, which means I accidentally ran the best MLM ever (Everyone Moved to Florida). The imposter feeling came with me and got louder before it got quieter.

Listening to my soul doesn’t always come from calm moments. Some of it is loud. Ironically, I’ve come to trust the calm in the middle of my storms when, objectively, it should be making me run for the hills. I feel this calm when I’m scared or sad or not ready. When that happens I take it as a sign that I’m where my soul is trying to take me. Up to now it’s led me to some fantastic places once the dust settled. From my experience so far, God sometimes leads us into this calm even when we dont feel ready for it.

Dylan is another calm place <3

We were friends for 15 years before we got together. He’s the most patient man in the history of the world. Well… besides Job.

When we weren’t together (in proximity), I felt that void everyone speaks of. I thought it was due to us being close friends for as long as we had been. We’d go months without as much as sending non-PC memes back and forth or a quick FT to check up on each other. This void was different, deeper. When we’re together I can think clearly, my heart rate returns to a normal BPM, and the background music finally goes mute. If I’m figuring out what I need from the grocery store, I have one single train of thought. NO WAY this is how people normally think btw.

When he’s not around my mind goes back to thinking 17 thoughts at once…

I prayed longer than I’d care to admit to be prepared for my husband, and at some point I quit asking altogether. The answer turned out to be a friend I’d had for years, someone I missed because I was busy scanning the horizon for a stranger (What Faith Looks Like When It’s Not Pretty). We’re engaged now. I was certain I’d be married with two kids by this point, and I thank God every day that it didn’t happen on that timeline (What Changed in My 20s).

The last place my brain goes quiet is writing.

In October 2025 I started this publication, which I wrote about in The Genesis. I wrote a lot for a couple of months and then disappeared. I would open a draft, decide it was bad, and close the laptop. Anything I started went to my Notion graveyard. After I turned 29, I decided to stop missing my own life (The One Where I Lived Forward). In June I rewrote my comeback opener twelve times before admitting the real reason I was back: I missed it (The One Where I Start Again).

The Honest Optimist isn’t some grand publication (yet) or necessarily somewhere people go for the latest tips and tricks on (insert wellness, financial, fitness, or business hack here).

Nonetheless, keeping the promise to myself to write felt good, and why I keep writing to all 75 of you. In real life I say the first thing that comes to my mind. Saying it in writing, for strangers to read, was a different hurdle. Now that I’m past it, y’all better watch out, because I don’t give a DAMN. In the best way, of course.

The chaos never quits.

I’ve come to realize this is where I thrive. I don’t necessarily love the chaos itself. If I’m going to choose any kind of thrill to make me feel alive, I want it to be the one where I’m doing everything I love. My current favorite self-inflicted chaos: travel.

In one stretch this year I went to Wyoming to hike, Cabo for a bachelorette with some of my most unhinged friends, then to Key West two weeks later, then on a lake trip a week after that. Not to mention I was traveling for work during the week, started up a side project that I’m not ready to all the way share, and started planning our wedding well before we were engaged. Throw in workouts, attempting to stay on plan, and some slight redecorating of my room… On top of that, I’m learning how to mourn my 20s and everything I have to leave behind with them. Some things are meant to seep into our 30s, and I’m in the middle of figuring that out now. My chaos is self-inflicted sometimes, and it always feels like something I can handle, even when the stress of being in the thick of it gets to me.

Where does that leave us? If you stick around, it’s only going to get more raw, unhinged, and chaotic. Reporting to you live in the middle of the chaos and giving you the 60 Minutes version once I know what the hell is going on. Regardless, I know I’m not in this alone and we’ll figure it out together along the way.

Your turn: where does your brain go quiet? Hit reply and tell me. I read everything.

♡ Syd

I played volleyball in college and the years leading up to it were built around training. From 12-18 discipline and consistency were drilled into me long before I stepped on campus. Being a teenage girl is hard enough while you grow into your body and are dealing with boys, mean girls and training as an athlete. Having that body and your skills evaluated on top of it is frustrating in a way that stays with you. By the time I got to college I had spent most of my life being measured.

I still felt the best I ever had during those years. The schedule and the training were set for me, and my body responded to the structure. What I never learned was how to manage my stress and performance anxiety. The structure put a bandaid over that burden for me, and I didn’t realize it until it was done playing.

When volleyball ended, I was left to my own devices and had no idea what to do. Not only was I not an athlete anymore, but I was experiencing what it was like to truly be lost for the first time. I had spent my whole life in a gym working towards something. Now that I had to run my own training and figuring out my purpose, I had no clue where to start. Someone else had always decided when I showed up, what I did, and how hard I pushed. Without that I was lost.

I was suddenly an adult with adult money. I could go anywhere, do anything I wanted, and I was already used to eating whatever I wanted because I was so use to training hard. I was in Kansas City and let's be real… going out with friends is essentially the main hobby there. Don’t get me wrong, I had SO much fun. But between the mismanaged anxiety and an outright identity crisis, I was looking for purpose anywhere I could feel it, and I felt it out with my friends. I gained weight, numerous insecurities, throw being lost with no purpose on top of that, and that’s the recipe for confidence issues.

The best way to build confidence is to keep promises to yourself, even small ones, and I couldn’t even manage to do that. When you’re in the Lost Loop, you’ll do anything to get it to stop.

“I need to workout in the mornings, drink more water, go out less, and eat only chicken and rice.”

“Ok, if I don’t let myself go out with my friends this weekend, then I can do one thing with them next weekend.”

(This type of mindset doesn’t work btw. Not sustainable at all.)

I would plan to work out in the morning before a busy day, knowing I wouldn’t make it in the evening because of my schedule, then I would snooze the alarm. I was so tired from the Lost Loop in my head. When the last alarm finally went off, I would realize it was way past when I had wanted to be up. Dread, disappointment, and a little shame hit all at once. That’s a horrible way to start the day. String a few of those mornings together and your confidence is shot.

I was exhausted from living in my own brain and from running myself down at work, therefore, I wasn’t treating my body right. Exhaustion made the promises harder to keep and breaking them wore me down further.

It took getting out of that environment and doing real work on myself to understand how much ADHD has to do with not keeping promises to yourself. Those promises get buried under the ping-ponging thoughts accompanied by background music. All that noise is stressful and feeds the anxiety. Once I finally figured out this was the root cause of all my other issues, I changed how I treated myself. Another task added to my morning routine or my day wasn’t going to be the antidote. Instead, I started with grace and patience.

I wasn’t going to go cut everything off cold turkey or weigh myself down with supplements and everything else this industry feeds you. I started with one sentence: a 30 minute walk outside, at any point in the day I was awake, was good enough.

That became my minimum. Thirty minutes of intentionally moving every day I could. Walking counted. Lifting counted. Getting my heart rate up on purpose counted. My brain defaults to "that checks the box," which turned out to be exactly what I needed. More often than not, once I started, I ended up in a workout for at least 45 minutes of real work. The minimum got me started, and getting started is all I needed to keep going.

Over time, the daily minimum grew into set workouts every week. Keeping that promise changed how I felt, and it pulled sleep into the picture. What your body does while it rests is just as important as the workout, and with no sleep nothing feels good.

Sleep led into food. For YEARS… I was a victim of the online fads and cheap “healthy” protein grabs. I even subscribed to the keto bullshit back in 2017. I felt HORRIBLE. Now, I have more energy and clarity to get my 30 minutes in when I’m mostly eating well, and I still enjoy food often and socially. It snowballed. Showing up in the gym, in the kitchen, and in my bed is what lets me have everything else life offers that doesn’t require tracking on an app.

The only tracker I want in my life is a flight tracker.

Travel put all of this to the test. I travel often for work and for fun. A couple of weeks in a row, I was on work trips and hadn’t prepared myself in the kitchen since I wouldn’t have one at any Marriott in the southeast nor the Caribbean. Eating out 2-3 meals a day for three days while working ten hours on my feet is a lot. I was also not in my own bed, so my sleep suffered too. I love Marriott, but their bed is not curated for me. Trip after trip, I felt terrible both mentally and physically.

I took matters into my own hands in what seems like little ways. I pack my lunches and enjoy dinner at a local restaurant. If the hotel only has a treadmill, I walk on an incline for 30 minutes and dumbbells are a bonus. If I am too exhausted after a work day, I let sleep be the reward, and I get my 30 minutes the next day. A few things from home come with me, like my silk pillowcase, my favorite pajamas, and my book, so that a hotel room feels a little more like mine.

At home, I stopped putting so much pressure on the routine since no two days look the same. I make a tentative plan the night before, based on what the next day holds. Some days my workout is in the morning, and some days I am with the PM crowd. I prep my lunches at a minimum and keep a few dinner options open so nothing is strict. On the days I miss, I tell myself it is okay and I start again tomorrow.

I dont track dinners with friends or family. I enjoy them! If I’m tired from a fun night out or from staying up too late trying to finish the Throne of Glass series, I’m happy with that kind of tired.

We live in a world that drills military-style routine and consistency into us. Don’t get me wrong, it has its place most of the time. Still, we aren’t in danger or completely off the wagon if we don’t do the exact same thing every single day, even though our brains and society tell us we are. We can have all the same benefits and tailor them to ourselves. That’s where I’ve finally found success.

My version of consistency might look like inconsistency to the naked eye. I work out 3-4x every single week, and I’m trending toward intentional movement every single day. I sleep pretty well, and I’m still a party girl at heart. I choose those late nights on purpose with people who fill my cup. I love to cook and try new recipes, and I challenge myself to make the dishes I love with better ingredients. I still hit up a late night fast food or pizza run about once a quarter.

Consistency for me is balance. It’s enjoying my life while doing what I need to do to feel good. It has me feeling better than I did in college.

Keeping small promises to myself is what rebuilt my confidence. The size of the promise mattered less than keeping it. I couldn’t do it in Kansas City, but I can now. My promises are small enough to fit into a hotel gym or a late night with friends and the consistency has followed.

♡ Syd

Several days in a row, I looked at the clock and it said 3:00 PM. I’m good about breakfast, but a 350 calorie meal isn’t enough fuel to think clearly or lift weights for 45 minutes. I had a choice to make. Keep grinding and worry about exercise tomorrow, or stop for fifteen minutes to make a late lunch and work out in the evening.

“A whole 60 minutes of that, when I could get 3 more things done in that hour?!” I chose the productive hour.

I chose it multiple days in a row. The meals I didn’t eat properly and the workouts I skipped spilled into everything else, including my sleep. Right before bed I’d map out the next part of the project. I dreamed about the next day, then about the presentation I’d give two months out, and some nights the dream was the presentation not being good enough.

Did it pay off? Absolutely. I also learned what I’m like when I lock all the way in. I can’t stop thinking about something until it’s done. It’s a great trait, but I’ve discovered what it costs.

I can tell when I cross the line into the place every movie shows us of the character who loses themselves for the gain at work. The healthy version is passion and obsession paired with self-confidence, and I can tuck it away to handle the personal priorities that matter. The unhealthy version is locking myself to something, being anxious over it, being the only thing I can talk about, and not doing anything else.

I’ve been the insufferable one. When I was going after a job, researching and getting into the nitty-gritty of what I’d be doing, it was all I could talk about. I think about the people who can’t have a personality outside their job, who talk about themselves in the third person in relation to it. What are we doing?

The whole goal is freedom. What are we working toward in a job if not the freedom to do whatever we want with our time? Part of that might be working. I like the idea of working out whenever I want during the day, meeting a friend for lunch, running an errand at 1pm o a whim or visiting a new city in the middle of the week. I also want the freedom to keep a rigid schedule if I choose.

I hold the freedom I’m striving for next to the project that cost me my time because the little things I do now are deposits.

I won’t trade sleep, nourishment, or anyone else’s stress that isn’t mine. In corporate America, everything is a fire drill. A group I work with kept needing data, or they need my schedule a month out, because of a meeting or a deal they were pushing. I answered every alarm. I turned work around faster than quality work should take. They wouldn’t touch it for two or three weeks, or they’d tell me they forgot the meeting was next week… not this week. “OOPSIE!” Come… on…

After enough rounds I started delaying my responses. Your fire drill is not mine. Just because I can doesn’t mean I should. Once people consistently show you how they operate, you pivot. The people pleaser in me had to die because I kept stressing myself out for someone who wasn’t considerate of my time. I’m working on letting that shit go.

The latest I’ll communicate with anyone about work is 6:00 PM, and that’s on very special occasions. I love my team, so I’ll always answer them. When a message comes in at 6:01, my heart drops a little and my first instinct is to reply right away. It took me well over a year and a half to fight that. Now I leave it unread and get to it in the morning. If my fingers still reach for it, I take a breath and remind myself that the world will not end and I will not get fired.

I can do this easily at work. Personally, it’s harder.

There are a few people I know I need boundaries with. I’m so used to bending to their expectations, working around their expected poor behavior, and absorbing how they treat the people around me. That’s a sign in and of itself that a boundary needs to go up. I hold a firm line with an employer. It’s taking me longer to hold one with people in my personal life.

Wanting more is not a bad thing at all. No matter how many jealous, unambitious people tell you that it is. I’m working on a personal project that I know will take a lot of time and money. I’m a closeted creative person, and this project is near and dear to the roots of who I am and where I come from. It’s one of the things I’m most excited about, and I pray I can do it justice when we bring it to life.

The ambition in me wants to rearrange my life around it. I also know my pattern: diving in head first at 150 mph and screeching into burnout before I can make it happen. I care about this too much for that. It doesn’t deserve that. It deserves the best of me, so I’ll work on it for however long it takes to give it that.

For now I’m enjoying the process. I’m not letting it make me anxious, or make me feel like someone who can never execute on what they said they would do. That’s why I’m keeping it close to the chest.

We can have both. We just have to reshuffle the cards sometimes and check our priorities. Some seasons my personal life comes first. Other times I can give more to my job because my personal life is going all right.

Every so often I audit my boundaries and my energy to see where I can give more and where I need to step back before I’m running too fast in a direction that isn’t sustainable.

I’ve landed on this: nothing is ever that deep. You need to do a good job and finish your work. The above and beyond doesn’t need to seep into your personal life, because once it does, you start to break down in both places. Find your limits and operate within them. Don’t forget that the goal is life well lived, not a life you had to make work for everyone else.

♡ Syd

These days, I will look at my schedule and work backwards.

“Do I have anything else of higher priority?” “Will this require energy that I don’t have?” “Do the people I will be around build me up or tear me down?”

After a series of questions, I decide if something is worth my time or worth being stretched a little thin (sacrifice is the price we pay for a village), then I participate. If not, I let it be okay and move on. This was a conscious effort for years until it eventually became second nature.

I was also certain I’d be married with at least two kids by now. Certain. I thank God every day it didn’t happen on that timeline. I still want it. I just wouldn’t have been equipped to handle both of those life events back then. The equipping happened while I was on my own, learning who I was and what made me happy. That part never makes the plan, but it’s the part that made the plan survivable.

When I try to list what changed, I keep hitting the same wall. The core of me didn’t. I’m still a party girl at heart. I love being social, and I love dancing to loud music. What changed is the allocation. I go out occasionally now, with the right people, for the right reasons. It used to be a hobby.

The rest of the portfolio shifted the same way. I’d rather cook at home than go out to eat UNLESS the restaurant serves something I could never make in my own kitchen. My excess money goes to travel. If I’m paying for dinner out, I want it to be in a city I’ve never explored cooked by someone who has lived there their whole life.

My sister recently pointed out how differently I set boundaries. I used to let anyone in. I still see the good in everyone, but a seat at my table is a different question now. Once I started answering it honestly, better people showed up. My small circle is made of people who are comfortable in their own skin and still reaching for something. Nobody in it is coasting.

Moving to Florida changed the most. I left the only environment I’d ever known for a place that was foreign to me. In theory I could have become anyone else. Distance hands you that option. Instead I became more of myself. I do the things I love without needing anyone to approve. I wear what feels good on me, whether or not it fits in a box. Most of all, I take better care of my mental, spiritual, and physical health.

Not every shift has landed cleanly. I’ve daydreamed about married-with-kids for as long as I can remember, and now that I’m engaged and it’s actually happening, I’m undecided on how it will shake out. Old me would have scripted it and felt anxious about it. Current me is in a good enough headspace to let go and let God with zero worries that whatever comes next is meant for me.

Moral of the story: Your core has probably stayed the same. Look at what you spend your time, money, and “yes” on because that’s where you changed. <3

♡ Syd

I’m saving for the rest of my life: work optional by 40, a house in 2-4 years, money set aside for children, time freedom for the life I want to live. In the meantime, I’m enjoying life as it is now, with travel, quality time with friends and family, and writing consistently. My body is in maintenance mode with goals and habits that set me up for longevity, for children (God willing), and for feeling good in my own skin. I really like my career and I’m advancing in it. There’s a creative dream in there somehow that’s slowly coming to fruition (more to come on that 🫣😛). That’s a lot of moving parts and sometimes feels like there’s nothing tangible to show.

I’m in the middle of everything.

That might be why before and afters get under my skin. People post the end goal with the very beginning, where they started, and skip the work of getting there. I get it. The middle isn’t glamorous and it doesn’t drive views. Still, I’ve seen the same post so many times I could storyboard it: the health journey, the paid-off student debt, the $100k saved, the business started, the “look at me I’m living the dream life” or worse the “don’t forget to live your life” reminder yet it’s still them showing a clearly curated lifestyle for the camera.

Whatever your age, career, or circumstance, there’s always something to improve. Everyone ends up in a middle sooner or later.

What do people trying to reach a goal actually have in common? Struggle. Anyone chasing a big dream or trying to make real change runs into it somewhere between the start and the finish. Watching someone work through that can be more motivating than the black and white of a before and after or the “look at me now.” Show me what you changed when you hit a road bump. Show me what you did after you quit four times.

We reward the results more than we enjoy the process of getting there. We miss a lot that way. In the middle you find out how you react when something goes wrong, how you actually learn and stay motivated, and what you value and enjoy. A before and after has no room for any of that. Neither does the cookie-cutter “do it my way and you’ll see success” pitch, and I don’t buy it for a second.

I’ve always been more drawn to people whose success shows itself than to people who have to tell you about it. I’m wary when people continuously lead with talk instead of action. When they keep telling me about what they can, who they are at their core, or all these things they have going on instead of leading with the proof, I start to wonder what’s actually there.

Volleyball was my first real “middle”. It was the first thing I put in serious time and reps to better myself. First, the goal was making the team, then varsity, then the 1s team in club, then getting recruited for college, then starting. To make the 1s team I had to learn a new position. I was a setter who hit sometimes. I kept taking hitting reps at practice until I was asked to try out as a pin hitter. When my coach asked if I could hit both outside and right side, I said “yes…..” knowing I’d have to work harder to figure it out. I trained to jump higher, hit harder, and move faster. That year turned out to be a blessing in more ways than one. I picked up a different position, and I learned I needed to be a better teammate from the bench.

In sports, we’re taught the end goal is the team win first, then individual success. We’re also taught to be more obsessed with the process and the training than with winning because you’ll never beat someone who is obsessed with the process.

You will never beat your current self if you don’t give your future self a chance by being obsessed with the process of getting to where you want to go.

Right now my middle is small and mostly invisible. I got a small bonus and moved it straight to savings instead of spending it. Nobody posts the deposit. They post the house. I knew this past Saturday was going to be a fun day with friends, so I stayed disciplined on my meal plan all week. We don’t see the internal battle to not order takeout and make a meal at home. This coming weekend I’m going home, and travel historically costs me a couple of days of workouts and meals and does a number on my budget too. I planned ahead for it: workouts lined up for the weekend, a Whole30 casserole with my sisters, a few hours to reset before I travel again so next week doesn’t start in a hole.

Piss-poor planning leads to piss-poor performance.

The middle is still the playmaker, the differentiator: one small thing that brings me closer to the goal when it’s easier not to. On the days I don’t get to everything I wanted, I’m giving myself the grace that one action towards it is okay.

I still don’t know why Sunday made me feel behind. Looking at my week, I wasn’t.

What does your silent middle look like right now?

<3 Syd

1. Evening Thunderstorms - People always ask me, “how can you withstand the Florida humidity?!” For starters, there is the option to stay inside. The summers here can get pretty wicked, but nothing beats going from sunshine all day to a tropical thunderstorm at night with the candles lit and a good book!

2. Crescent City: A House of Sky and Breath - Speaking of books… Y’ALL… I’m on a mission to finish the Sarah J. Maas multiverse by October 27th when ACOTAR 6 comes out. If you have not read the Crescent City series or you are stuck, I 10/10 recommend picking these books up. The second CC book has started off slower than I anticipated, but I am determined to push through.Lately, when I finish a book on my Kindle, I will go buy the hardback as a trophy (shoutout to my sister for the idea). I love BookTok also! Give me a lil follow and let’s geek out together on TikTok.

   

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3. Skin Food - I’m not sure if you have been to Colorado recently, but it is DRY. I went to my friend’s bridal shower in Lone Tree, CO coming on 3 weeks ago, and my skin (including my eyelids) have been extremely dry ever since. If you’re someone who struggles with dry skin on the reg I FEEL FOR YOU. My friend put me on Weleda Skin Food Moisturizer and it has changed the game! It can double as a primer also :) I will take any and all suggestions or hacks to help with this issue!

   

4. Azelaic Acid - Along with dry skin, I have also been someone who struggles with hormonal acne historically. As someone who is sniffing 30, I wish someone would have told me about Azelaic Acid for acne treatment a decade ago. This in combination with a salicylic acid cleanser has completely transformed my skin. Ask your dermatologist about it!

5. Perfect Bridal Shower Dress - I have never gotten so many compliments on a dress let alone one that is Pop, Lock, and Droppable. The SNDYS brand can be hit or miss on my 5’10” 175 lbs. stature, but the Jaymes Mini Dress did not disappoint.

   

6. Tofu (hear me out) - There are seasons I go through where certain foods freak me out. Typically, it’s eggs. I get to thinking about the concept of an egg too hard, and I will go weeks without them. Now, it’s chicken’s turn. I have had quite the meat aversion in general (no I am not pregnant). I love a challenge in the kitchen, and have turned to tofu as my main protein source. NOT TOO SHABBY. Dont knock it until you try it. I’m happy to share my recipes as well! Comment below.

7. Lifting Weights Again - I get it. Working out can be one of many things. Boring, hard, exciting, time consuming, exhilarating, uplifting, etc. I still identify as an athlete and there are times where I can’t seem to get myself to the gym. This is debilitating both physically and mentally. My trainer told me, “if you aren’t feeling the gym, just get your steps in. Build some momentum by keeping that one promise to yourself and you’ll get back into it.” By golly, it worked. After a week of getting my steps in everyday, I was ready to get back to lifting. INSTANT mood boost this week. Alexa Rae you’re amazing!

   

8. Silk Pillowcases - Back in March, I went from my natural dark brown to blonde (no I am not manic). I’ve been absolutely loving it! Switching to Quince silk pillowcases has kept my hair shiny, and not to mention how great it is for the skin.

9. Bedtime Rotation - As a dreamer, it is like fighting a kid off red dye #40 to get me to go to sleep. My brain wants to keep going and dreaming as long as it can. This week, the combination of ashwagandha and magnesium glycinate at night has shut that little kid up and allowed me to get some amazing sleep.

10. Pest Control - Barbie Dreamland (this is what we call our apartment) had a crisis this week. Have you ever seen/heard of a PALMETTO BUG? If you haven’t consider yourself lucky. On Monday, Madeleine discovered one being a squatter in our living room. She couldn’t capture and execute it before going to work. She was so sweet and she lined books up against the opening under my door so that it wouldn’t get into my room. We immediately put in a request to Orkin who took care of the issue. Very very grateful for pest control this week.

Hope you enjoyed! I’m curious… what are you loving this week and what has brought you some joy?

♡ Syd

I was mid spiral, feeling like my brain had nine tabs open with the spinning thinking wheel of doom. I told myself, “finish the thought before you start the next one.” It felt almost impossible. Like asking a toddler to walk in a straight line. My mind wanted to skip ahead, catastrophize, then skip ahead again. Slowing it down to one complete sentence at a time was the hardest thing all week.

I've been more anxious than usual for no real reason. Things are genuinely going really well. I’m healthy. My family is healthy. I have great friends. A great job. Nothing's on fire. I still do gratitude every night, still pray, still go through the motions I know are supposed to help. I've been more anxious anyway. That disconnect (doing the "right" things and still feeling off) is what sent me looking for the actual problem… the speed.

I have not been pausing. Not once have I intentionally, consciously pumped the breaks.

The power of pausing is a practice of its own.

We treat stillness like a reward you get after you've earned it. It’s something that happens once the to-do list is empty (it's never empty) or once the anxiety has already won and you're forced to stop because your body gave out first. That's collapse wearing a comfy PJ set. Actual rest, the one that resets you, has to be a decision you make on purpose before you're desperate for it.

That decision is a skill. A muscle. Which means it can atrophy exactly like every other muscle does. I hadn't used mine in weeks, and I could feel it. Pulling yourself out of a doom spiral once it's already spinning is the heaviest possible lift. It's trying to build the muscle while only ever doing your one rep max… No wonder it wasn't working.

I started smaller. Not "meditate for twenty minutes," which was NEVER going to happen. Not with this hyperactive brain. Just telling myself to think one full sentence before letting the next one crowd in. Over and over again.

After some success, I got curious about where else this applies because I don't think the pause is only useful when you're spiraling. What if it's a habit you build in the calm moments so it's actually there when you need it in the hard ones?

Before you respond to something that stung, in a text or in person, what happens if you wait in 3-5 seconds of intentional calm instead of firing back?

Before you walk into a meeting already rehearsing your defense, what happens if you take one breath and actually hear the first sentence someone says?

Before you order your coffee rapid fire, what happens if you look at the person handing it to you to show them you actually see them?

None of these costs a significant amount of time or energy. None of them require a retreat, a new app, or 45 minutes you don't have. They cost two or three seconds and a decision to not immediately move on to the next thing.

I've noticed something else from the anxiety piece. The moments I actually paused for are the ones I can still call up in detail months later. I can recall all the specifics down to minute detail. The moments I flew through blur into one long stretch I can't tell apart from the week before it.

Flying through a day might feel like it’s save you time, but you’re sacrificing moments that can be made it into memory.

Resistance is the word I keep landing on. Before I knew it speed became the default setting. Every time I pause on purpose, I'm rewiring those pathways.

I don't have this figured out quite yet. What I’ve seen so far are the days I paused, just for a second, to finish a thought before starting the next one, were the days that felt less like I was being dragged through them. There’s true power in a pause, and, “with great power comes great responsibility.” ;)

♡ Syd

I’m three years into my Florida residency, and people have kept moving down ever since. It started with my roommate in KC. When it got down to the final weeks before I moved, she decided to make the leap too. We started off in a one bedroom, one bathroom, one closet. Somehow it became some of the funniest memories I’ve created here. We made it feel like college again, just with stable jobs and money this time (a genuine glow up, if I do say so myself).

From there, the recruiting kept going without me even trying. Our friend Madeleine visited a few times, fell in love with it, and moved down. She’s been my roommate for the last two years, ever since Kate (my first roomie) moved in with her now-husband Maxx. Also from Kansas. He followed Madeleine down six months later. Then Alexa and Jordan, who’d been best friends with Madeleine for years, visited, saw the life we’d built, and brought their baby, G, down too.

It would be untrue, and a little conceited, to say this was all on me. I took the first jump. I just got lucky enough to have people who wanted to jump with me. I’m a saleswoman at heart. The real pitch, though, was never me. Nobody moves for the weather alone. They move because someone they love is already there, texting them about it.

Moving is hard on its own. A new apartment. A new grocery store. A new commute. A new community. Building all of that into a place that actually feels like yours takes time. It’s a lot easier when the people around you are like-minded. We hear our parents say, “you are who you hang around.” When you’re somewhere new, still figuring out your next move, that saying hits different. You’re extra vulnerable to picking up whoever’s habits, attitudes, and mindset are closest to you.

That’s why I’m so lucky for this MLM I’ve created, and I encourage you to create your own. Without Madeleine, we wouldn’t have Alexa. Without Kate, we wouldn’t have Maxx. They were integral in making this unfamiliar place feel familiar, and eventually, like home.

Start recruiting.

♡ Syd

A few years ago, when I was job hunting, I prayed that I’d get every single job I applied to that night. Every one of them, no exceptions. Looking back, the best job I could have asked for wasn’t even posted yet. It showed up months later completely out of nowhere. Asking God for exact outcomes can start to feel less like prayer and more like a demand. Praying for wisdom instead, or patience, or love, is a lot harder to do.

Falling asleep mid-prayer happens more than I’d like to admit. Most nights I don’t make it to amen. My brain needs to stay in prayer mode just to calm down enough to sleep in the first place. The second I actually finish, it clocks back in: to-do lists, random errands, whatever intrusive thought decided to show up that night. Half finished has become the only version that works.

Every one of these moments used to come with a scorecard attached, and I’d walk away thinking I’d failed the test of faithfulness. I used to think that meant I was doing it wrong. Like there was a cleaner version of prayer out there, and I just hadn’t found it yet.

There’s also the version of prayer that only shows up when you need something. That one can feel the ickiest if I’m honest. It felt like when you only text someone when you want something from them. However, if you’re not praying regularly I actually think this is a fine place to start. Letting the need you’re after be the reason you finally start talking to God isn’t the failure people make it out to be. If urgency is the only reason you ever show up that’s one thing, but if it’s the catalyst for you to keep coming back… I’m all for it.

“Badly” stopped feeling like failing once I started adding gratitude in every single day. Not the five-things-list-before-bed kind. Just noticing. Like the times I wouldn’t hit a red light when I was already running late. “Thank you, God” after a good meal with a friend, for the friendship and for being able to afford the meal in the first place. “Thank you for a job that pays the bills I’m allowed to stress about, and for things still being okay.” Badly is still praying. God isn’t grading form.

Praying badly, according to anyone including yourself, really isn’t bad. Praying regardless is always a good place to be. It means you believe someone’s actually there, watching over you, working things out in your favor. Believing is usually the hardest part. Go ahead and pray badly for a while, until you get the hang of your relationship with Him.

♡ Syd

My coach finally called it. I got into the huddle antsy, ready for a play, a read… something to actually stop the beating the other team was giving us.

“Their outside hitter always hits cross.”

That was it. That was the strategy.

I was instantly pissed. No shit she hits cross, she’d been doing it the entire game. What else were we supposed to do about it right now? So the first thing out of my mouth, dripping in sarcasm, was: “OMG. No way. Really?”

His face went neutral. He kept talking. I didn’t hear a word of it because I was too busy being mad at the situation. From a young age, I was ultra competitive. We broke the huddle, walked back onto the court, and the ref whistled for a sub. I sat the bench for the next five points.

He told me to stop being such an asshole. He was right.

I was trying to get to the point. What he needed from me was to listen and to lead by example.

This is a common example of where wittiness isn’t necessarily wrong.The wittiness isn’t the problem. It’s knowing where to aim it and the timing of it to make it land.

I come by it honestly. My dad’s side of the family is funny in the fast, sharp, say-it-before-you-think-about-it way. The second anyone gets a boyfriend or girlfriend, it’s open season. My uncle once gave my little sister an empty frame for Christmas that just said LOVE with a heart on it because she’d gotten her first boyfriend in eighth grade. She was mortified. We were all howling.

There’s a running joke that I have zero patience, so I just take over and do things myself. Whenever I’m visibly trying to be patient about something, someone will say “oh, look at you being so patient” and everyone laughs, including me. It’s not a dig. It’s my family looking at exactly what I need to work on and telling me they love me anyway.

Some people outside the family have taken that literally over the years. Heard the joke, missed the love underneath it, and walked away thinking we don’t actually like each other. Which, fair, if you don’t have the context. When sarcasm is aimed in the right direction, with the intention to connect with someone and make them feel seen, it stops being an insult. It becomes proof that someone paid close enough attention to know exactly where to land the joke.

So no, the wit isn’t the enemy. My aim is.

Case in point, more recently and much lower stakes: I was at a coffee shop with my sister and a friend. We got our coffees, checked the patio, no open seats. I said, “let’s go to the front.”

My sister asked if there was seating up there.

“No,” I said. “Why else would I say let’s go to the front and sit down if there wasn’t seating up there.” (Truly a masterclass in tone.)

She just said, “oh, okay.” A beat of silence. Then we moved on to whatever we were talking about before.

Nobody got benched for that one. But it’s the same reflex, just with lower stakes. I wasn’t nervous, there was no adrenaline, no rival on a run. I was just talking to one of the closest people to me and I stopped bothering to think before I opened my mouth. I don’t get sloppy with strangers. I get sloppy with the people who’d forgive me for it.

Where I’ve actually gotten better is work. I run meetings and trainings, and there’s always a moment where someone asks a question about something I just explained. Not because they’re not smart, they’re just not always tracking the same thread I am. My old instinct is the same one from that huddle: a fast, sarcastic clapback that gets me nowhere except feeling superior for four seconds.

Now I catch it. I take a second, actually think about where they’re coming from, and answer it in a way that means I won’t have to answer it again. Nine times out of ten they just say “oh, okay” and we move on. Same two words as the coffee shop. Just this time I actually thought about them before I said anything.

Wit and sarcasm, aimed well, are a real form of emotional intelligence. You’re reading a room fast enough to catch a callback, a reference, a moment, and turning it into something that makes someone laugh. That’s a skill. I used to think of mine as a release valve, something I pulled when I was frustrated or wanted the last word. These days I’d rather use it to make someone feel seen than to win whatever argument I’m annoyed about in the moment.

I’m not trying to retire the wit. I like it too much, and honestly, it’s one of my favorite things about my family. I’m just done letting it fire before I’ve decided who deserves it.

♡ Syd

There was a line of evergreens between our house and the neighbors’. One of them had an opening in the branches big enough for a kid seven or younger to disappear into.

When we stepped beneath the trees, it was a restaurant some days. A military fort on others. Once in a while, the passage to Narnia.

Nobody knew which one it was going to be until we got there. None of it was manufactured for an audience.

There’s minimal proof of this magical dimension. If there are any pictures of it, they’re buried in a box somewhere, not circling the internet for anyone to find. All we have are the memories of it and the feeling it gave us.

We had no idea what a camera was even for yet, not in the way we do now. Whether it looked good, whether anyone else would think it was cool, none of that crossed our minds. We were each other’s audience, and the only one that mattered.

There was no other option back then. Now there’s times where you re-stage the laugh because the first one didn’t look right on camera, or you wait to eat until the photo’s taken (guilty), or you do the whole thing twice, once for you and once for the version of it you’ll post. There’s an audience on the other side of a screen for anyone who wants one. We started tailoring our activities, hobbies, and joys for that audience instead of for ourselves.

I find myself soul searching for the moments that have brought me raw, unfiltered joy. That started way back before I could even spell my name.

circa 2002

Dad built a treehouse over several weeks, working on it after we were sent to bed or while we were at school, so none of us actually saw it being built. There weren’t any permits or plans taped to the fridge. No one filming the reveal. For a kid, it seemed that one day it was suddenly finished, like it had been growing alongside the trees the whole time. As far as we were concerned, it was the best treehouse to ever exist.

The backyard turned into whatever we wanted it to be. An obstacle course that ran through every part of it, the slide, crawling through the small spaces, and the finish line was a 40-yard sprint to the hose. The relays somehow always ended in a tie because nobody wanted to be the one who lost. If we did lose, we’d throw a fit until the next day when we’d get our redemption. We learned to pump our own legs on the swing, falling off more times than I’d like to admit , before it all clicked. I’m glad there isn’t a reel of me learning how to swing out there. I just learned how to swing, and it was done without being put on public display.

Everyone has one of these. A place or a moment that was ordinary to anyone walking by and completely sacred to you.

We had Perler beads spread across the kitchen table for hours, making ornaments, gifts, or new bedroom decor. Baking with Mom, flour everywhere, “helping” in the way a six-year-old helps.

Some weeks, one of us got to plan dinner. We would write out the whole menu in a Word document, print it, take it to the store with Mom and pick every ingredient ourselves. Then cook it and serve it to the family like they’d had their reservation for months.

These moments didn’t take much money to pull off either, and that might be the part I’m most grateful for now. Nobody handed us a finished product and said, “have fun.” We had to build it ourselves, which meant we got good at creating anything from our own imaginations. We grew up pretty traditional, middle class. There wasn’t a lot left over for the newest electronics or rooms full of toys. What we had was more than enough: supplies, imagination, and the space to make anything we wanted come to life.

Somewhere in your own childhood there’s probably a version of this. Something you did on repeat because you loved it. Not because it would get a lot of attention. See if you can still name it.

As far as my siblings and I? All of us love to cook now. All of us love to host. All of us have built our lives from the dream life that once only lived in our imaginations.

I’m aware of the irony of writing that to an audience (you’re on the other side of a screen right now). But there’s a difference between making something because you love making it, and making something because you’re picturing the attention you’ll get before you’ve even started.

Little Syd didn’t create her perfect dinner menu because she wanted the whole family to tell her how good it was and how impressed they were with her. She did it because she loved cooking with her mom and caring for others. That’s the part I’m trying to get back to.

The Perler beads, the dinner menus, the obstacle courses created in the treehouse. All of it was impressive to me because they were things I loved doing. It didn’t need to be trendy or the most interesting thing anyone had ever seen. It didn’t need an audience to be worth doing.

Right now, everyone online is trying to look like everyone else online. Let yourself love whatever you’re doing enough to be the reason you do it in the first place. The things that uniquely bring you joy are worth sharing.

♡ Syd

A few years ago I would’ve called this a lot of trouble. Now I call it the whole point.

We’ve built a culture that treats routine like the achievement and intentional connection like a quarterly deliverable. Wake up, cold plunge, supplement stack, gym, protein target, sleep score. All of it optimized, none of it optional, and somewhere in there “seeing people” got filed under if I have time. We talk about our mornings like they’re under contract. The people who actually live the longest aren’t the ones with the most disciplined routine. They’re the ones who keep breaking it for each other.

That’s not a vibe. It’s Blue Zones research, and it’s more specific than the wine-and-olive-oil headlines let on.

Dan Buettner’s team studied the five regions in the world where people routinely live past 100, and when researchers dug into what those places actually had in common, connection wasn’t one item on a longer list. It showed up three separate times under three different names: belonging to a faith community, putting family first, maintaining a close social circle. Diet and sleep are in there too, and they matter. But out of nine habits, only one got repeated three times. Three of the nine “Power 9” habits are just social connection wearing different outfits. In Okinawa they call it a moai, a group of people who commit to each other for life, showing up on ordinary Tuesdays with no occasion required.

The data behind it isn’t soft. One meta-analysis followed over 300,000 people and found that those with strong social relationships were 50% more likely to survive over the study period than those without. Researchers said the effect was as strong as quitting smoking or treating high blood pressure. A separate nine-year study found that people who lacked social and community ties were two to three times more likely to die than those who stayed connected. Loneliness isn’t just an emotional weather pattern. It’s a measurable mortality risk. (I did not expect to be citing mortality statistics in an essay about a same-day flight to Denver, but here we are.)

When I rearrange my week for someone, I'm not interrupting my health plan. I'm finally running the one part of it that's actually proven to work.

I think about this every time I catch myself protecting a routine like it’s sacred. The same supplements, the same 9pm wind-down, the same rotation of shows, on repeat because it feels like control. Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a calm morning and a numb one. It can’t tell you’re “optimizing” when what you’re actually doing is avoiding the version of connection that requires effort, planning, or a flight number. The chemistry we’re all chasing, the calm, the reset, the feeling of being okay, doesn’t come from a stack of pills timed perfectly to sunrise. It comes from a person who flew somewhere to see your face for four hours.

I used to think of “the village” as a nice idea. Now I think of it as a return on investment, and not a metaphorical one. The people you rearrange your life for are the actual longevity plan. Everything else is the in-between.

This doesn’t mean burning yourself out saying yes to everything, and this isn’t a whole cinematic moment, either. That’s a different problem, and a real one. This is about which inconveniences you’re willing to call worth it. There’s a difference between a life that’s overbooked and a life that’s oriented around your people, and the second one is the one the research keeps pointing back to. You can tell them apart by how you feel afterward. Overbooked drains you. Showing up for someone, even at a bad hour, tends to fill something back in.

It’s rarely the marathon finish line or the flight across the country. It’s more often the smaller decision, made repeatedly, to let someone interrupt your plans. Answering the call. Staying an extra hour. Saying yes to the trip that doesn’t make sense on paper. Every one of those is a deposit. You don’t see the return right away. You see it decades from now, in whether or not you’re still standing in a hospital room together, or whether or not you made it to 100 with people who actually know you.

We’ve turned rest into a personality and connection into a scheduling conflict. I’d rather be the person whose calendar looks slightly chaotic because I keep choosing people over the plan. If the Blue Zones data is right, it’s not even a sacrifice. It’s the strategy.

♡ Syd

If you want to read up on Blue Zones for yourself:
Sources

1. Blue Zones Institute — Research Evidence, bluezones.com/blue-zones-institute-research-evidence

2. Holt-Lunstad et al., meta-analysis of 148 studies (308,849 participants) on social relationships and mortality risk, cited via welzo.com/blogs/longevity/blue-zones-longevity

3. Berkman et al., 9-year follow-up study on social/community ties and mortality, cited via Kreouzi, Theodorakis & Constantinou (2024), American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15598276221118494

There was a version of this prayer I could’ve said in my sleep. Almost a year of nights, same words, asking God to get me ready for my husband. I knew it cold.

Then one night I didn’t say it. The next night I didn’t either, and I noticed I felt relieved, which is a strange thing to feel about giving up on someone you haven’t met yet.

That’s the part of faith I never hear anyone cop to. Sometimes it isn’t belief that keeps you praying. It’s habit. And when the habit finally breaks, you find out how little belief was actually holding it up.

I should back up, because the prayer itself is the whole point. I wasn’t asking God to bring him. I didn’t ask for a sign, a name, a face across a room. I asked God to keep preparing me. To have me ready when His timing was right, and to make it all click then instead of now. Which is a very mature thing to pray while secretly meaning now. (I meant now. I always meant now.) I’d say it at night, or in the middle of some event I wished I had a person to share it with, politely requesting a patience I did not actually want granted.

For a while it didn’t feel like anything. No chills, no clarity, no sense that anything on the other end was receiving. I said what I needed to say, I sat there, then went on with my day like I’d just replied to a text. I used to think that meant I was doing it wrong.

The thing about faith is that most of it looks exactly like that. Not the mountaintop. Not the testimony you cry through. Just the same sentence, most nights, into a quiet that doesn’t answer back.

The version we get sold is a highlight reel. Someone prayed, and then the job came. Someone believed, and then the diagnosis reversed. Someone trusted, and the door opened. I love those stories. I’ve written one of them. They’re the returns, though. We rarely highlight the years of contributions.

So around month ten, I quit.

Not dramatically. I just decided it wasn’t going to happen for me and started rearranging my life around that. I’ll be the fun aunt. Eventually the rich aunt. I doubted myself, and I’ll say the part you’re not supposed to say in a faith essay: I doubted God. I didn’t just lose the feeling. I gave up the wanting. I called it being realistic. It was really just being tired of asking for something that never came.

Here’s the question I keep circling. If I stopped feeling it, stopped believing it, and gave up on the whole thing, was any of that year even faith?

I’ve decided it was, and that the ugly, given-up middle is the only part that counts.

Feelings are the least reliable input I have. I’ve felt certain about people who left, felt called toward things that went nowhere, felt nothing in rooms where I now know something was happening. If I only counted the times I felt it, I’d have almost nothing on the books.

Doubt gets treated like a defect, the thing you confess and repent for. I’ve never met a person with real faith who didn’t have real doubt underneath it. The ones who scare me are the ones with no questions. That’s not conviction. That’s a position nobody’s ever stress-tested.

It got answered. Just not the way I was refreshing for. It turned out to be someone who’d been my friend for years, someone I never saw coming, because I was too busy scanning the horizon for a stranger. It didn’t click until I’d stopped waiting and started doing the work on me. The mirror stuff. The unglamorous, nobody-claps-for-it work of getting my own heart ready.

Which is when I finally caught the thing I’d been too annoyed to see.

The way you pray decides where you look. If I’d prayed bring me my husband, I’d have spent that whole year as a scanner, auditing every man in every room for the part, treating my life like a casting call. Instead I prayed prepare me, and without meaning to, that pointed the search inward. I wasn’t hunting for him. I was working on the parts of me that would’ve made me hard to build a life with. My habits. My fear. The stuff I’d have brought into it and blamed on him later.

The work did something I didn’t see coming. It taught me to tell the difference between a voice worth listening to and noise. “Sydney doesn’t know how to date.” “Her standards are too high.” That one usually came from people who called themselves friends. Then the other genre, from the guys: “I can give you whatever you want.” “I have a nice car.” I knew every one was a lie, and not because I was being stubborn. The praying had gotten me to actually know myself. You can’t sell someone a story about who they are once they’ve done the work of finding out firsthand. The standards weren’t too high. They were finally accurate.

The trickiest noise, though, wasn’t coming from them. It was coming from me.

When you want something badly enough, you start begging God for signs, and a sign is really just a demand with better manners. Show me. Point him out. Confirm it so I can stop wondering. But a standing order for signs is the easiest way to talk yourself down the wrong road. You start reading meaning into everything, and not all of it is a God thing. Some of it is just you, wanting, dressed up as guidance. (The enemy doesn’t need much. He mostly needs you impatient.) Tuning out the friends and the guys with the nice cars turned out to be the same skill as learning to stop demanding signs. Both are just noise. The work is what let me hear past all of it.

Praying to be prepared doesn’t hand you a map. It points your soul in the direction it was built to go, then lets you walk without a running list of signs to misread. When you finally land where you were made to be, you don’t need it confirmed. You can feel it. Your soul goes quiet in the good way.

I thought I was praying for patience. I was actually praying for a redirect.

The quiet year wasn’t God saying no. It was God doing exactly what I asked, and me calling it nothing.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. The man I ended up with, Dylan, isn’t just someone I can live with. He’s a better partner to me than anyone I would’ve cast back in scanner mode, when I was shopping for a type. I can only see that because of the work. The version of me from month ten would’ve looked right past him. Or worse, gotten him and not known what she had, because she hadn’t built the thing that lets you love a person in the specific way they actually need. You don’t get handed that. You build it before they show up, usually without realizing that’s what you’re doing.

That’s what searching can’t give you. Searching can find you a person. It can’t make you into someone who knows what to do with one. When you’re where God made you to be, with the person He made you for, your soul is at peace in a way that has nothing to do with butterflies. It’s quieter than that. I wouldn’t have recognized the feeling if I’d spent that year hunting, because I’d have been too busy looking to notice I’d already arrived.

The prayer worked. I just didn’t recognize it, because the answer showed up as preparation instead of arrival, and nobody sends a notification for that.

I still say some version of it most nights. Same quiet, most of the time.

I just don’t assume the quiet means nothing anymore.

♡ Syd

Not a sad story. Just an honest one. It got me thinking about a part of life that usually came easy to me that I found more difficult when I packed up my life and moved to a state where I knew approximately no one:

Nobody hands you a village in your late 20s. You build it. One awkward coffee at a time.

The village I had

Growing up in Kansas, community was just... there. It came with the territory. Family down the road. Friends I’d known since we were losing teeth. The church that watched me grow up. People who knew my parents, my siblings, my whole story before I could tell it myself. Even in college, I could tell someone where I was from and we’d instantly have common ground.

I never truly had to build any of that. It was handed to me, the way it’s handed to most of us. And like most handed things, I didn’t clock its value until I left it behind.

You don’t notice infrastructure until you’re standing somewhere it doesn’t exist. Roads, plumbing, people who’d notice if you disappeared for a week. Same category, honestly.

The second job nobody posted

Then I moved to Florida, and I learned what adult friendship actually costs.

Making friends as a kid was passive income. You showed up to school, to practice, to the neighborhood, and friendship just accrued. No effort required beyond existing in the same room repeatedly.

Making friends at 29 is a second job. There’s networking. There are cold intros. There are first hangouts that feel suspiciously like interviews. (So... what do you do for fun? Do you see yourself staying in the area long-term?) There’s follow-up. There’s the vulnerability of double-texting someone you’ve hung out with twice. There’s rejection, the plans that never materialize, the “we should totally do this again!” that both of you know is a pleasantry.

Here’s the part that stings: you’re doing all this labor at the exact age when everyone else’s village is already full. People in their late 20s have their people. Their group chats are established. Their traditions are set. You’re not just applying for the job. You’re applying for a position that technically isn’t open.

Chosen costs more. Chosen means more.

When I finally got comfortable in my new city, I started to resent this. Why does something that used to be free suddenly cost so much?

But I’ve started thinking about it differently. A handed village is inherited wealth. Wonderful, grateful for it, didn’t earn a dime of it. A chosen village is a portfolio you built position by position, and you know exactly why every single person is in it.

The friends I’ve made here didn’t end up in my life by geography or obligation or because our moms were friends. They’re here because one of us was brave enough to initiate, and the other one said yes, and then we both kept saying yes until it stopped feeling like effort and started feeling like home.

That’s not a lesser village. That might be the more honest one.

Gabi is proof. We met through work, but barely… we’re in a field where everyone runs their territory solo, and we’re not even in the same division. She’s in sales, I’m in consulting. Add in the fact that we live almost an hour apart, and there is nothing convenient about this friendship. No shared office, no shared neighborhood, no built-in reason to see each other. It exists purely because we both keep choosing it. The first time we hung out, it felt like talking to a friend who already knew everything about me. I knew immediately this was the kind of friendship worth throwing more energy at. So we did! The next hangout, we brought members of our already-established groups. And even though we’re both extremely busy and love to be anywhere but home, we still reply to each other’s stories and send the occasional “I miss you! Just wanted you to know” text.

What feels like a lot of effort in the beginning slowly becomes second nature. And then one day it’s just another person in your corner.

What it actually took

Not a strategy. Not a hack. Just a few things I had to get over:

Being the initiator, over and over, without keeping score of who reached out last. Saying yes to invitations I was tired for. Going to things alone, which I used to think was mortifying and now think is a superpower. Letting the awkward season be awkward instead of taking it as evidence that I don’t belong here.

Also, accepting the timeline. A handed village took 25 years to build around me. I’ve been in Florida for three years. The math was never going to be instant.

The return on all of it

I still miss the village that raised me. That’s not going anywhere, and I don’t want it to.

But there’s a special pride in looking around at the people in your life and knowing that every single one of them is there on purpose. Nobody assigned them to you. You found each other in the middle of busy, chaotic, adult lives, and you both decided it was worth the work.

The handed village is a gift. The chosen one is proof.

Proof that you can land somewhere with nothing and build belonging out of awkward coffees and brave double-texts. Proof that home was never really a zip code.

It’s just people who keep saying yes to you. And you, keeping the nerve to keep asking.

♡ Syd

Tell me: are you living in a handed village or a chosen one? Hit reply, I read everything.

I’ve seen a lot of friendships fall apart not because someone did something wrong, but because someone changed. Got a new job. Moved. Started therapy. Found a new hobby. Came out the other side of something hard looking a little different than before, and the people around them couldn’t figure out what to do with a version of their friend they didn’t recognize. So instead of getting curious, they got weird about it. (That’s not losing a friend. That’s just losing a grip on someone you were never actually letting be a full person.)

The friendships that last are not the ones that stay the same. They’re the ones that make room for the new.

Making room sounds like a simple concept. It isn’t. It means checking your expectations and ego at the door. It means not needing someone to stay exactly who they are right now so that you can feel comfortable with who you are. It means asking questions instead of projecting. It means celebrating when someone evolves, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it makes you feel like you’re getting left behind, even when their growth subtly points a finger at the places you haven’t moved yet.

Here’s what we talk about enough. When you create space for someone to be fully themselves, they do the same for you. It’s one of the best trades in existence. You stop performing friendship and you start actually being in it. You stop showing up as the version of yourself that everyone expects and you start showing up as whoever you are right now. This is when you can really know someone. Not the curated, comfortable version of them. The real one. The one who is figuring things out in real time, just like you.

You can only love someone through every change if you make room for every part of them.

Because you know who they actually are. You’ve seen the full picture, not just the highlight reel.

I have a friend I’ve known since I was 18. We were college roommates. She is not the same woman she was then. Neither am I. The person I met and the person I know now are completely different, and I’ve had the privilege of watching everything in between.

I have a friend I’ve known since I was 7. She is now a mother, a wife, a business owner. She is not the same 7-year-old girl I grew up with. Not even close. And that is the whole point.

The friendships I value most are with women I get to know in every phase. The marriage. The motherhood. The confidence that finally kicks in. The reinvention nobody saw coming. The heartbreak that changes how someone moves through the world. The season where they lose themselves, and the one where I get to watch them find whoever comes next. We love each other through the space and the silence. Some years we talk every day. Some years life gets loud. The friendship doesn’t disappear. It just breathes differently.

This phase of life, right before the next big chapter, is a privilege if you let it be. You start to see clearly. You find out which friendships have room to grow and which ones only had room for who you used to be. You find out what kind of friend is for you, what kind of friend isn’t, and the kind of friend you want to be.

♡ Syd

I don’t mean that in a bad way. People genuinely mean well when they project their complicated feelings about aging onto you at get togethers and in the comments of your birthday posts. But at some point in your mid-twenties, everyone around you starts doing math on your life that you didn’t ask for. Are you where you thought you’d be? Do you have the job? The relationship? The savings account that doesn’t make you want to close the app immediately?

Here’s how I think of it: we have only been adults for ten years. Ten. If adulthood were a career, we’d still be figuring out the unwritten rules and wondering why nobody covered them during orientation.

Your 20s are, and I say this with full love, baby adult years. You’re running on a combination of ambition and anxiety and very little of what anyone would call actual experience. You’re making decisions with maybe 10% of the information you’ll eventually have. And somehow we’re all supposed to have it wrapped up before the clock hits midnight on our 30th birthday.

I’m not buying it.

I turn 30 in February. Instead of feeling behind, I’ve started thinking about this last year of my 20s as three things at once: a celebration of what I’ve built, a funeral for the parts of myself that give me the ick, and the foundation for everything that comes next.

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The celebration is real. I stuck to a budget this year in a way that finally felt sustainable instead of punishing. I’ve been putting money toward the life I actually want instead of spending it on a version of my life I was performing for other people. (That’s a sentence that took me 29 years to be able to write without cringing.)

The funeral is equally real. There are patterns I’ve let myself get away with for too long. Ways I’ve shown up in friendships, in my own head, in my habits, that I’m officially done excusing. I’m not going to list them all here because I have some dignity left, but you know the feeling. The ick you get about yourself when you’re being completely honest at 1am. That stuff.

The foundation is the part I’m most excited about. I’ve spent the last couple of years getting better at choosing the right people. Not the ones who look good in a group photo, not the ones who seem “cool” to everyone else in whatever circle I thought I wanted to be in, but the people I’m genuinely myself around. The ones who make me want to be better, not different. This feels like something I’m building on for the first time instead of starting from scratch.

I think when people warn you about 30, they’re really just projecting their own regret about how they spent their 20s. Which I get. But I’d rather go into the last year of this decade with my eyes open than spend it anxious about an imaginary deadline.

30 isn’t coming to get you. It’s just coming.

♡ Syd

Those who actually makes room for me, versus who just lets me hover at the edge of things and calls it friendship.

A few weeks ago I went to dinner with some friends I’d call fun, not close. We met up with some of their friends I didn’t really know. Meeting new people is one of my favorite hobbies, so I was excited to be there. Except nobody pulled me into the conversation. Nobody asked me a single question about my life. I sat there for two hours basically watching a movie I wasn’t cast in. (Genuinely impressive how a table of so many can make one person feel invisible.) I’ve also got a friend I’m slowly putting distance between myself and someone who keeps score without ever saying it out loud. She’ll show up if it’s convenient for her. She keeps a running tally of every favor, and cashes it in the moment you stop being convenient. Being around her feels like a transaction I never agreed to.

Neither of those moments are a big deal individually, but they started to become a pattern. This taught me something: you can tell exactly how much room you have in someone’s life by what they do when it costs them something.

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The leads me to lean more into the people who do the opposite.

My roommate Madeleine does this constantly, in ways so small she’d probably be embarrassed I’m writing about them. She meal preps and saves me a plate so I have something real to eat when I land from a trip, exhausted, instead of inhaling whatever’s fastest from a drive thru. She knows I hate coming home to a mess after traveling, so she makes an effort to clean the common areas. When I tell her about something in my life (work, boyfriend, new hobby, etc.), she is just as excited as I am if not more. She’ll pick up the phone even when it’s a bad time for her. And she will let me talk through the exact same problem for the fourth time that week without once making me feel like I’m too much. That’s not a grand gesture. That’s just someone who decided, somewhere along the way, that I’m worth the inconvenience.

My friend Blair helped me put together furniture in my new apartment. All of it. On a weekend. For free, and not because she owed me anything. She made it fun. She didn’t perform helpfulness, she just showed up with good music and good vibes and turned a chore into one of my favorite memories from that whole move.

And then there’s Mary, who helped put together an entire birthday party for me this year. A real one, with a timeline. She made a virtual invites, reservations, and made it so Syd coded. She thought through how to make me feel celebrated in a way I genuinely didn’t expect anyone to put that much energy into, let alone someone who already has a full plate of her own.

Here’s the deal. None of these people are trying to win anything. There’s no scoreboard with Madeleine or Blair or Mary. They just decided, quietly, that I belong at their table, and they act like it whether or not I’m watching.

I used to think the goal was to be a good friend to everyone. Now I think the goal is to notice who’s already being one to you, and stop saving your good chairs for people who never bother to sit down.

Life’s too short to keep standing in rooms where nobody’s looking for you. Especially when you already know what it feels like to walk into one where someone saved you a seat.

♡ Syd

I tried “So, I’ve been gone for a while.” Too casual, like I forgot to text back. I tried “A lot has changed since I last wrote.” Nothing has actually changed. I live in the same apartment. I have the same cold brew order. I tried something that sounded so inspiring I almost convinced myself I’d grown as a person, and then I deleted it because it wasn’t true. And I gave myself the ick.

So here’s what is true.

I stopped writing because life got loud and I got tired and somewhere along the way I lost the thread of what I was even trying to say. I’d have an idea for a post, open a draft, and then think: this is absolute dog shit. And then I’d close the laptop and put on something on Netflix. This happened enough times that eventually I stopped opening the drafts at all. I got more caught up in writing something that was on fire instead of just writing.

It’s not a dramatic story. Nobody got hurt. I just quietly quit a thing I actually loved, which turns out to be one of the more cowardly things you can do.

The reason I’m back is simpler than I wanted it to be. I missed it. Not in the vague ‘I miss that’ way. The specific, annoying kind. As soon as the words didn’t come to me, I instantly got disinterested and went doom scrolling. Or worse… I would get far on a piece, then it would fall apart and get sent to my Notion graveyard. I missed having a place to work things out in words.

There’s also this: I turn 30 in February.

I know that’s eight months away, which sounds like a lot of time, except it also kind of feels like nothing. I keep looking at the gap between here and there and thinking that if I’m going to figure out what I want to be doing when that time comes, I probably shouldn’t spend the whole time on my phone.

I want to build something real. Something that’s mine. And I’d been waiting to feel ready. Great way to never start anything.

So this is me, starting again.

Same niche as before, I think. The slow, sometimes funny, occasionally painful work of becoming someone you actually like. The stuff that doesn’t make the highlight reel. The gap between who you want to be and who you are on a random Tuesday.

The last year of my twenties feels like a good time for that. I want to be clear… I’m not spiraling about 30. But I do think there’s something worth actually paying attention to here, and I’d rather write about it than not.

I’m not going to promise I’ll be perfectly consistent, because I said something like that last time and you know what happened. ADHD at its finest. What I will say is that I have something to write toward now. That’s new. A question I keep coming back to: what do I actually want to take with me into whatever comes next?

I don’t have an answer yet. But I’m going to keep showing up until I do.

If you’re new here, welcome. If you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you for still being here and for not quietly unsubscribing sometime in December when it became obvious I’d disappeared.

More soon. Starting with next week, which is already more than I promised last time.

— Syd

But the reality of time, fear of its speed, and the disbelief that came with it hit harder than I thought it would. Memories from high school, college, and even just my 26th birthday a couple years ago had me focusing on my rapid breathing. Seeing younger versions of myself made me want to give her a big hug and tell her to take it all in.

“No way I’m not 23 anymore?”

Suddenly, I was thinking all too hard about how many years, people, and memories have passed me by without truly feeling the gravity of it all. It was like I had been cruising through life without slowing down…God forbid stopping. For a while, life was efficient. I moved from one obligation to the next without friction. It worked. I have been in “the zone.”

But when I looked back, there were no chapters, just distance. Somewhere along the way, I realized I hadn’t actually been holding onto the moment. I had just been moving through it.

This scared the shit out of me.

I didn’t want to wake up when I was 29 practicing the same box breathing techniques. Another year of needing a photo to remember. I wanted to begin 29 knowing I experienced what I lived and be present enough to name it later. I didn’t need to overhaul my life. I just needed to start noticing it and participate in it differently.

One workout class became the time I forgot my socks and had to borrow some from a stranger. A simple trip to store turned into the night I made my now famous homemade steak dinner that I’ve tried to replicate since. That random bar we almost didn’t go to? It’s now a story we can’t stop telling.

But not every moment is small. Some are temporary. The sound of my best friend making breakfast in the kitchen. Saying “should we…?” when we know better and doing it anyway. I started booking weekend trips the Wednesday before. The season of life where you only answer to yourself.

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I can feel the edges of this era. I don’t know when it will change, but I refuse to miss it.

I began to create chapters on purpose. I would plan for the kind of stories I wanted to tell. When I daydreamed, they weren’t allowed to stall in my consciousness. I reverse engineered them. I’d pre-save for trips that I hadn’t imagined yet so I could book them later on a whim. I imagined the laughs and insides jokes made around a Friendsgiving table and would text the group chat to make them real.

I quit hoping I’d remember later. I started shaping it while I could.

This year, I woke up on my 29th birthday with the same headache, the same puffy face, and stream of notifications lighting up my phone. This year with a smile before even opening them. I remembered the photos without needing a caption. I didn’t feel behind. I felt inside of my life.

The last year hadn’t slowed down.

I just decided to attack it differently.

Planning backward freed me to live forward.

I have a weakness for comfort food. I think that I deserve it as a treat for being a good, hardworking adult throughout the week. This kind of habit can get expensive, and if you read my post Simple Habits For People Who Don’t Have Time For Habits you know that I have a hack for keeping myself from overspending and overindulging.

While I save at least $30 per week from deny my own flesh, I still wanted my chicken or shrimp pad thai, in my bed, with a movie on. That’s when this recipe came to life!

After a few trial and errors, picking and tweaking from a handful of people on the internet trying to give me the “BEST RECIPE,” I found that this one was the most simple, took the least amount of time, and could be made of mostly things I already have.

Without further ado… here’s my pad thai recipe:

Ingredients:

• 8 ounces flat rice noodles

• 3 Tablespoons oil

• 3 cloves garlic , minced

• 8 ounces uncooked shrimp, chicken, or tofu , cut into small pieces

• 2 eggs

• 1 cup fresh bean sprouts

• 1 red bell pepper , thinly sliced

• 3 green onions , chopped

• 1/2 cup dry roasted peanuts

• 2 limes

• 1/2 cup Fresh cilantro , chopped

For the Pad Thai sauce:

• 3 Tablespoons fish sauce

• 1 Tablespoon low-sodium soy sauce

• 5 Tablespoons light brown sugar

• 2 Tablespoons rice vinegar , or tamarind paste (I typically use rice vinegar)

• 1 Tablespoon Sriracha hot sauce , or more, to taste

• 2 Tablespoons creamy peanut butter* (optional)

Instructions

• Cook noodles according to package instructions, just until tender. Rinse under cold water

• Make sauce by combining sauce ingredients in a bowl. Set aside.

• Stir Fry:

  • Heat 1½ tablespoons of oil in a wok or large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the shrimp, chicken or tofu, garlic and bell pepper. The shrimp will cook quickly, about 1-2 minutes on each side, or until pink. If using chicken, cook until just cooked through, about 3-4 minutes, flipping only once.

  • Push everything to the side of the pan. Add a little more oil and add the beaten eggs. Scramble the eggs, breaking them into small pieces with a spatula as they cook.

  • Add noodles, sauce, bean sprouts and peanuts to the wok (reserving some peanuts for topping at the end). Toss everything to combine.

  • Garnish the top with green onions, extra peanuts, cilantro and lime wedges. Serve

    

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