Tag: personal growth

  • The Pirate in the Mirror: What Backrooms Knows About the Rooms We’re Afraid to Enter

    I watched Backrooms on vacation and couldn’t stop thinking about one image — a giant in a pirate costume, his face twisted in absolute misery. I recognized that look. I’d seen it in my own mirror. What this film knows about the rooms we’re afraid to enter might surprise you.

  • When the Tool Becomes a Crutch: AI, Agency, and Doing Your Own Thinking

    I’ve discovered something troubling: there’s a line between AI helping me organize my thoughts and AI doing my thinking for me. And that line matters.

  • When Helping Ourselves Becomes Hurting Ourselves: My Journey with Rumination

    For years, I thought retelling my abuse story was helping me heal. I had no idea I was retraumatizing myself every single time. Today I discovered the hidden pattern that’s been keeping me stuck—and why even well-intentioned therapy can miss it.

  • One Box at a Time

    Can you remember the last 5 self-help tips you saw on Instagram? I couldn’t. Every scroll triggers emotions without purpose. Every post we forget still drains our energy. Information that isn’t thoughtfully applied just becomes noise. Time to sort through one box at a time.

  • Finding Your True North: Why Grounding in Your Values Matters Now More Than Ever

    The Blur Between Authentic and Expected The line between our genuine values and society’s expectations has become so blurred that many of us don’t even know where one ends and the other begins. When was the last time you paused to ask yourself what you actually care about, separate from what you think you should…

  • Breaking Down the Barriers to Love

    “I spent almost half a decade looking into the mirror and seeing someone else. Who did I see? Someone who everyone else expected me to be. People-pleasing doesn’t give your true self the opportunity to be loved—and it doesn’t give someone else the opportunity to be loved by your true self.”

  • Are You Running on Fear?

    Our nervous systems are wired to keep us alive, not to keep us happy. They’re incredibly good at detecting danger, but terrible at telling the difference between real threats and false alarms. That rustling in the bushes could be a bear or it could be a squirrel. Your nervous system doesn’t care—it just screams ‘RUN!'”

  • Navigating the Cracks

    I’ve been trying to understand what I’m feeling when I look at social media these days. Confusion, fear, anger, and so much grief over where we are as a country right now. It feels like walking across a frozen pond with cracks, wondering when we might fall through. But I’m learning that beneath the surface…

  • Understanding Fawning: Breaking Cycles of Survival-Based Relationships

    Unlike fight, flight, or freeze responses that happen in the moment, fawning is different—it’s a survival pattern learned over time. Dr. Mary Catherine MacDonald explains how this trauma response develops through repeated experiences, creating adults who struggle to simply exist in relationships without constantly scanning for others’ needs. But understanding fawning is the first step…

  • When the Shell Cracks: Finding Truth Beyond Religious Performance

    Truth always finds a way to surface. Our ego tries to keep everything together, but eventually the shell cracks and what’s inside starts leaking out. If we’re brave enough to look at what seeps out instead of frantically patching the holes, we might find what we’ve been searching for all along.