Here’s How it Happened

March 2, 2025

If you are reading this, you’ve probably noticed I’ve taken on quite the “professional re-brand”! This website and this identity is a huge milestone for me that I am wildly proud of. I have spent hours with a graphic designer developing and editing my digital content, completely stepped out of my comfort zone in a professional photo-shoot, and banged my head against the wall learning how to code these landing pages to my standards of aesthetic sophistication. 

Admitting this all to you is, to be clear, a very vulnerable exercise, all of which is predicated upon the vulnerability that has been omnipresent in the creation of my “online presence” in the first place in September 2024. 

Since I began posting curations of content this past fall, I have had such widespread support and encouragement, and I cannot thank you all enough for that love. However, I had a vision from the start of this creative pursuit that is “my brand” that I would, at some point, require a forum outside the confines of social media’s necessary brevity to truly reach the itch I was looking to scratch.

In sum, I began my online presence—primarily on Instagram and TikTok—because of my lifelong infatuation with all things beautiful. I began this website because of my lifelong affection for written word. A soulful love that I have found my way back to with excitement, and courage, and inspiration.

Here’s how it happened.

I started my first diary when I was around eight years old.  Since my earliest, precocious days, I’ve found that long-form writing is the most essential way of distilling the thoughts and emotions bouncing around my mind.

For years, I scribbled on lines, filling pages with reflections, aspirations, and the occasional angsty ramble. But when I embarked on the rigor of 1L year in law school, my notebooks transitioned from personal musings to meticulous annotations on jurisprudential theory and case law. Writing remained, but its function became clinical—there was no room for artistry, poetry, or sensitivity in my exam outlines.

After law school, I proudly stepped into practice at one of the fifty largest revenue generating law firms in the United States, litigating high-stakes commercial matters. I was high-achieving, successful by external metrics. Writing became my trade, and the more impersonal and exacting, the better. I made best friends, I worked insane hours, I collected glamorous memories, and I experienced fleetings of happiness during that segment of my life’s timeline. However, there was a marked absence of courage, self-expression, or effervescence in my day-to-day. What makes me softly sad as I reflect is that I didn’t even recognize my spirit’s depletion at the time.

And then, everything changed. Like the sonic rupture of an explosive aftershock; like the silent hatching of a chrysalis. Things were one way, and then, in a blink, they were incontrovertibly and forever different.

At 27 years old, less than a year and a half into our marriage, my husband was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. In that moment, writing re-entered my life in its purest form—not as a professional obligation or academic exercise, but as a necessity. Carter’s CaringBridge site instantaneously became both a pragmatic tool for communications and a deeply personal exercise in processing grief, fear, and resilience. Like levees releasing, the words poured out, and through them, I built the life raft I so desperately needed to navigate cataclysmic seas.

People responded with such love and affection to my words.  I was taken entirely aback by how memorializing my brightest pains actually resonated with people, since, oftentimes, I was drafting the entries from the posture of shouting into the void.

Carter fought bravely for seven months and, by the grace of God, entered remission in December 2023. So, as effortlessly as I began, I stopped writing as a natural conclusion to that odyssey.

I started transforming my life with that second chance we got. I changed my entire world—my job, my health, my vision of what this existence means and what its purpose is. I worked so, so hard. In the gym, in therapy, in reading, in self-discipline, and in meditation. I have evolved more than I could have ever imagined, and my ultimate conclusion is this: life is so much more beautiful, and funny, and gorgeous than I had ever contemplated. I am more bold, inquisitive, and curious than ever before. I find myself critically analyzing the mundane and amateurishly musing over the greatest questions of life.

My life has dramatically transformed over the last two years, and my writings that will fill the virtual pages of this website serve as my love letters to the bravery and courage that saw me through this chapter.  Reminders to be vulnerable, to be confident, and to chase the quiet, secret hopes of my heart. Reminders that I know acutely how life is too short to place your dreams on a shelf.  Reminders that it’s not the critic who counts.

I am so excited to use this space to start writing once more about all the stories that I love—lifestyle, interiors, fashion, travel, and how to make your inner- and outer-worlds a more beautiful place. And I hope you enjoy following along, browsing my pages for interiors inspo, sartorial suggestions, and more.

But what I care about most is that you let me serve as your catalyst to chase your interests, that outdated hobby, or the inner voice that you’ve quieted with so much self-doubt and criticism that its light is nearly extinguished. Your dreams and aspirations and delights are not wastes of time, or silly, or embarrassing. Your playfulness, curiosity, and passions are valuable, important, and worthwhile. We are not made to be cogs making widgets. We are meant to be poets and aspirers and capsules of love and laughter and joy—for no purpose other than we are human and alive and we can.

With so much love,