"No" boundaries

#271

I used to be a pathological people-pleaser. Still kinda am, ngl, but I've gotten better at becoming aware of it.

How'd I become an approval-seeking, conflict-avoiding, boundary-less, serial yes-er? A walking apology most times? In short, a doormat?

Well, I was that kid at parties sitting alone in a corner while everyone else was having real "fun". The introverted 1-on-1 talker avoiding groups with her nose in a book while everyone else was... doing whatever it is cool kids do. Didn't have many friends back then. So when college happened and suddenly people wanted to hang out? I said yes to everything. Whatever it took to not be left behind again. Be flexible, easy, ergo likeable.

It worked! I had friends. Kept them too. But also... the cost was invisible. I'd said yes to stuff I hated and bent myself into shapes that didn't fit. I'd cancel my own plans last minute if someone needed me, sit through movies I hated, pretend to enjoy parties, laugh at jokes that weren't funny - just to keep people around. I'd also drop my own schedule to accommodate other people's availability, even when it meant exhausting myself.

Work made it so much worse. Toxic environments are designed to make you afraid of saying no. Say no to a random task and suddenly you're "not aligned with leadership." Say no to a meeting and you're "not a team player." The pressure isn't even about the work - it's psychological. And it works because you're already wired to people-please.

Thanks to my partner, I learned this crazy concept called "Boundaries". It amazed me to see how he was able to maintain his inner circle relationships that looked and felt and truly were way different than with those on the "outside". Implementation for me took several years but because I was a willing learner, I kept at it despite the gnawing uncomfortable feeling in my stomach every time I said "Umm...no...but thanks". Felt super weird the first time, felt a tad less weird the second time, and so on. I wish I could say I am proud to be a comfortable sayer of "no"s today, but at least it's a constant work in progress.

What happened when I started saying no? Surprise, surprise - people didn't hate me or avoid me. In fact, quite the contrary. My girl friends admired me for being a boundary-setter and started asking me how I do it. They wanted to learn from me because they thought it was almost impossible, let alone difficult.

Saying no to harder hikes so I can stay home and cook myself a nice meal? Not missing out. Saying no to extra social stuff to vibe with tea and a book? Not missing out. Happily indulging in JOMO - Joy of Missing Out. The term gained popularity as an intentional, positive alternative to anxiety-driven FOMO around 2016-2018 when people started talking about digital wellness and social media fatigue. Turns out, the thing I thought I was "missing" was just stress and exhaustion. The thing I was gaining? Peace.

The actual tea on how to do it:

One: Stop explaining yourself.
This was hard. People-pleasers love to justify, soften the blow with reasons. "I can't make the hike because I'm tired and my knees hurt and I have laundry..." Nope. "I can't make it. Thanks for asking!" Done. Research shows that reasons just invite negotiation - people try to solve your way into a yes. No reason = no argument.

Two: Check if you're saying no from fear or from actual boundaries.
Fear-based no feels heavy and guilty. Boundary-based no feels clean.

Three: Start small.
Say no to easy stuff first - dinner invites you want to avoid, extra tasks that don't add value.
Build the muscle so when bigger things come, you're not panicking. You've already flexed the "no" muscle.

One of my favorite dialogs is from the Bollywood movie Pink. Amitabh Bachchan says: "No is a complete sentence."
You don't owe anyone an explanation. You don't need a reason. Sometimes there just isn't one. And that's valid.

Brené Brown says boundaries are "the clearest path to compassion." When you know your limits, you actually show up for people who matter. You're not resentful or running on empty, rather, you're present.

Taylor Swift sings: "I wouldn't marry me either, a pathological people pleaser, who only wanted you to see her."

We don't have to be that person anymore.

Ladies First (Everything Else Second)

#270

So thanks to CrossFit, I got myself a gals gang. Didn't plan for it, just serendipitously happened. One workout buddy turned into four of us, sometimes twelve when literally everyone can make it, which is rare but a different, welcome vibe.

We hike. We throw birthday parties where the birthday girl shows up with a tiara she's already wearing and we're drinking wine debating whether Vegas is actually going to happen this year (it might, it might not, we'll probably book it at the last minute like we do everything). We lose our minds at the gym over each other's lifts. Like, genuinely lose it. "OMG your squat looks fly." "Did you just PR that deadlift??"  "Girl, look at those triceps working!!" The kind of loud, unselfconscious cheering that makes our actual partners a tiny bit jealous sometimes. They're happy for us, sure, but there's definitely that little glint of FOMO. Which is kind of hilarious because what are they jealous of? We're just yelling about weights and planning hikes.

Every other month, whoever can make it shows up. No guilt trips if you can't make it. No "where have you been?" No elaborate planning required. Just: you free? Cool, let's go. Sometimes it's three of us on a trail talking about life and philosophy. Sometimes it's ten of us at a restaurant somehow all talking at once about our most and least favorite concerts and other random things that are fun to vote on.

Here's the thing about girl gangs after college: most of them die or gradually turn into WhatsApp chats with muted notifications, where a couple of folks post for a while and then that fizzles out too. People move, get married, have kids, get busy, drift into their own lives. It's normal. It's expected. But with us, CrossFit brought us together and kept us going strong. 

Self-care is simply saying yes to the plans that get made spontaneously. Even on a low or meh day, putting on a dress and stepping out of the house to meet them is the hard part. The rest is taken care of.

Yes, And... Eat Well

#269

There's a game in improv called "Fortunately, Unfortunately." The rule is simple: one person says something fortunate, the next says something unfortunate that complicates it, back and forth. It's about accepting what comes and building on it—never blocking, always adding.

Fortunately, I had a high metabolism since childhood, thanks to my mom feeding me nutritious meals patiently for an hour, sometimes longer. This likely contributed to how my body processes food efficiently now, though I didn't appreciate that gift until much later. 

Unfortunately, I took that foundation for granted. As an adult, I tend to eat carelessly on most days. Fast and mindless, despite knowing how much damage careless eating can do even when your metabolism is naturally fast. Your vagus nerve - the gut-brain bidirectional communication highway - needs roughly 20 minutes to signal satiety to your brain. Rush through meals, and you bypass that entirely. But here's what matters more: your microbiome produces signals for fullness, but only if you eat slowly enough for proper digestion. Sports train your nervous system to actually listen to hunger cues.

Fortunately, that's what CrossFit did for me. I also started paying attention to what I ate. Food after CrossFit satiated not only my appetite but also my curiosity about the science. I also began caring about meeting my protein goals for the day - 0.8g of protein per kilogram of body weight.

Unfortunately, being a vegetarian since forever, and a vegan 6 months and counting, I had to get intentional about sources - tofu, lentils, chickpeas - to cross at least 60-70g of protein every day. 

Fortunately, I liked circling through them to maintain variety and avoid boring meal prep beyond 2-3 days. Moreover, variety helps. People who eat diverse plant proteins have significantly richer gut microbiomes than those who rely on a single source. Gut bacteria thrive on diversity. And they also say yay to fiber! Being a vegetarian, I was already eating a lot of fiber-rich foods without having to try too hard. 

Unfortunately, high fiber only works if your gut has time to process it. Adequate chewing increases enzyme breakdown and lets your gut bacteria ferment properly, producing those satiety signals your brain relies on.

Fortunately, eating well without noise is simple: eat slowly, eat variety, eat what satisfies you. I was never one for counting calories obsessively. I still don't indulge in that, rather look at the amount of protein intake per meal. The CrossFit food philosophy is basically: Meat and Veggies, Some Fruit, Little Starch, and No Sugar. I swap meat for more veggies and protein-rich carbs.

Unfortunately, we've been sold the myth that metabolism is destiny. Dr. Sarah Hallberg's TED talk on managing diabetes via a ketosis diet and the YouTube documentary Fat Fiction dismantle this. Mark Hyman, author of Food The Book, also prominently featured in the documentary, calls it "bio-individuality"—genetics, microbiome, dietary history all affect how you process food. What works for someone else isn't your blueprint.

Fortunately, everyone's body constitution is different. Find what works for you over blocking yourself with universal "shoulds."

Self-care is about listening to the one body you get.

"Taut" Lessons

#268

Paraphrasing Robin Sharma, "Hard becomes easy, and easy becomes hard by choosing hard things over easy things". That was my motto this year - to "Do hard things."

A few months ago, I allowed myself to pause guitar lessons, after only having been at it for about a year.

Why? Because I had hit a wall in my beginner-to-intermediate journey where weekly lessons introduced new songs in every session, and I wasn't putting in the practice time because, well, it was hard. And I used to be a chronic hard-things-quitter.

But come 2026, I decided to adhere to my theme so I thought - what if I picked up something even harder? And I found violin. An instrument I've never touched in my life. Signed up for weekly in-person lessons.

The logic made sense to me: if I learn violin, guitar will feel easier by comparison.

Turns out I was onto something.

Violin absolutely humbled me. The bow control, the pressure, finding the right notes on each string. Playing it initially sounded like a cat being run over again and again. Thankfully I got a mute that made practice easier! But it took way longer and multiple lessons for me to get accustomed to playing it right. I was grateful for in-person lessons so my instructor could correct every mistake immediately in real-time. Plus both my teachers (guitar and violin) are the kind of strict, passionate, hilarious humans who make you want to show up and work harder. They love what they do. And I love that.

And yeah - suddenly guitar didn't feel so impossible anymore.

Now I'm doing both. Taylor Swift songs on guitar (thanks Nena Shelby for making this fun on YouTube!), violin scales and pieces with my other instructor, about 3-4 hours a week total split between them. Both liberate me similar to driving. They help me clear my head, temporarily pausing incessant thoughts and worries.

The key lesson I learned here is that "hard" is relative. A great way to make something feel manageable or easier is to deliberately do something harder alongside it.

There's this concept in psychology called "anchoring effect" - a cognitive bias faced during estimations or negotiations, where the first piece of information you encounter becomes your reference point for everything else. Violin anchored 'hard' in my brain and everything else got measured against it. So guitar looked pretty doable from there. 

Over time, hedonic adaptation kicked in - my brain got used to the difficulty. Week over week, violin started feeling less uncomfortable, so did the guitar, and the journey continues. 

Addicted to the "inner net"

#267

I used to shy away from meditation and meditation-related advice. Someone would say "just focus on your breath" and I'd immediately start hyperventilating. Like, congratulations, now I'm anxious and panicking about my breathing patterns. 

BTW this happens to a lot of people—especially if you've been through burnout or your nervous system's been running on high alert. Focusing inward can feel threatening when your body's already in defense mode. So "just calm down" doesn't work. Your system isn't listening.

Anyway, I decided to give Insight Timer a shot this year because it was free and didn't require me to pretend I was some zen person sitting cross-legged in silence and stillness. The app has these category-specific meditations—anxiety ones, sleep ones, breathwork, affirmations, manifestations, challenges you look forward to because they're short and manageable, and more. I chose the guided meditation track and started with five minutes because anything longer felt overwhelming at the time.

After sticking with it for a couple of months, I started lengthening the duration - to ten minutes, then to fifteen, twenty, going back to ten on not-so-great days, and so on. I also learned to observe my thoughts and feelings without judging them. Not trying to fix them or make them go away—just noticing them pass. My mind would wander and I'd be able to bring back my focus to my breathing.

One thing that helped me, because I'm visual, was to start painting a picture: O2 oxygen molecules entering through one nostril, filling my lungs, making them all happy and buoyant. And CO2 carbon dioxide molecules leaving through the other nostril, taking the dirty stuff with it. Clean air in. Stale air out. Over and over. Watching my lungs expand and deflate like balloons.

There's a book written by Sylvia Boorstein titled: "Don't just do something, sit there." Which is basically the opposite of how I was wired in the olden days (read more about that in my Post #261: Resting Guilt). 

My entire system used to be built on react-now, fix-immediately, keep-moving-or-collapse mantras. Sitting with the discomfort instead of trying to bulldoze through or problem-solve it instantly? Kinda felt impossible. But nowadays? When anxiety starts creeping up, I become aware of it, label it, and say what's happening because putting words to it immediately causes a distraction and reduces the anxiety felt. I no longer panic about the panic. I try to sit with it. Watch it do its dance. It passes soon enough. And I'm still standing.

My best connection this year is the one running between my lungs and my brain. I enjoy continuing to increase that bandwidth.

Being okay with DNFing

#266

Goodreads just added a DNF shelf. Did Not Finish. As someone with a mild, completely-under-control need for closure — we all crave resolution in different ways, don't we? — I am not actually a DNF person though I might portray that confidence. I finish books. All of them. Even the ones that are clearly not my people. Even the ones where I'm reading the last page purely to know how it ends, not because I'm invested in how it ends.

So rather than a DNF list, I have a "finished but felt nothing" shelf. The polite breakup shelf. The "it's not you, it's me — actually it might be you — but mostly it's just taste, and to each, their own, right?" shelf.(See Parts 1, 2, and 3 for the books that did the opposite.)

Self-care, especially in terms of choosing what serves you and letting go of the rest, applies to reading too. Not every book deserves your full emotional investment. Some you finish, close, and move on from gracefully. Here are a few of mine:

Being There — slim, clever, satirical, a genuinely brilliant conceit — left me cold despite my best efforts. Lessons in Chemistry had a premise I wanted to devour and prose I couldn't quite sink into. The Nightingale and Babel both came with enormous hype and my complete willingness to be swept away, given I've read and decently enjoyed other books from the same authors — neither swept me away, though I finished both dutifully and admired what they were doing from a respectful, slightly detached distance.

And Christopher Paolini's To Sleep in a Sea of Stars — I gave it a proper go, truly — but somewhere around the midpoint I realized I was reading to finish, not reading to feel. Sometimes a book is objectively well-crafted and simply not your music, that's not a verdict on the book. Sarah J Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses fell into the same category: finished, respected, felt nothing particularly lasting. 

No hard feelings. Not every book is meant to be your book, the same way not every song is meant to be your song.

Life is too short and the TBR pile too tall for anything less.

Roots, Rhymes, & Unexpected Finds

#265

Well, would you look at that. I said at the end of Part 2 that I was already thinking about Part 3 — and voilà, here I am, having followed that train of thought all the way to its next station. This one is about the books that were simply always there, the ones that came with the territory of growing up, the poetry that snuck past my defenses, and the ones that found me before I knew I was looking.

The Childhood Shelf — Amar Chitra Katha, Tales of Vishnu & APJ Abdul Kalam

Before I knew what reading for pleasure meant, these were just the books that lived in the house. Amar Chitra Katha comic books — vivid, colorful, mythology and history squeezed into panels I could read in one sitting — introduced me to gods, warriors, and stories that felt both ancient and urgent. Tales of Vishnu followed, deepening the same thread. And honestly? The stories that stuck most weren't the heroic ones. They were the ones where Gods made very human mistakes. Bhasmasura — granted the power to turn anything to ash with a touch, immediately tries to use it on Shiva himself. The very god who gave him the power. Ego overtaking wisdom the millisecond the gift arrives — a phenomenon as old as time and as human as it gets. Vishnu steps in as Mohini, the enchantress, distracts Bhasmasura into imitating her dance moves, gets him to touch his own head, and — well. Problem solved. The lesson? Sometimes the most elegant solution to unchecked ego isn't confrontation. It's misdirection. And then there was the APJ Abdul Kalam biography — a boy from Rameswaram who looked up at birds and decided he wanted to make things fly. I read that one in school and didn't fully understand why it stayed with me. Now I do. Some books don't teach you what to think. They quietly show you what's possible.

A Treasure Trove of Short Stories — and the Tolstoy That Lives Rent-Free

Long before I had a Goodreads account or a reading goal or any opinion whatsoever about literary devices, there was A Treasure Trove of Short Stories — the ICSE school anthology that arrived as a textbook and stayed as a permanent resident of my memory. R.K. Narayan's An Astrologer's Day opened the whole book — and opened my vocabulary too, because somewhere in that first chapter I encountered the word paraphernalia for the first time, and it went straight into my all-time favorites list, alongside mellifluous, kumquat, and lexicography. Jerome K. Jerome's A Fishy Story had me in stitches, and also taught me what plaster of Paris was, which I consider a bonus education. Rabindranath Tagore's The Postmaster had me sobbing for little Ratan — waiting, hoping, being left behind. I felt so sad for her. And W.W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw sends chills down my spine to this date, even though I know what's coming. My favorite however, was Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Require? Read it in tenth grade as part of the English Literature curriculum and kept rereading and retelling this gem to anyone who'd listen. Then lived a few years in corporate, watched people sacrifice everything for the next rung, and suddenly Pahom — the peasant who keeps running to claim more land until he collapses and dies, needing only six feet in the end — felt less like a parable and more like a memo I'd received personally. Some stories are seeds. You don't know they've taken root until years later when you're standing somewhere completely different and thinking: oh hello, Pahom. I understand you now.

Poetry — Joy Harjo, Golden Lyre, & The Ones I Keep to Myself

Before Joy Harjo and Ada Limón, before anthologies with striking cover art, there was The Golden Lyre — a poetry and short stories collection that showed up in school like it owned the place, got assigned, and somehow never left. It was my first real encounter with poetry as a craft rather than just rhyming words on a page — where I learned what allegory and allusion actually meant. Two poems from that era that I still resonate with: Kipling's If—"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you" — which is basically the most elegant way anyone has ever said: I'm not calling you an idiot, I'm just asking if you can keep your composure when everyone around you has lost theirs entirely (then you're on your way to becoming a true gentleman). And Dickinson's Because I could not stop for Death — where Death arrives not as a horror but as a courteous gentleman caller, "He kindly stopped for me", taking her on an unhurried carriage ride through the stages of life toward eternity. Personification at its best — I understood what a literary device could do for the first time reading that poem. Joy Harjo's Catching the Light followed years later, deepening the same thread — poetry rooted in land, memory, and Native American experience, precise and unhurried in equal measure. And then there are the poems I've written myself — at least fifty over the past ten years, sitting in notes apps and notebooks, shared with almost nobody. Poetry, I've learned, doesn't need an audience to be real. Sometimes it just needs to exist. (See also: Rick Rubin. He would agree.) Joy Harjo says it best: "Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you." Honorable mention: Taylor Swift, whose lyrics are so metaphor-laden that you'll easily find viral videos on "Who said it: Taylor Swift or Shakespeare?" quizzes that people can't quite crack. Coincidence? I think not.

The Happy Accidents — Books That Found Me First

These are the ones with no origin story. No recommendation, no algorithm, no carefully curated list. Just a cover, a title, a random Tuesday. Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? — picked up on a whim, finished in a day, quietly life-altering. Genzaburo Yoshino's How Do You Live? — slim, deceptively simple, the kind of book that asks you one question and then lets you sit with it for weeks. Coming-of-age but for adults alike. Fredrik Backman's And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer — technically a novella, barely 100 pages, and somehow the most devastating thing I read all year. (Yes, more Backman. I contain multitudes.) And finally, Richard Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think? — exactly what the doctor ordered. The title alone is a full therapy session. Implementation? Joyfully, optimistically, stubbornly a work in progress. The unplanned ones, the stumbled-upon ones, the picked-up-for-no-reason ones — they have a way of arriving at exactly the right moment, saying exactly the right thing. The books you didn't plan for are sometimes the ones that stay the longest.

Books That Broke Me Open — Part 2: The Outer World

#264

If Part 1 was about the books that rearranged my inner world — the ones about grief, identity, creativity, and what it means to be alive — Part 2 is about the books that rearranged how I see everything outside of me. Systems, money, teams, leadership, and two memoirs that made me feel like I was living someone else's extraordinary life for a few hundred pages. Oh, and a fantasy series that had absolutely no business making it onto this list. And yet, here we are.

9: The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel I went in expecting a finance book and came out with a philosophy book. Housel's central argument: "Financial success is not a hard science. It's a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know." That reframe alone is worth the price. He also says, "Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays." Not your portfolio. Not your salary. Your time. I've thought about that sentence approximately once a week since I read it. Also: "Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money." No one could've said it better.

10: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — Patrick Lencioni Written as a business fable — and before you dismiss it as yet another "One-minute manager", give it three chapters, because by then you'll be nodding so hard your neck hurts. Lencioni argues that "not finance, not strategy, not technology — it is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage." The five dysfunctions build on each other like a very depressing layer cake: absence of trust → fear of conflict → lack of commitment → avoidance of accountability → inattention to results. Reading this after years in corporate felt less like discovery and more like diagnosis. Oh. So THAT'S what was happening! "If we don't trust one another, then we aren't going to engage in open, constructive conflict. And we'll just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony." Artificial harmony hit the nail on the head.

11: The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz The antidote to every sanitized leadership book that pretends it's all clean decisions and inspiring speeches. Horowitz opens by saying every management book promises recipes for complicated situations, and then delivers the hard truth: "there's no recipe for really complicated, dynamic situations." He's not wrong. And then there's this, which I think about often: "Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, 'I didn't quit.'" Bracingly honest, occasionally profane, and absolutely essential reading if you've ever been in a leadership role and wondered if you were the only one making it up as you went. You weren't. Nobody knows what they're doing. That's oddly comforting.

12: Conversations Worth Having — Jackie Stavros The quietest book on this list and possibly the most underrated. Stavros introduces Appreciative Inquiry — the practice of asking questions that build on what's already working, rather than fixating on what's broken. The central idea: the questions you ask shape the reality you create. "Change begins with a conversation." Simple, yes — and in practice, it quietly shifts how you show up in every meeting, every relationship, every difficult moment. Less "what went wrong?" More "what made this work, and how do we do more of that?" I've used this framework more times than I can count, and it has yet to fail me.

13: Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows Reads like a dense academic textbook — hardcore, technical, not a beach read — and also possibly the most important book on this list for understanding, well, everything. Meadows teaches you to see the feedback loops, the delays, the leverage points in any system — from ecosystems to organisations to your own habits. "There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum." She also reminds us that systems don't misbehave — they do exactly what they're designed to do, which means if you don't like the output, you have to change the structure, not just the people in it. And then there's this gem: "You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and.'" The "and" is gold. It's the interaction between elements — the relationship, the timing, the context — that actually determines what a system does. Two good people plus bad incentives equals a bad outcome. Understanding the "and" changes everything. Highly recommend if your brain likes to think in patterns rather than anecdotes.

14 & 15: Open + Shoe Dog — Andre Agassi & Phil Knight I'm pairing these two because they belong together — both are memoirs of obsessive, against-all-odds pursuit, both written with a rawness that most business books wouldn't dare attempt, and both made me feel emotions I had not signed up to feel. Agassi opens Open with "I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have." First sentence. First sentence! And you cannot put it down after that. Every day I read it, I felt what he felt — the loneliness of the court, the complicated relationship with his father, the long road to playing for something larger than himself. "There's a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired." Knight's Shoe Dog is almost as riveting — the early Japan stories, the absurdity of building a shoe empire on a handshake and a prayer, the section where someone finally takes a chance on him when nobody else would. "Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don't stop." Two very different men, same relentless energy. Read both back to back. Clear your weekend.

16: Mistborn — Brandon Sanderson A fantasy series on a self-care reading list? Hear me out though because why not!? I'd never read fantasy before — genuinely thought it wasn't for me. I'll be honest — dragons, thrones, and fellowships — these have never really been my thing since childhood (please don't throw stones at me!) Then I picked up Mistborn on a recommendation and within fifty pages I was absolutely, gleefully, and irrevocably hooked. The world-building is next level, the magic system extraordinaire, and then there's Vin — our protagonist. I can't burn metals, and I've certainly never had to survive a brutal dystopian empire, and yet I related to her more than I've related to almost any fictional character in recent memory. A scrappy, street-smart young woman who discovers she's more powerful than anyone ever told her she was, in a world that spent years trying to convince her otherwise. Sanderson writes: "Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be." Go women empowerment, honestly. I devoured all seven books in the two-part series. Now I'm ready to leave Scadrial behind, set foot into Roshar, and lose myself in the Stormlight Archive. The Cosmere is vast and I intend to explore all of it. 

And that's a wrap! On Part 1 and Part 2. Eighty-odd books distilled into sixteen entries — and I'm already thinking about Part 3. Some things just can't be helped.

Books That Broke Me Open — Part 1: The Inner World

#263

I read over 80 books in 2025. Some, I tore through in an afternoon. Some took three weeks, a snack break, and a minor existential crisis. And then there were the ones that made me put the book down, stare at the ceiling, and go "...oh wow! What a journey this has been."

These are those books. The ones that didn't just entertain me, but had the audacity to rearrange something in my mind, body, and soul. The books that I opened, that then opened me. Reading, for me, is the quietest and most nourishing form of self-care — borrowing other people's hard-won wisdom, living other people's lives, and somehow making more sense of my own without having to earn every lesson the hard way myself. No spoilers. Just honest reactions, key lessons, and the occasional monologue from yours truly.

(Part 2 — systems, money, leadership, memoirs, and one fantasy series that snuck past my literary pretensions entirely — dropping next week!)

1: The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I picked this up once when I was a kid. I had thought it was cute, a tad odd, and had fun illustrations. I quickly moved on, not thinking much of it. When I re-read it as an adult, I immediately wanted to call my younger self and say "girl, you completely missed the point." On the surface it's about a small boy hopping between planets. Underneath, it's a meditation on loneliness, love, and how we slowly stop truly seeing each other the older we get. The Fox tells the Little Prince: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." A sentence I've carried around for years like a small, wise pebble in my pocket. A forever book. No notes, because the whole book is the note.

2: The Road Less Traveled — M. Scott Peck My all-time favorite. Full stop. No contest. Dr. Peck opens with "Life is difficult" — that was the moment I knew I'd love the book. And of course I did. Dr. Peck says that ironically, once you truly accept that life is difficult, it no longer is. Because you stop being surprised by it. This book is basically a wise, no-nonsense uncle sitting you down and saying: stop expecting easy, start doing the actual work, and also — here's what love actually means versus what you've been sold. Same for discipline, delayed gratification, and personality types - character disorders versus neuroses. One of my "well, duh" moments (obvious but it really isn't; easy to understand in theory, incredibly hard to apply) from this book is about problems: "Most of us spend enormous energy complaining about, avoiding, or wishing away our problems — and exactly zero of that actually moves the needle. You solve the problem by solving the problem." I had to read that twice.

3: The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk Science-y but deeply personal. Hard-hitting. Not for the faint of heart. Incredibly illuminating and revelatory. Paradigm-shifting. Van der Kolk's argument: your body remembers everything your brain is trying to move on from. That tightness in your shoulders? The exhaustion that doesn't go away with sleep? Yeah. He writes: "Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body." This book gave me vocabulary for things I'd been feeling or seen in others but couldn't name or wonder why — and more importantly, told me that rest, movement, and self-compassion aren't soft options. They're physiological requirements. My e-copy looks like a neon art installation. Highlighted approximately 75% of the book. Whole paragraphs, pages even.

4: Can't Hurt Me — David Goggins I read this book twice in two months. Yes, he's a lot. Yes, it was an intense read. But it gave me rocket-like energy and enthusiasm and determination to get up and run, and lift weights, and just do everything with renewed gusto. The man runs 100-mile races for fun. For fun! I cannot run to catch a bus without requiring a full recovery day. (Yet!) But underneath all the extreme everything is one idea that refuses to leave me alone — the 40% rule: "When you think that you are done, you're only 40% into what your body's capable of doing. That's just the limits that we put on ourselves." I didn't finish this feeling inspired. I finished it feeling caught. Like Goggins personally reached through the pages, looked me in the eye, and said "really though?" Rude. Necessary. 10/10. I was hooked to this page-turner from the title of the first chapter onwards: "I should've been a statistic."

5: The Creative Act: A Way of Being — Rick Rubin Rick Rubin produced albums for everyone from Johnny Cash to Beyoncé, then wrote a book that has nothing to do with music and everything to do with how to be alive. I started noting one quote. Then another. Then another. Three pages later I looked up and went — did I just end up recreating those pages from the book verbatim? Yep! Here's a sampler before I get carried away again: "Art is not a noun. It's a verb. It's something you do, not something you have." And: "You are not the work. The work is the work. Your job is simply to get out of its way." Okay, just one more, I promise: "If you do something and it moves you, that's enough. That's the whole point." For someone who writes poems she doesn't show anyone and plays guitar in the bedroom when no one's watching, this was basically a permission slip delivered directly to my soul. The act of creating, he says, matters more than the audience. Accepted. Gratefully. Which is also exactly why this blog exists. Writing about what I love, what I do, how I live — started out as fun, turned into my most honest form of self-care. Rubin would approve. Probably. I'd like to think so anyway.

6: The War of Art — Steven Pressfield Yet another book where my notes == the whole book. In this book, Steven Pressfield names the villain and calls it Resistance — that sneaky, shapeshifting force that convinces you to reorganise your desk instead of writing, scroll instead of practicing, research instead of starting. He writes: "Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance." He doesn't offer a workaround. He offers a name. And naming it, somehow, makes it smaller. Short, punchy, slightly aggressive in the best way. I finished it and immediately opened a blank document. Pressfield would be pleased.

7: A Man of Two Faces — Viet Thanh Nguyen Emotionally gutting, politically sharp, and elegiac, this 2023 memoir is written in second person, so you don't just read his story: you're pulled so far into his experience of displacement and immigrant identity that for a few pages it becomes yours. Half the book is his story. The other half belongs to his mother — her fractured identity, her uprootedness, her sacrifices. Nguyen writes: "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." I ugly-cried at least twice, the hiccup-sob kind. Would enthusiastically recommend to anyone who has ever felt like they existed between two worlds and fully belonged to neither. And who enjoys, like me, poetic and literary writing that makes you scratch an itch in your brain you didn't know you had.

8: Things My Son Needs to Know About the World — Fredrik Backman Backman at his most unfiltered — part love letter to his newborn son, part chaotic meditation on what it means to be a halfway decent human being. He ping-pongs between profound and ridiculous in the same paragraph and somehow lands both every single time. "You can become whatever you want to become, but that's nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are." And then two pages later he's writing about IKEA cupboard doors and why they're never really about cupboard doors. "Find someone who doesn't love you for the person you are, but despite the person you are." I laughed out loud on public transport reading this. Sometimes with welled-up tears at the same time. Worth every side-eye I received. Then I immediately binge-read every other Backman book I could get my hands on — A Man Called Ove, Anxious People, Beartown, Britt-Marie Was Here, The Deal of a Lifetime, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer — and enjoyed them all rather equally, which tells you everything about his writing. Equal parts hilarious and transcendent, he taps into the human psyche with such precision and warmth that every page feels like he's been quietly watching all of us and taking very detailed notes.

Touch the Treadmill

#262

I get bored easily. Always have. The same route, the same routine, the same anything for too long and my brain starts looking for an exit. So the fact that I've shown up to the same gym, three times a week, for over tenth months running — that's not discipline. That's a good match.

CrossFit, for the uninitiated, is deliberately, structurally different every single day. The WOD — Workout of the Day — is programmed fresh each session: a different combination of movements, time structures, and intensity levels. One day you're racing to finish a set of rowing and kettlebell swings in under seven minutes. The next, you have twenty minutes to complete as many rounds as possible of pull-ups and box jumps — pacing yourself, managing your effort, finding a rhythm. The day after, you're learning the footwork of a power clean or grinding through wall walks. The programming is intentional — coaches cycle through strength, conditioning, gymnastics, and Olympic lifting across the week so your body never fully adapts and your brain never fully checks out. For someone who finds sameness suffocating, this is basically a cheat code.

And then there's the scaling. Every movement has modifications — lighter weights, resistance bands, shorter distances, scaled progressions. A beginner and a seasoned athlete can do the exact same workout side by side, each working at their own edge. Instead of a full pull-up, you start with a thick resistance band looped under your feet, then graduate to a thinner one, then thinner still, until one day — unassisted. Instead of a barbell, you learn the movement pattern first with a PVC pipe that weighs nothing. You meet the skill where you are, and work your way up. Being called an athlete throughout all of this — by coaches who use the word without irony, for everyone, from day one — it makes you feel like you've always been part of the roster.

My current obsession is pull-ups. I've been working my way toward a strict unassisted pull-up by the end of the year — recently graduated from a horizontal resistance band to a vertical one, and that single progression unlocked enthusiasm and excitement to keep trying harder, to keep moving toward lower and lower resistance bands. Oh, the joy of measurable, visible progress! Gymnastics movements are my happy place in general: wall walks (still mastering moving more than a couple of steps toward the wall), and headstands, where I've only just built enough shoulder stability to balance my knees over my elbows for about a minute. The next milestone? Getting both legs to lift off and balance in the air. I think about it approximately every other day.

Olympic lifting is a whole other universe — complex, dynamic, deeply technical, involving a series of compound movements that have to happen in the right sequence or the whole thing falls apart. It's genuinely hard. Which is exactly the point. My motto this year is to do hard things — and CrossFit delivers on that promise constantly. There's a question I keep coming back to: When's the last time you did something for the first time? Every week at CrossFit, I have a fresh answer.

I've written before about how the community and the people are what first pulled me in and kept me coming back — in Finding Your People (#257). The short version: I go there for the humans. The working out happens in between. I've since found myself a lovely little ladies' group — we grab coffee or catch up outside the gym every now and then, and that warm, easy companionship has quietly become one of my favorite parts of the whole thing.

What I want to talk about here is the starting. Because that's where most good habits go to die. Twyla Tharp, the legendary choreographer, wrote in The Creative Habit about her non-negotiable morning ritual — it wasn't the hours of dancing or rehearsal. It was simply getting into the cab to the studio. Once she was in the cab, the rest took care of itself. James Clear calls a version of this "touching the treadmill" — on the days motivation is nowhere to be found, your only job is to show up and make contact. That's it. Often, you end up staying anyway. My version is pulling out of my garage at 6:15 AM for a ten-minute drive.

And showing up, it turns out, is the most underrated form of self-care there is. Not the most glamorous. Not the most Instagrammable. But the one that quietly compounds — into better sleep, better eating, better energy, better days. The one that makes everything else a little easier to do, and a little harder to quit. Epictetus said it best: "First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do." The 6:15 AM drive is where I do what I have to do. Everything after is just the good part.