listening too much to Lana and DON

It has been since October since I last wrote on my photo blog.
Mostly because I wish I could report that I am better.

playlist for you !

And in so many ways I have made significant improvement. I should be proud of myself. But the loss in my life was so big that the grief has to be handled in very slow moving parts. Time moves fast.

What I am learning right now is how to take accountability for who I was and figure out how to move forward from there.

I used to be obsessed with manifesting, but lately my energy feels like effort isn’t where my work lies. I cry a lot still - a ridiculous amount. I cry in moments that make no sense but that is grief.

I am still teaching, and I am so grateful for that. Maybe I am codependent on it, but it is the only place where my mind stops thinking and I just enter a frequency. I feel my pores open like a vessel, a channel, a wave moving through me instead of me moving through life.

Sometimes I wake up after hours of conversations with myself.

Most of it is self-soothing my pain.

Pretending is exhausting.

There is something almost erotic about oversharing, yet shame still keeps the door closed. Intimacy feels strange because somehow I know myself, and at the same time I am still becoming.

Destruction. Planting. Blooming.
The ins and the outs.

I went to Paris though.
And it was everything. January 2026 (other blog)

My biggest takeaway was that things happen when they are supposed to happen and NOT when you force them. It created a kind of trust between me and the chaotic, divine forces of nature. I surrender even though I hate the word. Because sometimes we hate the truth when it forces us into a new reality without asking us first.

But still… surrender.
Even when we understand nothing.

2025 will go down as the year I became: me.

It wasn’t just 2025 though. It was probably the tumbleweed of the five years before it.

My mom used to tell me about the seven-year cycles — seven years of challenges and then blessings after the storm. Crazy enough, I feel it stronger than ever: miracles, openings, new beginnings. If you listen closely you can almost hear the bells. A gravitational pull.

Loss is alignment.
Chaos is alignment.
Rejection is alignment.

We just don’t talk about those parts anymore. Everyone wants evolution without the breaking.

Fairness isn’t a universal rule. Survival is.
Resilience comes from getting yourself out of situations you once thought were impossible.

My mirror came to teach me my flaws, my beauty, and mostly everything I had been avoiding and working towards. Love without Sacrifice is just indulgence . Love isn’t only beautiful. it grows through the excruciating parts of becoming.

I’m not poetic. I’m human and a cliché at the same time.
Go to work. Stop letting every feeling take over your direction. Avoidance only creates scar tissue, and scar tissue never returns to what it once was.

Have I always been like this?
Or was I privileged enough to keep pouring myself into people until I shape-shifted?

Metamorphosis is pain and process again and again and again - a million agains until one day you notice:

I changed.
I am not the same.

And now, it is my turn.