Category: Personal Insights
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I Love Being a Mother, But It’s Harder Than I Ever Expected
Motherhood is beautiful, but it’s also overwhelming in ways no one really prepares you for. As a stay-at-home mom, stepmom, and holistic practitioner, I’m learning to hold gratitude and exhaustion at the same time, embracing the mess, the noise, the loss of freedom, and the deep love that comes with raising a child.
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My Honest Experience of Wellness and Holistic Medicine Schools
Over the last few years, I’ve enrolled in three very different wellness and holistic medical education programs: A lot of people ask me what schools they should attend to become a holistic practitioner. I wish I had an easy answer, but to be honest, in the holistic world, one school just doesn’t cut it. One…
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My Daughter Didn’t Mean to Hurt Me, But the World Already Did
When my biracial daughter told me she thinks “bright” skin is more beautiful, it opened a much deeper conversation about colorism, media influence, and how early beauty standards take root, even in children.
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What It’s Like Being a Stepmother and Coparenting with a High-Conflict Bio Mom
I became a stepmother when the kids were 9, 10, and 12, old enough to remember life before me, but young enough to still need stability, guidance, and love. Now they’re 12, 13, and 15, and I’ve watched them grow into teenagers right in front of my eyes, all while raising my own 3 year…
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Getting Beyond the Baby Blues
I remember the day I found out I was pregnant. I had been dealing with painful cramps for days and, like I often do, my mind jumped straight to worst-case scenarios. I was convinced it was something serious, maybe pelvic inflammatory disease. When I went to the doctor, the nurse casually handed me a pregnancy…
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What to Pack in Your Airport Travel Bag: The Essentials
We just got back from Saudi Arabia, which meant a very long journey with multiple flights, long hours in airports, and a lot of physical and emotional energy being used. On trips like this, having the right essentials isn’t about convenience, it’s about staying regulated. If I don’t have these things with me, long travel…
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Beginner Gardening Tips I Wish I Knew Sooner
Gardening looks simple… until you actually try it. You buy the plants. You water them faithfully. You check on them every morning like they’re your babies. And somehow… they still struggle. When I first started gardening, I honestly thought effort was enough. If I cared enough, watered enough, watched enough, it would all just work.…
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When Women Fight Each Other Instead of Holding Men Accountable
Something I keep noticing in different times of my life, and something I reflected on heavily in therapy the other day, is how quickly women turn against other women… while the man in the situation walks away untouched. A man will lie, cheat, manipulate, disrespect and somehow another woman becomes the main problem. I’ve learned…
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Sisters, Growing Pains, and Finding Our Own Homes
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about sisterhood, and how strange it feels when the people you once shared every corner of your life with suddenly aren’t under the same roof anymore. Three sisters, all creatives, all with the same slightly dramatic, slightly introverted, deeply imaginative personalities. Growing up in a home where our relationship…
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The Warehouse Job That Looked Perfect From the Outside
What looked like a dream warehouse job, free concert tickets, generous perks, and a wealthy, seemingly kind owner, slowly revealed a hidden system of favoritism and unspoken social classes. From working the warehouse floor to managing returns, I witnessed firsthand how power, proximity, and privilege shaped who truly benefited.
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Why I Find Japan’s Mask Culture Really Beautiful
One thing I’ve always quietly admired about Japan is how normal wearing a mask is. Not because of fear.Not because of rules.Not because someone told them to. But because it’s considerate. If you have a cold, you wear a mask.If your allergies are acting up, you wear a mask.If you’re packed into a train with…
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VR, Quarantine, and Making the Best of It
2020 feels so unreal right now. It really feels like the world has slowed down, maybe even stopped. We’re home all the time now due to the quarantine that’s just been sanctioned. Isolated from society. Extremely bored. My best friend just bought me a VR headset a few weeks prior, and I don’t think she…
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Why Women With Big Hearts Attract Men With Unhealed Trauma (DV Content Warning)
Content Warning: This post discusses domestic violence, emotional abuse, childhood trauma, and near-lethal situations. Please read with care, and only if you feel grounded and safe enough to engage with these themes. I don’t remember much of my childhood in detail, but I do remember the overall environment. My parents were emotionally volatile, always fighting, and…
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How My Love for Film Started
My love for film started when I was a child, long before I ever understood what filmmaking even was. Growing up, we had movie nights every Friday. It was a whole ritual, the popcorn, VHS rentals, the excitement of picking something new at Blockbuster. My parents worked a lot and I never got to spend…
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How I Realized that Novel and Blog Writing Suits Me Better
I love films. I always have. Cinema shaped how I see the world, how I understand emotion, pacing, silence, and beauty. Some of my most formative experiences came from watching stories unfold on a screen, feeling seen by characters who didn’t even know I existed. Film made me fall in love with storytelling long before…
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ClassPass, Yoga, and Finding My Calm in This City
Miami is loud, fast, colorful, chaotic, and distracting. Yoga is the opposite. It’s the only place where I’m not thinking about anything else, not my phone, not my to-do list, nothing. Just breath, heat, music, and movement. Lately I’ve been using ClassPass to hop around different yoga studios all over Miami, and honestly… it’s becoming…
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The Hardest Truth Therapy Made Me Face Today
I just walked out of therapy and I feel very unsettled right now. The entire session came down to one thing I really didn’t want to accept. Some people will hurt you and they genuinely do not care. They don’t sit with it. They don’t feel the weight. They don’t lose sleep. They don’t replay the…
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My Experience at a Filmmaker Bootcamp in Downtown Miami
A lot of the people I look up to in the film world didn’t attend film school, , and honestly, that always made sense to me. In film school, you’re usually learning from people who have never actually completed their own film, which always bothered me. Along with the performance anxiety I suffered from at…
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My 23andMe DNA Results: A Deep Dive Into My Ancestry🧬
My best friend had bought me a 23andMe DNA kit for my 27th birthday and and honestly… it was wild seeing my genetic story laid out in charts, colors, and timelines. I always knew I was mixed, but seeing the exact regions and generations mapped out felt like opening a time capsule of everyone who…
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Grieving a Friendship That Wasn’t Healthy
I’m writing this because I feel heartbroken. I just cut off one of my long-term best friends, and even though it had to be done, I still feel terrible about it. We met as kids at Norwood Elementary, right off 19th Street and 14th Court in Miami Gardens. From the beginning, there was this magnetic…
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Curly Hair Gang: How I Take Care of My 3C Curly Hair
If you have 3C curls, you already know this, your hair has a personality. Some days it cooperates. Some days it absolutely does not. And a lot of what I learned about my curls came from trial, error, and ignoring advice that clearly wasn’t made for my hair type. I’ve straightened and colored my hair…
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Honestly, Vanessa 