A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

After our standard London breakfast (coffee from Tamp, chocolate croissant from Gail’s, a banana from the street vendor) we walk to the train and board for Blackfriars. We’re going to Tate Modern to meet Honee, a friend I made in 2022 when she attended our Visual Journaling retreat in the south of France.

I haven’t seen her since then, but our time together feels easy. We catch up on our present lives and then we visit our past ones: I learn about her childhood and upbringing, we exchange notes on our familial relationships, on art-making, on daily evolution. When we hug goodbye, it doesn’t feel like it’ll be for the last time.

Afterwards, I meet up with T and the girls and we venture into the Tate Modern bookstore. I haven’t stepped inside this gorgeous room since 2019, and the selection is always so tempting: dozens and dozens of beautiful books, all of which I want to purchase and take back home.

T immediately spots Start Where You Are on the shelves and excitedly shows our girls. He makes such a big deal out of it that I feel sheepish. I feel demure—after all, it’s been a full decade since this, my first book, was published—does it still deserve such fanfare? My relationship with deserve is a sticky one, conflated with dangerous notions of self-worth and how I must earn it.

*Start Where You Are: A Journal for Self-Exploration (2015!)*

It’s been 10 years since Start Where You Are was published—with well over a million copies in print, it’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, has been translated into a dozen languages, and continues to help people all over this earth learn more about themselves. Seeing that it’s still stocked in one of the most prestigious museums in the world, a decade later, is validating.

*Finding* Start Where You Are *at Tate Moden with N and F :) (2025*)

This book changed my life. It began my career as an author; it invited me into the world of publishing—and allowed me to build my life around my love of books; it gave me my first real reason to take a chance on me. It has a very dear place in my heart, and if I consider it quite clearly, it’s disappointing to know that over time, I have learned to push all of my achievements away.

Luckily, T forces me to recognize my success, regularly, and for that I am grateful. Celebrating this book with my young girls is beautiful. I’m grateful for the chance to show them, first hand, that making things from the heart, with honesty and integrity, can take you to incredible places—to places that once, they weren’t even allowed to go.

I want to raise young girls who don’t feel the constant need to minimize their achievements, and believing that I deserve good things is fundamental for doing that. Believing that I deserve good things is hard—but I’m on my way.

TUESDAY

I’m On My Way by Ben Kweller, obviously, for the aforementioned reasons.

WEDNESDAY

A peek into N’s London sketchbook, which was made inside an actual sketchbook but also on various paper menus throughout the neighborhood. This one, that she made while we had lunch at Franco Manca’s with a dear old friend, is one of my favorites:

THURSDAY

A few sketchbook pages from my time in London, including (in order): St. James’ park, colors as memories, the girls walking to Homefield Park, N in front of a cobbled doorway, and the greens of London.

FRIDAY

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

—You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford

A year ago, these were the five things I most wanted to remember:

Dear Somebody: I am not a machine. (September 6, 2024)
Dear Somebody: Losing a penguin. (September 20, 2024)

See you next week!

xx,

To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

*The Wedding Sari* for Issue 65 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

*Paul Simon at Stifel Theatre in Saint Louis (2025)*

For the first time since 2019, T and I go to a show. The last time I saw a musician play life was six years ago, in Nashville—before the pandemic, before lockdown, before two children and graduate school and all of the rest. I was a different person then, carrying different dreams and hopes and worries.

I’m rarely in a crowded room anymore. I barely remember what it’s like to be part of a collective movement—to be collectively moved, to collectively move alongside hundreds of other people who are listening to the same music that I am. I’m so used to making art alone, within the privacy of my own studio that I often forget what it’s like to witness someone making their own right in front of me; a special kind of bravery.

We settle into our seats at Stifel Theatre and watch Paul Simon walk onto the stage. It is strange to see the person who created the soundtrack to my life. No other musician has taken me from childhood to having children of my own, no other musician who has a song for every moment I remember most. He plays his latest record and I’m flooded with my own past: the many Novembers spent deep in conversation on park benches; the hundreds of letters we wrote; the long drives to Atlantic City, salt water taffy and ankles in the sea; the friendships I believed would follow me to the end of my life; the friendships that haven’t lasted long enough to see me to my forties.

Paul plays and I remember exactly where I was when the Twin Towers fell; watching the dawn chase the night over the Atlantic; years of loneliness and years of being known; running to catch the SEPTA train to Philadelphia; the many New York City winters bleeding me; the gold bracelets I gave to my loved ones on my wedding day, and the one I’ve worn on my right wrist, each day, for the past six years. He plays and I listen to the many people he has been. He plays and I remember myself. After all of these years, after changes upon changes, I am more or less the same.

*Ben Kweller at Off Broadway in Saint Louis* *(2025)*

The next day, we see Ben Kweller in a small, crowded space that transports me to my teenage years. It’s a stark opposite to the evening before: the sound is too loud and the floors too sticky. Hundreds of us smushed together, faces full of earnest eagerness, waiting for a 43-year old man play the songs we love most. It’s a stark opposite to the evening before: we jump and we dance and I don’t look backwards once. I’m having fun, something that the seriousness of me doesn’t say or feel that often but that I want more of. That’s what good art does: it wakes the sleeping parts of you.

Ben plays Thirteen and I think of what love used to be, he plays Family Tree and I think of Dorian, the sweetness of a young child finding his way; he plays On My Way and I’m out of my head now, finally in this room, with the music in me. He plays Lizzy and I’ve got T’s hand in mine. We’ll keep love alive, even on Texas time.

TUESDAY

“The more intricate and ornate a panetar is, the more status the bride’s family was believed to have. The panetar symbolizes marital bliss and prosperity; historically, it also promises fertility—a blessing seen not only for the bride herself, but for the family she was marrying into.

At the time, it felt romantic to wear a garment previously worn by two people I loved, on their wedding days, on my own. As much as it connected me to my mother and her sister, my aunt, it also connected me to a longer tradition of compromise and, hopefully, continued compassion between me, my chosen partner, and the family we formed. Now, years later, my wedding panetar means something different to me. It doesn’t resemble prosperity or fertility or wealth, but choice. I consider what marriage meant for my mother and my aunt—and, because of their choices, compromises, and triumphs, what it is now allowed to mean for me. Like any piece of art, each sari is created, painstakingly, by a specific set of hands, guided by certain techniques and traditions, for a specific purpose. However, it’s story and meaning is created by the person who wears it.”

—An excerpt from my latest essay, The Wedding Sari, for Issue #65 of Uppercase Magazine

WEDNESDAY

I can’t believe I haven’t shared Dear Bookstore with you yet! This picture book about the importance of bookstores was written by my dear friend Emily Arrow and illustrated by my friend Geneviève Godbout.

It’s such a gorgeous and sweet love letter to bookstores, the third place they’ve become for so many of us, and the community they foster. Please shout about it, purchase a copy, and request it at your library.

THURSDAY

“Imagination—not intellect—has saved my life. It has saved the lives of the people, animals, and lands to which I belong, those I hold most beloved. Imagination, I believe, is the way we dream into the future—futures that can’t be defined by any paperwork or bullet or algorithm or machine. Imagination brings us into abolitionist practices, into the pu’uhonua (places or people of refuge) we’ve yet to meet. As scholar Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio reminds in her work: there is no ‘ōlelo word for rights, only kuleana—our responsibility.

Making nonsense of the story, of our collective stories, is a weapon. I was a child magician, and what I’ve learned from sleight of hand is that the eyes will follow an arc or shape made, from beginning to end. But if the hand moves in a straighter line, our eyes look back to the beginning, to the source of that movement. This is the objective—to keep our eyes fixed forward, bracing and bracing for what’s next, instead of allowing the space to look back, or around, to what we know. Our work, then, becomes mending the stories. Tying those strings back together.”

—T. Kira Māhealani Madden on Listening to the Past, from 100 Days of Creative Resistance

FRIDAY

I hear the drizzle of the rain
Like a memory it falls
Soft and warm continuing
Tapping on my roof and walls

And from the shelter of my mind
Through the window of my eyes
I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets
To England, where my heart lies

My mind’s distracted and diffused
My thoughts are many miles away
They lie with you when you’re asleep
And kiss you when you start your day

And a song I was writing is left undone
I don’t know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can’t believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme

And so you see, I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you

And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I

—Kathy’s Song by Paul Simon

See you next week!

xx,

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