Journaling has always been the container for my restless mind.

It allows me to explore things I have yet to say out loud or haven’t been able to admit to others, or even to myself.

Journaling is a process. The journal is like a chrysalis: the container of your goopiest, most unformed self. It’s a rare space, in this age of hyper-curated personas, where you can share your most unedited thoughts, where you can sort through the raw material of your life.

Day by day, page by page, you uncover the answers already inside of you, and you begin to transform.

Journaling allows me to trace the contours of what I’m thinking and feeling and gain a sense of agency over it. Once I have figured out how to contend with my circumstances on the page, it becomes possible to engage with the people around me and to live life more freely.

Recently, I’ve stopped journaling.

I’ve felt like I’ve had nothing to say and, at the same time, too much to say. I guess the point of this post is to be vulnerable and tell you that I’m feeling quite insecure when it comes to sharing myself online. Trusting myself. Wondering if what I have to say makes any sense.

I feel as if I’m in this tango with fear. I’m still in the trenches. I’m still becoming.

To sit down at the laptop and face the blank page, to face my own mind, it’s unbearable at times. But we’re taking baby steps.

Opening the laptop is a baby step. Spilling my heart into a draft is a baby step.

Publishing it and letting whoever needs to read it find it, that’s a big girl step.

I suppose we all tango with fear. You go through a hard breakup and swear off romance because you feel like you won’t be able to survive that kind of heartache again. You get rejected, and the sting is such that you vow to never put yourself out there again. You want to try something new, but you worry you’ll be bad at it. You fear you’ll humiliate yourself, and so you never start.

We. are. all. feeling. the. same. things.

We. all. get. scared. sometimes.

It’s hard to tango with fear. But I know that a fear-driven life is one where I never make plans, where I stop myself from dreaming ambitiously.

It means living safe and small, always hedging against the worst-case scenario. Instead, I want to live boldly. I want to hold the best-case scenario at the forefront of my mind and let that guide my decisions and actions.

And so my new goal for 2026 is as follows:

To trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what I had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear often brings you exactly what you need.

Even if I feel the terror of writing my own story only to be misunderstood or criticized, or maybe worst of all: ignored.

Can I write about the person I want to become and the distance between me and her?

Through this journey, I will peel back the layers, uncover my truest, most laid-bare self, and in doing so, dare to dream boldly and learn the brutal and beautiful facts of life.

And with that,

let’s begin.