The Glorious Relief of Letting Go

Turning 36, Leaving Seattle + the Future Becoming Real Again

I had a birthday since the last time I wrote here. I turned 36, which is an age I once assumed I would arrive at with parents, property, a respectable credit score, and a much firmer understanding of where all the important paperwork is supposed to go.

Instead, I am, for all intents and purposes, a bit of a penniless orphan. It has somehow been more than a decade without my parents, so it is mostly just me floating around the universe with two poodles, trying to build a life sturdy enough for the three of us while occasionally remembering that there is no longer anyone above me in the familial chain of command.

There is no childhood home to retreat to, no parent to call when the logistics become too much, no garage where the boxes can live until I am ready for them. When something falls apart, I am both the person having the crisis and the adult responsible for handling it.

I have become okay at handling it, but this is not the same thing as being okay.

Since my last post, I have also finally found an actual getaway plan that appears to be genuinely possible. If everything continues in the direction it is currently moving, Seattle will be behind me this fall.

I know. Goosebumps, right?

I am keeping my next hiatus home a secret, partly because I deserve to have secrets and partly because I am attempting to protect my peace as much as any chronically online classic over-sharer reasonably can. I have spent so much of my life translating what is happening to me into something other people can read, understand, respond to, speculate about, or consume.

I love writing. I love sharing. I have built much of my life and work around being visible, but actual privacy is not dishonesty and a future does not become more legitimate because I announce every coordinate before I arrive.

So, for now, the location belongs to me.

What I can tell you is that I have found one of the few opportunities a person can get in 2026 to pay affordable rent, and when you are going through hell and someone hands you a Hail Mary, you do not interrogate the aesthetics of the football. You catch it and hold on with both hands, say thank you, and immediately start figuring out how to get your life into boxes.

I have already lost an entire version of my life to boxes once.

Actually more than once, but the recent one was when my storage unit in Michigan was auctioned off while I was MIA in a serious depressive episode. In retrospect, it was a very efficient and humiliating way to discover that sentimentality is ultimately subject to monthly autopay.

Inside was my perfectly curated wardrobe, irreplaceable thrift pieces, antiques, photographs, sentimental objects, and what had previously constituted the physical evidence of my life. These were not simply things if we’re being real. All of that was records of taste, memory, identity, and the selves I had been before my life became something I was mostly trying to survive.

I have grieved them. I still grieve them. Some losses are enormous and obvious, while others pop up years later because I suddenly remember a coat, a photograph, a handwritten note, or an object my mother touched that now belongs to a stranger or, more likely, a landfill. Grief does not care whether the thing had monetary value. It was mine and now it is not.

After losing so much without choosing to, I thought I would spend the rest of my life clinging tightly to whatever remained.

Instead, I am looking around my apartment and preparing to let go of even more.

It is big and scary, but mostly I think it is going to feel like the most glorious relief.

I keep imagining the first moment in the new space. Me, Nellie, Theodore, what remains of my clothes, a f*ck ton of books, boxes of product testing for The Beauty Brief, a few pieces of art I refuse to part with, an incredible ornate antique gold mirror, and the miscellaneous thrifted wonders that made it into the Jeep when I first moved to Seattle. That will be the physical inventory of the next version of my life.

It sounds sparse when I list it that way, but it does not feel sparse. It’s plenty.

Losing the things has taught me that the life I am trying to save was never stored inside them. I am still here. Nellie and Theo are still here. The books keep multiplying as work keeps finding me. The gold mirror, by the grace of a higher power and my refusal to make sensible moving decisions, is still coming with us.

So much will be gone and it will be worth it.

Of course, before the glorious relief comes the profoundly unglamorous administrative nightmare of leaving. What is directly ahead of me is stress, coordinating, manual labor, selling things on Facebook Marketplace, strangers asking whether I will accept eleven dollars for furniture I listed for forty, and never taking more than a brief moment away from work because I am self-employed and the world does not stop spinning simply because I am trying to relocate my entire existence.

There will be no cinematic montage in which I pack one tasteful box, drink wine on the floor, and emerge in a new city with excellent lighting and a renewed sense of purpose. I will be answering emails between donation runs, writing strategy decks while surrounded by piles labeled SELL, DONATE, PACK, and I will continue building brands, publishing stories, sending invoices, following up on those invoices, and pretending that moving is simply another task I can fit between client calls.

Most likely, once this apartment from hell is finally empty, the three of us will purchase two plane tickets, sedate ourselves, see the U-Haul box off, and hop on a plane to freedom.

I say freedom with a sense of humor, but I also mean it.

Seattle has given me things I needed. It gave me clarity, even when it could not give me certainty. It showed me what I could survive and what survival was costing me. It forced me to sit inside circumstances I could not rapidly reinvent my way out of, which was particularly offensive to a woman who has historically treated a crisis like an aggressive personal-development deadline. I kept waiting to become clever enough, productive enough, connected enough, healed enough, or profitable enough to expedite the part where everything got better.

It did not work that way.

There was no single breakthrough. I have endured a very long period of being tired, continuing anyway, and slowly becoming honest about what had to change. For a while, that honesty felt cruel because I could identify the problem without having the resources to leave it. Knowing exactly why you are unhappy is not especially liberating when your rent, credit, income, health, grief, and responsibilities are all standing between you and the exit.

Now, for the first time in a long time, the future feels real enough to require logistics.

That is exhilarating and also terrifying.

A theoretical future asks very little of you. You can make it beautiful because it has no utility bills, moving estimates, or consequences. A real future begins demanding decisions. It asks what you are taking, what you are selling, what you are willing to release, and whether you actually believe you deserve to go. It takes the longing you have used to comfort yourself and turns it into labor.

Apparently, hope has a lot of admin.

The next year will be for actual healing. It will be for restoring a positive credit score, continuing to hustle my ass off while building my businesses, and getting extremely hot again.

To be clear, it is not that I am not hot now. Being hot is a state of mind, and currently my mind says we do not have the energy. Depression, grief, financial stress, and prolonged survival mode are notoriously hostile to flamboyance. It is difficult to access your most shameless self when every internal resource has been rerouted toward keeping the lights on, responding to messages, meeting deadlines, and preventing the remaining structure of your life from collapsing.

But that exhausted version is not the entirety of me. She is the version who got us here.

I want to give her somewhere safe enough to rest.

I want the energy to care about getting dressed again. Thinness, beauty, and desirability will not save me. Self-expression has simply always been one of the ways I recognize myself. I want to wear the clothes instead of saving them for a version of my life that feels more worthy of an outfit and feel present enough inside my own body to enjoy being witnessed. I want hotness in the expansive sense, as an appetite for my own life.

While I am exhausted, I do deserve to be here. And when I am fully here, life is significantly less exhausting.

This is where I think we have to be extremely honest about survival in 2026. It is complex, expensive, undignified, and surprisingly expressive. Sometimes saving your life looks like therapy, medication, boundaries, and rest. Sometimes it looks like selling your furniture to strangers online, putting your remaining belongings into a shipping container, sedating two elderly poodles for a flight, and disappearing to a place where the rent gives you enough room to become a person again.

There is no morally superior way to survive. There is only the question of what becomes possible when one door finally opens.

If you are going through hell and you are given a Hail Mary, you take it. The leap may be terrifying. It may also become the greatest gift you have ever allowed yourself to accept. Your future self may not care whether the decision looked impressive, strategic, or appropriately aspirational to anyone else. She may simply be grateful that you got her out.

What comes next for me is a lot of stress, rest, and locking the f*ck in. It is clearing out an apartment, completing the work, getting on the plane, and arriving with less than I once believed I needed. It is also an in-between phase. I am not pretending that a new place will instantly repair my credit, nervous system, grief, health, or relationship with myself. Geography cannot do all of that work for me.

But geography can change the conditions under which the work becomes possible.

Affordable rent can give me the financial room to invest in getting better. Privacy can give me somewhere to do so without narrating every moment. Letting go of my belongings can free me from paying, carrying, cleaning, organizing, and worrying about the material remnants of a life I no longer want to maintain. None of these things are healing on their own. Together, they can create the conditions I need to begin.

For years, I have asked what kind of life I am actually building and when surviving becomes living. I still do not have a polished answer. What I have is an exit plan, two plane tickets waiting to be purchased, and the first believable chance I have had in a long time to find out.

I am ready to let go. I am ready to be in a different era. And after years of waiting for the future to become visible, I am ready to meet the version of me who gets to live there.