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The Influence Around Us

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I recently started watching a new anime, The Ogre’s Bride , expecting nothing more than a little weekend entertainment. Instead, I found myself thinking about influence. There is a character whose upbringing made me particularly curious. She was constantly treated as the special one. She was praised, prioritized and given almost everything she wanted, while her sister often came second. Over time, something interesting happened. What began as privilege became expectation. She came to believe that good things were naturally meant for her. Then her sister received something beautiful, and suddenly it felt unfair. Not because she had been denied something she was entitled to, but because her understanding of the world had been shaped around always being first. It made me think about how much of us is influenced by what surrounds us. Take three children. One grows up being protected from every difficulty. Another grows up experiencing ordinary hardship and learning, “I can fall and get bac...
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Let it pass or deal with it??

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There is a school of thought that says when an emotion arises, we should simply give it space. Let anger be anger. Let sadness be sadness. Don't fight it, don't feed it, and don't immediately act on it. In time, the emotion will naturally lose its grip and pass. Then there is another perspective: if we don't deal with our emotions, they don't necessarily disappear. They may simply go underground, waiting for another opportunity to resurface. So, which is it? Perhaps the answer is neither extreme. Giving an emotion space does not have to mean ignoring it. It means allowing yourself to experience it without immediately reacting to it. If anger comes up, you can acknowledge, “I am angry right now,” without sending the angry message, starting the argument, or saying something you will regret later. Take a walk. Breathe. Sit with it. Let the intensity settle. But once you are calm, it can also be useful to ask: Why am I angry? Sometimes the answer is surprisingly sim...
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Let People Evolve

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  Sometimes we don't struggle with people changing. We struggle with accepting that they have changed. A friend recently told me about someone she has known for many years who decided to take a different path in life. She wanted to become more spiritual and spend more time in ways that aligned with the person she felt she was becoming. Naturally, that meant spending less time with some of the friends she had spent years with, particularly the weekend crowd. The interesting part was that the friends felt abandoned. They said she was no longer caring. She wasn't available like before. And technically, they were right. She wasn't. But perhaps that was the point. People are allowed to change the way they spend their time. They are allowed to change their priorities, their beliefs, their habits and even the environments they once enjoyed. That doesn't necessarily mean they have stopped caring about the people they left behind. I do think, however, that when you've shared...
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Finding Myself

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I was listening to some audio snippets from Carl Jung about authenticity and the way we can slowly lose ourselves while trying to fit into society. It got me thinking. We are born with certain tendencies, personalities and curiosities, but society quickly starts teaching us what is acceptable, admirable and rewarded. Be polite. Be successful. Be agreeable. Be sociable. Get good grades. Get a good job. Get married. Have children. Be this. Don't be that. And because some of these things are genuinely good for us, we learn them. We adapt. We become versions of ourselves that work well in the world. But somewhere along the way, we can forget to ask: Do I actually want this ? Jung spoke about the persona we present to the world, the social mask we develop to function within it. The problem isn't having a mask. We all need different versions of ourselves for different situations. The problem is forgetting that we are wearing one. So how do we find ourselves again? I'm beginni...
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Heavy Hearts

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  Sometimes I think caring about people comes with a strange little trap: you can start carrying pain that was never yours to carry. A friend of mine has been going through a difficult situation recently, and I have found myself praying for her, thinking about her, wondering what I can do and hoping that somehow I can make things a little easier. But I have also noticed something else. Sometimes I start feeling her pain as though it were happening to me and the mind will just accelerate these feelings in real time. And that reminded me of something that happened years ago.I went to a burial where a child had lost their mother. Everyone was sad, of course. I was grieving the loss too. But when I looked at the child, something shifted in me. I started feeling the grief I imagined that child would feel if they were old enough to fully understand what losing their mother meant. The funny thing was, the child was actually okay. They were playing and moving around, completely unaware of ...
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The Beauty of Showing Up

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Sometimes you witness something so simple that it stays with you long after it is over. That happened to me over the weekend. I went for a painting session, one of the little extracurricular things I have been doing to keep life interesting and to give myself something to look forward to. There were three ladies there who had clearly come together as friends. What happened over the next three hours was unexpectedly beautiful. They painted. Then they took a break and did a TikTok dance, complete with the kind of laughter that makes you forget anyone else is in the room. After that, they sat down and played Ludo. Somehow, they managed to fit all of this into one afternoon. But what really caught my attention was the effort behind it. Two of them lived quite far from where we were. Yet they had made the effort to come because they wanted to spend time with their friends. One of them even kept saying that she needed to travel quite a distance, but she would leave a little later because she...
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Impossible Perfect

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This weekend I had one of those moments that only make sense in your own head. I had just gotten my nails done. Ladies, you know the investment I'm talking about. Time. Money. Sitting in one position until your back starts negotiating with your soul. They looked beautiful. Then Saturday happened. I was doing some chores and... chip. One nail. Just one. Nine others were still looking fantastic. Guess which one my brain decided deserved all of my attention? That single chipped nail. Within seconds I had already planned another salon appointment, calculated the money I would have to spend, imagined the hours I'd lose, and quietly mourned the entire manicure. It was almost impressive how quickly my mind escalated the situation. Then another thought interrupted me. "Who exactly is demanding perfect nails?" Silence. No one. Not my family. Not strangers. Not the supermarket cashier. Certainly not my dog. The pressure was coming entirely from me. That realization stayed with ...
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