Welcome to the parlour.

A living, breathing, bleeding memento mori and I’m thrilled you decided to stop by.

This isn’t a place built around a niche. It couldn’t be even if I tried. Life refuses to stay inside neat little boxes, and so do I. My curiosity has always wandered where it wasn’t expected to go. My convictions are strong. My pattern recognition can be unnerving. I ask inconvenient questions, follow unlikely threads, and have developed an almost allergic reaction to living someone else’s version of a meaningful life.

If you’ve found your way here, there’s a decent chance you do too.

Perhaps you’ve already lived through the quiet apocalypse they call the dark night of the soul. Perhaps you’ve watched entire identities collapse beneath you, only to discover that endings have an uncanny habit of becoming introductions. I’ve become several women in one lifetime already. I suspect I’m nowhere near finished.

Professionally, I’ve lived many lives.

I spent years untangling trauma as a healing coach, long enough to become deeply skeptical of an industry that often mistakes endless healing for living. Before that, I coached health and fitness. Before that, I spent nearly a decade working as a paralegal in personal injury law.

Useful chapters, every one of them.

But they were never the whole story.

Beneath every title was the same woman I had been since childhood. An artist. A collector of symbols. A lover of old stories. A animistic heathen with dirt beneath her fingernails and wonder tucked into her pockets, waiting patiently beneath layers of fear, conditioning, grief, and all the roles I believed I was supposed to perform.

She survived.

Now she gets to make things.

Not because they are profitable. Not because they are strategic. Not because they will become a brand.

Because creation asks to exist.

I’ve come to believe that art needs no greater justification than the making of it. Sometimes it heals the maker. Sometimes it finds the person who needed it years before they knew they did. Either way, the work has already fulfilled its purpose.

I believe we are allowed to become who we might have been at any age. That reinvention isn’t an exception reserved for the fortunate. It’s one of the quiet privileges of being alive.

If something makes your soul exhale, you don’t owe anyone a defense.

So this is where I’ll practice what I preach.

Expect essays about health that wander beyond conventional wisdom. Honest conversations about intuition, grief, beauty, and rebuilding a life from the inside out. Food that nourishes instead of merely feeds. A little folklore. A little philosophy. The occasional strange rabbit hole. Homesteading dreams. Stories that smell faintly of old books and woodsmoke. And more vulnerability than is probably good for me.

I’m simply a forty something mother, a happily celibate feral female, a late blooming creative, and a student of old remedies still becoming herself.

If that sounds like your sort of company, pull up a chair.

The kettle’s on.

Let’s make this one of those rare places where we remember that a life isn’t measured by how safely it was lived, but by how completely.

From The Parlour is an immortal companion.

Not because it promises eternal answers, but because it refuses to die each time I become someone new.

I chose Substack the way one might choose a worthy fledgling.

Not for reach. For permanence.

I wanted somewhere that still belonged to the written word.

Somewhere slower than the algorithm.

Somewhere thoughts could arrive in all their inconvenient, opinionated glory before the mob decided whether they were acceptable.

Somewhere curiosity wasn’t interrupted every eight seconds by someone trying to sell us salvation in a prettier package.

Letters feel different.

They wait patiently in your inbox until the evening is quiet enough to meet them with a proper cup of tea, a glass of wine, or five stolen minutes in the car before walking back into the world.

That feels profoundly human.

And humanity is something I have no interest in burying or outsourcing anymore.

What awaits inside for those who stay…

Essays that wander freely between science and folklore without asking either for permission.

Unconventional, sometimes controversial, ideas captured before they’ve been sanded smooth for public approval. Thoughts in their living form rather than their polished one.

Reflections on intuition, mothering, grief, beauty, mortality, and my enduring disdain for conformity.

Honest stories. Old remedies. The occasional crow.

Rabbit holes I fully intend to disappear into, and would be delighted for you to follow. Not to lose ourselves to madness, but to become better acquainted with the shadows that make us whole.

If you’ve been searching for a place where curiosity is rewarded and becoming yourself is considered a lifelong craft...

I’d be honored to save you a seat in the parlour.

The door is left slightly ajar for those curious to enter.

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