Climbing back into the tree, hello again!

1 month hiatus turned into 15 months, burnout, and...cancer?

Aug 27, 2025

When I first launched this newsletter in the fall of 2023, we were sitting in a tree here because of the good ol’ heteronormative schoolyard rhyme:

Girl and Boy, sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Girl with the baby carriage (because of course it’s the girl).

As a newlywed 30-something, I wanted to talk about the gargantuan life-choices and nuanced epoch of time that I, and so much of this community, are currently navigating. What next? Family complexities, marriages, divorces, the baby decision, friendship evolutions, grief, personal development– what parts do we want to participate in or abstain from?

2 years later… things have changed.

I’m sitting in the tree, partially to take a birds-eye view and breather (disassociate + escape) from the unprecedented dumpster fire of the world below, while forcing myself to look up at the still-hypnotizing sky and clouds that continue to steadily move along (for now), to explore what it means to navigate a world so full of contradicting wonder and horror.

In the last 2 years, I got married, finally had my endo surgery, and then abruptly decided to move back to the east coast and get settled into the NJ suburbs– a place I swore I’d never live, but have now come to genuinely embrace and love as our home.

We started settling into our new house. I got a long-awaited AuDHD diagnosis that elucidated all the parts of my entire life that were previously blurred around the edges, and forever changed how I exist in and perceive this world – in a beautiful, complicated way. J and I explored and chose plans. November 6th came, and served us a jolting earthquake, completely disorienting what we envisioned for what lay ahead. January came, and sped up the never-ending revolving door of life’s chaos, with Butternut Bonespurs moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., who has since been swinging a wrecking ball into the Constitution and humanity.

Then I found out that I had a rare, cancerous tumor… about 48 hours before jetting off to Switzerland for a work trip. Amidst this news that changed the gravitational force of my mental state and the parameters of my life, we were dealing with medical scares with our beloved baby boy, Benny, that have still yet to fully resolve.

Swiss cows are great emotional support animals, honestly.

I’ve felt nagging guilt, the kind that every recovering overachiever living in this timeline constantly feels, when it comes to this newsletter and every untouched initiative I had on my *big plans* list for my career. I avoided Substack for awhile, even reading the ones I really love, because it was a glaring reminder of all the balls in the air I couldn’t keep up at the same time.

Then I take a look back over these last two years — the last two months that have felt like two years within two months— and I know I’m a different person than I was two years ago, because my guilt evaporates.

Because frankly? After everything, I think I deserve a year-long vacation with no obligations, no doctors appointments, paired with endless poolside spicy mezcal margs, magically metabolized by the liver of my 20-year-old days.

Clambering back to the branches, with splinters– here’s what we’re doing in the tree now.

Being the hyperlexic, hyperverbal human that I am, I do my fair share of yapping and advocating on my social media pages– whether that’s for constitutional rights and our current fight against fascism, or insisting that you make this epic roasted garlic dressing RIGHT NOW – but the thoughts that feed my insomnia at night are far more nuanced than what the hollow nuggets of content, whittled down to serve as mini m&m’s of dopamine for our ever-shortening attention spans, can possibly convey.

I care deeply about this shared world we live in, and am endlessly fascinated with the inextricable intersectionality that weaves the fabric of our world.

Health and well-being, food, mental health, politics, consumerism, societal norms, environmentalism – all things that cannot be isolated without willful, selective ignorance, and that overlap is a lot of what you’ll see here.

So we’re sitting in the tree, to gab about it all: dumpster fire below, endless skies above.

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