Unfinished Thoughts

A handful of real-time thoughts, questions, and half-finished realizations pulled from the chaotic depths of my journal and notes app lately

We’re shaking things up a bit this week!

I’ve been a little low on creative energy the past few days and honestly haven’t had the capacity to write my usual long-form piece. So instead of forcing one, I’m sharing something that feels a little more real-time: a collection of thoughts, reflections, questions, and half-finished realizations pulled pretty directly from my brain, journal, and notes app recently.

Lately, I’ve been trying to let “done and honest” matter more than polished and perfect. It’s not easy, but I think I’m learning that messy authenticity is often far more impactful than spending hours refining, curating, and trying to say everything “just right.”

So this felt like the perfect way to still show up this week without forcing creativity or over-editing every thought into something more polished than it needs to be.

If you enjoy this format, or if any of these ideas resonate and you’d want me to expand on them in a future essay, I’d genuinely love to hear from you. Every message I get about my writing means more than you know. It always surprises me in the best way to know there are real people reading these words on the other side of the screen.

Without further ado, here are some lightly-edited brain musings pulled straight from my journal/notes app.

Unfinished Thoughts:

• I think I’m often confusing urgency with importance. I’m starting to question this constant sense of urgency I feel because lately everything seems to feel urgent, and not everything actually needs my immediate attention.

• Why does rest feel so hard for me? I swear I would rather be producing, creating, planning, working, or checking things off a list than just sitting still…Part of me wonders if I’m avoiding something? Another part wonders if I just doesn’t know how to exist without constant stimulation.

• I’m realizing how quickly I try to escape feelings like boredom, tiredness, uncertainty, irritability, anxiety, sadness, or even just feeling mentally foggy. Anything that makes me feel less “on” immediately starts to feel uncomfortable.

• I’m starting to understand the difference between being desired and being deeply cared for. Desire is often based on attraction, projection, or someone’s idea of me. But real love requires being fully seen, known, and cared for beyond just the polished or attractive parts of myself. I have to show the full (and sometimes messy) me in order to be truly and fully loved.

• I think I’ve been using “I don’t know” or “I’m waiting for clarity” as a way to avoid taking action and potentially failing. I act as if one day a fully formed life plan is just going to fall from the sky and hit me in the head. But I just had an epiphany: action precedes clarity. I have to actually move and take action and trust that things will start making sense from there.

• My coach just told me that calm can initially feel like tiredness when you’re not used to resting. Something unlocked in my brain. Growing up, I was always dancing, studying, achieving, or trying to get ahead. Being tired never really felt like an option. Maybe that’s why slowing down feels so uncomfortable to me now?

• I used to think grief only referred to losing a person. Now I know there’s actually a lot of different types of grief in life. I’ve grieved relationships, people, old identities, versions of myself, expectations, dreams, and futures I thought I’d have. It’s making me realize that loss is a natural part of life…which kind of makes the idea of feeling it a little less overwhelming.

• Maybe stillness feels hard for me because it removes distraction. Because once the distraction is gone, everything I’ve been avoiding suddenly has space to rise to the surface.

• Healing is not linear. I’ve heard people say this a million times, yet part of me is still trying to force healing into a straight line anyway.

• I think part of me feels safest when I’m striving. When I’m moving toward something, achieving something, improving something, or working toward becoming “better,” I feel like I my life has meaning. When I’m simply existing as I am, I feel lost.

• I’m realizing loneliness and solitude are completely different experiences. One feels like disconnection from myself and others. The other feels like appreciation for myself.

  ---