Field Notes
an ongoing collection of observations, small memories, sensory impressions, fragments.
ikigai | 生き
a Japanese concept that means
"a reason for being" or "a reason to live.
A few things I’m learning about myself in this new season.
• How a body can change without warning, and how I’m learning to change with it instead of against it.
• How meaning feels different when your days aren’t guaranteed to be predictable — how it sharpens, softens, rearranges itself.
• How beauty still shows up, even here, in the hard places — quiet, stubborn, insistent.
• How memory becomes a compass: not nostalgia, but direction.
• How my curiosity shifts when I’m not trying to perform strength.
• How important it is to build a life that honors the version of me that exists now — not the one the world conditioned me to be.
These small notes are the breadcrumbs I’m following through this new chapter — reminders of who I’ve always been, and who I’m becoming as my body writes a different story.
This Life in Motion
I’m in a season of re-learning myself — of finding a new homeostasis in a body that refuses to return to what it once was. vEDS has begun expressing itself differently, unpredictably, and I’m learning how to co-exist with it instead of fighting every shift.
Some days it feels like learning a new language; other days it feels like remembering one I’ve always known.I’m asking different questions now:
What does ikigai look like when stability is not promised?
How do I paint my ambitions in colors that honor my limits, my truth, my pace?
Where does beauty sit when everything hurts?
How do I remember the core of myself without the layers of survival, expectation, performance?
Right now, my life moves like this:
Returning to my own center.
Softening into what’s real.
Listening for meaning in the mundane.
Rooting in memory, curiosity, and grace.
Becoming without urgency, without apology, without abandoning myself.
I’m learning, slowly and honestly, that purpose is not something I chase—it’s something I uncover in the small, grounded moments where my body, my truth, and my life finally meet.