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Greetings my lovely feral, dark, and bright ones,

The Arizona sun is already doing what it does best today. By this afternoon the pavement will shimmer, the air will feel heavy, and stepping outside will feel like opening the door to an oven. Before long, I’ll walk out onto our barbecue patio, lift my hands toward the sky, close my eyes, and do something that would probably make a few of my neighbors wonder if I’ve finally lost my mind.

Honestly?

I don’t care.

This moment isn’t for them.

It’s for me.

Over the past several years, life has asked more of me than I ever imagined it would. Some of that weight came wrapped in grief. Some of it came in responsibility. Some of it arrived disguised as guilt, fear, worry, and that quiet little voice that insists you always have to be the strong one because everyone else is counting on you. The strange thing about carrying a burden for so long is that eventually it doesn’t even feel heavy anymore. Your shoulders adjust. Your heart adjusts. Your mind quietly accepts it as normal, and you stop asking yourself whether you were ever meant to carry it in the first place.

Then one day you wake up exhausted, not because you’ve failed, but because you’ve forgotten what it feels like to set the weight down.

That’s where I find myself today.

Before I leave for my massage, I’m going to step outside beneath this enormous Arizona sky and let go of some things I’ve been carrying for far too long. I’m releasing the guilt that has spent years convincing me everyone else’s needs should come before my own. I’m releasing the fear that whispers I should wait until life settles down before I allow myself to enjoy it, as though there will ever come a day when everything is perfectly quiet and neatly tied up with a bow. I’m releasing the heaviness that has become so familiar I almost forgot it wasn’t supposed to live here forever, and as I let it go, I’m making room for something that has been patiently waiting for me all along. I want my laughter back. I want my curiosity back. I want to feel excited about tomorrow instead of always preparing myself for the next crisis. Most of all, I want my power back.

If someone happens to drive by and sees me standing there with my face turned toward the sky…

Well…

They can think whatever they want.

I don’t give a flying fuck.

Or a flying monkey’s balls.

There comes a point in life when other people’s opinions become a burden you’re no longer willing to carry, and I think I’ve finally reached mine. I’m not standing outside to impress anyone. I’m not trying to prove a point to the neighbors. I’m simply telling myself something I should have told myself a long time ago.

I’ve survived enough.

Now it’s time to live.

That decision didn’t arrive all at once. It wasn’t some dramatic lightning bolt or life-changing epiphany. Looking back, I think it had been quietly growing inside me for months while I wasn’t paying attention. If you’ve been walking beside me here for any length of time, you’ve watched me move through some incredibly painful seasons. You were here while I grieved my mom. You were here through the losses of our beloved fur babies. You watched me write through heartbreak, exhaustion, uncertainty, healing, and every complicated emotion that comes with loving people and animals with your whole heart.

Those chapters mattered.

They still matter.

They always will.

They helped shape the woman I’m still becoming.

But somewhere along the way, I realized grief had quietly taken center stage while the rest of my life waited patiently in the wings. Without meaning to, I had become so focused on surviving that I stopped making room for living. I wasn’t chasing joy anymore. I wasn’t feeding my curiosity. I wasn’t looking toward the horizon wondering what adventure might be waiting for me next. I was simply trying to make it through another day, then another week, then another month.

Healing doesn’t ask us to forget the people we’ve lost. It doesn’t demand that we stop loving them or pretend the pain never happened. It simply reminds us that love was never meant to end our story. The people we’ve loved become part of who we are, but they were never asking us to stop living because they were gone.

My mom certainly wouldn’t want that.

Neither would the little girl I used to be.

As strange as it sounds, that realization eventually led me to book a plane ticket.

In September, I’m flying to California.

Yes, I want to see the Pacific Ocean. I want to stand barefoot in the sand, breathe in the salt air, watch the waves roll in, and finally experience a place that has lived in my imagination since I was a little girl growing up in northwestern New Jersey. I want to wander through Los Angeles, visit Hollywood, explore little cafés, and see places I’ve only ever known through movies, music, and television.

But if I’m being completely honest…

California isn’t the real reason I’m going.

The real reason is Vickie.

She is my best friend, my soul sister, and if you ask me, my twin flame. We met online back in 2007, and if someone ever wrote the story of our friendship, they’d probably think parts of it were fiction. Over nearly two decades we’ve laughed until we cried, celebrated life’s victories, disagreed, stopped speaking for periods of time, and somehow always found our way back to one another. Life has tested our friendship more than once, but somehow it has only made it stronger.

We reconnected a couple of years ago after spending some time apart—2023… or maybe 2024. Honestly, Vickie will probably read this and remind me which year it actually was because my memory has a habit of blurring timelines together. The date isn’t what matters. Finding each other again is.

Since then, she has stood beside me through some of the darkest moments of my life. She held me through Ronnie’s accident. She held me after my own car accident. She held me through my mom’s stroke, and she held me through losing my mom. She has listened while I cried, laughed with me until neither of us could breathe, celebrated every victory no matter how small, and reminded me who I was when grief made me forget.

Some people come into your life and quietly become family.

Vickie became mine.

We live hundreds of miles apart, yet somehow she’s always been right here beside me. We talk almost every day. We text. We FaceTime. We laugh. We vent. We solve the world’s problems… or at least we think we do. She’s also my blog administrator because I trust her completely, but she’s so much more than that.

She is my person.

Now, after all these years, I finally get to spend four beautiful days with her in her world instead of mine. I don’t even know everything she has planned for us. I know we’re going to the ocean, and beyond that I’m perfectly happy letting her surprise me. That’s part of the adventure. The truth is, I could spend four days sitting on her back patio with a cup of coffee, talking about life and laughing until we snort, and I’d still come home feeling like I’d had the trip of a lifetime.

The Pacific Ocean will be incredible.

Hollywood will be fun.

Seeing California for the first time will be unforgettable.

But wrapping my arms around my sister after all these years…

That’s the moment I’m looking forward to the most.

Although…

California might want to brace itself.

For the first time, the two witchy sisters are finally going to be together.

To everyone in California…

You’ve been warned.

And to everyone outside California…

You should probably consider yourselves warned too.

Who knows what kind of magical mischief two powerful witches can stir up in four days?

Maybe that’s what this chapter is really about.

Not California.

Not Arizona.

Not even standing beneath the blazing desert sun with my hands lifted toward the sky.

It’s about remembering that the lioness who dreamed of adventures all those years ago is still here. She never disappeared. She simply got buried beneath responsibility, grief, obligations, and the ordinary weight of life.

Today, I’m brushing the dust off that part of myself and inviting her back into the light.

I’ve survived enough.

Now it’s time to live.

This is an ongoing memoir of choosing life after merely surviving it. If you’ve ever felt like you’ve been carrying the weight of the world for too long, I hope these words remind you that it’s never too late to reclaim your joy, your curiosity, and your own permission to truly live.

Thank you for walking this journey with me.

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