This month passed by faster than usual. I caught myself pausing halfway through, unsettled by the feeling that my days were beginning to blur together. So, in an attempt to slow things down, I’m trying to take notice of all the small things… the ones that make even the most ordinary moments feel meaningful.

Curated for me and you—an edit of the things I read, watched, and listened to this month, along with a few moments and ideas that stood out along the way.

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I truly used to be the most timid person.
I would avoid going out if I knew there would be a lot of people there.
I would stay cooped up at home if my closest friends weren’t free (and I’d be miserable about it).
I’d avoid living life or doing the things I actually wanted, simply because I had no one to do them with.

…and then one day, I said enough.

I was single, lonely, and honestly tired.
Tired of waiting for someone to make me a priority, or for someone to give me confidence, or for someone to take my fears away and hold my hand through life.

And so I did it for myself.

If you’ve been living in the shadows, waiting for life to finally happen for you…
If you’ve been watching other people live the life you secretly want for yourself…
If you’ve been standing in your own way, blaming circumstances, timing, people, anything, instead of looking inward…

This is for you.

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I had just gotten out of an awful relationship—one that robbed me of my early twenties. It was one of those relationships that isolates you from everyone and everything. It was one of those relationships that puts you down, breaks you down, strips you from your confidence, your sense of self and leaves you questioning your worth.

You know the kind.

After four years of unhappiness, and the final two spent convincing and preparing myself to actually leave… I did.

Then came the months of shock. Untangling every unfair moment, every harmful and hurtful word, and the deep deep loneliness that comes from being in a relationship like that.

Time passed, and though leaving felt freeing, it revealed a strange emptiness. Not clarity, but the absence of myself: my confidence, my worth, my appetite for life.

The loneliness after of the loneliest relationship had settled in, and I simply decided that I didn’t want to live with that kind of hollowness anymore. I decided I wasn’t worthless or filled with fear. And I decided it was time to take my life into my own hands.

So I did the wildest, most liberating thing I could think of.

I booked a ticket to Italy… alone… as one does.

Having no one to travel with, no one to go on dates with, no one to call up whenever you feel lonely—is one of the greatest blessings you will ever receive.

This is how being alone became the thing that truly set me free.

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But this year, when I sit to think of the past year, what stands before all the wondrous things that have happened, is my faith.

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I remember walking into a chapel years ago in Rome. I didn’t truly believe back then, I only knew that there was something greater. I was drawn in by the art, the history, the commemorations, and the weight of it all.

I sat at the pew, bent my knees before the altar, and closed my eyes in prayer. Out of respect, out of habit from my childhood and Sundays in church, out of comfort. And behind my closed eyes, Saint Gabriel appeared before me. It was just a flash, and though I didn’t know what he looked like, I knew it was him.

The feeling was transcendent. An overwhelming moment that caught me off guard and moved me to tears. An affirmation of a presence I so often questioned. God’s divine messenger, letting me know he was with me and that he heard my prayers.

Years passed and I held onto the belief I had found in that chapel, but I couldn’t name it, or maybe I didn’t want to. Something inside me stopped me from doing so. A higher power, I would say or the Universe... but it felt incomplete, at least within me. Not incomplete in that I couldn’t feel His presence, but incomplete in my own faith, and how I leaned into it. How I put my trust in the greater.

But this year, I found God, truly. Or maybe he found me. Lost and looking for answers. Lost and looking for something to ground me, to anchor my values and beliefs in. And so I asked for Him. When I wrote, I would ask for Him to help me find the words. When I was scared, I asked for His protection. When I was seeking to find my way, I asked for Him to lead. I took the trust that I held within myself and the stubborn hyper-independence and hyper-reliance I held onto so tightly, and I gave it away.

To have found God was to have let go of my ego—and to realize that I am not, in fact, alone, as I so often have believed. It meant releasing the pressure I put on myself to do everything on my own, and trusting that His plan is good. Better than good.

I learned that I could never truly grasp what awaited me—what He was ready to fulfill for me—if I kept clinging to what I thought was meant for me. I learned that stillness was not inaction but while I waited (and learned patience), He was moving mountains. And when the trust in myself wavered, my trust in Him never did.

Though His presence had always been there, this year I learned how to listen. When I speak with Him, He answers. He answers in flashes of lightning that light up the darkness as I pray, eyes lifted to the midnight sky. He answers in the shivers that make their way down my spine—a knowing that he’s listening, placing his hand on my shoulder to let me know he’s near. Like an ever present being that holds me the way I hold Him. And just like that, my prayers don’t feel like stranded words anymore. Instead, they’re grounded and rooted in something that is flourishing. Finding God hasn’t removed fear from my life, nor has it removed the drive to keep working towards my dreams. But, it has changed who I reach for when fear arrives, and who I call to when the direction has shifted.

Despite the many blessings in my life, both the ones I share and the ones I keep to myself, the final month of this year was one of the most difficult. It pulled me out of my comfort and safety and stirred a kind of fear that left me shaken.

When there was nothing left to do but pray, I leaned into the faith that had strengthened me in the months past. And He answered. He answered in the gentleness and kindness of strangers, in guiding me safely, in carrying me to where I needed to be, and in granting me the things I prayed for so deeply. I know now, that I don’t have to look too closely to find signs of God. I just have to be open to receiving. Because He is all around.

And so, as this year comes to a close, I don’t look back searching for proof or permanence that I’ve done more, achieved more, seen more... Instead, I set my ego aside. I put my faith before me and I look back with gratitude for the losing, the unlearning, the surrender. For the moments that broke me down, shifted my trajectory and asked me to trust that which lives outside of me.

I don’t know exactly where the next year will lead me. But I know I won’t walk into it alone. This time, I enter it with a faith that has settled into my bones—one that steadies me as I step forward the same way I pray: present, still, and held.

Melody

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The first frame is my favorite.

Not because of the view or the stunning backdrop. Not for the colors of the sea, or for the crowds, but for its simplicity.

Three chairs against a white wall, aprons draped over them like a pause in someone’s day.

I imagine an abuela and abuelo there, maybe with their daughter or son, maybe a grandchild.

She’s just stepped out from the kitchen after a morning of cooking, passing down her most-loved recipes, he’s returned from tending the garden or errands in town. They sit together, looking out at the same view that has me in awe.

Maybe they gossip about the neighbours, maybe they bicker over something small, or maybe they sit in that easy silence that only comes after a lifetime together.

I wonder if they see the beauty that I do, or if it’s simply become the backdrop of their days. I wonder about the lives they’ve lived, and if they reminisce the way I know I will of these days.

It’s a simple frame, but it tells a whole story. It tells many stories. Where life and slowness and presence intertwine to become a life well lived. Despite the magnificence that people travel far and wide to see, it’s a humble life. There is no pretence, no facade. It simply just is.

I think about other lives a lot. Not in envy, but in a curious way.

It is a wonderful thing to leave the familiar behind. To hear the world, taste the world, feel the world and see the world in a lens that feels a little more undone and a little less polished.

It’s an unlocking of the senses in a way you’ve never done before. The familiar of your day to day is washed away by the unknown. You’re suddenly pulled out of the routine that causes everything to blend into one, so much so that you can’t tell days apart.

Your perspective becomes that of an old digital camera.

The perfection of it remains, because it simply is that. And at the same time, it is imperfect, blurry. Your view, once pulled out of the cycle you’ve become so accustomed to, is shaken up. The reality of these lives that feel so far away, are as mundane as your own life back home.

All it takes is that single frame with three chairs against a white wall with aprons draped over them. And you realize that you found someone else’s familiar. You found someone else’s day that seems extraordinary to you, but to them, it simply blends into every other.

We yearn for what others have, others yearn for what we have. But it’s simply all perspective. Life isn’t the perfectly captured picture. It’s the grainy digital camera that offers a different point of view.

And something about these small, ordinary moments makes me think about the shape of a life—how our days stretch and shrink depending on the season we’re in. How in our twenties, everything feels like a beginning. How at forty, we’re searching for meaning in the middle. How at seventy, we might look back and see it all as one long thread of ordinary days we didn’t realize were extraordinary at the time. Maybe that’s why scenes like this move me. Because they collapse time. They remind me that no matter where we are, we’re all just living through a series of “everydays” that eventually become the story of our life.

At our firsts breath and in our oldest age, in our purest innocence, or after we’ve been dealt every hand, when life has yet to begin, or when it’s coming to an end.

Be it skyscrapers that touch the clouds or mountain views that descend into the sea, we’re simply all the same—waiting for the next thing to that will set tomorrow apart.

Melody

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I’m craving solitude.

Time lost to the waves and seaside skin that melts.

The stillness of some far off and foreign land in the middle of the week.

That space where my mind quiets to let my words roam free, coming to surface in the way they only do when I’m away.

A desolate and entirely liberating escape, the kind that bursts me open, sheds me from the facade, and fills me with life.

And all at once.

I’m craving companionship.

A connection that makes time stop and makes my skin shiver.

That which encompasses me under the warmth of crisp white sheets on a weekend morning.

A love so loud it echoes through me, writing itself with a quiet knowing. Undeniable and unwavering.

That sense of wholeness, the one that rids me from my past and fills me with the wonder of what could be.

All at once.

I wonder if there’s a world where the connection can leave space for my solitude.

Where time stills and disappears altogether.

A place where my words flow from the quiet, yet are simultaneously magnified by the uproar of love.

Where that wholeness is liberating in itself. Opening me up to all of life and all of my future.

Where the two lives I crave so deeply can converge into one.

A prayer for a life that lets both breathe, all at once.

Yours,
Melody

I like to think that I’m intuitive. That I follow my gut feelings. That I trust myself so well as to never steer myself wrong.

But maybe that’s not the whole truth.

All of us singles out there have heard it all before…
Your standards are too high.
Maybe lower them a little.
You have unreasonable expectations.
You do it to yourself.
You’re just too difficult, too complicated.

That’s not really the case now is it? I know what I have to offer and what I bring to the table. I would only expect for a man to meet me in that same place, if not from a better one. A man that I admire and that brings out the best in me. And I trust myself enough to know from the very beginning whether my needs and expectations will be met.

But I’d be lying if I said that these days, all of the endless jabs at my desires, haven't been getting to me. Is everyone right? Should I trust myself less?

In the endless dialogue of the chronically single woes, my friend looked at me and said “it’s not that you should trust yourself less, but trust others more…”

For a moment, everything stilled. I sat there, struck silent, staring back at her as her words turned over in my mind. It was a sort of revelation. She saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself. It was as though a light switched on, and the mindset I’d been holding onto—that closed-off energy I had gripped so tightly—finally gave way.

And so I have been attempting to delve deep into my psyche.

Maybe it’s not about trusting myself less but trusting others more.

What does that mean? It’s not that my instincts have ever been off. Every failed situationship, I knew would fail. Quite literally. I knew there was an expiration date almost instantly, but I pursued it anyway.

Why?

Am I constantly looking for someone to prove me right? To disappoint me? To break my trust. Do I dismiss those that may just prove me wrong? Are we all always simply looking for someone to confirm the false narrative that we’ve solidified as true.

If I’m being honest, I’ve been living this self-fulfilling prophecy all long.
Spending more time than necessary with men I already know will disappoint me, lingering just long enough for them to fulfill the expectation and give me the end I never doubted.

It’s a quiet force, this self-perpetuating and reflexive behavior, where my guardedness seeks out the very outcomes I expect most. I simply avoid being proven wrong because I love being right. I really do.

And so this begs the question…

In trying so hard to prove myself right, have I dismissed the ones who might’ve proven me wrong and broken the cycle? Have I been walking around with blinders this whole time? I wonder how many no’s I have thrown around at the nice men—the ones with good intentions, the ones who wouldn’t have broken my trust or disappointed me.

It’s not my instincts that are the problem. It’s actually my trust issues.

That was an unlock. A profound reckoning.

In light of this all, I realize it’s not about getting off my high horse, or lowering my standards. It’s about trusting a little more. It’s about loosening my grip. It’s about giving the nice men—the ones with steady hands and open hearts—a real chance to meet me where I’m at.

Maybe it’s about learning how to lean back, even when it feels terrifying, and letting someone catch me. Maybe it’s about being okay with not knowing the outcome, not knowing if there even is an expiration date.

Maybe it’s about giving myself permission to fall.

After all, a trust fall only works if I’m willing to let go.

Yours,
Melody

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