That was the end of Africa.

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I walked back through the village to the carpark, found my driver, and closed the door.

I’ve been home a week, and this is the first I’ve been able to write.

I want to tell you it was jet lag. Some of it was. But the truer thing is that I walked back into a life where everything has a place, where I am almost painfully organized, and I felt paralyzed.

I stood in my closet and couldn’t move.

Bags I still hadn’t unpacked. Hangers so full I couldn’t slip one more thing between them. I had just spent multiple days an arm’s length from the Big Five, in a world I never thought I’d get to stand in, and I came back to all of this and something in me wouldn’t settle.

So I didn’t force it. I took the week. I cleared my own field before I let myself write about theirs.

And now I can tell you what I discovered.

When I arrived, I fell in love. How could I not?

It was a scene out of Out of Africa. I felt like Meryl Streep among antiques and heirlooms that made the place look more like a film set than a life anyone actually gets to live. I kept waiting for Robert Redford to walk in, scotch in hand, ready for an evening of storytelling by the fire.

&Beyond Bateleur Camp had set the stage. Crystal on white linen. Leather campaign chairs at the edge of the deck, looking out over a sweeping stretch of plain with a single elephant on the horizon.

And then my room.

A tent, yes. But one with a teak door and walls papered in antique maps. A bar cart styled like Ralph Lauren himself had come to arrange it. A crystal decanter labeled SHERRY.

And a brass tub facing a wall of glass, the plain sitting right there, the first thing I’d see in the morning. On the other side of beautiful screened doors that stayed locked all night, but still let the sounds of the Mara seep in. A candle inside a large hurricane votive flickered across the ceiling. Just enough to see by if we needed to get up. Just enough, in the otherwise dark vista.

So yes, I was completely surrounded by luxury. And I own the fact that I love beautiful things.

It’s not what I came from.

I grew up often wearing the same outfit to school two days in a row, hoping no one would notice. I can distinctly remember the one. Black corduroy pants. A green cardigan sweater with a white shirt. And brown boots that were my prized possession. I loved that outfit for everything it was and hated it for everything it wasn’t.

Wearing it made me feel like I fit in. But rewearing it (out of necessity) left me standing outside the inner circle I desperately wanted to live inside. And in high school, that can do a lot to a girl’s psyche. It certainly did mine.

It’s no surprise that I’ve spent much of my adult life surrounding myself with beautiful things. It’s not that I wanted to be as far from that girl as I could get, it’s that my subconscious drove me directly toward everything she envisioned when I finally had the means to make it my own. Somewhere along the way, though, appreciation quietly became accumulation. One more sweater. Another purse or pair of shoes. Beautiful things disappearing into a closet already full of them.

I recall walking through the Ralph Lauren store in downtown Minneapolis during those formative years of my life. I was never the patron. I was the plus one to the friend whose parent was there to meet their personal shopper. Mindfully absorbing every detail. It was a world far from my own, where timeless elegance met quiet luxury. Where worn leather, soft cashmere, warm wood, and objects felt as though they’d been collected over a lifetime, each detail carrying its own story. It felt lived-in, in the most sophisticated way.

Standing in this camp, in the middle of the open plains of Kenya, felt like stepping into the world my teenage self would have dreamed up if someone had handed her an unlimited budget, assigned her a personal shopper, and told her to go big.She would have loved every inch of it.

And here’s what she never could have imagined and what I didn’t expect.

When we woke early the morning after our arrival, something inside of me began to rearrange.

Because when the coffee arrived, on the silver tray, along with the 4:30 AM wakeup call, I stopped insisting on my own preferences and allowed myself to receive what the experience offered. Admittedly though, my gut is only now catching up. But everything exciting in the Mara happens as the sun begins to climb and in the afternoon as dusk falls. Embracing both required something from me. It required a kind of surrender I’d never allowed myself. One that asked me to soften my edges and let go of what I could control.

When I stepped into a basket and lifted off the ground, hovering over the Mara in a hot air balloon, with the lens of the camera stretched as far as it would go with no end in sight, I experienced peace.

Everywhere I looked. Just peace.

And trust me, as the day carried on, and when the lion turned toward our vehicle, the adrenaline went through me like a current. But our guide just sat there. Calm. A true she-warrior, and the embodiment of fierce grace.

And the lion passed just as she knew it would.

The elephants and cheetahs did the same.

We saw it all. From near and far. The herds of animals slowly migrating from the Serengeti, where I stood directly between Tanzania and Kenya. There is something special about being able to check another country off the list by simply placing a foot over the imaginary but real dividing line.

And the kills with the vultures hovering. We experienced those too. The Mara didn’t hold back for us. We got the full show.

And still, in the middle of all of it, the elephant bull charging our vehicle and the lions mating less than ten yards away. Peace.

I loved all of it. It was everything I imagined it would be.

But what I loved most was how at ease I felt.

Yes, I came with the outfit. Curated for every part of the journey, of course. That’s me. That will always be me.

But out there, it wasn’t even needed and it wasn’t what mattered.

And maybe that’s the thing I’m only now realizing. Because arriving home and standing in my closet with hangers I could barely slip a piece of paper between, I was both as far from Africa as I could get and worlds away from the peace I felt when I was there.

Before I could even sit down to write, I had to clear my own field. And I did. I’ll continue to—not to whittle my life down to only the essentials, but to create room for beauty to be seen again. To build from the beauty I already have. Because I will always be the girl in awe in the Ralph Lauren store. But I am no longer chasing.

Africa didn’t make me love beautiful things any less. If anything, it made me appreciate them more.

It’s not lost on me that I’ve spent years trying to surround myself with beauty, only to discover I’d collected so much of it that I could no longer fully appreciate what was already there.

Africa reminded me of something I’ve overlooked.

Beauty needs space.

Space to be noticed. Space to be worn. Space to become part of your life instead of another thing tucked onto an already crowded shelf.

I’ll always love beautiful things.

I just don’t have the same need to be consumed by it anymore. And when I pack for the next safari (which is already in the making) or the next adventure, I will curate it with ease and unpack it without paralysis.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

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P.S. There is a Part Three to this series. Of course there is. I’m still unpacking that one too. It will arrive… soon.

P.P.S. These are the pieces that made the edit. The ones I’m making space for. The ones that will get repacked for the next safari and will continue to wear, rewear, and love for years to come.

Safari Essentials

Layering is the name of the game when packing for safari. It gets super dusty driving through the open plains of the Mara, and the days start really early. Hats are key, both to make for an easy morning departure and to keep the wind from tying knots in your hair. Scarves help combat the dust and keep you warm. I was so grateful for each of these pieces.

• SoldOut.NYC sweater — a great layering piece over my Zara t-shirts.

• James Perse pants — packed light and wore well.

• VEJA tennis shoes — traveled to both Ireland and Africa, and are now a mainstay in my closet.

• Miu Miu hat — a splurge, but worth it for both safari and gorilla trekking. I even shared it with my roomie, who looked darling in it.

• Rag & Bone cap — felt too appropriate not to take along plus it was on sale when I bought it.

• Velvet sarong — doubled as a skirt and a scarf, and folds to nothing when packing.

• Kujten and ASHA scarves — splurges as well, but will be worn for a lifetime.

• Warby Parker progressive reader sunglasses — I’m at the age where readers are required, and on safari, sunglasses are a must against the dust. These doubled as both my readers and my sunnies all week.

You’ve seen the reel. Set to something sweeping from The Lion King. The post that teaches you how to curate your safari wardrobe. The wine picnic laid out with a herd grazing in the vista. The farm-to-table dinner that looks too composed to eat.

Don’t get me wrong. I came fully intending to write my own version of that piece. Lord knows I packed for it. I probably spent as much on every “essential” inside my brand new soft-sided luggage as I did on the trip itself. Each leg its own category, each occasion its own outfit, the whole trip sorted and labeled before I left the house. The limit was thirty-three pounds. I exceeded it. Knowingly. I’m a rule breaker, after all.

And I took the photos. Trust me, I took thousands.

But there are two sides to every story. The other half of the Mara is the one you won’t find in the brochure. The one that makes those beautiful posts even possible. This week, the lens widened, and I met the Kenya that exists behind the shiny four-by-six photos that fill the frames.

Putting these past several weeks into words feels like a task bigger than the land itself. So I’m dividing the telling the way I divide my packing cubes. Four distinct parts, each carrying the weight it deserves. This is part one. Welcome to the Africa you may not have known existed.

I arrived on an organized retreat, the Sacred Awakening Retreat. I’m honestly not a group-travel person. At all. But my daughter Elise called me the moment she saw a dear friend was hosting it. Mom, you have to go. She’d been on safari the year before, and it changed her. She wanted me to see what she saw. It had always been on my bucket list. It just wasn’t on my late husband’s. It seemed like the right time to finally do the thing I’d been waiting to do. A friend decided to come too. That sealed the deal, and I’m so grateful we made the choice to go.

Underneath all of it was Paige Elenson. Paige has lived in Kenya for the better part of two decades, responsible for the employment of countless youth through an organization she co-founded, Africa Yoga Project. A non-profit that uses yoga to educate and employ young people across Africa, so they can become leaders in their own communities. An organization I hold dear.

With her name on the itinerary, I should have known. A trip Paige touches is never the curated half. Of course the lens got wider. That’s what she does. She widens it, then asks you to look in the most introspective, beautiful and inviting way.

And here’s the part that gets me. It was all right there on the schedule. Spending time in the local environment, connected to the community, nature and purpose. I read it like a mission statement and saw it as logistics. Then, I lived it as something else entirely.

So I looked.

It’s everywhere, if you’re looking. Unless you arrive by private jet, positioned right beside a five-star camp, which is possible, and is part two of this series. But that’s not how I first arrived. My drive was long.

Nothing in the Mara is close. Every journey requires some version of an unpaved road. And the longer you travel, the more you see. The children walking to school, some without shoes. The homes of mud and thatch, of tin pressed into walls. The river, and the mile of hill between it and everywhere the water needs to go.

None of it staged, posed, or curated for a reel. Just authentic. Always there. Exactly that far outside the frame I’d have happily called the whole picture.

Not this week, though.

This week, I lived outside the frame.

We visited a primary school where we stepped off the safari trucks like celebrities walking into a stadium of screaming fans. They don’t get visitors often, so they welcomed us like we were the most important people who had ever arrived. Children reaching for my hand, touching my blonde hair, saying my name, telling me they loved me.

They meant it. That’s the part that takes the floor out from under you. The people with the least, giving us all they have to offer. Their time. Their presence. Their hands to hold. Their voices.

We played. We laughed. We had the simple kind of joy, the kind that doesn’t check whether anyone’s watching.

We felt the same fanfare at the local college and high school. Students who are the first in their families to receive an education. Celebrities in their own villages, in their own right. They see education as an opportunity, a means to a new life, for themselves and for the countless family members behind them. Their pride, their joy, their devotion, their determination. If you could bottle it, it would be worth more than anything sold here.

We visited the Kipsigis mamas. Literally the mothers of the community. We met a woman who built her home over eleven years for about a hundred and fifty dollars. I have spent more than that on a Tuesday and could not tell you on what.

She invited us in. Shared her life. Held the whole room with the story of how she’s transforming her community by empowering the women in it.

Then she showed us how she lives. We walked down to the river and filled the jugs. The ones they depend on to sustain their lives. Wash their clothes. Cook their food. Water their crops. And care for their livestock.

And the jugs weren’t light. They were fourteen liters (or forty pounds to you and me, which required a Google search and conversion to know). Then, up the hill. With the full jug strapped to my back or wrapped around my head (an option I didn’t take for fear that I would return without a full head of hair).

I did it once, as an experience. They do it multiple times a day simply to survive.

I got to put mine down. They cannot.

And there are photos I didn’t take.

Not because I didn’t want to capture the moment. Because the moment captured me, in a way no photo could hand back to anyone later. Some things don’t go through the lens. They go straight in and stay.

The most real hour of my week is the one with no proof it happened.

And then there’s Jackson.

I spent the week with Jackson. A Maasai elder. Warrior, in the way the word actually means here. The last generation to earn it the old way.

The most obvious and still prevalent telltale sign of a Maasai warrior is a missing front tooth. It’s a visible marker of identity, of beauty, maturity, and belonging. The sign that someone has crossed into adulthood and earned their place in the community. Worn with pride, never hidden. And even if they wanted it back, a dentist is not a profession in the Mara. When that tooth comes out, it’s done by an elder with the tip of a machete. The same one they carry at their waist. The same one that cuts the leaf from the vine, and in a worst-case scenario, the last defense in a wildlife encounter. All of which occur.

Last night Jackson walked us through the brush. Taught us the weapons. And then, the path. What it has always taken to become a warrior here, and what that path has become.

At fourteen, one of the first rites is a public circumcision. The circumciser’s only job is to make the boy flinch. A blink. A breath. The twitch of a single toe as the blade meets skin, sometimes dull as a kitchen knife, sometimes doused in hot pepper oil. Any movement, and the label follows him and his family for generations. If he holds still, he’s earned it. If he doesn’t, his mother is beaten for raising a weak son.

The other rite was to kill a male lion. Alone. With a spear.

Jackson has killed six.

He told us this himself, at dusk, in the brush he’s known his whole life. Not as a performance. As a path. One he then explained has since been retired. The lions are protected now. And the change made room for something else: girls can become warriors too. And I met one, a she-warrior. I only knew she was a warrior by her tooth. The proving ground is no longer killing a lion. It’s education. The reward is still a cow. It remains the most prized gift and family possession. And one they work hard to achieve.

I keep thinking about who Jackson is in a safari photo. The silhouette. The red shuka against the sky, the figure the Mara prints on its brochures.

Every piece Jackson wears tells a story about identity, age, status, and community. His shuka, beadwork, jewelry, sandals, staff, and spear. What you do not see among them is his pen. Jackson co-authored a book, The Last Maasai Warriors, and he’s wielding the pen as purposefully as he once wielded the spear, toward something harder to win.

He and his fellow elders are rewriting a playbook as old as the land itself. Not to be photographed. To be heard. To change the landscape into one where girls become warriors through school instead of survival. Where women have a voice, earn a living, carry it back to their communities. Where there’s infrastructure, and health that’s tended, and clean water that doesn’t cost a mile uphill. Where there’s food.

The spear protected the old world.

The pen is building a new one.

And he didn’t hide any of it from us. None of them did. They didn’t keep their half of the Mara outside the frame. They invited us in, so that we might help carry the voice out. So that when the world looks at Kenya, it sees something that makes it pause instead of scroll. Something that connects the dots between the beautiful moment and what it costs to make that moment possible.

A community’s survival, underneath the postcard.

I don’t know what to call the week.

On paper it was a retreat. That’s what I booked. That’s what I paid for. It wasn’t a mission trip. It wasn’t a training. And I won’t shrink it by calling it a cultural immersion, or a life-changing experience, though I suppose it was both. Those words are too small.

I still don’t have the word for it. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s enough to know this half of the Mara exists. And to know that the half I came for, the five-star luxury one, isn’t at odds with it. It’s welcomed. Because it offers the Maasai what they need to build their new world.

What I do know is what Mara authenticity looks like now. And it’s not in any brochure.

The curated bag is me. Authentically me. Every considered, labeled, occasion-matched piece of it. I packed for the trip I thought I was taking.

The Mara didn’t stay in its category.

I’m writing this en route to the half I came for. The Instagram-worthy one. I’ve learned there are two real times to see the Big Five, the animals everyone comes for: dawn and dusk. My next stop has it all teed up, curated and certain, the animals practically waiting in the wings. I won’t pretend I won’t love every frame.

Both are true. The woman with the curated bag and the one who carried the water a mile uphill. I’m not choosing between them. Jackson is the reason I don’t have to.

And tomorrow at dawn, a hot air balloon. It will lift me up and show me how vast this land is. How far apart two lives can sit on the same stretch of ground. The divide between where I was this week and where I’ll be an hour from now, measured in a single ride.

I’ll be looking down at both halves at once.

But the thing I can’t stop turning over isn’t ahead of me. It’s Jackson, riding shotgun.

Two hours from Bogani to the five-star camp, he stayed on as our guide, watching the road, keeping us safe, all the way into the half of the Mara I came for. The same spear that killed six lions, now clearing the bush bathroom of wildlife before we stepped in. Trust me, two hours on those roads requires a pit stop or two. Behind a tree or not, it’s a necessity at 52.

He has every reason to resent this half. The luxury. The lens. The version of his homeland that gets sold while his people carry water up a hill.

He doesn’t.

He loves it. All of it. He knows this half feeds his land and his people, and he embraces it the way he embraces the rest, with joy, with wonderment, with both halves held easily in the same two hands that have thrown a spear and now hold a pen.

I spent a week learning I didn’t have to choose between the woman with the curated bag and the one who carried the water.

The man with the most reason to choose was sitting beside me the whole time.

Choosing both.

Still.

Always EDITing, Leslie

P.S. - Part two is the half I came for. The luxury. The Big Five at dawn and dusk. The frames I won’t pretend I won’t love. Coming next.

And part three. Aline. Through Africa Yoga Project, I spent three years mentoring a young teacher in Rwanda. We’ve never met in person. In a few days, we will. Everything else on this trip, I packed for. Her, I can’t. That moment will come with emotion that will require its own version of unpacking. That one gets its own Edit.

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I first heard it in a yoga class. Now I keep learning it the hard way, and I can’t seem to escape it, or myself.

Because yes, last week, I did, in fact, get us escorted out of one of the world’s greatest libraries.

And if I must admit it, I am shamelessly proud of myself for it.

We approached The Old Library at Trinity College Dublin as naive travelers, completely unaware you had to buy tickets and book a time. For once in my life, this trip had no itinerary. We’d come to Ireland for a wedding, an extraordinary one. A few bucket list items: the Cliffs of Moher, Guinness. Beyond that, The Old Library was the only other thing on the list.

It never occurred to me a library required tickets.

When they told us the next available tour was several hours later, I looked at my husband and said, well, wherever there’s an entrance, there’s an exit. Let’s go find it.

Dave is the rule follower. I told him to follow my lead.

And that he did.

Because when someone tells me I can’t, I don’t take it at face value. I turn it into oh, yeah? Let me prove to you that I can.

I told the guard I was looking for my mother, the ticket holder. She was not, in fact, there, or in Ireland at all. He was kind enough to believe me, which is the reason my husband continues to pray for me, and let us up the steps.

There it was, in all its glory. The heads of all the literary greats, capstoning each aisle. The shelves themselves mostly empty; the library is under reconstruction. (Which for some reason made me feel slightly better about my little white lie.) I walked around. Took a few photos, and asked Dave to take a few more for me.

He was visibly uncomfortable. Stiff as a board. My poor Catholic husband. In the silence of that grand barrel-vaulted Long Room, with only the faint whispers of tourists, it was as though I could hear him quietly reciting “forgive us our trespasses” over and over as he made his way past each of the famed marble busts.

The library also holds the original Guinness harp, alongside the university’s oldest books. To round out our nefarious break-in, we started toward the harp, past the exit stairs we’d climbed on the way in. Just then Dave noticed an older couple leaving, turned, and said, let’s follow behind them. She looks old enough to be your mother. The guard will be none the wiser. I looked at him, I’m sure with an eye roll, and carried on with my quest.

Just as we laid eyes on the harp, the guard laid eyes on us. With a knowing look, he pointed to the stairs and ushered us directly down and out. Dave, with his tail between his legs and me with my head held high.

For the record, we did make a donation at the library gift shop. I am not a conscienceless bandit.

It’s not lost on me that I got kicked out of a library at a university I could never have gotten into in the first place.

But travel just goes to show you. You can never truly escape who you are.

And it’s not just travel. When I started on Substack, the plan was a lifestyle blog. Travel, aesthetics, the curated stuff. From the very first piece, what came out was something else. A turn inward. A deeper dive. Of course it did. Wherever you go, there you are. I have always been interested in understanding myself more deeply.

Here’s the thing, though.

In the moment, my reaction came from what was already wired. I didn’t pause long enough to understand what was driving me to the exit. I just started walking. Dave reluctantly in tow, but curious enough to stick with me. He’s also keenly aware of my instinct to break rules and wasn’t about to challenge it in the midst of the library square buzzing with scholars who held the air of “I belong,” where we clearly didn’t.

It was only later, only when I sat down to write this, that I had to do the double-click. To ask why I couldn’t just take no at face value. Why my brain doesn’t hear “you can’t” and stop. It hears it and goes hunting for the way in.

And I know exactly where it comes from.

You cannot leave the dinner table until you eat that entire fish. Head, eyes, and all.

I know my dad’s reading this. So. Thanks, Dad. You’re the reason I became a stubborn rule breaker.

I don’t know what he was trying to prove. The fish was larger than my plate, though in fairness it was probably a sardine, but that was also before the days of his sobriety, so who knows. All I recall is that I sat there and must have thought: I’m not going to grow roots in this chair. Eventually they’ll get tired enough to want their own beds. And if I wait long enough, I’ll leave this table without eating a single bite.

So I sat. And I waited. And I left, fish untouched.

Something got wired that night when I was just eight years old. When someone says you can’t, there is always a way in which you can.

Decades later, it walked me up the stairs of The Old Library.

I didn’t decide to be that person at the entrance. I already was. The deciding, the seeing, only came after.

And that’s the part I’ve actually been working on. Not just since I started writing. For a long time now. Getting to know my parts. The stubborn one. The analytical one. The one that reverts to a child at a dinner table without noticing she’s done it.

We all have them. The people pleaser. The one who needs to be right. The one who keeps the peace and calls it kindness.

We weren’t born knowing an apple was an apple. Someone showed us. We learned it. And anything learned can, in theory, be unlearned.

But only if you can catch it in the act.

That’s the work. Seeing the part show up. Oh, there it is again. And understanding where it came from. Some of mine I like. Some of them I’m proud of (I am a damn good organizer). And some of them get in the way of being a good partner, a good parent, a good human. Those are the ones I’m still tracing back to the root.

I’ll never escape myself.

But maybe that was never the point. Maybe the point is to finally see it, the part that walks to the back door before I’ve even decided to, and ask where it came from.

So here’s my curiosity, beyond the travel: what part of you shows up when you’re not looking? The spirited one. The one that craves being seen. The one that needs to be liked, to belong.

When does it show up?

And do you know yet where it was wired? Please share. I would love to learn from each of you.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. A few frames from the rest of our day in Dublin.

We started at Guinness, the self-guided Stoutie tour winding up through the building. For 170 years they didn’t advertise; the beer did the talking. When the family finally agreed to it, there was one rule: the advertising had to be as good as the beer and they proved it to be. They let you sample, then they let you taste. We had our own selfies poured into the foam, then climbed to the Gravity Bar, the round room with the 360 view of the whole city.

A picture-perfect day, the kind Ireland doesn't hand out often. We walked the entire city. Split the G more than once. We found our way into a whiskey bar and even ate Shepherd's Pie. (If you find your way to Dublin, The Ivy has one that's worthy of every bite.)

I don’t regret a minute of it. Including the break-in.

P.P.S. I am still working on the piece that gets to the root of all my parts. That journey has its own story. One that is taking time. In the meantime, I just arrived in Africa. The next few Edits will be from this extraordinary part of the world. Stay with me.

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How are you wired? What drives you? I’d love to know. Are you a rule breaker? Ruler follower? Fellow aspiring CIA Agent? Organizer? Planner? Casual observer? The list is longer than space allows. Drop your most beloved part below. Let’s discovery through each other.

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Rather than battle spotty wi-fi loading all the photos and tales from our time in Ireland, I’ll leave you with this. A photo from the cornerstone of our trip. The reason we had a reason to visit this majestic Emerald Isle.

Not that visiting Ireland needs a reason beyond curiosity and a little spirited adventure. But this epic Bridgerton-esque wedding, fresh oyster and champagne cart included, became ours. And it was nothing short of incredible.

More to come Sunday. Including how I got my rule-following, Type-A, Catholic-born and still-practicing husband to break into Ireland’s most beloved historic library.

And then get escorted out. Oops.

While he’s still asking for forgiveness. I’ll be writing about it.

Cheers from somewhere above Ireland.

Until Sunday…

Always EDITing,
Leslie

P.S. I’d love to know your favorite travel tales or destinations. Drop a comment. I am always looking to plan the next escapade.

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P.P.S. I am headed on safari in Kenya and then onto Rwanda to go gorilla trekking. If you’re interested in following along, subscribe for all the updates along the way.

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I am just at the beginning of a multi-continent adventure. This first stop is Ireland.

What I didn’t have was the rest of my luggage. It was en route to Paris. Ironically, my favorite city in the world. One of the best places to run in the early morning, the smell of bread baking city-wide.

I digress.

It took 36 hours. Whether it was standard procedure, my bulldog persistence with Delta, or the customer service rep who seemed to place 911-level alerts throughout their system, our bags finally arrived. The AirTags earned their spot on my Travel Essentials list. We could tell Delta exactly where to find the bags.

Fortunately for me, my husband is as patient as a saint and sees the bright side of everything. Our attention never landed on what we didn’t have. Only on what we did.

I am learning to roll more like a ball and less like a square.

Oddly enough, Dave is more organized than me. I truly found my unicorn, but where we differ is he rolls while I fumble. Sometimes I get so caught up in perfecting that I lose sight of what is most important.

My late husband and I traveled the world together. I’m still wound tight, but his itineraries had itineraries. Looking back, I wonder how much I lost in that.

I’ve seen it show up everywhere since. An unwillingness to let go. Gripping something so tight that other things slip by.

You know the grip. We all have one.

Hello, sword of blame and judgment. I’m grateful I set those down years ago. The heaviest, the one of righteousness, that one still lives in the arsenal. It’s dusty. It’s also what keeps the edges of my square sharp. That sword though is slowly dulling as are my edges.

The last couple of years have been filled with loss. I lost my late husband and my best friend both unexpectedly, and then my daughter to college, followed by a whole litany of change. Some planned, some spontaneous, some out of left field. All of it has taught me more lessons than I asked for. More than I care to count. Many of which I am still trying to piece together as I piece myself back together.

While this 26 day adventure could read as an Eat, Pray, Love like midlife reconciliation, it’s not. It’s just pure fun.

Ireland first. Then onto parts of the world I only dreamed of discovering.

So here’s where it began.

From the Dublin airport, we were driven straight to Adare Manor, in a small, quaint village in County Limerick. This pivot from our original plan arrived last week. We couldn’t return from Ireland without a glimpse of what we’d only seen in movies. But the immediacy of the drive meant picking up the basics at the Manor pro shop, which Dave didn’t mind, and the manor boutique, which I relished. The local wool and cashmere artisan designed her brand around creativity and sustainability (Cayo). How could I not want to support her… on Delta’s dime.

We both found exactly what we needed for the day ahead.

That first night, in what we arrived with, we wandered into the village for a pint and a prosecco. Then the local grocery store. For a hairbrush. Seriously, I arrived with no toiletries but somehow with a camera I still don’t know how to use and my favorite handbags, the ones that made the travel list.

The woman who packed 26 vitamin bags. Buying a hairbrush in a village shop in Ireland while staying at a Manor so precisely manicured that each blade of grass on this Central Park-like property (one acre less, in fact) seems as curated as each of my packing cubes. The irony.

I grew up with twins for close friends each with beautiful wavy red hair. A far cry from my stick-straight blonde. They could wash and go on the fly. The perfectionist and future banker in me (yes, I started my career as one) needed all the product and all the tools.

My hair has never been my friend. Shower and go looks profoundly different on me.

I had someone once tell me my hair was too straight. What does that even mean anyway? I am still untangling that one.

So thank you, Adare Grocery.

The next morning we met Keiran, our driver, from the town of Adare. He knows the region like the back of his hand. Every winding road. Every little village. He took us first to Bunratty, a 15th-century castle, exactly the medieval winding staircase you’d imagine. We climbed to the top and got the most epic photo. Irish luck. Two people kissing with an Irish flag blowing behind them.

From there, through the hills, to the shores of Lahinch where we spotted a few Irish surfers, then onto the Cliffs of Moher.

What do I say about the Cliffs of Moher.

Dramatic. Epically green from continuous days of rain. And windy. I mean blow-me-over kind of wind.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a hairbrush. There was no controlling my hair anyway.

Nor did it matter that the only thing I’d arrived in Ireland with was a pair of tennis shoes. The ones I wore on the plane.

Because that’s exactly what the day needed.

On the way back we stopped at an old Irish pub, Fitz’s, in Doolin, for seafood chowder, brown bread, and a pint of Guinness, of course. Then back to Adare, where we were finally reunited with our luggage.

A shower awaits. One where I can wash my hair and brush it with a brush of my own and all the product to hold down my locks.

But standing at the edge of those cliffs today, with none of it. No plan. No luggage. No hairbrush. No control over a single strand of hair in that wind.

I didn’t miss any of it.

Turns out, I am after all these years, finally learning to roll.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. My writing usually comes from reflection. Experiencing something, then letting it land. The next few weeks look different. Less reflected. More lived. Sent from the road, through the lens of a camera I’m still learning. The cadence will wobble. Stay with me. I’ll be here, just in motion.

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Lost anything along the way? I am curious what other travel snafus you’ve encountered. I am certain I am not alone here.

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Yesterday I was late to a meeting because one more thing needed labeling.

It was a planning meeting. I’ll let that sit for a second.

On Wednesday I leave for almost a month. Twenty-six days, several countries, more time zones than I want to count. Part of it city, part of it jungle. I’ll be gorilla trekking in Rwanda before it’s over. And celebrating our nation’s 250th birthday on a rooftop over the Potomac by returning to Florida.

So this week I’ve been decanting things into smaller containers. TSA-approved, which means everything I own is now in a vessel it doesn’t normally live in. I label each one. Not because I’m fussy. Because three weeks from now I’ll be reaching for something at an hour my body doesn’t recognize, jet-lagged, off my circadian rhythm, awake when I shouldn’t be. And I will not trust myself to know what’s what.

The lotion and the shampoo look the same in unmarked travel bottles. I don’t want to wash my face with shampoo or put lotion in my hair.

So I label. So that disoriented me, somewhere unfamiliar, knows exactly which packing cube has the pajamas and where the charging cord is. I rearrange my whole life around TSA’s rules so the bag that matters never leaves my side. And TSA doesn’t trash my belongings. I’ve had that happen before. It’s expensive mistake.

I was in the middle of it yesterday. I got caught up in it again today. It’s part of my DNA.

And somewhere in the middle of it, a few minutes past the time I should have arrived, my girlfriend texted me. Are you coming?

I shot her a quick text back that my voice note got as rocky as I was in the moment: a little bit of grace I am almost there I am a type a girl living in a type B world today it’s been a little rocky trying to roll like a square

Here’s what you should know about me. My house is categorically categorized. Labeled. Someone else could move in tomorrow and find the batteries. The safety pins. The things that were notoriously lost, never findable, in the many homes I grew up in.

I built this. On purpose.

And I love it. This isn’t a confession. I love the hyperorganized, diligent part of me.

It’s not for everyone. I get that.

But here’s what I believe: the work you put in to build the foundation creates ease everywhere else.

The hours this week are not lost hours. The label maker is not a quirk I’m sheepish about. The version of me reaching for something three time zones from home, she’s calm, because the version of me standing here today did the work. That’s the trade. Front-loaded effort for future ease.

So yes. Sometimes the same instinct that makes me ready makes me late. A few minutes other people would never spend, spent on a label they’d never think to make.

My late husband George used to say I lived on my own time zone.

He wasn’t wrong.

Some days I’m trying to roll like a ball. But I’m a square. So the path is a little rocky.

And it’s still my path. I’ve watched my daughter grow into the same wiring. The same desire to have structure. Organization. A home for everything that needs a home.

It’s a part of me I have grown to love and rely on.

Others rely on me for it now too. It’s become a gift.

Ultimately the label isn’t the thing that slows me down.

The label is the thing that means future me never has to search. That is the grace.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. If you’re wired like me, here’s how I keep myself contained and feeling closest to home on the road. And if you’re not, here’s what to get the square in your life.

These are the ten I don’t leave home without. Not a ranking. The whole list.

Packing cubes and an extra bag for dirty clothes. You can find cubes anywhere, and I’ve tried many over the years. What I like about these: they zip all the way open. I’ve had others that don’t, and that’s frustrating when you’re trying to pack things flat without wrinkling them. The compression is key too. Not the vacuum-sealed kind, those leave everything too wrinkled. These ones are great. And the extra bag for dirty clothes, when I forget it, I always regret it. Rolling up one extra takes no space and saves you every time.

RIES airless pump travel bottles. Mine are the set of three, 1.7 oz, TSA-approved and leak-proof. I use them for shampoo, conditioner, and face soap. They’re refillable, BPA-free, easy to use, and I’ve never had one leak. They turn at the top. One note: they come marked shampoo and conditioner, but I find the labels hard to read in the shower. As I said, I’m a little old these days and can’t quite see the way I used to. So I take a Sharpie to them. Of course I do.

Cadence travel containers. I use the Daily Routine set, magnetic containers with lids, four mediums at 1.32 oz and three smalls at 0.56 oz. My favorite for condensing face products. The magnets mean they snap together and don’t roll around, and the sizes cover everything from shampoo to pills.

The Simplehuman light-up mirror. Compact, lit, and 10x magnification. I can’t live without it. Hotel bathrooms have terrible lighting. My eyes are aging. If I have any intention of wearing makeup, or just want an honest look at my own skin, I can’t rely on anything but this. The magnification and the light together make it worth the price.

Katie Loxton makeup bags. I have them in three sizes. They fold open. They’re durable. I’ve tried so many others. These are my favorite by far.

Pill bags. I’ve shared these before. Each day of vitamins and supplements goes into its own little reusable bag. They’re also great for jewelry. Hair ties. Coins. Nearly anything small. I don’t like things rolling around the bottom of my bag. And here’s a small trick I’m proud of: you can peel the label off a medicine bottle and reattach it to the bag. I did that with my malaria pills for Africa and got to recycle the bottle.

5-in-1 portable charger. This one seems obvious. But I’ve forgotten a charger before. What I love about this one: it has three cables built in plus a wall plug, so it covers everything and I don’t need to pack separate cords or adapters. You never know if you’ll land next to an outlet, on a plane, in an airport, or anywhere else. This one has been with me across the globe.

The red exercise band. Mine comes in a five-pack, and the red one is my go-to. Just the right amount of resistance. I’ve used these consistently for years. It weighs nothing and I can do an entire workout with it. Core work, all of it. There are so many things you can do with one band, and it takes up zero space. It keeps me on track when my routine is anywhere but home. It also makes a great bookmark, if you want it to. There’s always one in my bag.

AirTags. This goes without saying, but it occurred to me today when I went to buy replacement batteries for them. I popped mine into little holders with a clip, so I can attach them right to a zipper inside the suitcase. That way it’s not rolling around and feels a little extra secure. If you do have to check a bag, they’re an extra layer of comfort. Lost luggage happens. When it does, it helps to know exactly where it is.

The Tumi Just In Case Tote. This one is a gem. It costs hardly any room, but if you find yourself needing more space on the way home, souvenirs are sometimes a must, it fits more than you think. You can consolidate into it and suddenly you don’t look like a bag lady. The two-bag rule can be frustrating. This lets you put bags inside bags and wheel on board without an issue.

Finally, a reminder. When you’re shopping for any of this online, check Rakuten first. If you’re not using it, I can’t say enough about it, and the thousands of dollars I’ve earned back over time. True cash in my pocket. If you want to know more, I wrote about it in my piece called Girl Math. You won’t regret it. Neither will your bank account.

Wow… if you got all the way to the end… THANK YOU for reading.

Type A or Type B? And what's the one thing you'd never leave home without? Tell me what I missed.

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Each week, I write about the patterns we don’t see until we name them. Motherhood. Marriage. Grief. The roles we keep playing. Two pieces a week. Tuesday and Sunday. Follow along.

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That space is already taken.

Someone else already rose to the top. That idea has already been claimed.

What else could possibly be invented?

This is what runs through my head when I listen to other people’s success stories. Not from a jealous place. It’s deeper than that. It’s a quiet belief that someone is already sitting at the head of every table. Every meaningful seat filled by someone smarter, more talented, more connected, more experienced.

So you start questioning what you could possibly bring that doesn’t already exist.

A friend said something to me yesterday.

I think my brain is where good ideas go to die.

She meant the ideas that arrive and never leave the room they were born in. I’ve been sitting with that line ever since, because I know exactly where I do my own version of it.

I open the app and it’s a wall of other people’s announcements.

I just signed with an agent. I just published a book. I just made the bestseller list.

All of it real, all of it earned, all of it amazing. And I read it from the base of the foothills, looking up at people standing somewhere near the summit, wondering if the climb is even still available. Is the shelf space already full?

Sometimes other people’s success propels you. It gives you momentum, pulls you forward, shows you the thing is possible.

And sometimes the same exact thing flattens you.

Same input. Opposite effect. The difference is just whatever you already believed about your own seat at the table when you opened the app.

I think this is happening to a lot of people right now. And this time of year magnifies it.

Students are graduating. My daughter is nearly one of them. One minute she’s a curly bleach-blonde girl in jean shorts and Birkenstocks with a backpack. The next she’s in heels and a structured suit carrying what is essentially a briefcase on her way to her internship.

Of course there’s an identity crisis. How could there not be?

The costume changes before the nervous system catches up.

A young friend I had dinner with a few week’s ago put it darker. The real reckoning isn’t a year out from graduation. It’s the anniversary of your first day of work, when it lands that this is the next thirty or forty years.

Most of us hit some version of that. Again and again. For the rest of our lives.

At 22 it sounds like: Who am I in this world now?

At midlife it sounds like:

Am I too old? Too late? Too behind? Does the world even need another voice in this space?

That last one is mine. The one I have to talk myself out of. What could I possibly offer that hasn’t already been said better by someone else.

And yet I keep watching the same truth get authored over and over, by remarkable people, in completely different ways. Same idea. Different carrier. And the carrier is the whole thing.

Because people don’t connect to ideas.

They connect to energy. Perspective. Voice. Timing. The particular life someone lived before they said the thing.

Twenty people can speak on the exact same topic and one person rearranges something inside you.

Not because the topic was new.

Because the person was.

I listened to Oprah on her podcast recently. She said that for the first time since her original show ended, she finally feels lit up again. Creatively. Like she’d come out of a fog.

And I thought, if Oprah Winfrey can sit in a fog, what makes the rest of us think we’re failing when we do?

Maybe the fog isn’t failure. Maybe it’s just what happens before reinvention.

I did some deep therapy work a few weeks ago. Not the kind that just looks at your past. The kind that goes after the root of what you believe about yourself.

And what I found was something I already knew.

I am not worthy.

I’ve carried that one a long time.

Here’s what I’ve realized in the weeks since. When that belief gets touched, when something leaves me feeling unseen, unheard, like there aren’t enough seats at the table, it doesn’t show up as a thought. It shows up in my body. Something lands in the pit of my belly. A tightness in my chest. My nervous system tangles. I come undone.

Social media is the red light. You open it and you don’t know what’s coming. Some days it’s all golden retrievers. Right now it's gorillas, because I'm getting ready to go gorilla trekking in Rwanda.

And some days it’s a thread of people standing at the summit, and the thing lands in my body before my brain has a say.

For a long time I thought that feeling was information. That it meant something true about me. That I was never worthy of a seat at all.

It isn’t.

I think about one of my first yoga classes. Packed. Wall to wall, mat to mat, inches apart. The instructor brought us into a wide-leg forward fold and invited anyone who wanted to take a headstand.

Oh, dear Lord, I thought. This is going to be dominoes. The whole room coming down on top of each other.

Head below my heart, a window between my legs, I looked back through the sea of people. And there were feet in the air. Solid. Like pillars in the middle of the room.

I wasn’t doing yoga. I was doing watch asana. Marveling at the room, certain I’ll never be able to do that.

Years later I was the one calling for the headstand, in a studio I built that’s twelve years strong. And I was the one with my feet in the air, head rooted to the ground. Or hands planted, feet high overhead. I’m five foot nine and a half, and when I take a handstand I become something that feels indestructible. The tallest pillar in the room.

If I’d stayed in the seat of the student. In watch asana. Tangled in the belief that it wasn’t mine to do.

I’d never have gotten there.

That response. The flatten, the pit of the belly, the voice. It’s coming from an old part of me. An unhealed one. And the difference now is that I can feel it for what it is. Not a verdict. Just a wound getting touched.

When it starts to feel like that childhood game, musical chairs, the music stopping, suddenly not one left for you...

there is.

You just have to go grab it from another room. Pull it up.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. Each week, I write about the patterns we don’t see until we name them. Motherhood. Marriage. Grief. The roles we keep playing. Two pieces a week. Tuesday and Sunday. Follow along.

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P.P.S. I'm leaving soon for a few weeks overseas. A friend said to me today, people must be so excited to see what you're up to. I'll be honest… that had never once occurred to me. So I'm genuinely curious. Would you want to see the photos? Tell me. I'd love to know.

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I do at 52.

15,700 likes. 531 comments. In two days.

I started Thursday with zero followers. By Sunday I had 582, and my profile had been viewed nearly a quarter of a million times.

For someone who doesn’t have a real social media presence, this felt insane.

Let me back up.

I’m trying to grow my Substack. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Some people arrive with an audience already built. A following somewhere else that comes with them. I’m not one of them. No real Instagram presence. I’m not an influencer. I’m not, honestly, much of a social media person at all.

So I’ve been paying attention to how other people do it. I’ve read all the articles. You know what I mean.

There’s a writer I started following a few months ago. She’s a wonderful writer, and her growth has been remarkable. Honestly, none of it surprises me. In one piece she mentioned a note she’d posted on Threads that had taken off. I got curious… enough to actually go look. I wanted to understand what it was about.

What I found surprised me. It isn’t Instagram. It isn’t quite Substack either. It felt like a younger brother… a looser, more provocative version with less guardrails. Less performance. More chat. Like stepping into a pub where everyone’s had a couple drinks and words are flowing freely.

And I’ll be honest. There’s a part of me, at 52, that still feels unworthy of taking up the space. Sharing a platform with gifted writers. That part of me felt somewhat at ease with Threads.

So on Thursday, on the way to Washington, I jumped in anyway. Zero following. My first note: I just arrived on the scene. Any tips for the new kid on the block?

Twenty people answered.

Just be yourself. Comment when you want. Think of it like a big chat group.

Lift others up.

Be as feral as you like.

Block family and friends from real life if you want to stay feral.

Don’t post dick pics.

I laughed out loud at that last one. It’s 2026 and we still have to say it to each other.

But that was the thing. The whole welcome was like that. Honest. Disarming. Nobody selling anything. Nobody curating. Welcoming in a way that didn’t feel performative at all.

So I tried. I posted a few things. Shared a few thoughts. Nothing was tracking.

Then Saturday night, on our way to dinner in DC, it occurred to me I hadn’t posted again all day.

So I put up that photo. Those four words.

I’d been studying how to grow, doing the small deliberate things. And the thing that traveled was the one I almost forgot to post.

A second thought. Something I was sure wouldn’t make a difference.

Not instead of the effort. On top of it.

The deliberate work got me in the room. The thing I didn’t think about is what people could feel.

I was trying to grow. I wasn’t trying to win.

When I lost my late husband unexpectedly, when life flipped upside down and everything I knew went with it, rebuilding wasn’t about winning. How could it be? It was about moving forward. The only direction I could go. I hear people say, I’m in my no fucks era. I think about it differently. It’s discernment without abandonment.

I still care. In fact I care deeply. I just care differently now.

Maybe that’s why I could post it without thinking.

Yes, the numbers stopped me. But what really got my attention was the messages.

Hundreds of them. Some version of the same thing, over and over.

Thank you for giving me hope.

Hope for love. Hope for a second chapter. Hope that life can still surprise us. Hope that their story isn’t over.

I’ve read nearly all of them. I’m still answering each one.

I didn’t post it to inspire anyone. I posted it because I’m in love, and I wanted to share the moment.

For the first time in my life, I’ve been stepping outside my comfort zone. In front of the camera. And this strange new place felt, of all things, safe enough to do it.

What surprised me most was how many people were reaching for hope.

People are looking for it everywhere. In small places. In big ones. I drove around town today, an ordinary Monday, and caught the stink eye at half the stop signs. People are tired. People are bracing.

And then four words and a photo gave a few thousand strangers something to hold onto.

Faith, Hope, and Love were the cornerstone of our wedding. They’re the cornerstone of our marriage. They sit underneath everything.

But hope might be the one the world is hungriest for right now.

If four words and an image can offer it, then so can the words and the talents the rest of us are walking around with.

And here’s the part I keep sitting with.

The response gave me hope.

Readers don’t just want to follow influencers.

My writing isn’t all for nothing.

And that part of me that felt unworthy of taking up the space?

I’m realizing I’m worthy of it.

Always Editing,
Leslie

P.S. And yes — to answer the question that sent me to Threads in the first place: my subscriber base grew too. So if you’ve wondered whether it’s worth finding your way over there, it is. Find me when you do. I’ll follow you back.

P.P.S The writer. The one who unknowingly became my expander. She deserves a shout out too. Thank you . Your truth is the feral cat in the room, and the one that keeps me coming back to your words.

You know how I feel about comments. I read every one. They're the reason I keep showing up. Leave me yours.

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My late husband died and those words went with him.

I don’t have a single recording of George saying I love you. Not a voice memo. Not a video. Nowhere in my phone, in this whole digital age, can I pull up his voice and hear it.

I have one voicemail from him.

December 16, 2022.

It’s ten seconds long. The only thing he says is hello... hello? Something wasn’t working in that moment. The line, the signal, something. He was reaching and not getting through.

That’s the one voicemail I have. Him, trying to connect, and the words never landing.

For some reason, I didn’t delete it at the time.

He died unexpectedly a few months later.

Those seemingly meaningless words became entombed in my phone.

I’m writing this with tears. I’ll be honest about that.

I remarried.

If you scroll through my voicemail inbox right now, there are thirty-six of them from my husband Dave. I counted.

They’re short. He’s on his way home, or out running an errand. They almost always start the same way.

Hey, babe.

And they almost always end the same way too.

I love you.

I am completely unwilling to delete a single one.

And I hear those words at home, too. On any given day.

Then there’s one from Elise. My daughter. 2015. She would have been ten.

Hi mommy I love you so much love you bye.

She left it without thinking. The way a child does. The exact words, all of them, in one breath, and then gone — love you bye — already on to the next thing.

And then, ironically, one more. From my late best friend Todd.

He passed away suddenly one year after George.

He called late at night. A few pops under his belt, as he would say. Which usually looked like straight vodka on ice.

God love him.

The voicemail is terse. He was mad at me. Inappropriate, frankly. And I still keep it.

It makes me laugh now. We had that kind of relationship. George used to say we were like brother and sister.

So I keep them all. A ten-year-old saying I love you so much without being asked. Dave, thirty-six times. Todd, mad at me at midnight. George, reaching through a bad connection and never quite getting there.

The words… from a child. From my husband. From others.

Everyone except from him. I’d do anything to hear him say them. But I can’t.

He lost his words before he lost his life.

A spontaneous rupture arrived and scrambled everything. Three weeks of word salad that carried no meaning. The brain bleed took that from him. It took it from me.

And it rips me to shreds that I don’t recall the last time he said it. Not because he didn’t. Because he did so often it became the background. The casual departure.

I do have him, though. Not his voice saying the words, but him.

There are videos. Funny ones I can replay. One where he’s at the piano. He loved to play. I’m so blessed I can still hear his music whenever I want.

But to hear him say I love you and be able to play that. That’s the one. That’s the wish.

I can’t clip it together from fragments of what I do have. No AI in the world can generate the true sentiment. Nothing satisfies what only lives as a memory now. A sketchy one at best.

We planned for everything else. He was a lawyer by trade, after all. His affairs were in order. We just didn’t plan for the unexpected. And when it came, what I lost wasn’t on any list. His words. His ability to say I love you. The one inheritance that would keep part of us, part of him alive.

No one tells you to save the voice. Not a lawyer. Not an estate attorney. I wish they had.

I can’t go back for it. But I can keep it from happening again.

I’m in Washington, DC, right now. With Elise. I leave tomorrow.

I won’t see her again for more than a month.

That’s the hard part.

And then I’m getting on a plane to somewhere remote. I don’t know if I’ll have a good connection where I’m going.

I promise you, when I leave for that trip, I know exactly what I’m taking with me.

But before I go, I’m capturing her voice. Her telling me she loves me. And I’m leaving her mine. So she never has to wonder what I sounded like saying it.

If you’ve lost someone, you already know. You don’t need me to explain it.

And if you’re lucky enough to still hear those voices every day — then this is the only thing I’ll ask.

Save one. The voice. The words. The ordinary hey babe that’s so familiar you stopped hearing it.

Not because you’re afraid of losing it.

Because it’s worth keeping.

Capture them telling you. Let them capture you telling them.

Don’t wait. Do it before the next ordinary goodbye you won’t remember.

Hello... hello?

That’s what I have.

So I’m going to go get more.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. Each week, I write about the patterns we don’t see until we name them. Motherhood. Marriage. Grief. The roles we keep playing.

Two pieces a week. Tuesday and Sunday.

Follow along.

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Whose voice would you give anything to hear again—or which one are you going to capture before you can't? I would love to read about it.

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I have the same green cargo pants in three different versions.

James Perse. Velvet. Frame.

All green. All cargo. All the same. And yet, I’ve convinced myself, different enough.

I’m headed to Rwanda. Gorilla trekking. And to meet Aline.

I met Aline through the Africa Yoga Project. AYP empowers marginalized youth in Africa through yoga, leadership training, and employment.

I mentored her remotely for years, once a week on a screen. That was years ago. It changed her life. It changed mine. This is the trip where I finally meet her in person.

Even writing that makes me cry.

I’m anxious. Nervous. Excited. All of it rolled into one.

So yes, I have been preparing.

Not by packing. I haven’t done that.

By shopping.

I keep looking. Keep ordering. Keep deciphering.

The gorillas will not notice the difference between the subtle variations of my green cargo pants. I am fairly certain of this. And my travel companions? They came for the gorillas. Not my fashion show.

I know this.

And yet.

I keep curating. A capsule wardrobe for what I’ve decided will be a perfect trip. Every piece considered. Every shade of green accounted for. As if the right pants could guarantee the right experience.

It’s the perfectionist in me. The part that believes if I get the preparation exactly right, the thing itself will follow.

So I prepare. I order. I prepare to prepare.

And then, because apparently I wasn’t done, I bought a camera.

A real one. The kind that takes a beautiful photo, in the right hands.

Mine are not yet the right hands. I don’t know how to use it. Which means I now have a new project… learning the camera. And that’s layered on top of a trip I haven’t packed for, in service of capturing a trip I haven’t taken.

The suitcase is still open on the floor.

The piles are still piles.

But the Amazon cart is full. Still waiting for more. Still waiting for me to push Place Your Order.

Here’s the part that gives it away.

This week I’m leaving for Washington, D.C. I’ll pack for that the night before. Somehow that one seems easier. A trip that’s days away gets the night-before treatment. A trip that’s weeks away gets a capsule wardrobe and a camera I can’t operate.

The closer it is, the less I fuss. The farther it is, the more I prepare for it.

I’ll let you sit with what that says about me. I’m still sitting with it myself.

This isn’t just about packing.

This is Getting Ready to Get Ready. The hamster wheel. I’ve been on it a while now. It’s exhausting.

We all get caught up in it at some point. Starting to write and over-editing. Planning that turns into weeks of indecision. The minute you open Instagram, it hands you another idea. Another place to go. Something else to try instead.

We are flooded with information all the time. Too much information becomes the decision highway stuck in traffic. Like being on the 405 in LA for hours.

The cart fills. The wheel spins. The trip doesn’t get packed.

If I’m honest, the wheel isn’t just exhaustion.

It’s fear.

The part of me always waiting for the other shoe to drop. The part that thinks if I prepare enough, maybe nothing drastic happens to take this moment off the map.

As if planning could keep the worst from arriving.

I know what it looks like when something gets taken off the map. I’d rather not see it again.

The fourth pair of green cargo pants isn’t going to make the trip happen. Packing will.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. If you’d like to see what survived the wheel — the things I now take on every trip without thinking — vote below. I’m honestly curious whether it’d be useful to anyone but me.

P.P.S. I write about the patterns we don’t see until we name them.
Motherhood. Marriage. Grief. The roles we keep playing. Tuesdays and Sundays.
Follow along. I am always editing… something.

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I was on a phone call with a family member a few years ago, and I could feel it turning.

Not what was being said. The direction of it. The shift.

You know that moment. When something crosses from a conversation into something else.

And I remember thinking, we’re getting close.

So I said it. “Before one more thing gets said that either one of us will regret, I’m going to hang up now.”

I can recall exactly where I was. I had just pulled into the garage. CarPlay still active. The Bose speakers still reciting every breath. I shut the garage door. Turned off the engine.

And had my thumb hovering over the red END button on my screen when the ten words were said.

“You wouldn’t understand this from your selfish point of view.”

I said, “That’s exactly what I meant. I’m saying goodbye.”

And I did.

That’s the part I still sit with.

Not the fight. Not even the ending.

The moment right before it tipped. The moment I could feel it coming.

And the reality that you can see something clearly, try to stop it, and still not be able to stop where it goes.

My late husband George was an attorney. He understood discernment.

He used to call me the blonde pitbull. I could argue a point to the nth degree. Stay in it. Push it. Win it.

He was different. He knew when enough became too much.

I didn’t always understand the difference.

It took me years to shake that nickname. If I’m being honest, I probably carried it until the day he passed. Every now and then I still hear it. From an old friend. A former colleague.

The blonde pitbull.

It served me well.

Corporate finance. Legal negotiations. Holding the line.

I spent years in boardrooms across the world. Sometimes thirty lawyers across the table, going at it for hours, well into the night, until night turned into morning and a few hours of sleep felt optional.

The deals were complex. A fleet of cruise ships for a household name. Manufacturing facilities for some of the largest automobile companies in the world.

I sat at those tables and didn’t let others finish sentences.

When the objections were thrown, I came back with a rebounding punch.

I got paid well for it.

And my clients walked away grateful.

You had to be fierce. Especially as a woman.

I didn’t just want to win. I wanted the last word.

To close a thing the way you close a deal. Every point understood. Every party agreed. Everyone signed off and clear.

But fierceness doesn’t translate. Not to the people you love.

There’s no signature page. No final set of documents where everyone agrees to all the terms. Some things don’t close. And the harder I tried to button them up, the worse they got.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, slowly, and not by choice.

George wasn’t teaching me discernment. He couldn’t. He was showing me something he didn’t have the power to hand over.

I had to learn it the only way it can be learned.

The hard way.

It comes from loss. From the conversations that didn’t end well and can’t be redone. You earn it by saying too much, once, to someone who mattered, and watching what it costs.

Recently I learned that someone said something about me they’d never say to my face.

Something I wasn’t meant to hear.

But I did.

A friend shared it with me. Not to wound me, but to help me make sense of something I hadn’t been able to understand.

And here’s what I noticed in myself.

I don’t need to confront the person who said it. They don’t know I know. And I’m going to leave it that way.

Not out of fear. I’ve spent my life in harder conversations. It’s that there’s nothing to resolve. No version of the conversation that closes clean.

Some things don’t translate to closure.

Things have been said. They can’t be unsaid. The hurt is done.

Apologies can circulate. But the sentiment lingers.

Like the smell of smoke after a forest fire. It seeps into your clothes. Your skin. Your hair. You’re reminded at every turn. It lessens. But it remains.

So I’m not going to confront them. Not because I’m carrying the sword of blame…I let that go. I don’t want to live my life weighed down by swords of any kind.

It’s that sometimes the smarter thing is to walk away. Not completely. Maybe just enough.

Not out of playing it safe.

Out of playing it smart.

I don’t want to be the family member on the phone. The one who got the last word.

And I don’t want to be the woman in the checkout line who leaves a snarky comment behind for the rude clerk. The one who has to even the score with a stranger she’ll never see again, just to walk out feeling right.

Same fierceness. Different sizes.

I’ve been her, too. While I may have gotten the last word, I never feel good about myself after.

The need to finish it. To make it land. To be sure they understood.

Words don’t come back.

Not every sentence needs to be finished.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. Each week, I write about the patterns we don’t see until we name them.

I send two pieces a week. Tuesday and Sunday.

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I didn’t need reminding. It’s not a day I will forget.

But his previous pharmacy texted me a greeting. Confusing my number as his and no longer aware that it’s been over three years since he picked up a prescription.

In grief, those are the hardest moments.

The expired future.

The things you thought you would do together. Have together. Share together. The moments you thought you would celebrate, together.

A date. An event. A calendar notification.

One more thing to grieve.

But the expired future doesn’t only come from losing a person.

Yesterday I was on a coaching call with a young man. Successful by every external measure. An impressive title with a reputable company. Financially secure. A beautiful home. But underneath that “American Dream” hides an unhappy 33 year old who quietly admitted he hates his job, doesn’t love the city he lives in, and recently ended things with a remarkable woman he loves deeply but felt uncertain about family and forever.

“I’ve been going through a really dark period,” he said.

I asked him why he called it dark.

He paused.

“I guess it’s grief.”

“Yes. I have been grieving.”

He is grieving.

Not a person. Not a relationship.

Himself.

Another expired future.

The man he would have been without a broken childhood. The man he would have become if he hadn’t been abused as a child.

A version of himself he will never know.

One that was taken from him.

One he was robbed of by another.

That grief has no funeral. No casserole train. No anniversary card.

But it is grief.

Not just his.

We all have those parts of ourselves.

The choices we made. The different adventures we chose. The ones we look back at and wonder about.

We should give ourselves permission to grieve those too.

Grief doesn’t need a doomsday label. “Dark” makes it sound oppressive.

Grief doesn’t need a modifier.

The expired future is grief.

We should have permission to sit in it. Learn from it. Let the emotions run their course without labeling them.

I am not an expert in anything.

No license. No degree. No permission to prescribe.

I just know grief. I know it in my bones. I know it in my heart. I know it in my mind when it spins wildly out of control and lands me in tears greater than any tissue box can absorb.

And I don’t know many people who don’t know it.

I know people who have experienced loss and try to run from it. I was one of them. I ran ten marathons through sweat and tears. The grief I ran from then is not the same grief I know now.

I cry for George and the life we shared.

I grieve the friends I lost who didn’t understand how I could move forward and remarry. The family who, in the midst of the celebration, were still living in the wake of the first and unable to meet me where I was at.

There are losses inside the loss.

A college basketball coach said something to me not long after George died. I’ve come back to it more times than I can count.

Forward is a direction.

Not healing. Not closure. Not moving on.

Just forward.

And as I told that young man yesterday:

Grief isn’t something that has an ending. There is no fixing.

And two things can be true.

You can still be grieving one thing and learn to love, have, and hold another.

He’s slowly realizing this for himself now.

George’s nickname was Messy. In fact, that’s all I called him or sometimes just The Mess.

I’m learning to live both with and without The Mess in my life.

Forward is a direction.

I’m still walking it.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. Whatever your expired future is, you’re allowed to sit in it today.

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P.P.S. Each week, I write about the patterns we don’t see until we name them. Motherhood. Marriage. Grief. The roles we keep playing.

I send two pieces a week. Tuesday and Sunday. This week Tuesday arrived early. I like to think of it as a HBD to The Mess.

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A Law & Order type accusation.

The story itself isn’t worth retelling. It feels like drama. Not worthy of air space.

But in the moment, I was cast into a role. I wanted to defend myself.

I didn’t.

Then a friend called me this week. Spiraling. She’d been similarly accused, something she’d said, twisted by the time it landed.

Word-slide.

Like that age-old game of operator.

What got back wasn’t anything close to what she said.

She wanted to rush to the table to defend herself. To explain. To set the record straight.

She too had been cast into a role.

Persecutor.

Here’s the part nobody says out loud.

We don’t negotiate these roles with the people we’re in them with. We assign them. They are assigned to us. We rotate through them. Silently. In our own stories. In theirs.

Then we wonder why everyone seems miscast. Why we are so misunderstood. Why we are being talked about when we aren’t even in the room.

A few months earlier, I was rereading Daring Greatly. The section on parenting. On shame. On the quiet ways we pass it down without meaning to.

I didn’t ease into the realization. It hit all at once.

I have been quietly rescuing my daughter.

For years.

We often joke that the umbilical cord was never fully cut. The reality is, I never let go.

I have stepped in too quickly. Buffered her from consequences. Made things easier when they were supposed to be hard.

Every time I did that, I was telling her something underneath it: that she couldn’t handle it on her own. That the world was happening to her. That she needed me to make it right. Isn’t that what a parent is supposed to do… ease the pain?

In reality, I had cast her as the victim.

I had been trying to rescue her… for a lifetime. Hers.

The accusation I opened with is different.

The hardest one. Because it’s a role I never took. It was assigned.

A result of word-slide. Or more simply someone wanting to shift the narrative. To make me wrong. Make me the villain. It’s hard to know exactly. Ultimately, I was cast as the persecutor.

You can’t audition out of it. You can only choose not to perform.

There is another role in this world of drama. The one I almost sat in.

I was the first one to say I love you in my relationship with my husband.

When I said it, I told him not to respond.

I didn’t know then what I know now. That he didn’t come from a family that traded those words easily. That waiting for him to say it back would have drowned me.

I would have spent the silence writing a story where his pause was about me.

When really, it was just about him.

That’s playing victim. Thankfully, I didn’t jump into the role then.

But I’ve taken it plenty of other times. When a text goes unanswered. When a friend goes quiet at dinner. When someone I love seems distant for reasons I can’t pin down.

The first thing I do is make it mean something about me.

That’s the trap.

These roles aren’t real. They’re casting decisions. We make them without telling anyone. And then we play them like they were given to us.

We are all writing each other into stories we never agreed to be in.

The rescuer doesn’t ask the victim if she wants to be saved. The victim doesn’t ask the persecutor if he meant to wound. The persecutor usually doesn’t even know she’s been cast.

We just play the parts.

We project, we react, we wound, we defend, we apologize, we placate.

And the whole time, we are the main character of a story we believe is reality.

The triangle isn’t a trap because the roles are inescapable.

It’s a trap because we keep showing up to play them.

When my friend called me this week, spiraling, ready to rush to the table and defend herself, that’s what I told her.

The moment you defend, it will be word-slide again.

It will escalate. It will travel. And the next time it comes back around, you won’t be the persecutor anymore. You’ll be the victim. The one they’re talking about when you’re not in the room.

If you let it go, there will be no more oxygen for it to carry on.

But the hardest part is giving up defending yourself.

You have to let someone keep believing a thing about you that isn’t true. You have to let the story travel without you in it. You have to be misunderstood and not correct it.

Someone used to say to me: you cannot defend what isn’t real.

I never understood it then.

I do now.

You don’t fix the triangle.

You step out of it.

And what’s been sitting with me since I started writing this is that I owe my daughter an apology.

For casting her into a role she never asked to be in.

Always EDITing,
Leslie

P.S. — Tired of the drama? Of defending yourself? You can’t step out of a role you can’t see.

Below is a five-step worksheet for finding the role you play, the role you’ve been cast into, and the one small action that moves you out of both.

For the people who no longer want to live in the drama.

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P.P.S. — This is the first worksheet I’ve created to go with an EDIT.

If it lands, I’ll keep building them.

Not just naming the patterns… but giving you a way to step out of them.

Stepping Out Of The Drama Triangle Worksheet

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A five-step worksheet for stepping out of the Drama Triangle. Notice the role you play, the role you've been cast into, and the one small action that moves you out of both. For the people who no longer want to live with drama.

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We got in line behind a woman unloading four rotisserie chickens from her cart.

Never shy, I asked.

“What are you doing with all the chickens?”

She said her doctor keeps telling her to eat more protein. This was lunch for the week.

Then she added it.

“I’m being lazy.”

What she meant was she wasn’t roasting them herself.

What I was thinking, standing there with my sourdough, was that I should run back and grab one for our fridge.

Meal prep is not my strong suit. I’ve found my workarounds. I am not well when I am hungry... ask my husband. The mean-spirited teenager shows up in those moments. Anything longer than 30 min prep time can quickly bring out that little monster.

But I kept thinking about her on the drive home.

Four chickens. A doctor’s order. A solution she’d already executed before she even got to the register. And in the time it took her to load them onto the conveyor belt, she had judged herself for it.

I wasn’t judging her. I was taking notes.

We do this. Quickly. Reflexively. We solve a problem and then apologize for the way we solved it. We find the smart workaround and call it the lazy one. We do the thing that actually serves us and then pre-empt the criticism by criticizing ourselves first.

Nobody asked her if she cooked the chickens.

She volunteered the verdict.

We don’t wait to be judged. We volunteer the verdict ourselves.

Here’s the part I didn’t say out loud at the register.

Hiding below my sourdough was my own protein time-saver. Amylu chicken sausages and crumbles. If you’re a Bobby Approved kind of person, the only knock is that the chicken, while free of antibiotics, “should be non-GMO or organic or, ideally, pasture-raised”.

I live 80/20. I am willing to color outside the lines for an easy Italian dinner on a Tuesday.

But I noticed something.

The judgment she was avoiding?

I’ve been avoiding it too.

I have a small list of things like this. Quiet shortcuts I’ve collected over the years that genuinely make my life easier and my body better. And I rarely share them.

Not because I’m protecting them.

Because sharing them would mean admitting I’m not doing the thing the “right” way.

Which is its own version of four chickens and an apology.

So this week, a small practice.

Catch yourself reaching for “lazy” or “cheating” or “shortcut” to describe something that’s actually working. Notice who you’re apologizing to.

Most of the time, no one is asking.

I’ll go first.

The chicken sausages are in the fridge.

Always EDITing,
Leslie

P.S. I’m about to start something new. An aligned experiment. It makes me both excited and nervous. It’s the kind of thing where I can already feel where the wobble lives. The voice that wants to call the smart move the lazy one. The reflex to apologize before anyone has questioned anything.

I’m learning to exercise the muscle myself.

More on that in the weeks to come.

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She’d turned 21 in that gap. Finished her last final. She’s officially a senior, headed to a professional internship in Washington D.C. this summer. While I couldn’t be prouder, I also feel myself already bracing.

I texted her when my luggage dropped. She was between events. I told her to carry on. I walked into one of my favorite boutiques, grabbed Erewhon (if you know you know) to go because it is undeniably the greatest (and most expensive) hot bar on planet earth, and pulled up to her apartment just before six.

Her roommates were gone. One for the weekend. The other for the summer.

I was excited to camp out with her. Her apartment in Malibu has its own special vibe, affectionately known as The Peterson House. Think Serena & Lily meets SoCal on a college student’s budget. The peel & stick wallpaper gives it personality you can’t find in a basic rental.

She came in thrilled to see me. Her boyfriend was with her. And then her attention moved… fast.

The Barbie birthday cake I’d sent for the surprise party her friends threw had been left out on the kitchen counter. The afternoon sun had hit the Barbie tower just right. It had melted. And nose-dived to the floor with a big thud of yellow and pink frosting covering the floor.

Our reunion turned into clean-up in aisle 5.

He was headed to a beach bonfire for another friend’s birthday. I could tell she wanted to go too.

Torn.

I sent them both on their way. I was doing all I could to keep my eyes open anyway.

And as the door closed I felt it again, like watching her step into a continuous revolving door as a little girl and emerge, each time, a little more grown.

Every time she chooses something that proves I raised her well. Every time she doesn’t need me for the thing I would have stayed up all night to give her.

She returned well after 1 AM smelling like a s’mores. My ability to recap her night was drowned out by her post campfire shower and my heavy eyelids. Our reunion didn’t actually begin until the next morning.

The tides have changed.

Long are the days when I sent her to camp and she begged to come home. Long are the days when she wrote in kindergarten:

On the first day of school, we had three recesses. I missed my mom.

I am no longer the main character in her story.

I haven’t been for a while, if I’m being honest. The shift has been happening for years. I just hadn’t named it yet.

There’s a concept from one of my favorite authors, Don Miguel Ruiz, that I haven’t been able to shake. He calls it the storyteller.

We’re each writing a story where we are the main character, and everyone else, our parents, our partners, our children, is a secondary character we’ve cast and shaped. We don’t actually know them. We know the version of them we’ve created.

And when they grow into someone we didn’t write, we feel the loss before we can name it.

The story needs a rewrite. The rewrite takes a kind of looking we don’t always have. Or want.

I saw it last week, in a way so small I almost missed it.

My daughter and I were taking her car to be stored for the summer. She said she needed gas, but only a little, they say it’s not good to fill it all the way up before storage.

I asked who they was.

Neither of us knew. We looked it up. Turns out you should fill it. It’s better for the tank.

It was a small thing. But it stuck with me. How quickly we accept they say as truth. How easily we live inside stories we never traced back to a source.

I do this with people too.

For 21 years, I have been writing my daughter as the main character in my story. The lead role. The reason I make most of the decisions I make. The first call. The first thought. The first concern.

But that’s the trap Ruiz is naming.

The character I’ve been writing isn’t her. It’s my version of her. The little girl who needed me. The teenager I worried about. The college freshman I dropped off three years ago. Each one a real moment. None of them the whole person.

She has been adulting beautifully.

Quietly. Without fanfare. Without asking my permission (just my credit card). The way it’s supposed to happen.

And while I’ve been holding onto the character I created, she’s been becoming someone I’m only now meeting.

She has her own story. Her own boyfriend, her own friends, her own city, her own birthday celebrated without me there. Her own internship. Her own next chapter that I am only loosely consulted on.

I am no longer the main character in her story.

I’m not sure what I am yet. Author of my own, maybe. Witness to hers. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have a name yet. It’s a role I’m writing as I go.

And the character I’ve been holding onto isn’t really hers either.

Growing up, Elise used to say, you’re my best friend.

My answer was always the same. No. I am your mother. Someday when you’re old enough, you can call me that.

I think that day arrived.

And I’m not sure I’m ready for it. Acknowledging that feels like I am giving up something I am not sure I ever want to let go of.

This is what no one tells you about motherhood at this stage. The grief isn’t that something has gone wrong. The grief is that everything has gone right. She has become exactly who she was meant to be. And that becoming requires that I loosen my grip on the role I’ve held for two decades.

The end of our 5 days together came fast.

Another 4 AM wake-up. We were both flying out at 7. I had to return the rental car. Her boyfriend showed up at the apartment at 5 to load the bags into the car. His request… to drive her to the airport. Their last moments together before a summer apart.

Young love at its most beautiful stage.

I drove separate.

If you know me well, you know I live in my own time zone. That’s what my late husband used to say. Drove him crazy.

He’d be the one shaking his head, murmuring “Goddammit” (his favorite verb, noun, and adjective) and telling me to hurry, even now.

So it was no surprise that I caught every red light. Got rerouted. Hit more delays at the still-not-quite-finished LAX rental car return.

CLEAR shuffled me through security where I finally found her.

Only for my bag to get flagged.

Each moment ticking. Fast.

The boarding door was one minute from shutting when I ran — the first time I’ve run since I crossed the Sydney marathon finish line in August. My tenth and last marathon.

I was the very last person on the plane.

I didn’t get to linger with her. No long goodbye.

Three weeks until I see her again.

She’s writing her own story now.

The most loving thing I can do is stop holding the pen.

Instead, I’m writing this with tears 30,000 feet above the world.

My own story.

As far from her as I’ve ever been.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

A few weeks from now, I’ll be writing from somewhere very different.

My bag came home a little heavier.

Top of the list: safari attire.

I am over the moon about my upcoming trip to the Maasai Mara for the great migration and the chance to see the Big Five in their own habitat. The bigger bonus, gorilla trekking in Rwanda. And an opportunity to finally meet a woman I mentored for years (more to come on this for sure).

Planning for this is its own special curation. I found some goodies to take along. Thanks to my time in Malibu.

I’ll be writing from there. Come along.

Oh and… last week’s subscriber give-away was announced in my Notes yesterday. Another one will drop next month. Not from Malibu. Think: Africa!

This will land in Meredith’s mailbox this week.

For others, lake days, kids out of school, baseball games.

The busyness of summer in full swing.

Which means a lot of us are about to go quiet. And a lot of us are about to misread it.

I grew up in an age when, on any given night, you could find a 25-foot phone cord snaked beneath the narrow gap where the wood floor met the carpet, stretched all the way from the kitchen wall to a bedroom down the hall.

If the phone wasn’t already in my sister’s room, I would sneak in quietly, lift it, back out, close the door as if no one had come or gone, then drag that long cord down the hallway, under my door, and into my room.

In the kitchen sat the answering machine, looping messages on a tiny cassette tape. And when we walked in the door and saw that blinking red light, it was a race to the kitchen. Who could press play first.

Back then, silence did not mean anything at all. It was just silence.

And if you called someone and the line was tied up, you got a busy signal. That familiar, repetitive tone that some of us can still hear without even thinking about it.

Busy meant busy. That was it.

It meant they were already on the phone. It meant they were unavailable. It meant you would try again later.

It did not mean rejection.

If life were only that simple today.

Back then, silence said nothing. Now it says too much.

We live in a world where communication moves at a speed no nervous system was built to absorb. News lands instantly. Emails fly across the world in less than a second. Text messages arrive with an expectation, spoken or unspoken, that they will be answered just as quickly.

To be honest, the only person who consistently leaves me a voicemail anymore is a loan officer letting me know I have been preapproved for a $200,000 line of credit. No matter how many times I block the number, they keep calling, filling my voicemail inbox with opportunities I never asked for.

Otherwise, access to people usually comes through text. Or Snapchat. Or DMs. I cannot even keep track anymore.

Texting is still the most common route, and I am, like many others, guilty of having a message box full of unanswered texts. Not because I do not care. Not because I am avoiding people. Not because I do not like them.

Because the inbox is crowded.

It is buried under air junk. Coupon codes. Brand texts. Shipping alerts. The 15% off offer that seemed worth it at checkout.

And somewhere in that mess lives your text message.

So if the reply does not come right away, it is rarely what you think.

I have been on both sides of this. More times than I would like to admit. And I just sat witness to a friend who got caught deep in the drama of her own doing.

She reached out to a friend who she usually sees a few times a month. She extended a dinner invite that got declined. Her friend was sick. She followed up a few days later to check-in. To revisit making plans and her message was left unread.

She sent a second “checking-in” message. Crickets.

A few days went by. She called me unraveled. Concerned, but also wanting to hit replay with me to make sense of the silence.

Ironically, I had just written this piece. It’s actually been sitting unpublished for a few weeks now. Other edits took precedence. So I read her a few parts of it. Mainly the “grace” I offer at the end.

A few days passed. I asked her if she had heard back.

The answer came with an audible exhale. Yes… she’s been so busy. We are getting together in a few weeks. They shared a brief but lovely exchange that restored her peace. And her friend… none the wiser of the tailspin she had been in for days.

Days of unraveling. Over a silence that never meant a thing.

We’ve all been there.

You sent the message Tuesday.

You have re-read it twice since.

You have checked your phone more times than you would admit.

And with every hour, the silence gets louder. And the story gets worse.

We have become far too quick to make meaning out of silence. In the absence of a message, we assume we have been dismissed. Forgotten. Ghosted. Disliked.

And once that story starts, it moves fast.

We spiral. We question. We fill in blanks that were never ours to fill. And before long, someone who simply has a crowded inbox becomes the unwilling participant in a story they never wrote.

That is where the danger lies.

Not in the delayed response itself, but in the meaning we attach to it.

Give yourself grace. Give other people grace. And when something matters, communicate in the clearest way you know how.

Hey, it has been a minute. I have not heard from you. Just wanted to let you know you have been on my mind.

That says more than any story we tell ourselves in the silence.

Not everything needed a response then. We didn’t assume it did.

Not every unanswered text is a rejection. Sometimes it’s just a modern-day busy signal.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

I actually wrote this EDIT a few weeks ago. It got tucked away as others took precedence. When my girlfriend called last week in her own unraveling about the friend who left her unread, I pulled it back up and decided to publish it today. The original post script, the one that follows, remains. I kept it. In hindsight, that trip I took north to Toledo, it was exactly what I needed. Reinvigorating in the most surprising ways. For the first time in three years, I felt far less anxious about being back in a place I used to call home. One that holds memories that are sometimes still too painful to carry. I was too busy to check in. And that checking out… it turned out to be exactly what I needed to recalibrate.

P.S. —

In the spirit of checking out. I am currently en route north for a quick meeting. One I am excited about. The trip also allows me to revisit some of my favorite places to reset. First stop, literally from the airport to the table, an hour at Dr. Lu’s Nourishing Life Center in Ann Arbor. When I lived in Toledo, Dr. Lu was my 2-3x a week nervous and wellness system ritual. I was an East Asian Studies major in college, and lived in China for a bit. I gravitate towards his philosophy and to traditional Chinese medicine. It’s not for everyone, but it works wonders for me. And he and his practitioners are healers in their own right. I am grateful to each of them for all they have done for me over the years.

As if the universe was preparing me for that hour of respite ahead, one of today’s most modern-day dependencies failed. I sit without Wifi. No ability to check in. Just the ability to check out, which comes with a completely different kind of checking in.

If you’re squeamish about needles pause here. I was loaded with cups and needles and left feeling remarkable. The photo says it all.

This morning I was watching a clip of Taylor Swift talking about her writing. Not her songs. Her process. And one line stopped me.

“I remember writing it and being like, oh my God, do you wanna say this? And I’m like, actually, I feel like a lot of people feel that way. That always overrides my discomfort if a line feels too true. Because I don’t really think there’s anything that’s too true.”

That made me pause.

Because for the last several months, I have been writing around things. Tiptoeing. Polishing the edges. Saying just enough without actually saying the thing.

My writing coach called it.

“Take the lid off. Put your fingers on the keyboard and let it rip.”

It didn’t feel inspiring. It felt like a punch.

But he wasn’t wrong. And neither was she.

How do I make a newsletter really compelling? That’s the question I’ve been sitting with for months.

The answer started with a teeter totter.

I loved the playground when I was little. But the teeter totter? I never quite got it.

Even back then, it was flat.

It took me forty years to know why.

Here’s the thing about writing in public.

We start out honest. We publish something true. People connect with it, and a few people don’t. The few who don’t will say things. Sometimes loud. Sometimes pointed. Sometimes cruel.

And whether you mean to or not, you start writing toward them. The next piece is a little more measured. The one after that, a little more careful. You’re writing for the people who might be upset, not the ones who came because you were honest.

This is the teeter totter.

Criticism sits on one side. The pressure to play it safe sits on the other. You sit in the middle, between two opposing weights, trying to balance.

Your writing coach reads it and tells you it’s flat. The numbers stop moving. The connection thins. Subscribers don’t convert.

The criticism you’ve been absorbing came because of the very thing that was working. The vulnerability. The honesty. The willingness to say something true. That’s what drew people in. And that’s what drew the fire.

You start protecting yourself from the fire, and in doing so, you flatten the very thing readers came for.

The teeter totter doesn’t care which side has more truth on it.

It just balances.

There’s a second way I see this, and it’s more familiar than the first.

Years ago at the airport, I’d watch the luggage carousel and pray it wasn’t my suitcase that came around with the latch broken, and the contents spilling out for the whole baggage claim to see. The bra. The thong (I would die). The thing I’d shoved in at the last minute.

Nobody wants to be the messy suitcase. Seriously, I would walk away before I’d claim it as mine.

Whoever invented packing cubes is a genius. If TSA opened my bag tomorrow, it would look contained. Considered. Nothing falling out. Nothing damning.

This is what flat writing looks like.

Call it packing-cube writing. Everything in its place. Nothing exposed. Nothing the algorithm or the critic or the screenshotter could grab and hold up.

And it reads exactly like that. Contained, considered, closed. Flat.

I was with a friend recently and she mentioned someone we both know. “I have a hard time connecting with her,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

I knew why immediately.

The person she was describing is guarded. Not in an obvious way. In the way that gets felt across the table without ever being named. The packed-up version of a person.

The thing you think you’re hiding is exactly what the reader is sensing.

You can be honest and still write flat. The criticism you’ve absorbed has already edited the honesty before it leaves your fingers.

The flatness is the tell.

The packing cubes are the tell.

The careful sentence where you almost said it and then pulled back, that’s the tell.

The reader can’t always name what’s missing. But they feel it.

That’s why they don’t subscribe.

That’s why the piece you worked hardest to make palatable is the one that didn’t land.

That’s why the writer you can’t put down is the writer who’s exposed something you weren’t expecting them to.

That’s why the world loves Taylor Swift. She sings to what you’ve experienced but never had words for. She doesn’t hold back. She unpacks it all for the world to see.

What I’ve learned from my writing coach isn’t just about how to write.

When we started working together, he gave me a brand brief. A cohesive recap of everything I’d created with The Preferred EDIT to date. Thoughtful. Introspective. Honest.

One paragraph stopped me cold and has had me rethinking my life in its totality ever since.

It read:

Three years ago, Leslie’s husband George Chapman — a public figure — passed away unexpectedly from a spontaneous brain bleed on March 22, 2023. In the years since, she has navigated profound grief, launched her daughter Elise to college on the opposite coast, relocated from Ohio to Florida, sold and purchased homes, remarried to David, and undergone a wholesale reinvention of her life.

I’d been living it. I hadn’t been seeing it.

Reading the brief, and the articles it alluded to, I saw a pattern that long predated my writing. I’d been holding the container tight for decades. Maybe a lifetime.

Always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So I learned to sit right in the center of the teeter totter. Playing it safe. Maintaining control through chaos by packing life neatly up wherever I could. Balanced.

The packing cubes weren’t a writing problem.

The packing cubes were a way of being.

What my writing coach, and ironically, Taylor Swift, have taught me is to move out of the center.

It’s like learning to walk again. It’s like learning a new language — internally, the conversations I have in my head, and externally, how I project myself into the world. How I want others to see me.

I am not the same person I was three years ago.

Thank goodness for that.

So here’s what I’m doing.

I’m getting off the teeter totter.

But not from feedback. Feedback is what got me here.

The criticism was flattening me. The pushback that called the flatness flat — that’s been the fuel. It lands me in a more introspective space than I was in before. For that, I’m deeply grateful.

I’m unpacking the cubes.

Some of what’s inside is uncomfortable. Some is fuel for other people’s fodder. Some of it might be again. But the alternative is writing a contained, considered, perfectly polished version of myself that no one wants to read, including me.

Some of what I’ve been packing into the cubes is going to come out. If you’ve only known the polished version of me, this is me telling you in advance.

Taylor said if a line feels too true.

There’s no such thing.

If you’re a writer and your work has gone flat, look at what you’ve been carrying on the other side of the teeter totter. Look at what you’ve been packing into cubes.

The reader knows.

They’ve always known.

Write for the few who showed up to take shots.

Or the many who showed up because you told the truth.

I’m learning. I’m unpacking. It’s my rewrite.

Take the lid off.

I finished this piece while flying somewhere over the western US, en route to Malibu to spend a few days with my daughter. My suitcase is packed. Packing cubes, naturally. If they all fell open, here’s what you would find.

Malibu is one of the most relaxed places I visit. Getting dressed there technically looks like a hoodie and flip flops. I elevate that my way, a cozy cashmere cardigan, a slightly elevated tank top, my beloved Birkenstocks, and anything drawstring these days (loving that vibe). I never need to bring much. My daughter’s closet handles the rest. But the hat and the bag… all mine and both from my wildly talented friend at Anya & Niki. The crossbody straw bag stops people all the time. And the hat... a requirement as I am diligently working to offset skin damage of the past.

This is the other cube.

My daughter has a thick head of beautiful curls. I have stress, age, and hormones, which have caused major fallout. Truly, alarming. The kind of alarming that has you researching things at midnight and being more honest with your doctor than you have been in years.

The K18, the Nutrafol, the Oribe, the brush I will not travel without. Not an immediate fix. But over the past year, they’ve helped me rebuild. I won’t leave them behind. And my daughter, bless her curls, doesn’t own them for me to borrow.

That’s the honest cube.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. — A small thing.

There’s a boutique in Malibu I love. I discovered it on my last trip. The owner is one of those people I could talk to for hours, and her shop is the kind of curated that doesn’t feel staged. I’d like to send something from there to one of you.

Subscribers only. Leave a comment on this post. I’ll pick someone next Saturday (5/9) and DM you here on Substack.

If this lands well, maybe we make it a regular thing. I have a lot of fun travel coming up, and so much I know I’ll want to share.

On Christmas Day, 2015, my late husband George gave me a ridiculously large emerald.

Elizabeth Taylor style. Surrounded by tiny diamonds. Set in gold. The kind of piece that makes other jewelry feel self-conscious.

He found it through a jeweler who had acquired it from an estate sale. No origin story. No history. Just… this stone.

And when he gave it to me, I didn’t quite know what to do with it.

It felt like something a pirate would tuck away after a long voyage. Too large. Too bold. Not quite mine to wear.

So I did exactly that. I tucked it away.

For years.

I thought about turning it into a ring. Repurposing it into something I could actually use. But every time I came close, I hesitated.

It never quite felt like me.

Some of us have a version of this. Something we were given, or chose, that we tried to make fit. Like Peppermint Patty in a ballgown. It wasn’t me.

So it spent over a decade inside my safe, loved but unseen.

Eventually, I sent it to a jeweler in California to sell.

He made it into a ring instead. Two diamond baguettes on either side. Still… all 9.49 carats sitting on my finger felt like a balloon I couldn’t quite hold onto.

It wasn’t meant for me.

And maybe, somehow, it knew that.

The ring never sold.

Instead, it found its way to a friend of mine in Naples, a jeweler, who shared it with his fiancée.

She fell in love with it immediately.

And this time, it stayed.

A decade later, when it came time for our December wedding, she loaned it back to me.

This beautiful, ridiculous piece of my past.

It became my something old. Something new. Something borrowed.

But more than that, it became a bridge.

A way to carry a piece of my life with George into the life I was stepping into.

It was harder than I expected to give it back.

For a moment, I considered asking to buy it from her.

But then she wore it to her own wedding.

And somehow, that felt right.

Now she plans to pass it down to her stepdaughter.

And maybe someday, my daughter will wear it too.

Some pieces aren’t meant to belong to us.

They’re meant to move through us.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

Our photographer told us it would take up to eight weeks to receive our wedding photos. He wasn’t kidding.

By the time the gallery finally landed in my inbox, we were in the middle of travel and life and everything that keeps you moving forward. We skimmed them, smiled, and kept going.

But recently, we slowed down long enough to actually sit with them.

Every image. Every moment.

And it’s been unexpectedly emotional to relive it all.

If you’ve been here since December, you read about our wedding in real time, five days after we said I do, written from a quiet British West Indies island on our honeymoon. This is the fuller story now, four months later, with the photos in hand and the reflection I didn’t yet have.

A more intimate look at the moments that made the day what it was.

Getting remarried after losing my late husband three years ago wasn’t something I ever contemplated for myself. That is until I met Dave.

Our initial connection, albeit via text, felt like the universe was conspiring toward something neither of us thought possible.

At 58 Dave had become known as the forever bachelor. He didn’t plan for that. It’s just how life took shape. After too many bad endings, he turned his attention to faith, family, friends, his career. He is truly the best friend to many, a devoted godfather to the fortunate few and the greatest brother and son a family could ask for. Finding this rare gem, my unicorn, seemed unimaginable.

A strong Irish Catholic faith comes first in his world which made marriage profoundly significant for him. Knowing this about him makes me love him all the more and gave me a new perspective on shifting my own thoughts about remarrying.

But to be honest, when he proposed, the idea of planning a wedding was paralyzing. My social conditioning said: you don’t do this again. Not with a big wedding. Not when you’ve been married before. But how could I deny that to my beloved fiancé who waited 58 years.

And celebrating felt like something we both earned.

We didn’t want a wedding built on tradition. We wanted one built on intention.

Because Dave had never been married, our guest list leaned heavily toward his friends and family. People who had waited a lifetime to witness this moment. The love in that space was palpable. Collective. Earned.

A balance of simplicity and elegance. Nothing extra. Nothing missing.

The shamrock, of course, became the cornerstone of every detail. A nod to Dave’s Notre Dame roots and symbolic of faith, love and hope. Something we have built into our marriage manifesto.

When we unraveled the expected and rebuilt the framework of what it looks like to get remarried, the list of no’s was long. Every decision ran through the same filter. And every time we asked it, we knew.

So there was no groom’s dinner. Instead, a casual meet and greet at an Irish pub. Another nod to Notre Dame, with lots of Guinness shared among his former college friends and teammates.

There was no bridal party. No choreography. No obligations disguised as tradition.

Instead, Elise, my beautiful daughter, stood as our honoree. My bonus daughter, Bre, shared a reading. My late husband’s childhood best friend walked me down the aisle. And our two best friends delivered a ceremony written entirely by us. Words chosen carefully. Honestly. Tenderly.

Looking back, most of our attention was placed on our vows. Every word of the ceremony came from the heart. Every word written by us, with the exception of our officiant who went off script in the best way.

When it came time to say I do, Dave said it six times.

Six.

No hesitation. No pause. Just certainty spilling over.

There was not a dry eye in sight.

I did not wear white. I wore navy, Dave’s favorite color, in a ball gown that made me feel like a modern day Grace Kelly.

Fully myself.

I was adorned in a ridiculous amount of borrowed jewels from dear friends, including a repurposed gem originally gifted to me by my late husband George. My something old, new, and borrowed all at once.

There was no limo. We took a beach Moke instead. Ridiculously fun. Wildly us. And the source of epic photos.

The reception was intimate and food forward, held in a courtyard that felt like being wrapped inside an orchid filled New Orleans venue, right in the heart of downtown Naples. Candlelight. Conversation. Presence.

There was no dancing, with the exception of one couple who had their own special moment at the end of the night. One I will always remember, and they may not.

But there was extraordinary music. A pianist and a saxophonist filling the space with warmth and soul.

There were impromptu speeches. The kind you can’t script. The kind that leave everyone in tears, from laughter and from joy.

And honestly something I hadn’t considered at all. So when the microphone began to pass, it was the best surprise of the night.

There was no cake. Instead, we served warm mini donuts. Dave’s favorite. Nostalgic. Joyfully unfussy.

This was not a wedding designed to impress. It was a wedding designed to reflect.

Perfectly imperfect. Deeply intentional. Exactly us.

Always EDITing,
Mrs. Leslie Legus

P.S. Four months later, we laugh that we’re past the warranty period.

Next EDIT: more about the borrowed emerald ring — and the strange, quiet life it’s lived.

One more… I’ll never tire seeing this.

We’d just met. I was acknowledging her publicly. Someone corrected me. I apologized.

But the moment had already passed.

And it’s been sitting with me since. Because of what it showed me about everything else.

Because we do this all the time.

In rooms much bigger than the one I was in.

You show up to book club already off.

Not dramatically. Nothing worth canceling over. Just… off.

You had an argument before you left the house. Something small. Something that, in the moment, felt big enough to carry with you.

So you do what we all do. You sit down. You exhale. You start talking.

About life. About stress. About the argument.

It passes. The night moves on. Everyone laughs. You hug goodbye. You go home.

And by the time your head hits the pillow… it’s over. You and your husband work it out. The moment dissolves as quickly as it came.

You forget about it.

But they don’t.

Because that’s what you left them with.

So the next time you walk into that same room, you’re met with concern.

“I’ve been thinking about you.” “I’ve been praying for you.” “I hope everything is okay.”

And for a second, you don’t even recognize the version of yourself they’re holding.

Because you’ve already moved on. But they’re still standing in the last thing you gave them.

We leave people with a version of us that isn’t current. Call it the last snapshot. A moment taken mid-reaction. Mid-emotion. Mid-story.

And then we walk away, resolve it privately, evolve quietly…while they continue relating to that snapshot.

Because once it’s said, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to the person who heard it. And they will carry it forward until you give them something new.

Think about someone you love. Right now, they are holding a version of you that isn’t who you are anymore.

The daughter who hung up on her mom. The mom is still sitting with the receiver in hand. The daughter’s already out with friends. Laughing. Enjoying her night.

The truth is, people don’t remember everything.

They remember the last thing.

That becomes the reference point.

Which is why her name keeps coming back to me.

Then I came across this quote in Into the Magic Shop, a neurosurgeon’s book about the brain and the heart of all places, and it stopped me:

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

You don’t need to curate your life.

You don’t get to control what people remember. Only what you give them to remember you by.

So I’m starting with names.

What are you starting with?

Thank you, Damiya. You are the source of inspiration for this EDIT. I will never forget your name.

Always EDITing,

Leslie

P.S. The next EDIT drops Sunday. Inside the camera roll from our recent wedding. I cordially invite you.