friends
My deeply southern family raised me to never talk about money. We were poor, sometimes living in our car, and occasionally hungry. But we never said it out loud.Now, as a single mother of three kids with significant medical needs, I’ve worked several jobs to pay for their childcare and…
In 2024, I had the privilege of going on multiple solo trips to Europe.On my very first night in London, sleep-deprived and high on my new adventure, I met a lovely local named Nora at a restaurant. We spent several weeks hanging out in London pubs, parks, and restaurants.The following…
After I wrote about moving to the suburbs near Columbia, Maryland, for love — and the nostalgia that hit when I missed living in my hometown, Nashville, after that relationship ended — people began reaching out.They sent kind messages and suggestions for how I could get more involved locally. One…
I’ve always felt most at home in or around the water. Sometimes that meant swimming laps in a gym pool with waterproof headphones on and music in my ears. Other times, it looked like floating on a raft in my suburban New Jersey backyard pool on a summer afternoon, or…
A few weeks ago, a friend dropped a link in our mom text group asking if anyone wanted to take an afternoon off and see a matinee on Broadway together.My first thoughts were: absolutely not. I have a job. It’s the most hectic time of the school year. I’m a…
I’ve moved my family across three countries, from Australia to Switzerland to the United States, and before each move, I romanticized what starting over would look like.I imagined charming cafés, weekend adventures, and eventually finding a like-minded new community.What I didn’t anticipate was that making friends would be one of…
I found home in a person before I found it in a place. In January 2017, I met my now-husband — a 6-foot-3 Indo-Fijian man with kind eyes and a deep, soothing voice — on Bumble in Canada.At the time, I was a New Yorker living in Toronto temporarily. I…
Six months ago, my husband and I uprooted our lives, moving to a little town on the coast and away from the metropolis of Johannesburg, where I spent the last 32 years. Hermanus, South Africa (my new home) is small — a population of 100,000, compared to Johannesburg’s 6 million.In…
Two things prompted my move from Michigan to Colorado in 2017: the mountains and a tight-knit group of friends that loved the outdoors as much as I did.As a 20-something hiker who couldn’t get enough trail time, my hometown started to feel stifling, like the state lines were confining my…
