So…Where were we? 

 

It should come as a shock to absolutely no one that my four-month hiatus was spectacularly derailed by the gravitational pull of another birthday—because of course it was. Of course I emerged from my self-imposed silence not for something noble or narratively clean, but because the calendar screamed “look alive!” and I, predictably, obeyed. There’s something about orbiting the sun one more time that makes even the most introspective among us feel compelled to wax poetic on growth, grief, and the duality of crying on the subway while also being kind of hot. So yes, I’m back. Not because I’ve reached some enlightened state—but because time, that relentless little overachiever, just keeps going. And apparently, so do I.

 

Oh, dear reader, what a year twenty-seven was. I stared down the barrel of my own mind and lived to tell the tale—medicated, finally, and just lucid enough to enjoy every second of going to grad school at Columbia fucking University. I finally gained the weight, lost my appetite for performative wellness, and somewhere in all of that chaos, lost my dad too—the kind of loss that doesn’t happen all at once but in echo, in ritual, in silence. And just when I’d made peace with being cosmically punk’d, in walked a boy so gentle and golden he felt like he’d been written by the version of me who still believed in good things. And I, formerly a fortress, am learning not to flinch. So no, twenty-seven wasn’t gentle. It asked everything of me and then some, and I gave it all, recklessly and reverently.  But it was honest. And if nothing else, I am leaving it with a story to tell.

 

We’ve got some new faces aboard the one-way trip to the inside of my brain (hi! I see you!😘), so it feels only right to give a quick lay of the land before we all spiral together in style. This space is part scrapbook, part soapbox, part existential group chat I forgot to mute. It’s where I document the tiny, glittering mess of being alive—equal parts chaotic monologue and soft epiphany. Sometimes it’s poetic. Sometimes it’s petty. Always, it’s personal. On this day in particular, I come here to metabolize the year: the highs, the heartbreaks, the bizarre plot twists and quiet glimmers. Stay, leave, skim, cry—do whatever tickles your titties. You’re welcome here either way.

 

Historically, this day tends to bring up an unhinged mix of feelings: nostalgia, dread, disproportionate joy over sharing a birthday with one North Kardashian West. Today is no different. But more than anything, it’s always been a moment of pause. A checkpoint. A time to take inventory of the lives I’ve lived in the past twelve months—and who I’ve become in the wreckage and wonder of it all. Last year I joked about entering my late twenties and still looking sixteen (except now I have 32As), but this year I’m less concerned with timelines and more interested in texture. What made this year dense. What made it matter. What broke me open in ways I didn’t see coming. And while I don’t have twenty-eight lessons to share with you today—no numbered carousel, no pithy revelations tied up in lowercase bows—I do have this: a deep knowing that time is both a thief and a gift, and this year, it was generous enough to offer me both. I won’t pretend to have cracked the code on healing or happiness or how to keep my apartment clean for longer than a week, but I have learned how to stay. In my body. In the grief. In the room. And that, I think, is its own kind of growing up.

 

We’d also all notice if I left out that today is also Father’s Day, but more on that later. 

 

For those of you who are new here, today marks the reveal of my annual tradition with Jen (my therapist, spiritual advisor, and unwavering hype woman). Every year, in the lead-up to my birthday, we carve out a session to reflect, unravel, and choose a word that grounds the season ahead. Sometimes it’s profound. Sometimes I cry for forty minutes straight and then name the word between sniffles. If twenty-seven had a title, it would be ✨The Year of Letting Go (Whether I Wanted To or Not)✨. Releasing control. Releasing certainty. Releasing people, places, patterns I once believed were permanent. Jen and I crowned it the year of release early on, but neither of us anticipated how literal the universe would take it. What started as a whispered invitation to loosen my grip, to stop white-knuckling every outcome, to detangle worth from control—became a full-body reckoning. Release didn’t ask politely; it arrived with teeth.  It clawed its way into every corner of my life, demanding I let go of the narratives I’d outgrown, the expectations that never belonged to me, the illusions of stability I kept mistaking for love or safety. Turns out, letting go isn’t some serene act of transcendence. It’s clumsy. It’s so aggressively unsexy. It looks like rereading old texts you swore you deleted. Like over-apologizing and then catching yourself mid-sentence. Like finally saying, “I don’t know,” and meaning it. It’s disorienting as hell—and weirdly clarifying. Because once you stop trying to grip everything into place, you realize what’s still standing is probably what’s meant to. 

 

Release, I’ve learned, isn’t just a subtraction. It’s an excavation. It clears the space you were too afraid to touch, guts the rooms you kept filling out of habit, makes a mess of the architecture you once mistook for security—and in doing so, it dares you to rebuild. Slowly. Differently. With more light this time. I used to think loss was the end of something; now I know it’s also the beginning of everything that comes after. Grief and all sentiments that orbit cracked me open, yes—but it also made room. For something more gentle. For slowness. For the kind of love that doesn't arrive to fix you, but to sit beside you. For the life that finally had space to unfold once I stopped trying to manage every corner of it. And maybe that was twenty-seven’s greatest gift: teaching me how to unclench. 

 

But here’s the part no one prepares you for: what happens when you do let go? When the life you once begged for starts showing up in real-time? Everything you want says yes. And yet—just as things were beginning, something else was ending.  The kind of loss that guts you quietly, then keeps showing up in echoes and unmistakable signs (what’s the deal with airplane peanuts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). And so began the year of learning how to carry it all at once. It was whiplash in slow motion: joy, grief, joy, grief, repeat. I spent so much of the year trying to hold both without unraveling. When the love arrives and he’s soft where you’re sharp. When the momentum builds and suddenly you're no longer clawing toward the dream—you’re in it. And instead of basking, you’re bracing. For the fallout. For the fine print. For the catch. The mental gymnastics of trying to live inside the life you once only imagined while simultaneously preparing for it to vanish? Exhausting. Release got me here. But staying here? That takes something else entirely. 

 

Some revelations arrive dressed as afterthoughts, so here’s one: sometimes, the hardest thing about getting what you always wanted—love, purpose, proximity to a version of your own becoming—is the quiet panic that follows. Because once the noise dies down, you're left alone with it. With you. And suddenly the dream you spent so long chasing demands maintenance. Presence. A nervous system that doesn’t short-circuit at the slightest whiff of stillness. 

 

During therapy on Thursday—because of course this all went down in the final five minutes of our session, as I was dramatically flopped sideways on my bed like a bagong-gising Victorian ghost—Jen asked, “What’s the word this year?” And I, in classic fashion, spiraled. I had feelings, sure. I had metaphors. I had a monologue about how I didn’t want the word to be something aspirational or performative or, god forbid, Pinterest-y. But an actual word? Crickets. 

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Because after spinning in circles trying to articulate what I felt but couldn’t quite name, we turned to the robot overlords with the deeply earnest (and slightly deranged) question: What word would be born if “present” and “intentional” had a child? We filtered out the ones that sounded like startup names or self-help book subtitles, and landed on one that felt just right.

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I know, I KNOW. You’ve been patient. You want the word. The reveal. The orgasm-so-good-you-forget-your-name-and-file-for-residency-on-another-planet, if you will. And look—much like a well-executed edging session, I believe in the art of the slow build. Foreplay matters. Emotional context matters. But fine. You’ve earned it. After all that releasing—unclenching, unraveling, letting go—this year needed a counterweight. Something rooted. Something that doesn’t flinch when the good things stay. 

 

With all that I learned in the last lap, the data would suggest that twenty-eight will ask me to stay anchored. Not to a place, not to a plan—but to myself. To the version of me that’s learning how to hold joy without caution, stillness without guilt, softness without shame. It’s a word that asks me to hold my ground without hardening. To choose depth over distance. To trust that I can stay—through discomfort, through happiness, through the quiet middle parts that don’t come with an epiphany or a punchline. Anchored doesn’t mean still. It means I’ve stopped running.

 

Release and anchor live on opposite ends of the spectrum, and yet, I’m starting to think they’re part of the same dance. You can’t stay anywhere—really stay—until you’ve learned how to let go. Maybe the art is in doing both—learning when to loosen your grip and when to hold, gently but with intention. Because anchoring isn’t about gripping for dear life—it’s about choosing what’s worth returning to. It’s about trusting yourself enough to stay put in a moment, in a body, in a truth, without reaching for the escape hatch. Letting go taught me that not everything is mine to carry. Anchoring is teaching me that some things are. And maybe the tension between the two—that beautiful, infuriating in-between—is where the becoming happens.

Earlier I said, “We’d all notice if I left out that today is also Father’s Day, but more on that later.” So—later is now.

 

It’s a strange kind of poetry, isn’t it? That the day I came into the world and the first birthday I’m spending without my dad would both land on Father’s Day. The symmetry of it all feels almost suspicious, like the universe couldn’t resist a little narrative flair. Like a before and after folded into the same date. A beginning and an absence, stacked on top of each other. And maybe that’s the first lesson in anchor—that sometimes staying isn’t about planting yourself in certainty, but learning how to carry the people you’ve lost forward with you. To let their love—not just their absence—be what holds.  My dad was complicated and imperfect and mine. I spent the last six months of twenty-seven unpacking grief—not just the kind that hollows you, but the kind that quietly reshapes everything it touches. I used to think grief was just absence. But now I know: it’s also a reintroduction. To yourself. To what matters. To what remains. It strips away the noise and hands you back what’s essential. It doesn’t get easier, not really—but it does get clearer. And maybe that’s where anchor begins. Not in certainty or stillness, but in the decision to stay soft in the aftermath. To keep showing up. To remember what’s gone while holding space for what’s still here. Including me.

 

So today, I’m staying anchored in this unparalleled happiness—with the people I love, in a body I’m learning to live in with less apology, and with a boy who somehow turned my whole world upside down just by being soft and steady and maddeningly good to me (disgusting, I know). I still don’t quite know how he managed to sneak past my defenses—but he did. And today, I get to be wrapped in a kind of love that would make every version of me—every anxious, aching, armor-wearing version—feel like their pain was worth it. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t just real—it’s blinding in all the best ways.

 

Does this bitch ever stop fucking talking? Unclear. But if you’ve made it this far, congratulations—you now qualify for emotional hazard pay and a commemorative sticker that says “I survived Lau’s  annual spiral.” Jokes aside (but only slightly), thank you. For listening. For laughing. For holding my contradictions with curiosity and care. You have no idea how much that means to a girl who once thought she had to earn love by being low-maintenance. If anything here spoke to you, I hope you take it with you. Tape it to your mirror. Tattoo it on your ass. Whisper it into the void. Your call.

 

So here’s my soft little bow: Thank you for being here. For holding my sweaty hands, my tangled thoughts, and the parts of me I’m still learning to stay with. I’ll be off now—probably to cry over a text, to stuff my face in cajun-drenched king crab legs, and let myself feel all of it. In case I haven’t said it enough, this year cracked me open and stitched me back together with people like you. Thank you for helping me stay anchored, even when I was tempted to float away. I love you like my life depends on it (it does).

 

Big hug, 

Lau