PeonyMagazine

  Here comes February. ’Tis the season of love again. Valentine’s Day, when I think of it, I see couples loving each other — honest, faithful, loyal, committed. Some think of it as a day measured by presents: a bouquet of flowers, a bundle of chocolates, small surprises wrapped in red and pink. It always seemed like love had a formula during this season. You give something tangible, and that becomes proof that you care. I have a friend who once received both a bouquet of flowers and a box full of chocolates on  Valentine’s Day . She told me she appreciated the gesture. She really did. But she never liked flowers; she was allergic to them. And chocolates? She couldn’t eat them because she has diabetes. We laughed about it when she told me. It sounded ironic to receive everything the world says you should want on Valentine’s Day and not be able to enjoy any of it. Behind those gestures, she didn’t tell her partner she didn’t like the gifts. She said she didn’t want to make him f...

  There are seasons in life when everything feels like it is falling apart at the same time.  I know this because I lived through one. Or maybe many.  There was a time when I didn’t recognize myself anymore. When I experienced the worst of married life, it broke something in me that I thought would never heal. I fell into a slow, heavy darkness, the kind that sits on your chest and makes it hard to breathe.  Depression, anxiety ,  panic attacks … they became my shadow. Most days, I felt like I was disappearing quietly, hoping someone would notice but also wanting to hide. I locked myself away from the world, thinking silence could protect me. It didn’t, but somehow, I survived it. Somehow, I learned to stand up again, shaky but standing. And just when I thought I was finally moving forward, life tested me again. I decided to take a rest from the world, from everyone. I resigned from my job and spent months doing nothing but trying to breathe again, believing my ...

  The darkening of the day turned the alley into a thick, dark liquid, and in this kind of dusk, every doorway was like a shadowy figure sharing a secret. I zigzagged my tiny suitcase over the paving stones in Lisbon, counted the tiles until I reached the one that should have been the blue door with the brass fish knocker.  Before I could utter the slightest word, the woman at the reception stood up. “You came,” she said, almost as if touching was an essential step and the  friendship  would be created in a few seconds. She pointed to the kettle, the clementines, and the  Wi-Fi  code hidden under a small porcelain swallow in front of us. I loved the lobby being so lively, with fingerprints on the postcards, the ghost of the citrus-cleaning scent, and the sounds from the kitchen, where someone was quietly having a good laugh while cooking. The lady at the reception took me to my room that night in Lisbon, demonstrated the deadbolt and the safe to me, and gav...

  When I was younger, I thought needing friends made you weak. In my early twenties, I survived on independence, or at least that’s what I told myself. I was the type who handled things alone, brushed off hurt alone, healed alone. I didn’t think I needed a “tribe.” I was fine moving through life quietly, keeping my world small, guarded, and manageable. Somewhere along the way, life placed a handful of women in front of me who felt like a soft landing. I didn’t go looking for them. They just arrived. I was around 28 when we found each other, or maybe when we finally allowed ourselves to be found. Back then, our idea of bonding was drinking until our worries dissolved into laughter and someone cried about a breakup at 2 a.m. We were messy in the most honest way. We carried each other through heartbreaks, wrong decisions, life turning points, and those early years when we didn’t know who we were yet. We talked over each other without caring who finished the story. Someone always laugh...

  Like allergy season, it occurs every quarter. We’re all auditioning for jobs we don’t really want when someone mentions “stretch opportunity” during the Monday stand-up. There are new OKRs, a new round of “visibility,” and another calendar block that is inexplicably named “ Career Pathing .” I watch my colleagues click into performance mode: bright voices, bullet points, cross-functional collabs, and I feel it again: that small, stubborn honesty rising like a blush. I’m tired of pretending I want the next rung. There was a time I did. I collected mentors the way other people collect houseplants, arranging them near sunny windows and asking for watering tips. I volunteered for special projects, took a course in “influencing without authority,” and learned the taxonomy of titles. I kept a promotion packet like a scrapbook, curating artifacts of productivity: dashboards, kudos, and before-and-after slides. I knew how to say “impact” while pointing at a bar chart. It was a decent gam...

  Sometimes the hardest part of life is having a plan. I used to believe that a real adult had everything mapped out, career, savings, love, success, all neatly arranged five years into the future like pins on a board. I thought not knowing meant I was failing. So I forced myself to create timelines I didn’t believe in and goals that didn’t feel like mine. I would write them down, stare at them, and feel nothing but anxiety. What no one tells you is that  a plan can become a cage . I wasn’t scared of the future, I was scared of choosing the wrong version of it. What if I planned my life too carefully and still ended up unhappy? What if I followed a path just because it looked responsible, not because it felt right? So I kept rewriting my five-year plan, hoping one version would finally feel like home. It never did. There was a moment when everything I had planned fell apart. The job didn’t work out. The direction I was so sure of suddenly felt empty. I remember sitting alone o...