I grew up in the dirt of a broken heart. Not metaphorically — I mean real dirt. The kind that stains your knees when you’re eight and trying to fix a busted pipe under your uncle’s trailer. The kind that smells like oil, metal, and a hundred years of hands that never stopped working. My childhood wasn’t soft. But it was real. Real like the taco my abuela made on Sundays with her hands stained red from dried chile and fire-roasted tomatoes.

And maybe you didn’t grow up in the dirt. Maybe you grew...

There was always a strange comfort in the bathroom stall. Not the act of using it, but just sitting there. Locked in. Alone. I used to fake stomach aches just to escape lunch. That fifteen minutes of quiet solitude? Way better than the clatter of trays and forced conversation I never quite knew how to navigate.

I was weird. Not eccentric or quirky in a cool, Zooey-Deschanel-in-an-indie-film way. Just weird. Reserved. Shy. The kind of kid who got invited to group projects only because the teacher...

Let me start with the pile.

The one on your chair. Or in the backseat. Or jammed in that junk drawer you haven’t opened in months. It’s not just clutter — it’s a map. Of how we buy, toss, repeat. A quiet monument to convenience disguised as progress.

That pile didn’t show up overnight. It grew, quietly, with every late-night impulse buy, every “treat yourself” scroll, every cheap thing made somewhere far away by someone paid barely enough to live.

And that’s the fucking problem.

But this isn’t about...

I don’t know about you, but every time someone told me “it gets better,” I wanted to punch a wall. Better? What the hell does “better” even mean when you’re knee-deep in a sadness so heavy it feels like you’re carrying another human on your back? Or when you’re smiling at work while your insides feel like they’re bleeding out?

Mental health isn’t a fucking straight line. It’s not “sad” to “better” with a confetti cannon at the finish line. It’s more like walking through a damn minefield — some da...

It starts with something simple. A plastic fork. A gas station receipt. A grocery cart packed with more than we need, filled with food we didn’t grow, wrapped in packaging that will outlive us. And that’s not an accusation. That’s the reality we’ve been handed.

Somewhere along the way, we traded our old knowledge for convenience. We forgot the rhythm of seasons, the sacred hush of forests, the stories the soil used to tell us. We paved the ground our ancestors once walked barefoot. We silenced th...