02/08/2026
When I closed my brick-and-mortar apothecary at the end of 2022, I didn’t fully understand how deep my burnout ran. I only knew that my body needed a change of scenery. What followed were two years of grief, intense fatigue, and worsening chronic illness symptoms, as the consequences of pushing past my limits finally caught up with me.
My vision was clear, but the cost of bringing it into form was not. The transition asked me to reckon with the stories I had internalized about identity, productivity, and health—stories that framed endurance as virtue and collapse as personal failure.
I gave myself time and space to experiment, to follow threads rather than plans. And the thing is, that s**t really worked.
Now you might be saying to yourself, well yeah, if I didn’t work and could just focus on following my heart I’d feel a hell of a lot better too, but I DID work. I still had to survive. I actually worked a ton. I even won a whole ass Emmy award as a producer in 2023.
And I lived happily ever after.
Just kidding. My clarity came with a double edge. I was right to trust my intuition, the change was necessary. My mind, body, and spirit needed the flexibility that freelance life offered. But flexibility without stability is its own kind of precarity—especially as a single parent, especially with an invisible illness, especially under late-stage capitalism. That whole socioeconomic status thing and those social determiners of health really come into play here.
Care, it turns out, is not something you can will into existence through insight alone.
Eventually, I found what once felt like an impossible thing: A regular-ass job I genuinely love. It also happens to be full-time, in an office. Which means many of the challenges I thought I had left behind are now resurfacing in a different ecosystem, asking different questions of my body, my time, and my capacity.
Care Is an Ecosystem emerges from this tension. It is not a solution or a blueprint because I don’t have either. It is an acknowledgment of what I do know: that care is relational, contextual, and contingent, and that no single structure can hold it all without cost.
I hope you’ll explore with me.
