Every day, I wake up and often ask – why.

Why this dance across the stage of life?

Why the endless daily swirl of activity? Is it meaningful movement or just motion disguised as meaning? My unflinching routine of a quiet coffee before my 5 am workout, followed by the reading and writing moments that give me the solace and strength to seek the answers I crave, seem only to lose the vitality they offer me as I step into the day. The forced smiles, the small talk, and the never-ending to-do lists exhaust me, yet I am automatically pulled into that vortex. My obsession with productivity both fills me and depletes me. It is an obsession driven by a senseless attempt to prove my worth to a barely watching world, an obsession that leaves me spinning away from my core. Why must I be relentlessly result-driven, as if the outcome is the only thing that justifies my efforts?

Can I unlearn this? Do I want to?

I feel like I live in a simulation – a beautifully glitchy video game.  And I wonder…am I a non-performing character in someone else’s plot, or do I carry main character’s energy?

Do I fully grasp the fragility of my world – from my first kiss to my final breath?  I toggle through roles and responsibilities, unlocking achievements as if wholeness were a prize just one level away. Is the game of life predetermined (fixed), or can I hack the code? Is it fruitless to wonder?

Yet still – I keep asking, am I alone in these thoughts?

Are there others who feel this way, too?

Maybe this is why I lean into storytelling.  I need to know how everyone else manages their time on this life stage.  Are we all dancers in a desperate ballet or awkward tango of life? We are all dancing, but truly, who is leading? Everyone is moving to a rhythm no one seems to understand, smiling like the music is beautiful, like we are at the best dance party ever, when really, we are all just shuffling closer to the crash—to the end.

And yet, we smile. We slap on hope like glitter and twirl anyway. Because if we stopped moving, stopped pretending, stopped laughing at the bad jokes that life tells—what would we have left?

Maybe life is a wacky, brutal, absurd comedian. Perhaps we are all the punchlines. But maybe—just maybe—we are also the ones who get to choose whether we laugh, cry, or dance anyway. Perhaps the bravest thing isn’t pretending it’s not absurd—maybe the most courageous thing is knowing it is and still showing up in the costume, ready to spin.

I sometimes wonder how I keep going, knowing the ending is already written; knowing I will stop breathing one day, and knowing the story will go on without me. And that is absurd, right?

Absolutely absurd.

I wake up every day inside this strange human skin, knowing that every face I love, every time I hold my husband’s hand or hug my two boys, and every voice I cherish will vanish, eventually. Yet, somehow, here I am—still breathing, aching for answers, laughing, longing for more, and fighting for another day.

Maybe that’s the rebellion: staring into oblivion’s face and choosing to love anyway. To choose joy, anyway. To build something beautiful out of fleeting moments, even knowing they will crumble to dust. Maybe life isn’t meant to make sense. Perhaps the absurdity is the point.

Perhaps the answer is to dance despite the absurdity.

Because, despite the absurdity, the ocean still crashes, the flower still blooms, the sun still rises, and I still feel—all of it. I live not because I will last forever but precisely because I won’t. That’s the defiance. That’s the poetry. That is the magnificent absurdity and audacity of being human.

To be human is to awaken in a blink—a blip of time—between stars being born and stars burning out. We arrive mid-sentence, inheriting stories already in motion, searching for meaning in the in-between. We love fiercely, even knowing it all ends. We ache for permanence in a world of change, gathering moments like fireflies in jars too fragile to last the night.

And yet—we create art, hold hands, bury the dead, sing lullabies, whisper prayers, and ask where all the precious souls go when the body goes quiet. Maybe being human is not about knowing the answers. Perhaps it is about becoming in a place where questions can live with tenderness and wonder. Maybe it’s about embracing the power of finding others who also question and seek greater meaning for themselves and life to better frame the absurdities that life presents. Perhaps it’s about welcoming the dance, finding the tune and steps that best suit us, and learning from others who have perfected their own.

I didn’t set out looking for her. But somehow, Lou Andreas-Salomé found me — as if holding up a mirror to a part of myself I had long tried to silence. Some women are born carrying a wildness the world doesn’t quite know what to do with. Lou Andreas-Salomé was one of those women. And in many ways, I realized after reading about her – so am I.

Lou lived in a world that demanded women be small—obedient daughters, silent wives, compliant mothers. Yet she refused to play along. Lou lived by her own terms: thinking, questioning, writing, unflinchingly carving out a life of intellectual and emotional sovereignty. She walked among Nietzsche, Freud, and Rilke—not as a muse or footnote—but as a mind who challenged, provoked, and changed them.

When I first encountered Lou’s story, it wasn’t admiration I felt—it was recognition. Across time, across different worlds, I could feel her wild heart beating against the invisible bars of her skin and century. It sounded like my own.

Lou once wrote, “Only those who have the courage to write about themselves can tell the truth about others.” Those words burned through me. Because telling the truth—especially as a woman—is still a radical, sometimes dangerous act.

It’s why I write women’s stories. Not to romanticize them. Not to tidy them into palatable myths. But to restore their realness: their flawed, complicated, resilient, furious, tender lives.

Storytelling is legacy work. It can be an act of rebellion against a world that has too often demanded our silence, erased our contributions, softened our rage, or rewritten our daring as deviance. When we tell our stories—fully, fiercely—we lay down stepping stones for the ones who come after us. We show them that living in their whole truth is not betrayal. It is birthright.

Yet, telling the truth often comes at a devastating cost. I have learned within my own first family system that society will punish a woman who refuses to shrink. They are the same ones who have internalized the systems I seek to dismantle. The ones who call our freedom selfish, our courage disloyal, our voices “too much.” The echo of those who seek to silence us is loud, but the deepest wounds come from voices and actions closer to home – from the very people we were taught to trust, to believe would understand: our families and friends.  Yet they can’t.  They don’t.  And theirs is a grief all its own.

The loneliness of being unchosen by one’s own is a grief too vast for easy language. It breaks something—but it also remakes something. In the ashes of that grief, something incandescent can grow: an understanding that living your truth is not contingent on applause, knowledge, or even love. It is an offering to something much older, much larger—a tapestry of women across time who dared to exist entirely despite the cost.

Writing women’s stories and my own is not just a literary act. It is a resurrection. A reclamation. A reminder that our lives were never meant to be footnotes or afterthoughts. We were—and are—the whole story.

Today, I walk with Lou Andreas-Salomé in spirit. Not because our lives were the same—they were not. But our hunger for sovereignty, unvarnished truth, and living unclaimed by anyone but ourselves is the same. She reminds me that a woman standing alone in her truth is not tragic.

She is necessary!

It is worth repeating Lou’s words again here.

“Only those who have the courage to write about themselves can tell the truth about others.”

I will continue to carry that courage forward, to dance to my tune—for her, for me, for all of us.

And for every woman still fighting to be fully seen, fully heard, fully herself:

You are not alone. We were never alone. We carry each other.