Baby, read. Read on paper. Read on a screen. Listen while you walk. Borrow someone else’s brain for a while. Because here’s the quiet truth: the universe is vast, and you are gloriously unfinished. That’s not an insult. That’s oxygen. There are galaxies of things you don’t know yet...

Stay weird. Not performative weird. Not quirky-for-attention weird. Stay holy odd. Stay the kind of strange that refuses to shrink to fit a room. Stay rooted in your own-ness and your you-ness—yes, we’re inventing words because language occasionally lags behind reality. You are a one-time...

Baby, it is fully respectable to be a true-blue steel magnolia. The strongest souls I know carry both gentleness and grit — a little grace, a little holy stubbornness — because the willow that bends but does not break is too busy growing deep roots and reaching for light to waste time proving...