About

Nothing on these pages are waiting for you to hurry.

No clock running underneath it, counting toward something you’re supposed to decide before you’re ready.

You can stay as long as it takes. Longer, even, than that.

This is The Floor. Warmth first. Everything else after.

Art of Small Things is built the same way — the room before the ask, belonging before the frame, before anyone is handed a single thing to do.

You are standing on it now.

Why put this outside substack now?

This is here so Black Cat has a home.

Not a metaphor. No pun intended.

I have more pieces sitting in folders that never went anywhere. They need somewhere to land.

Writing gave me a way of describing exactly how I see things.

Felt first. In the body.

Sometimes too much comes in at once. I learned to pause with it. Not push through it.

Making sense of the writing meant going back through years that had never been processed.

I grew up learning by diagram. Drawing the shapes, connecting them, colouring them into categories until a pattern showed itself.

That didn’t help here.

For a long time the story was: too sensitive. Felt too much.

I sat with that story until it stopped being true.

What I actually discuss are the things that get my own hackles up.

That is not the same as too much.

That is just not looking away.

People respond to How to Win a Million Dollars. To 10 Steps to —.

I couldn’t write those unless I had personally done it. Writing it any other way would feel like a lie.

Even then, I would confuse myself. If this happens, then this. And there might be three of those branches. Or thirty.

This writing spirals.

Not rooted in a direction. Rooted in the knowing in the body. That is what leads.

Someone I work with saw that immediately. Without being told.

I started by writing lies.

The ones we tell ourselves.

The ones I told myself.

I stopped formal work to take care of my parents.

I am still writing.

I have more to say.

There are things that need to be said out loud. Not to normalise them. To release the shame packed into each letter like pressure with nowhere else to go.

I had to do it for myself first.

It shifted things for the people around me too. Especially in caregiving.

Running both — the job, and the care I actually want to give my family — was too draining.

I stopped one.

I am going to document both.

It was never just a job.

The women I was interviewing could have been me. Different country. Different circumstances. That is the whole difference.

I took the calls. The cases. In Singapore. In real life.

Each one felt like the only emergency in the world.

Enough of them, and the emergency wore off. What was underneath had been there the whole time.

The patterns showed up on their own.

What I saw. No names. Just what I noticed.

What they showed me was a window. A chance to make a real difference for my own family. Or at least try, before it closes.

The business was never mine.