From Chaos to Clarity

...to making a million dollars (just kidding)

June is here, and not to be annoying, but you’re either happy about it or mad about it.

before we start, let me set my June 1st scene: i’m fresh off a red-eye flight to NYC, having only gotten about 2 hours of sleep. i'm sitting in a coffee shop, wearing a full fleece sweatsuit, writing you this letter. i carried over 50 lbs of luggage up multiple flights of stairs through three train stations, i haven’t peed in 9 hours but don’t want to leave my suitcase alone at the coffee shop, and it’s 70 degrees at 8 am. will the UTI i contract be worth it? only time will tell.

June can be a month of contrasts. some people love the warmth and the promise of summer adventures, beach trips, and long, sunny days. others might feel more introverted and overwhelmed by the social expectations that summer brings. for them, the heat can be draining rather than energizing. guess which one i am?

June also marks the halfway point of the year, which can stir up mixed emotions. you might feel incredibly proud of what you've accomplished so far, though there's a fear that things can only get worse from here. alternatively, if the first half of your year sucked balls, the only solace may be knowing that there’s nowhere to go but up!

in 2018, i was really struggling with ending both a relationship and a job i knew, deep down, weren’t right for me. but knowing something deep in your soul and actually coming to terms with it IRL are two very different things. i started writing monthly intentions because some yoga teacher told me to do it and though hesitant at first, i found that the practice led me to making more conscious choices.

after my first month of writing intentions, i quit my job, broke up with my boyfriend, started a business, and made one million dollars! lollll jk. writing intentions won’t drastically change your life in the matter of a month, or even a few months. but, the act of writing down intentions can be an insanely helpful practice for understanding and validating how you’re feeling.

personally, it’s allowed me to re-center each month and move through some sticky shit versus just pushing it aside. intentions help me navigate my life with purposeful direction and give me a sense of clarity where i otherwise would likely lose myself in the chaos of life.

i’ve been posting my monthly intentions online for almost as long as i’ve been writing them (6 years!!!), and as my page has grown, i’ve become less detailed to honor my privacy. but substack is beautiful <3 because our community here is more intimate, which is why behind the paywall i’m sharing the in-depth meaning behind my June intentions with you.

you can think of this newsletter as an intentions how-to-guide. i’ve written a bit about what intentions are, why we set them, why it’s important to write them down and how it doesn’t need to take you a ton of time to do it. bonus content (!!!) i included some fun articles i found this month about sleep tracking, friend tracking, and hot tea re: instagram cookware. plus, some sneak peeks into June’s exclusive recipes.

i hope this letter—in some way—leads you to living a more self-aware life that you feel proud of, even when things aren’t going totally amazing!!

a little bit about my June intentions:

spend less time thinking and more time feeling: