I Don't Know What I'm Doing.

This wasn't the plan, but it's working.

I started Less Thinking, More Living in the dead of winter. Not the cozy, nostalgic kind with twinkle lights and simmering stew. The real kind — the Minnesota kind — gray skies, frozen car doors, and a creeping sense of existential dread.

I needed a project. A spark. Something to jolt me out of my listless haze. This Substack was my version of shock paddles to the chest: CLEAR!

Naturally — and with a large scoop of irony — I led with my head: overthinking my way into essays about “Less Thinking.” My old writing teacher — a gruff and lovable New Yorker — used to bark when I got too intellectual.
“Too academic,” he’d say, metaphorical red pen in hand. “You’re not writing a dissertation.”
(Except, joke’s on him — I did write one of those.)

I picked trending psychology topics and attempted to Frankenstein them into tidy, digestible essays. I branded it Less Thinking, More Living but kept the living part at arm’s length. What resulted was... fine. Supportive. Respectable. And a little bit boring.

Week by week, I kept trying to find new angles on overthinking — until I hit a wall. The kind made of soft existential despair. After motor-mouthing my angst aloud one day, my husband said:
“Why don’t you talk more about the living part?”

Wait. Me? Talk about how I’m actually doing?
You mean, share what it feels like to wade through life — sometimes cooking but most of the time cooked?

Well. Okay.

Eeek, personal disclosure….

So I tried it. I stopped performing and started telling the truth.

And something strange happened: people responded. They liked it. I got messages that said,
“This is exactly how I feel.”
“Thanks for naming that.”
“I thought it was just me.”

Recently, over coffee with another psychologist I went to grad school with, she brought up my dissertation:
The Person of the Therapist: An Autoethnography of a Psychologist in Training.
Working title: Who, Me? An Expert?

While many of my peers were collecting data and running analyses, I was deep in the weeds of personal narrative, trying to understand what it meant to sit with someone else’s pain while still sorting through your own. I’ve always felt the pull toward honesty — not performative vulnerability, but real, awkward, often-unflattering truth.

Even before grad school, I was that person asking why.
Why do people act like that?
Why do I feel like there’s a swarm of bees in my chest before a hard conversation?
Why can I walk into a room and instantly sense tension before anyone says a word?

The information is always there — in our bodies, in our patterns, in the strange quiet of our internal monologues. If we pay attention, it tells us everything.

So now, this is what I’m doing. Maybe it’s a rebrand. Maybe it’s just me finally catching up to myself.

Yes, I’ll still share psychology insights and the occasional new vocabulary word (old habits die hard). But more than anything, I want to write about what it means to be a thinking, feeling, slightly-frazzled human trying to live with some measure of presence and honesty.

I’m also resisting the urge to name exactly where this is going. And believe me, that urge is strong. I love a goal. I love checking a box and feeling like I’m crushing it.

So I’ve tricked that part of me. I told her the goal is:

Be honest. Write consistently. Keep going — even if you don’t know where it ends.

So here we are. Less polished, more alive.
And I’m so glad you’re here with me.