Hey Perfect Stranger, Want to Read My Diary?

Issue #48 · Five half-baked ideas that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Hi there, I’m Emily! 🙋🏼‍♀️ For those who are new, here’s a quick catch-up:

Five years ago, I packed my life into a suitcase and hit the road, moving to a new city every few months. Now I write stories about the quirks and realities of living abroad, intertwined with my attempt to create a happy, meaningful life.

April 30, 2025: Writing online already feels like baring my soul to the world, so today I figured I’d lean into that diary-level honesty and share an embarrassing little secret: My highly unscientific, wildly inconsistent, held-together-with-duct-tape writing process that I’ve painstakingly curated over the past few years.

It currently consists of the following:

• A 78,000-word Google doc sorted into 22 tabs of vaguely themed word vomit

• Sixteen raw, unfinished, embarrassingly rough first drafts

• Over a dozen stream-of-conscious voice-to-text blurbs in the notes app of my phone

• A stack of coffee-stained journals filled with impossible-to-decipher penmanship

Given this chaos, perhaps it’s no surprise that so far in 2025, I’ve fallen off the consistent publishing train. I’m trying to be more patient with myself, as I’ve realized there’s a fine line between pushing through a creative block and forcing something that just isn’t there. Sometimes, the wisest move is to stop chasing words that aren't ready to be caught — though I must admit, there was one particularly frustrating day last week when I nearly lit all of my non-idea-yielding journals on fire.

But instead of hitting [PERMANENTLY DELETE] on all of my dysfunctional drafts, or worse, feeding them to ChatGPT and asking it to “find a good angle” as several people kindly suggested (advice I ignored, because I refuse to believe that the 86 billion neurons in my human brain aren’t sufficiently creative enough on their own) — I’ve decided to grease the wheels by putting together a list of some of the half-baked essays that have been sitting in my drafts for a while.

If any of these topics resonate and/or leave you wanting more, let me know in the comments, and maybe I’ll write a full post about them. 🙂

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⭐️ On Life Transitions

Sometimes, life changes so subtly that it goes unnoticed for months, and only in hindsight does a distinct, well-defined phase become apparent.

But other transitions — graduations, career changes, breakups, moves — arrive with great fanfare and an obvious punctuation mark. It’s always a strange feeling to be acutely aware that a major life chapter is coming to and end, and as we speak, I can see the pages in my book beginning to turn.

In a few days, I’m leaving Mexico to fly back across the pond, and for the first time, I don’t have plans to return to Puerto Escondido long-term. Five winters here feels like the perfect accidental round number to close this chapter on — I still love this place and will definitely return for shorter stints here and there, but the version of me that once fit like a puzzle piece here has evolved, and I’m ready to plant more permanent roots elsewhere.

As I count down the single-digit days that remain, I’m already nostalgically mourning the life I've built here, while wrestling with a mix of eagerness and apprehension for what’s ahead. So if I seem a bit unhinged these next few days, that’s just the emotional rollercoaster talking (please fasten your seatbelt).

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⭐️ On Cutting Back on Booze

I’ve never worried about having a problem with alcohol. I tend to be on the responsible end of the spectrum among my friend group, I never drink alone and I don’t feel a compulsion for the booze itself — it’s purely a social thing.

That being said, at the tender age of 35 and 11/12ths, even just a few beers will absolutely wreck my sleep, make my heart race, and turn me into a shell of a human the next day(s). Shouldn’t that be enough to set off alarm bells? And if it’s ‘purely a social thing’ why is it that I never go out sober?

After spending the past 15+ years poisoning myself at least once a week, last month, I significantly cut back on my alcohol consumption, almost to zero. And I felt fantastic. As it turns out, waking up without a headache is actually what I find to be kind of addictive.

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⭐️ On the American Dream

Perhaps unsurprisingly, immigration has been weighing on me lately.

This is obviously a hefty topic, and one that I want to approach thoughtfully rather than with knee-jerk reactions. But it’s hard to stay quiet when $200 million worth of racist, anti-immigrant propaganda keeps interrupting dinner.¹

Beyond the clown show that is the Trump administration, I come at this topic from an interesting perspective, given that I’m currently living in Mexico, and because I’m a few months out from navigating another country’s immigration process.

So yeah, deportations without due process, ICE detaining folks during scheduled immigration appointments, threatening to send U.S. citizens to foreign prisons, and the rise of nationalism/xenophobic rhetoric in general tend to keep me up at night.

Sidenote: I have a hunch that many Americans don’t realize this (or perhaps even know who she is), so I want to point out that Claudia Sheinbaum, the first female president of Mexico who took office just over six months ago, is absolutely killing it. Not only does she have record-high approval ratings, but she’s even more popular among men than women.

It’s kind of wild timing — the juxtaposition of Mexico's progress with the simultaneous unraveling of things in the United States has been interesting, to say the least.

A well-spoken, steadfast, effective female president? What a concept.

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⭐️ On Biological Clocks

Babies. A topic that I don’t feel ready to write about yet, but one that feels increasingly urgent to confront with each passing day (as mentioned, I’m 35 and 11/12ths years old). Here’s what else I’m working with:

• I genuinely still don’t know if I want children, or if it’s just another societal expectation that I feel compelled to fulfill.

• Several of my friends, including some younger than me, have already struggled to get pregnant.

• Given that I am undecided if I even want children, I am uninterested in putting my body through the chemical-induced torture of freezing my eggs.

• Does any of this even matter because maybe I’ve already missed my chance?

I’ve read tons of eloquently written pieces by women who have made the conscious, empowered decision to NOT have children (this one by

Lane Scott Jones

, I particularly loved). I support Lane wholeheartedly and deeply admire her conviction — in fact, I can only hope to reach that same level of clarity one day. For now, it’s still a mental game of ping pong — mostly because I struggle to see the “yes, I want children” path as a real possibility.

That’s because any time someone asks me if I want kids, my mind doesn’t go to a pink nursery or a list of cute names. It goes straight to the question: with who? How can I envision a life with a child if I don’t know who my partner in raising it would be?

Yeah, yeah. I can already hear the well-meaning advice rolling in: “But Em, you have to have kids, I can’t imagine my life without mine!” The thing is, I can envision my life without children, and it’s wonderful. Or perhaps, “But Em, it’s 2025, you don’t need a man to have a baby!” As it turns out, there are a few things that I am already 100% sure about.

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⭐️ One Last Thought

I saw this one-line zinger somewhere on the internet a few weeks ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since: There is a version of you 10 years in the future that is begging you to enjoy life a little more right now.

Was that juicy enough for you? If so, let me know in the comments what resonated and/or which topics you want to read more of, and maybe I’ll share a few more pages of my diary.
xoxo

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1. Not sure what I’m talking about? Yeah, I had a feeling this got mostly swept under the rug in the U.S. — For the past few weeks, this ad has been playing on cable networks, YouTube and Spotify in Mexico (in English, mind you). Last week, I was out having a bite with two of my Mexican friends. The waiter had his phone hooked up to the aux, and I nearly choked on my burger when WE WILL HUNT YOU DOWN echoed throughout the restaurant.