I wanted magic but settled for distraction. I wanted depth but swam in the shallow end, smiling for the camera, while drowning quietly, just out of frame.

The comfort of illusion

 

The real glow-up

 The real glow-up isn’t about looks, money, or attention. It’s the moment you realize your energy is valuable and you stop handing it out to people who only take and never pour back. It’s when you stop explaining yourself to those committed to misunderstanding you, stop showing up for people who never show up for you, and stop shrinking just to make others feel comfortable. It’s choosing peace over proving a point, choosing boundaries over burnout, choosing yourself without apology. It’s the kind of transformation no one can see at first, but everyone feels. Because the moment you treat your energy like it’s expensive, your entire life begins to rise to that standard.

A parable

  A farmer and his son had a beloved stallion who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbors exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!”. The farmer replied, ‘Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see’.

A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild mares back to the farm as well. The neighbors shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the mares and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The villagers cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all the able-bodied boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, still recovering from his injury. Friends shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Maya

 “Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”

You’re not stuck for lack of options. You’re stuck because you cling to what’s outlived its purpose. Loyalty isn’t the same as carrying dead weight. Release what’s been pulling you beneath the surface.

You can’t outwork a bad strategy. All that hustle without a clear direction just leads to burnout. Stop for a moment. Look at what’s actually working. Make the adjustments you need. The solution isn’t to push harder—it’s to work smarter. Effort is powerful, but only when you aim it the right way.

Mandela

 "It always seems impossible until it's done."

Building from scratch

Building a business with no safety net requires a level of determination most people will never understand.

You carry all the pressure, all the risk, and all the responsibility while trying to look confident on the outside.

There are days when fear wants to take over and you still show up anyway.

That is what makes you different.

Entrepreneurs bet on themselves when no one else does.

You need a strong mindset, unshakeable belief, and a work ethic that refuses to break.

It is not easy, but the freedom makes every struggle worth it.

Entrepreneurship is a brutal teacher

 Entrepreneurship will humble you before it rewards you.

It will expose every weakness, test every belief you have about yourself, and force you to grow faster than you ever planned.

There are days when you question your sanity, your decisions, and even your abilities.

But if you stick through the failures, the setbacks, the sleepless nights, and the doubt, you become someone who cannot be broken by normal problems.

Business teaches you what books never will.

Survive the struggle, and you come out with knowledge, resilience, and freedom no job could ever give you.

- The Innocents Abroad - Mark Twain

"In America, we hurry ~ which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us...we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe...What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!"

The people most successful are brutally honest with themselves about their weaknesses. Not in a self-flagellating way. Just clear-eyed assessment. They see their flaws without drama or denial. Most people can't do this. They either deny weaknesses completely or dramatize them into identity. Neither is truth. Just clear observation. This is hard. This is who I am. Now what?

Authenticity

 

~ Derek Walcott from Sea Grapes

 “Love After Love”

"The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life." 

Some people live like they’re trying not to break. I live to feel every crack.

 I came into the world with a voice that refused to hide. I want to give language to what so many of us couldn’t say out loud. I want it to be a home for anyone who had ever felt too tender, too queer, too alive for the world around them. I want to speak and write about love and loss and identity with such raw honesty that it could stop you in your tracks.  

I don’t want to get out without a broken heart. I don’t want to slip quietly through life. I want to be changed by it, marked by it, shattered and remade by love. I am full of gratitude, awe, and a steady reminder that beauty and sorrow often share the same breath.  

I want to learn and teach how to stay soft in a world that can be cruel. 

The goal isn’t to survive untouched. It’s to love so deeply that you can’t help but be changed. It’s to let the breaking be proof that you were here and that you lived all the way through.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. ~Pema Chödrön

~ E.E Cummings

 A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel, but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling, not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself, in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

There's no thinker ~ just thinking.

 The voice in your head isn't you. 

It’s a loop of conditioning pretending to be someone.

Mom

 May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell...

~ JOHN O’DONOHUE

The noise

 Sometimes you have to stand in the emptiness of your own company to realize you were never really empty—just surrounded by people who never filled you. There’s a quiet kind of truth that surfaces when the noise fades and the room feels too still. You start to notice how much of yourself you gave away trying to be understood, accepted, or loved by people who only saw the surface of you. The silence can feel sharp at first, almost unbearable, but slowly it becomes a space where your heart starts to breathe again. In that stillness, you begin to see that being alone was never the problem—it was being unseen while you weren’t.

And when that realization sinks in, something changes. You stop craving company for the sake of not feeling lonely and start craving connection that feels like home. You begin to choose peace over presence, depth over distraction. The emptiness that once frightened you becomes a sacred place where your spirit rebuilds itself. You learn that solitude isn’t a void—it’s a vessel. And in filling it with your own laughter, your own thoughts, your own love, you finally understand: you were never lacking—you were just waiting to meet yourself without all the noise.

Great game

 

The Fourth Sign Of The Zodiac ~ Cancer

 I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~ Mary Oliver

The Grave-Digger BY KAHLIL GIBRAN

 Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me, “Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like.”

 

Said I, “You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?”

 

“Because,” said he, “They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”

I’m interested in that thing that happens where there’s a breaking point for some people and not for others. You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there’s no sign that it’s going to get any better, and that’s the point when people quit. But some don’t.

Meet yourself

 Sometimes you have to stand in the emptiness of your own company to realize you were never really empty—just surrounded by people who never filled you. There’s a quiet kind of truth that surfaces when the noise fades and the room feels too still. You start to notice how much of yourself you gave away trying to be understood, accepted, or loved by people who only saw the surface of you. The silence can feel sharp at first, almost unbearable, but slowly it becomes a space where your heart starts to breathe again. In that stillness, you begin to see that being alone was never the problem—it was being unseen while you weren’t.

And when that realization sinks in, something changes. You stop craving company for the sake of not feeling lonely and start craving connection that feels like home. You begin to choose peace over presence, depth over distraction. The emptiness that once frightened you becomes a sacred place where your spirit rebuilds itself. You learn that solitude isn’t a void—it’s a vessel. And in filling it with your own laughter, your own thoughts, your own love, you finally understand: you were never lacking—you were just waiting to meet yourself without all the noise

An invitation

 "Do not fear your demons. Stand tall, breathe deep, and let your flame meet their smoke. They are not the end of you; they are a threshold. They arrive holding the truths you hid from yourself, the mirrors you turned face down, the keys you thought you were not strong enough to carry. Hold your ground. Let them show you where you shrink, where you trade your voice for approval, where an old hunger still tells you to stay small. Listen until the noise turns into meaning.

A powerful woman does not outrun her darkness; she outgrows it. She steps into the furnace and remembers she is the fire. She does not swallow poison to prove her goodness. She does not call numbness peace. She names what hurts, blesses what is true, and builds a spine from clear boundaries and unashamed tenderness. She is lightning in slow motion—precise, bright, and impossible to domesticate.

Your demons are lessons with claws. They come to sharpen you. They press your edges so you can tell which ones protect life and which ones cut it. They point to the wound and insist you look, not to punish you, but to return you to the power you left there. Ask your fear what it is guarding. Ask your grief what it refuses to bury. Ask your anger what promise it wants you to make in daylight and keep.

Invite them close under the bright lamp of your honesty. Give each one a name. Feed them boundaries and they will stop feeding on you. When their snarl turns into a story, listen. When the story turns into a lesson, write it on your bones. When the heat rises, do not flinch—temper is made in fire, and you were born of a star. Let shame fall away like old bark. Let doubt crack like ice in spring. Let your yes burn clean and your no ring like iron.

Do not fear your demons. Study them, lead them, graduate from them. Walk forward with a gaze that does not lower and a heart that does not harden. You are not the haunted house—you are the architect who opened every locked room and let the windows breathe. You are not defined by what chased you, but refined by what you chose to face. Rise blazing and whole. Become the teacher your demons came to find."

~ Steve De'lano Garcia

The Enlightened Idiot

 Spirituality: The Art of Losing Your Bullshit

I’m here in Ubud, where Burning Man meets Bali in ceremony and celebration — a jungle playground of ecstatic dance, cacao rituals, and tribal designer wear that looks like it was inspired from the cocktail hour set of a Mad Max movie. Everywhere you turn, someone’s rebirthing, realigning, or remembering who they were in Atlantis ,  surrounded by an army of tantric linen gods who look like they’ve descended from Mount Instagram to bless the dance floor with perfectly moisturised enlightenment.

It’s a festival paradise with a side of performance art ... sacred selfies and sandalwood smoke swirling under the banner of awakening.

And yet, beneath the drums, the crystals, the shirodhara, and the endless sound baths, the same question hums like a mosquito in meditation: what happens when you stop performing spirituality, and actually start dumping your bullshit?

Forget the incense, the earthy toned loose linens, and that smug “I’m more enlightened than you” smile.

You don’t become fucking spiritual. You’re still just human, only now with better incense and worse delusions.

That’s the ego’s final, most devious trick: convincing you that your shiny, newly awakened self is somehow above all the other lost souls still fumbling through the chaos of being human.

You’re not. 

Spirituality isn’t a lifestyle choice.

You don’t “get spiritual” like you pick up pottery or CrossFit.

There’s no enlightenment starter pack, no celestial VIP lounge where the chosen few sip matcha and compare past lives.

But we love the costume. We love being the calm one in the chaos … the one who “gets it.” We light the sage, post the quote, and call it presence.

It’s not.

It’s just your ego in designer yoga pants ,  still performing, still selling, still addicted to identity. 

The real thing doesn’t add , it takes away. It doesn’t elevate you,  it fucking dismantles you. It peels you like an onion until you’re sitting there, raw and blinking, staring at the ashes of everything you thought made you “you.” ... All your beliefs. Your opinions. Your moral superiority. All fucked off and gone.

What’s left?  ... Confusion. Silence. A fragile, flickering awareness that you’ve been full of shit this whole time , and somehow, that’s okay. Just when you think you’ve cracked enlightenment, your ego sneaks back in with a shiny badge: “Look at me, I’m spiritual now.” And off you go again ,  bowing before your own humility, secretly thinking, “I bow better than they do.”

People love to claim they’ve transcended suffering… until some twat cuts them off in traffic.

Then it’s not Namaste, it’s 'fuck you, cunt!'

That’s the game.

You win by realising there’s nothing to win. No guru. No influencer. No loose linen wrapped Bali life coach charging ten grand for a tribal “awakening” retreat has the key to your soul.

Truth isn’t a course you buy ,  it’s a demolition job you survive.

You don’t learn it. You live it. Usually while muttering, “Holy shit, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.” 

That’s enlightenment — the freedom to not know.

If you’re lucky, the whole façade falls apart. You lose the labels, the logic, the armour. You stop trying to be “good.” You stop trying to be anything. 

And in the rubble, there’s this quiet space … empty, terrifying, magnificent. Nothing to hold onto, and somehow, everything held. 

That’s the punchline:

The nothing you’ve been avoiding was the everything you were chasing.

There’s no final version of you waiting at the end of the path.

No halo. No certificate. No chocolate watch.

Just you ...  a little softer, a little freer, a little less full of shit than yesterday.

So burn the script. Drop the robes. Let the ego collapse under the weight of its own performance. Then get up, stretch, and live the fuck out of life. Not to become enlightened ... but because you finally realise you already are.

That, my friend, is the art of losing your bullshit.

The Enlightened Idiot

I thought awakening 

would make me special.

Instead, it made me laugh 

at every version of myself

that ever tried to be.

ZP