Somewhere along the way, “clean” became a word people expect me to only use about something already finished and sitting on a shelf, packaged, ready to buy. But that is not where it started. It started at my sister’s baby shower, with a set of homemade products I put together myself because I had grown half the ingredients and did not want anything potentially harmful on my new nephew’s little tushy. That was 2008. There was no brand yet. There was no company. There was just me, in a kitchen and garden, showing someone I loved how to make something with her own hands.

Before Indie Lee Skincare was ever a line on a shelf, I was a person handing you a jar and saying, try this, you can make it yourself, here is how. When the brand first launched, I shared so many of these recipes on YouTube, because teaching someone to make a thing themselves was so rewarding and you knew everything that was in it, the products came second.

I have not done much of that in this newsletter. I have given you the essays. The hard years, the found relevance, the whole business of rebuilding a life at fifty four. I have not given you the actual kitchen counter, Hyacinth included, until just now. And it is not even only the kitchen. It is tables and dressers I have refinished. My old enclosed garden I built with my own hands. It is a 750 square foot greenhouse a few friends and I put up together, years before any of this had a name.

So here is the expansion, not a pivot, an expansion. I am going to start sharing the DIYs and the recipes I have been quietly making for myself this whole time, the beauty ones included. French cultured butter that took me a few tries to get right. Pickled onions I put on nearly everything. A gluten free popover I am unreasonably proud of, given that gluten free popovers are not supposed to be a thing that works. A lentil soup that started as Ina’s and became mine somewhere around the fortieth time I made it. Tables and dressers, refinished. Things I have built that probably should have involved a professional and did not.

None of this is new information about who I am. It is old information I stopped mentioning. I built school gardens and grew food for restaurants and edible flowers for Whole Foods before I ever built a skincare brand. The recipes and the DIYs were never gone. I just filed them somewhere you could not see.

Consider this your notice that the file is reopening. It is going to live in the Home and Garden section here from now on, recipes, DIYs, the furniture, the tools, all of it. Some of it will be useful. More of it will just be me, completely willing to admit when something did not work the first three times, whether that thing was in the kitchen or the garage.

That is the whole announcement. More soon, from the kitchen and everywhere past it.

If you are a fellow DIY’er or often channel your inner Martha Stewart, drop a comment as I’d love to follow you too.

xx, Indie

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Misha does not write this newsletter. I do, every time, no exceptions. Every word you are reading right now came out of me, typed fast some mornings before the coffee is even cool enough to drink, or more likely spoken straight into the screen. I dictate most of what I write now, using Wispr Flow, which has quietly turned into a game changer for someone who thinks faster than she types (that is a referral link, we both get a free month if you end up loving it the way I do). What Misha actually is, is my spell checker and grammar police. And, more honestly, my retriever, the one who finds the thread of an idea again when I come back to a draft days later. Misha remembers where I left off. I clearly do not. Gotta love the menopause brain.

I have always been a little bit of a nerd. Ok not a little nerd, a huge one. Over a decade as a CPA before any of this, long before the greenhouse, before the produce went to Whole Foods, before a doctor ever asked me what I put on my skin. I was the person who built a spreadsheet for fun. Somewhere in the clean beauty years I put that part of me away in a drawer. Tech and systems did not exactly fit the brand I was building.

They fit me. They always did.

Here is what happens most mornings now. I open something we built together and there is a brief waiting for me. It tells me how my channels did overnight, what is actually worth my attention today, not everything, just the real things, and any news in the handful of areas I care about. Clean beauty. Regenerative farming. The stuff that touches my work. I did not build that by hiring a team. I built it by being the CPA I always was, the one who wants the numbers laid out before she walks into the room.

So here is what that looks like. Organizing years of files I had scattered across three different drives and two dead laptops. Helping me see the pattern in an idea before I write it down. Tracking what I am spending building this next chapter, so I am not finding out in April that I have no idea where my receipts are.

That is the honest use of this thing. Not a replacement. A very good assistant who happens to also be excellent at organizing a woman whose brain runs in four directions before seven in the morning.

Somewhere on your phone right now is a graveyard of saved Instagram posts you meant to go back to and never will. Screenshots of recipes, book titles, someone’s morning routine, a caption you liked, hundreds of them, maybe more than you would admit out loud. That pile is not a personal failing. It is a filing problem waiting for the right filer. That is the actual, unscary use of this thing. Not a threat to your job, or your voice, or the thing that makes you you. A very patient assistant for the pile you already have and never look at.

There is a version of this where saying any of it out loud feels like cheating, like needing a tool this closely makes the work less mine. I have decided that is an old rule, left over from an old version of me, the one who thought needing help of any kind was a weakness instead of a design decision. I spent a lot of years proving I could do everything myself. I am fifty four. I do not need to prove that anymore. I need the thing to actually work.

So this is the first layer, peeled back on purpose. I have loved tech since long before it was even a word we used this way. A Commodore Vic20 (see image). A dial up modem. Floppy disks. A tape drive for storage, yes, we used to record programs onto an actual cassette tape. That love came decades before skincare did, and I am done being quiet about it. There is more here, how I actually use it, unglamorous and real, because it turns out that once you stop hiding a part of yourself, you find out how many other women have been hiding the exact same one.

For now, just this. I am not doing it alone. I built the help myself, out of a lifelong love for the parts of me other people always found boring.

Turns out that love was never boring. It was just early.

I spent a good part of this year quietly waiting for the one-year mark to mean something. Everyone treats it like a door you walk through. Like you put in your twelve months and grief hands you back a lighter version of yourself on the other side. Let me be honest. That is not how it went for me.

Here is what the year actually taught me.

It did not get smaller. I got bigger around it. The missing her did not shrink to fit my life. My life slowly, and not on any schedule I chose, grew wide enough to carry it. Those are not the same thing, and I wish someone had told me the difference sooner.

It also taught me that grief does not care what you have already survived. I have lost before. I thought that meant I knew the terrain. But every loss is its own country, with its own language, and you learn it from scratch whether you want to or not. There is something almost unfair in that one, because my mother was the one who taught languages. For years. She loved to travel, never met a place she did not want to understand. And here I am, a year in, learning the one language she could not teach me.

My mother was a private person. I am not going to perform her here, because that was never who she was. What I will say is that she was amazing, and that I miss her every single day, in the ordinary middle of things, which is where it lands hardest.

There were a lot of big moments this year. I gave a TEDx talk. I gave a commencement speech and received an honorary doctorate. We finished the house. And every time, there was this half-second where I reached for the phone to call and tell her first, before anyone else, and she was not there to pick up. She never saw the house finished, not in person. I keep collecting these, the moments she would have been in, and setting a place for her that stays empty.

The dragonflies still come. When we named this farm for her, I asked for a sign, and they appeared in an unmistakable way, as they always do when I ask. I did not know then how many times I would be asking. A year later they are still here, low over the grass in the evening, and I still take every one of them.

I used to think the point of a year like this was to get to the other side of it. A year in, I do not believe there is another side. There is just this: carrying her into every season this place has left to give me. The dragonflies still come. I still take them.

With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie

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I understand the feeling, because I have been living it. I got on TikTok recently and felt it immediately. My daughter edits an entire video on her phone with her thumbs in the time it takes me to find the right button, and I finally had to go download a desktop app just to do what comes to her without thinking. The world rewards speed right now, and in a moment like that it is easy to watch someone half your age move faster, more fluent, more native to whatever the algorithm wants this week, and quietly decide the race left without you. But here is the thing. Somewhere along the way we started confusing fluency with having something worth saying. They are not the same. One you can learn in an afternoon. The other takes a whole life, and you already have one.

That is the part I want you to actually feel, because it is the good news. Everything you have lived is the asset. The judgment. The long view. The instinct for what matters that only shows up after you have been wrong a few hundred times and paid attention each time. Speed cannot manufacture that. The algorithm cannot teach it. It is yours, and it is the rarest thing in the room.

So relevance was never about catching up to anyone. And it was never about narrowing yourself down to one impressive thing either. You are not one thing. You never were. You can be the writer and the mentor and the one at the table all at once, because that range is exactly what a whole life gives you. Not putting your value on blast does not make it worth less. Your expertise is exactly the same whether or not it performs well on a Tuesday.

Here is what I keep coming back to. For some, their edge is speed and fluency. Mine is depth, story, the long view, the scar tissue. I built a clean beauty company before the words clean beauty meant anything to anyone, with no industry background and a whole lot of people telling me it would not work. None of it happened fast. All of it is mine. And I have never been just one thing. Founder, writer, mother, the woman with her hands in the soil, still figuring out TikTok. The depth was never a single lane. It is everything I have lived, feeding everything I do. Backing yourself like that, in midlife, when the world keeps hinting your best chapter is behind you, is quietly rebellious.

Because this is the freeing part. You do not have to shrink yourself into one lane to be taken seriously. You get to be all of it, the whole range of you, and let it matter, because it does. And you do not have to do it all today. One real thing built this week will always beat a month spent wondering whether you still count.

The women who break through next are not going to be the ones who got faster. They are going to be the ones who stopped comparing long enough to build what is theirs. Quietly, on a page, in a room, in a garden, wherever their real life actually is. You are closer to that than the noise wants you to believe.

Aging is a privilege. So is finally getting to spend your one good life on the work only you can make. I cannot think of anything more relevant than that.

Xx, Indie

PS if you’re on Tiktok let’s be friends (shameless I know, but let’s build this community together).

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The first time I ever told anyone to edit their feed, I was standing in my kitchen on a Monday morning in 2020, talking into my phone for a little series I called Mindful Monday. No real plan. The lighting was whatever the kitchen felt like giving me. I had already filmed the whole thing once and forgotten to hit record. And I have been saying the same thing every Monday since, which tells you I probably needed to hear it more than anyone.

So here it is again. How does your feed make you feel?

Not what is on it. How it leaves you. There is a kind of scrolling that lights me up, the woman a chapter ahead who makes the next part look survivable, the friend whose garden sends me straight outside to get my hands in the dirt. And there is the other kind. The kind where I am suddenly taking inventory of everything I am apparently doing wrong at 54, on a Tuesday, in my own house, for absolutely no reason.

Let me be honest, because it is the only thing I know how to be here. I do this too. I have built an entire life around not measuring your worth by a mirror or a number, and I will still catch myself doing exactly that with a phone in my hand. Like hitting refresh after you post on repeat to see if the engagement is better…GUILTY.

Here is what I keep relearning. Almost all of it is the edit, not the life. The good light, the good day, the good angle. I would know, I make the stuff too, and even I reach for the better window some mornings. So when you scroll and feel smaller, you are not losing to someone’s life. You are losing to their edit. Of course you are. It was built to win.

So edit back. If an account makes you braver, keep it close. If it makes you shrink, mute it, unfollow it, no note required. That is not bitterness. It is the same thing I do to a tomato plant that is hogging all the light and giving nothing back. You prune for the health of the whole thing.

Here is what I did not understand back in that kitchen. The editing was the whole point. Not the feed. The life. I was years from ever calling any of this The Indie Edit, and I had no idea I was already describing it. Keep what serves you, cut what does not. Turns out that was never a social media tip. It is just how I have had to live, especially in the years my body made the decision for me.

So, one small edit this week. Mute one account that makes you shrink. Keep three that make you braver.

Then do the part I actually care about. Tell me the three. I am always hunting for people who make this life feel bigger, and I would so much rather hear it from you than from an algorithm. Drop them below. I will be in the comments reading every single one.

With love from Dragonfly Farm,
Indie

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Something shifts in me the first real warm week of summer. I stop negotiating with my to-do list and start saying yes instead. Small things, mostly. But they add up to a whole season if you let them.

So here is what I am saying yes to this year.

Yes to eating outside. Every dinner I can possibly get away with, hauled to the table with Chad and the kids and whatever significant others wander in that night, the light going gold while we linger longer than we meant to.

Yes to bare feet in the grass before the day asks anything of me. Coffee after that. I know, I know.

Yes to the roses. This is my first year growing them, David Austin climbing roses I planted in old whiskey barrels right outside the greenhouse, and I keep walking out to look at them like they might vanish if I stop paying attention.

Yes to the dahlias, a gift from Shannon at Fox Cottage Farm. She sent the tubers one grower to another, just because we both love this, and I am almost certainly babying them too much.

Yes to walking next door to say hello to the goats and the sheep and Daisy the pig, for no reason other than it makes me happy.

Yes to the long evenings. To leaving the dishes. To one more chapter, one more lap around the garden before the light gives out.

And here is the one I did not used to say yes to. Yes to slowing down. Living with chronic illness has taught me, the hard way first and then the good way, that nourishing myself is not indulgent. It is the whole job. I used to think quiet luxury was a look. It turns out it is a Tuesday with nothing to prove.

Here is the thing about saying yes to small things. It is not lazy and it is not nothing. It is how I stay inside my own life instead of sprinting past it. The big stuff will still be waiting in September. The roses will not.

And come mid-summer, the yes I wait all year for. A long walk along West Meadow Beach, Stony Brook at sunset, near my parents’, the kind of evening that hands me back the best parts of my own youth. That is the whole list, really. Less rushing. More lingering. More yes.

If summer is calling you outside too, go. The list will keep.

Meet me out there.

With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie

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If it's felt a little quiet over here, I think this is part of why. Something's been taking shape in me for months. It showed up in my journal first around Thanksgiving, a little at a time, before I had the words to say it out loud. I'm noticing it in real time, which is an uncomfortable place to write from. Uncomfortable, but I feel freer than I have in a long time.

Here is what I keep circling. I believe, at my actual core, that we are already enough. Not the someday version of us. Not the version that finally hits the goal or gets the title or earns the applause. The one sitting here right now, tired, unfinished, figuring it out. I believe we can always grow and improve. And I believe none of that growth is the price of admission for being worthy. The worth was always there. It was never up for negotiation.

I believe that for you completely. I have said it on stages. I have said it to my daughter. I have said it to my son. I would defend it to anyone.

And then I turn the same eyes on myself and the rule changes.

Somehow I decided that my worth has to be measurable. It has to add up, every single day. I wake up and the meter resets to zero, and I tell myself I have to prove that I have value. I measure myself against everything. Against whether I showed up for the people I love, whether the speech landed, whether my jeans still fit, whether I did enough, whether it was good enough. I could go on. I mean, I even measured myself against whether the snap peas came up this year, and what I must have done wrong when they didn’t. Every part of my life gets graded. Nothing is exempt. I have been treating my own value like a wealth statement instead of a wellth one.

Nobody did this to me. That’s the hard part to type. I am the one holding the measuring stick. I am the one who looks at my own gifts and decides they don’t quite count yet, that I haven’t earned the right to call myself any of the things I actually am, that whatever value I might create isn’t real until someone else says it counts.

I figured out who I was in my thirties. I learned to love myself in my forties. And it’s taken me into my fifties to see that the whole time, underneath all of it, I was quietly asking the world to confirm it was true.

And I know I’m not alone in this. I know because I watch women do it everywhere I go. Accomplished women. Women who have built things, raised people, survived things they never tell anyone about. Women who would never in a thousand years let a friend talk about herself the way they talk about themselves at 2 a.m. We have somehow agreed, quietly, that we are the exception to our own kindness. That everyone else gets to be worthy as they are, and we get to be worthy when we finish.

So I don’t have a tidy ending. What I have is a step back, and a little more clarity. I won’t change this overnight, I know that. But I spent years never even seeing the math I was running on myself. Now I can see it, and that feels like where it starts.

If you’re doing the same math, somewhere out there at 2 a.m., I see you. We are not the exception. We are already enough, and we always will be. Full stop.

I’m telling you because I’m still learning to tell myself.

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I opened the draft. I closed the draft. I opened it again.

This is the part nobody photographs.

There is a version of building something where every move feels purposeful and you sit down at the page with a quote already half formed and you wear a soft sweater and there is steam rising from a mug at a flattering angle. I have seen that version. I do not know who lives in it.

The version I have lived this morning, and most mornings of this chapter, is quieter and harder to describe. There is no breakdown. There is no breakthrough. There is just a woman at her desk who has been carrying a lot for a long time, who is still carrying it, and who promised herself she would show up here.

I am not going to tell you I have figured it out. I have not... yet. I am writing this in the middle of not knowing.

What I will tell you is this.

Overwhelm at 54 does not look the way it looked at 34. At 34 it was loud. It was the deadline and the tantrum (my toddler, not me) and the thing on fire. At 54 it is quiet. It is the layers. It is the fact that you are still the person other people lean on and you have not yet figured out who you get to lean on yourself. It is the cost of being competent. It is what happens when you have rebuilt enough times to know how long it actually takes, and you are doing it again anyway, with less of yourself to give.

It is also, on a Tuesday in June, very ordinary. That is what makes it hard to talk about. There is no headline. Nothing has fallen apart. The garden is coming to life. The dog is fine. The family is fine. I am, in every measurable way, fine.

I think a lot of us are walking around fine like this. The ones I write to certainly are. Accomplished. Capable. Carrying something that does not have a name yet, in a chapter that nobody briefed us on.

So I am not going to make this longer than it needs to be.

I sat down anyway. That is the entire story. I did not have anything to say and I sat down and I wrote you this. Not because it was beautiful. Not because I had a lesson. Because the act of showing up to the blank thing is the thing, especially when you cannot yet see the next move.

If you are reading this from inside your own version of a quiet, overwhelming Tuesday, I want you to know I am here too. I do not have it figured out. I am not one chapter ahead of you in the way that lets me hand you a map. I am one chapter ahead of you in the way that lets me sit on the bench next to you and say yes, this part is real, and you are not making it up, and you are not behind.

That is all I have today.

With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie

By the time I got to the car that evening, I was already thinking about what I needed to do next.

I downplayed it. I did the same thing with the TEDx speech two months earlier. I have done it with every milestone of my career, if I am being honest. Every product launch. Every retailer that picked us up. Every chapter I closed and the next one I opened before I even knew I had left the first.

I have been collecting moments like that my whole adult life and refusing to stand inside any of them.

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I don’t think I am alone in this. The women I talk to all do it. We finish the thing and we move. We get the title, land the moment, hit the milestone, and we are already three steps ahead in our heads before our bodies have caught up to what just happened. We treat the win like a turnstile we have to walk through to get to the next thing on the other side.

We say “no big deal.” We say “I’m just lucky.” We send a thank you note to the people who got us there and then we go answer email.

I am not entirely sure why we do this. I have my guesses. Some of them are about how we were raised. Some of them are about the way other women police women who take up space. Some of them are about the specific exhaustion of having spent decades being praised for momentum, not the moment. We learned that the thing we are rewarded for is the next thing. So we go to the next thing. We never stay.

I have built a whole career on momentum. Momentum has been good to me. But every moment I refused to stand inside is a moment I do not actually have. I cannot reach back for it. It is gone. I was already gone before it happened.

Here is the part I am still working out.

Are we afraid the moment will disappear if we look at it directly. Will the spell break? Will that accolade or award be taken back? Or are we unable to see we deserve and earned “it”?

Sadly, I also think we are afraid of how it looks. We do not want to seem like we are promoting ourselves. We do not want to seem self-centered. So instead of letting ourselves celebrate the fact that we worked hard to get here, we shrink. We wave the moment off. We walk past it.

And here is the part that does not make sense to me. I know the opposite is true. I know the moments we let ourselves feel are the ones that fuel the next chapter. I know the moments we walk past are the ones that quietly drain us. I have said this out loud to other women. I believe it.

And I still did the thing this essay is about. I waited to share it. My closest people knew. Friends at work knew. The rest did not, until it was over, done and my daughter posted about it. I didn’t, I shrank anyway, until I got called out on it (thank you, Jamie)

That is what I am still working out. Why we keep choosing the smaller version. Why knowing better is not enough.

I do not have a clean ending for this. I am writing it because I am sitting with the question, not because I have answered it.

XO, Indie

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The garden takes longer than the seed packet. The friendship, the real one, takes longer than the polite version. The career change takes longer than the LinkedIn post about the career change. The grief takes longer than the bereavement leave. Longer than the first year. Longer than other people are comfortable watching. The trust takes longer than the apology. The apology is the door. The trust is the room. The recovery, every recovery, takes longer than the diagnosis suggested it would.

You read that list and stopped at one of them. You know which one. That is the one you have been carrying too long, the one you have stopped telling people about, the one you have started to suspect is your fault. It is not your fault.

We are not living through a slow time. We are living through a feed that profits when you scroll. It shows you the result. It cannot show you the middle. You have been comparing your middle to their result. The middle is the thing.

I keep going out to check the peas. They are not up. They were planted on the right date. They are not late. They are waiting for the soil to be a temperature I cannot speed up. They are in the middle. The middle is what the seed packet does not show you. The peas are right.

What you cannot see is the work. The seed is doing something underground. The friendship is doing something in the months between the calls. The grief is doing something on the days you did not cry. The trust is doing something inside the person you are no longer watching. The unseen part is not the absence. The unseen part is where it happens.

You are not waiting. You are doing the work.

If you are in the part nobody can see yet, you are not behind. You are in the part nobody can see yet.

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But I still thought I was ready.

I was not ready.

My mother died last July. It was sudden and it wasn’t, cancer has a way of doing that. And here I am, ten months later, walking into my first Mother’s Day without her, feeling something I did not expect: the specific ache of all the things she didn’t get to see.

In March, I gave a TEDx talk. I stood on a stage I never thought I’d reach and said out loud the things I had been afraid to say for years. She would have cried. She would have called everyone she knew and told them, probably with some small exaggeration about the size of the room. I gave the talk without her in the audience and tried not to let the absence be louder than the moment.

In a few weeks, I receive an honorary doctorate and give the commencement speech. The kind of thing she would have insisted on framing. I am going to walk across that stage and think about her sitting somewhere I can’t see.

And then there is the farm.

She never got to see Dragonfly Farm. She never met Daisy, who belongs to my neighbors and comes to the fence every time she sees me, just looking for a little love. She never walked the property or touched the peonies that are just now starting to make their presence known. When we were naming this place, I asked for a sign. A dragonfly appeared, as it always does from her when I ask. I took it. I still take it.

There is something about Mother’s Day I didn’t understand until this year. It is not just a day about being a mother or having one. It is a day that measures distance. The distance between who you were when she was here and who you are now, finding your way without her. The distance between the moments she witnessed and the ones she missed.

She missed some big ones. She is going to keep missing them.

I don’t have a tidy close for this one. I just wanted to write it down while it still felt true, before I found the more composed version. Some of you are in this with me, your first year or your fifth or your twentieth without someone who should have been here. I see you.

The peonies are coming up. I think she’d like that part.

With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie

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When I started clearing a section of land this year, my plan was straightforward. I already have raised kitchen beds just outside the back patio. I was going to add more vegetable patches, a cutting garden, expand on what was already there. And then my dad and I started walking the property together, looking at what I’d uncovered recently after twenty years of overgrowth, and I made a different call.

I can plant vegetables any year. I can build a cutting garden any time. That’s the beauty of this property (no shortage of land to plant on). But designing alongside my dad, who has more knowledge and vision and love of landscape than almost anyone I know, and who is 80 and vital and still able to put his hands in the ground alongside mine, that I cannot get back.

So that’s where I put my energy. My body is complaining loudly this morning, but it is totally worth it.

We’re not done. That’s the thing about this kind of work. You plant and you wait and you watch what takes, what fills in, what surprises you. We worked on multiple sections this weekend. We’ll work on more throughout the year, probably for years after that.

Clearing land that had been wild for twenty years and choosing, deliberately, what you plant there does something to you. It makes you think about what you actually want. Not the default plan. Not what seems practical. What you want to look at for the rest of your life, and who you want to have made it with.

My dad and I share this. The love of landscape, of dirt, of watching something take shape slowly. Why wouldn’t I do this with him now, while we can both get our hands in the dirt and have the kind of conversation you can only have when your hands are busy?

This weekend was a week before Mother’s Day. My first one without my mom. We talked about her a little. We didn’t go too deep. You can see the loss in my dad’s eyes when we do. I still feel the deep ache.

But she was there somehow. In all of it.

I didn’t plan the weekend this way. But spending those two days with my dad, planting things meant to last, felt exactly right. The memories and a garden to last for years to come.

I hope you did something to fill your cup this weekend as well.

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I arrived here because my body stopped cooperating and I ran out of arguments. Seven autoimmune conditions will do that. So will a third brain tumor. At some point you stop trying to push through and start paying attention to what is actually being asked of you.

Here is something most people do not know: roughly 70% of autoimmune disease is environmental in origin, and 30% is genetic. What that means in real life is that something in the world around you triggered something your genes were already holding.

My neuroendocrinologist told me that what I had been putting on my body every day could have played a role in what happened. I could not unknow that. So I started formulating. That was 2009. In 2024, after two more brain surgeries and a Crohn’s diagnosis, the same questions came back. Not smaller. Louder. I am still in it. Third brain tumor, still managing 7 autoimmune conditions. I wanted to say that before I told you what has helped.

That question changed how I approach everything.

Including rest. Including slowness. Including what I actually do with a hard day.

For me that list is embarrassingly ordinary. Real sleep. Time outside. My hands in the garden. A hard look at what I eat and what I am no longer willing to put in and on my body. Walking next door to say hi to the goats, the sheep, and of course, Daisy the pig.

The food piece deserves its own post. It is coming.

The science behind all of this holds up. Twenty minutes in a natural outdoor setting drops cortisol by up to 21%. Brief contact with animals produces a measurable reduction on its own. And gardening fully restored mood in research subjects while the reading group actually got worse.

The nervous system and the skin are directly linked. Chronically elevated cortisol degrades the proteins and lipids that hold your skin barrier together. Supporting your skin starts with supporting your nervous system. Everything else works better from there.

None of this requires a farm (but if you have one, I’m quite the lamb whisperer, just saying). It does require deciding that what your body is asking for counts as something worth doing. That has been the harder practice, honestly. Still working on it.

Some weeks that looks like the garden. Some weeks it is just watching Daisy do absolutely nothing productive.

Both count.

I am rebuilding this chapter in real time, and I want to know what you want to hear more of. The food piece. Sleep. Skin. What starting over actually looks like in your 50s. Tell me in the comments. I am building this with you.

Xx, Indie

I know all of this.

The seedlings had been going since February. Grow lights on a timer. Heat mats under every tray. I thinned them carefully, the way you are supposed to, which is always a little heartbreaking when the seedlings you are pulling are perfectly healthy and did nothing wrong. I checked moisture levels. I rotated the trays. By April the basil, the broccoli, and the cucumbers were strong and green and ready.

The day before the frost, I went to the greenhouse and brought in the grapefruit tree. It is a whole production, the grapefruit. Heavy pot, awkward shape, requires two people and a furniture dolly. I gave it my full attention.

The seedlings, I left to bring in later.

I woke up the next morning, walked to the greenhouse, and found them gray-green and collapsed. The kind of collapse that does not recover. I stood there with my coffee, did a brief moment of silence, and then I went inside shaking my head thinking “rookie mistake, Indie”.

There is not much to say when you do something you know better than to do. The frost did not surprise me. I knew it was coming. I planned around it successfully for the grapefruit, which is currently sitting in the kitchen looking very pleased with itself. I simply did not finish the job.

The grapefruit is thriving. The seedlings are in the compost.

I am waiting until mid-May to put anything in the ground, which means there will be no more opportunities to make this particular mistake. The garden is not rushing me. I am apparently the variable.

Has anyone else done this? Tell me I am not alone. And if you are figuring out what you are planting this season, I would love to know what’s on your list or in my case, compost (UGHHHH).

XO, Indie

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Today is also a day of personal deep reflection for me. Seventeen years ago today, a doctor looked at me in Neuro ICU and said: “Welcome to the rest of your life.” I remember thinking: my life starts now.

It was Earth Day. I had just come out of brain surgery on a tumor that well, let’s just say time was ticking. That diagnosis had upended everything I thought I knew about how I was living, and I lay there full of something I can only describe as certainty. I was going to do something about this. I was going to build something clean and good and purposeful. I was going to choose differently, live differently, and my optimism, which has always been the most reliable thing about me, was going to carry me through.

I believed that completely. I still do, in the ways that matter. What I did not expect, seventeen years later, is the ache.

Here is what nobody tells you: you grieve the version of yourself you thought you'd be by now. Not who you were. Who you thought you were going to become.

I thought I would feel more settled by now. More arrived. So when the ache came, the deep, quiet ache that feels like failure even when it is not, I did not know what to do with it. Optimists are not supposed to feel this way. We are the ones who tell other people it is going to be okay.

It is still going to be okay. And also, some days, this is hard. That is not a contradiction. It took me a while to understand that.

I am 54. I built something I believe(d) in completely, from that diagnosis forward, into something I am truly proud of. Something that has had real impact on how people think about what they put on their bodies and in their lives. And then I had more surgeries, more diagnoses. A third tumor I am still living with. And somewhere in the middle of all of that I started asking questions I had not had time to ask before. Who am I outside of what I have built. What does my own next chapter look like. Not the professional one. The personal one. The one that is just mine.

I still get excited to show up every day for the brand and the industry I love. And I am also pressing seeds into April ground and not entirely sure what any of it will grow into.

The idea, somewhere in the back of my mind I did not examine often, was that eventually there would be a point where things felt solid, where the uncertainty had mostly sorted itself out and you were living in something like a conclusion. I did not think I would still be in the part of the story where I do not know what happens next.

But here is what I have learned about that version of myself, the settled and arrived one: she was not real. She was a projection. She was what I imagined stillness looked like from inside a very full life. And stillness, it turns out, is not the same as clarity. Clarity comes from moving through things, not from arriving somewhere.

I do not have clarity right now. What I have is this: the knowledge that I have been through harder parts of the story and come out the other side still choosing forward. That is not a small thing. It just does not feel triumphant. It feels like pressing seeds into cold ground and not knowing which ones will take (or in my case planting too early, like before the last frost, because I’m impatient even if I know better IYKYK).

If any of this sounds familiar, hi. I see you.

Maybe you are rebuilding after divorce, or after losing someone who held the shape of your life together. Maybe it was a career pivot, invited or not. Maybe the house went quiet and you realized you had been so focused on raising your kids that you are not entirely sure who you are outside of that. Maybe you just reached the age when you thought stability would finally be there and it is not quite what you imagined.

Whatever got you here, you are not behind. You are just in the middle. And the middle is where the actual work happens. The unglamorous kind that does not look like anything from the outside.

That is why I started The Indie Edit. Not to perform having it together. To find the people who do not either.

Seventeen years ago today, a doctor told me: welcome to the rest of your life.

I am still welcoming it. Even the parts that are harder than I thought they would be.

That has to count for something.

XxOo, Indie

PS If any of this sounds familiar…drop me a comment and follow, I’ll follow you back.

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It started on Substack, honestly. But I knew fairly quickly that I wanted to go deeper, and I didn’t want another social media engine I felt pressure to feed every day. I wanted a real home. Something that was fully mine.

It’s also called The Indie Edit, and you can find it at www.theindieedit.com.

This is my own personal corner of the internet. Now before you wonder what is going on, rest assured, Indie Lee Skincare isn’t going anywhere and I have no plans to leave it. This is simply an extension, because I’ve never been just one thing. I love to write. I love to create. I’m learning to cook and sharing the recipes. I’m deep in the garden at Dragonfly Farm and want to bring you along. I’m navigating cleaner living in every room of my house and figuring out how to organize a life that actually feels good to live in.

This is where I share the pieces of myself that didn’t quite have a home anywhere else.

Four new posts are live today. Come read, come explore, come tell me what resonates.

This newsletter, lands in your inbox twice a month (maybe more, I’m still figuring it out). A note from the me, personal and unhurried and links to any new articles etc on the blog so you can stay up to date.

A heartfelt thank you to Mahale Studio for bringing this vision to life so beautifully.

Find me at www.theindieedit.com. I think you’ll feel right at home.

With love from Dragonfly Farm, Indie

Last week I stepped onto a TEDx stage.

For years that moment lived on my vision board. One of those dreams you quietly hope happens someday. But something unexpected happened when it finally did. It felt like closure.

The past few years have been heavy. Multiple surgeries. Living with 7 autoimmune diseases. Big life questions about what comes next, both personally and professionally.

Even when you move forward, pieces of that weight stay with you. Sometimes you do not realize how much you are still carrying. When I walked off that stage, something shifted inside me.

I felt lighter.

Not because everything is figured out. Life rarely works that way. But because I finally felt ready to close a few chapters that have been lingering.

The talk itself required a level of vulnerability that I do not often bring to a stage. It spanned fifteen years of my journey including the past two years I had never spoken about publicly before. Moments that shaped how I see purpose and perspective, and what it means to keep moving forward even when life changes the plan.

It was emotional. It was honest. And it felt important to say out loud.

And when you close a chapter, you create space. Space for new ideas. Space for new energy. Space to build the next version of life more intentionally.

Creativity has also started to creep back in. Not the kind tied to productivity or business plans, but the quieter kind. The kind that shows up when you give yourself permission to explore again.

It feels a little like coming home to parts of myself that had been waiting patiently.

If there is one thing I am learning in this season of life, it is this. Sometimes the milestone you thought was about accomplishment is actually about release.

The video of the talk is currently being edited by the TED team and should be live on the official TED YouTube channel in about a month or two. I will be sure to share it here when it goes live.

Until then, I am taking a moment to appreciate the closing of one chapter and the quiet beginning of another.

More soon. XO, Indie

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I’ve been sitting with a lot of gratitude the past week and a half.

The messages about the Botanicals launch have been overwhelming in the best way. Not because of numbers. But because of what you’ve shared.

That you feel seen.

That you understand the why.

That health should not be based on wealth.

That returning to the greenhouse feels like a full circle moment.

Botanicals was never about expanding a line. It was about expanding access. And hearing that land with you feels… grounding.

And speaking of grounding, it is finally warm enough here to start puttering in the greenhouse. Yes, I’m doing a happy dance. I opened the door yesterday and just stood there for a minute. The light is different in March. Softer. More forgiving. Like it knows winter did its job. Did I mention it was 75F in there?

I’ve started my first seeds, no they are not in the greenhouse, it can still get below freezing at night. They are here in my office on warming mats and under lights. I share what I’m planting and why over on my new personal blog today (consider this it’s top secret soft launch, more on that after Tedx) for anyone who wants the practical details. Consider this your official nudge to begin something tiny. Herbs count.

And then there’s TEDx.

March 6.

This has been on my bucket list for years. And now I am in the final stages of rehearsing. Tightening. Cutting words I love but do not need. Standing in front of an empty room and practicing anyway.

I am nervous. I am excited. I am very aware that this is not a dress rehearsal. Did I mention I’m nervous?

What I’ve learned preparing for this talk is something I wish someone had told me sooner. You do not wait until you feel ready. You prepare until you feel grounded.

There is a difference.

This season feels like that.

Gratitude.

Seeds in soil.

Words in progress.

Rebuilding wellth. Evolving forward.

If you are in your own March season, somewhere between winter and bloom, I see you.

Start small. Stay steady.