I spent 30 hours there. For those of you who don’t know, I have a third brain tumor that we monitor. Three MRIs and an MRA, which meant an hour and a half straight in a tube, and at the end of all of it the results came back inconclusive. So my neuro team at Yale is reviewing everything.

That’s it, that’s the whole update, and that was my whole weekend. Sunday I rested and made sourdough. The sad part is that for so many of us with chronic illness none of that is abnormal, we just don’t talk about it in public.

Along with the tumor I live with six other autoimmune conditions. This is what that actually looks like. You’re fine, and you’re also not fine. One minute I’m on a phone call talking about something completely ordinary, and the next minute the doctor is on the other line saying those symptoms are concerning, I think you need to go to the hospital. You spend most of your energy managing it so it never gets in the way of what you’re doing, and most people around you never know.

I told almost nobody. My immediate family and a few of my closest friends, that’s it. So some of you are reading this and finding out for the first time (sorry), and I don’t want to be shocking, that isn’t what this is about at all. I’m just done hiding it, because hiding it was helping nobody, including me.

I have to own my part in this. For years I let other people decide what I could say and when, and I went along with it when I knew better. My health is the entire reason the company I founded exists in the first place, and I still went quiet about it. (This is how I operated as a people pleaser, fun fact, I once asked a boss if the timing was right for getting pregnant, so no this is not a new thing). That’s not where I am now. I work with an amazing team, nobody is telling me to keep quiet, no one is judging bad days. What’s left is me, and how programmed I am to keep it all in. Which helps nobody, because what people need to see is that you can be successful and still be managing a chronic illness every single day.

I also know how fortunate I am. I know how to advocate for myself, I have a medical team I trust completely, and I know what resources the Autoimmune Association has and how to go looking for answers. I walked out of that hospital Saturday evening without a single answer, but I also walked out with an action plan, and that’s more than most patients ever get. There are women and men reading this who are still waiting on their first answer, first diagnosis, still being told it’s stress, and still being told it’s in their head. On Saturday, I’m walking in Washington, DC, and I’m doing it for them, and for the research that still hasn’t been done.

For those of you who don’t know, the Autoimmune Association puts it at more than 50 million Americans, and says about 80% of us are women. Their own unpublished 2020 report put it closer to 80 million. The research these numbers rest on goes back to 1965. We are severely underfunded as a group, and there is still no national registry ⁽¹⁾ for us the way there is for cancer. Something needs to be done, and we have to start going after the root cause, not just the symptoms.

Having one autoimmune disease, or seven, doesn’t make you weak. I have never once thought of the women I know living with this as weak. It has made me stronger, and it’s made me appreciate a good day in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s shown me what I am capable of in the best possible way. Sometimes I lose site of that.

So I’m not staying silent. If you’re still waiting on your answer, I see you, and you are not in it alone. I’ll be thinking of you Saturday when I walk for hope and as always my DM’s are open if you need someone to listen.

With love from Dragonfly Farm,

Indie

PS You better believe I use AI for spelling and grammar check. Trust me it’s better that way. ;)

(1) National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report Enhancing NIH Research on Autoimmune Disease, 2022.

While everyone is mourning the end of summer, I’m over here getting excited about new stationery. Just because my kids are no longer in school, doesn’t mean mom isn’t able to pick up new notebooks and pens. There’s something about the start of a new school year that has me excited for a fresh start, it must be the new notebook thing. Give me a new fountain pen and a fresh moleskin notebook and I’m a very happy Indie.

Back in June I told myself I was going to read more and scroll less over the next 3 months. I am proud to report (see I’m in school mode), I finished fourteen books, including The Edens series by Devney Perry, thank you Gerianne for the recommendation. The series was a perfect summer read about a family in Montana. Sadly, for my husband, I now want to live in rural Montana (just kidding, sorta, on the moving part). By the middle of July, I had stopped reaching for my phone at night to scroll. Unfortunately, I also realized I wasn’t gaining followers, because I was nose deep in books vs community engagement. So I need to figure that out, suggestions welcome…also follow me at https://www.instagram.com/indielee (shameless I know).

One of the other things I also promised myself, is that I was only going to plant herbs and veggies that we would actually eat or use. In the past, I would just buy tons of seeds, over-plant, and see a lot go to waste. This year was very intentional as I only have four raised beds at the moment, next year I have much bigger plans. I really hope my husband doesn’t read this (he has no idea what I have cooking up in my head).

While, yes, I might have gone a little overboard on the tomatoes, I’m learning to cook with them, so I’m seeing that as a win. By the way, if you’ve never tried basil garlic pickled cherry tomatoes, you are missing out. I’m on my fourth batch, I have absolutely stood at the counter eating them straight out of the jar. I feel more connected to my food than I have in a really long time. No shocker that I’m also noticing a difference in my health as a result, much more to discuss on that in another post.

Now onto the roses…I’m forever grateful to my friend Noelle, who went to the garden center with me, and Lydia Millen (IYKYK), who inspired me to get three, not one but three, David Austin climbing roses. Oh my gosh, they are starting to trellis up the greenhouse, and they’ve given me the most spectacular blooms since the day I purchased them. Needless to say, I will be getting more David Austin roses next year (again, praying Chad doesn’t see this).

Not everything I planted was a success. The potato tower was a complete failure, I got 5 potatoes. I have absolutely no idea what I did wrong, but that’s the beauty of gardening for me: trying new things, failing, and then figuring out what you did wrong so you can do better the next time. I can tell you my arch trellis in the raised bed has more birdhouse gourds than I know what to do with, so I will say that little experiment was a complete success. My neighbors are going to have a ton of gourds to decorate.

The other thing I picked back up this season is seed saving. I’m excited to build my inventory for next year. There’s so much to seed saving properly: How to properly collect and store, what you can and cannot sell, what you can and cannot share, but that’s an essay for another day.

The most perfect way to wrap up this incredible summer growing season is my speaking event in New Hampshire with Shannon. The Bloom Effect, Wednesday September 9, at Bird Dog Farm + Cider in Greenland, New Hampshire. Shannon is the one at Fox Cottage Farm who sent me the dahlia tubers this spring. Five of us across two panels talking about flowers and farming and what it does to a person, amazing bites and then a dahlia u-pick out in the field under lights afterward. Tickets are here: https://www.foxcottagefarm.com/products/the-bloom-effect If you’re anywhere near the Seacoast, please join me for this special event.

With love from Dragonfly Farm,

Indie

I’m the board treasurer of the Autoimmune Association. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the national nonprofit working on autoimmune disease, research, advocacy, all of it, and I joined the board because after eighteen years of living inside this I wanted to be useful somewhere other than my own body. (Once a CPA, always a CPA.)

On Saturday, September 19th we’re holding the Second Annual Hope Journey Walk. There are two in-person walks, one at The Wharf in DC and one at Independence Oaks County Park in Clarkston, Michigan. I’ll be at The Wharf (hint, hint).

Now I know most of you reading this aren’t getting on a train or a flight to DC, which is why they created a Walk Anywhere option. You pick the place. A sidewalk, a school track, the park, the treadmill in your basement, gardening. It all counts.

So much of living with an autoimmune condition is being told what you can and can’t do and on whose timeline, usually by people who mean well. This one lets you go where you are, at whatever pace your body can handle.

When I got my seventh diagnosis (yep 7th), I figured there was something truly wrong with me personally. Why me? Then I realized this is just how autoimmune tends to work. If you have one, chances are you’re going to have more. About 1 in 4 people with an autoimmune disease end up with more than one.

The money for the Lace Up for Hope walk goes to research and advocacy, and to shortening the four years and six doctors it currently takes the average person to get an accurate diagnosis. For one of mine it took fifteen years and countless doctors sending me down dead end paths.

The National Academies looked at where the NIH puts its research dollars and found autoimmune disease sitting at 2.6 percent of the total, and it stayed at 2.6 percent from 2013 through 2020 while the overall budget grew. Over fifty million of us, more than a hundred and forty diseases, no cures, 2.6 percent.

So, two ways in. If you want to walk, send me a note and I’ll add you to my team. It’s $45 in person, $30 to Walk Anywhere, free for kids 12 and under. If you’d rather just give (even $5 helps), my page is give.autoimmune.org/IndiesHope.

September 19. Wherever you are.

With love, Indie

So I took it as a sign to spend time outside. Resting, which I’m not especially good at, and puttering around the garden emptying out beds to get them ready for fall. Which somehow resulted in placing a much bigger Home Depot order than I had any intention of at the start of this weekend. But more on that in another post.

Here’s the incredible part I wasn’t expecting, Jacob decided he was going to spend the weekend at home with us. We had him to ourselves, which at 26 is not something I assumed I’d still get. Cooking, laughing, just doing things together. If you haven’t had a couple of days like that with your grown kid and you get the chance, I highly recommend it.

For those of you who don’t know, my son is a glassblower. When we found this piece of land, one of the things that came with it was an old barn. When I say old, I mean dilapidated. It came with a fox, and I’m sure a few other houseguests I did not personally invite, and years of things left behind by whoever was here before us. Jacob is slowly bringing it back to life as his glassblowing studio. What else it turns into, no clue, but that’s the fun of it. We dream, we ideate, we see what’s possible and then figure out how to fund it (man lumber is expensive).

I walked down to see him while he was clearing more of it out, getting ready to do a little light construction. He knows I’ve been begging him for another one of those little beehive watering stations he made me. So he rigged up his torch, set up his tanks, grabbed a rod of glass, and started.

It was mesmerizing. It wasn’t only watching him work, it was the conversations we had while he was doing it. I even got to give it a whirl. I filmed some of it too, because people find it so fascinating, and then the two of us sat and edited the video together and laughed our way through trying to pick the music. I’m including it here in case you don’t follow me on IG (also hint… https://www.instagram.com/indielee shameless plug but I’m trying to get to 10K).

If I had spent the weekend in front of my screen doing what I’d planned, I would have missed the whole experience. Why do I keep needing to relearn this? It must be my type A personality.

Sometimes the thing that stopped you is the thing that moved you. Not always. I am not going to tell you every hard day arrives with a gift attached, but it’s happened often enough that I have stopped assuming an interruption is a loss.

This weekend, it turned out to be what I needed.

XO, Indie

As I opened my eyes, I sighed and did a little high five. The migraine had dissipated. I had the most incredible afternoon sipping tea, having finger sandwiches, and walking with my bestie through the gorgeous grounds. When I got home I could not help but reflect on what a gift the day was. Not the tea, although it was so fun, but the friendship.

D and I met when my daughter, Emily, was less than four months old. Her daughter had met me at Friday night services and spent the entire evening wanting to hold Emily. How could I say no to this little girl with the most spectacular ringlets and wide eyes?

The next morning I ran into her and her mom. D walked up to me and said her daughter told us we needed to be best friends (we both knew it was so she could continue to hold Emily). We laughed because we were onto her daughter, who was sheepishly watching this conversation. The rest is history. They’ve been stuck with me ever since.

When I say stuck, this month marks twenty-three years of a friendship that has spanned our kids’ graduations, engagements, the loss of parents, three brain surgeries, starting Indie Lee, and everything in between. The highs and the lowest of the lows, she has been there for me every step of the way. She was with me for every appointment before my first brain surgery, helped me get my affairs in order when the odds were against me, and was there when I opened my eyes to the rest of my life. There were long walks while I was still turning the idea of this brand over out loud, thinking maybe. I honestly don’t know if there would be a brand if the ultimate hype girl wasn’t there telling me I could. She was there with me past midnight years ago, wrapping a candle collection in cellophane so it would be ready in time. I officiated her wedding when she remarried (I mean, how else could we make sure I was there beside her). Twenty years in, she was the one I wanted to be there waiting for me when I walked off the TEDx stage this past March. I mean she literally is the only one who I trust with ALL my passwords.

There is a kind of friendship where you stop needing to explain yourself. The one where neither of you has to perform being fine for the other one. It’s a rarity, a treasure, and I don’t take it for granted.

Eighteen years ago I was told I had six months to live. That was the year the two of us started texting each other Good Morning Sunshine, first thing, every single day. GMS, we call it now. It came from her. It came from a woman deciding that if six months was the number, every morning was going to start with someone telling the other one she mattered. Eighteen years later, wherever either of us is in the world, the text still comes. I don’t think she knows how much all of this means to me.

That is what this past Sunday was. Not just tea and a walk through the gardens, but time with the person who taught me a single good morning text can carry you eighteen years. She taught me that eighteen years and three words might be the most reliable thing I have ever built, more reliable than the brand, more reliable than any stage.

Here is the thing we don’t say enough. Friendships like this are not the backdrop to a good life. They are the good life. If you have a D of your own, tell them. Not twenty three years from now, not saved up for a eulogy. Today, in three words or three hundred. Hold onto them. They are the gift.

Tomorrow’s Good Morning Sunshine is getting more than three words.

XoXo,

Indie

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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