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Permission to Take a Break
There’s something deeply ironic about launching a blog called Gentle Nook… and then immediately sprinting like I’m training for the Gentle Olympics. Hi, it’s me! Your friendly neighborhood former therapist, the one who preaches gentle living while simultaneously staying up until 3am, forgetting to eat, and running almost entirely on Coke Zero, cheese and granola bars. Classic. And it’s not just been this week. The last few months were eaten alive by the technical nightmare that was my old site, Ofglow. When Technology Becomes the Enemy When I first bought that domain, I pictured this serene, well-lit corner of the internet. Instead, I got something closer to a digital haunted…
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From Burning Out to Breaking Free: Why I Created Gentle Nook
There’s a moment when everything breaks. Except for me, it wasn’t really a moment. It was a slow undoing that unfolded over months in a fluorescent-lit office, staring at case files while my capacity quietly dissolved. I couldn’t concentrate. My executive functioning had vanished. All I could manage was going to work and coming home. That’s all the energy I had left. Then my psoriasis flared worse than it ever had, angry red patches spreading across my skin like a map of my stress. The inflammation triggered psoriatic arthritis, and suddenly my joints were screaming along with my mind. I was 37, a therapist, a single mother. And I was…
