Dear Digital Diary

thoughts and thinkings of a woman navigating her twenties

occasional diary entries. sometimes in the form of handwritten notes. some extra words posted in between.

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  • The Break Down & Breakdown of A Year Post-Grad

    Dear Digital Diary,

    I graduated (a year ago)!

    AU, AB, JG, me, and JE during our grad pics last May. (Forsyth Park, Savannah, GA)

    It’s said that time flies when you’re having fun, but I’d like to argue that. Time really starts to fly when you are trying to survive your first year post-grad. All of a sudden, I’ve lived another year, but this time, without homework deadlines and late nights out, and my humid college town. While I’d like to say I got a job with my degree immediately, moved to Boston, traveled out of the country, and finally got my wisdom teeth out, that just wouldn’t be realistic.

    Here’s how it really went:

    May 2025

    • Graduated with a BFA in Writing
    • Moved out of Savannah
    • Moved back in with my parents

    June

    • Clocked back into my college summer job
    • Went on dates with now ex-boyfriend (we’ll call him Blondie)
    • Family visited
    • Got rejected from two major publishing houses

    July

    • Worked
    • Went to Boston with Blondie
    • Celebrated Blondie’s 25th birthday
    • Attended a baseball game while the stadium workers were on strike (oops)

    August

    • Worked
    • Painted a sail for SailMaine (year three baby!) and got a check for it
    • Went to Bar Harbor with my family

    September

    • Worked
    • Toured an apartment (ended up not being able to afford it)
    • Box dyed my hair dark
    • Flew to Vegas with Blondie
    • Went to the Grand Canyon
    • Nearly got stuck in Joshua Tree National Park
    • Stayed in a sketchy Motel 6 on the outskirts of Blythe, CA
    • Stepped into the Pacific Ocean
    • Gambled in Vegas
    • Stayed at the Bellagio and acted rich for a day
    • Started mentoring young writers every Wednesday afternoon

    October

    • Worked
    • Halloween (which is less fun out of college)
    • Blondie was hospitalized for views
    • I developed a stomach ulcer (allegedly)
    • Started a new seasonal job on top of the tourist job
    • Got rejected from an internship out in LA

    November

    • Worked two jobs
    • Winter started to hit 
    • My sister turned 21
    • Thanksgiving
    • I started to become more anxious

    December

    • Still working two jobs around the holidays (ouch)
    • Completed the writing mentor semester
    • Traveled to NYC with family
    • Saw Hamilton
    • Said hello to my OG college roommate
    • Went to Boston
    • Celebrated one year with Blondie
    • Saw Patti Smith on her book tour
    • Found Blondie on my friend’s dating app
    • Slid into a telephone pole on a snowy evening
    • Christmas

    January

    • New Year!
    • Seasonal job ended
    • I had three ribs slip out of place
    • Found a new therapist
    • Got a haircut
    • Started writing more consistently on my blog
    • Had to pay to get my damaged car fixed
    • Got a first interview for a museum temp position
    • Got rejected from another publishing house

    February

    • Lost car access for three weeks during repairs
    • Worked every Saturday for ten hours
    • Got a cold from hell
    • Finished my novel manuscript
    • Started up acupuncture again
    • Valentine’s Day with Blondie
    • Got another cold from hell
    • Ribs slipped out of place again

    March

    • Started looking for another job
    • Printed out my manuscript
    • Went to Savannah to visit my sister
    • Had an identity crisis
    • Got norovirus but thought I was hungover
    • Went to Boston to visit my cousin
    • Got a second interview at the museum temp position but decided against it

    April

    • Finished a painting
    • Started a new job
    • Worked two jobs
    • Finally decided to break up with Blondie
    • Bought tickets to a concert
    • Learned I’d dropped fifteen pounds in three months and my hair started falling out
    • Sat at the DMV a day before my birthday to get my license renewed
    • Turned 23
    • Got a psychic reading done

    May 2026

    • Sold two paintings
    • Worked two jobs
    • Had a conversation with David Walton from New Girl
    • Quit my tourist job!
    • My childhood best friend had a baby
    • Locked in on editing my manuscript draft
    • Realized it’s been a year since I graduated
    • Had a slight breakdown, but recognized that I’m actually doing alright

  • The Terms and Conditions (Of Love)

    Dear Digital Diary,

    we accept the love we think we deserve.

    At what point is this decided? To think you’re worthy of love isn’t something constructed overnight. Perhaps it’s a slew of things, like your relationship with your mother, the friendships lost and gained in middle school, the teenage love that broke your heart. All of it builds up into what you believe you deserve in terms of being loved.

    “Deserved” is a strong word, too. It usually comes with the expectation that you are automatically owed something or that you have to earn it. The unconditional versus the conditional. While love should be unconditional, I’ve found it often has conditions.

    And it’s frustrating because you could believe you have high self-esteem, that you know your worth, and that you’re picky. But as the story goes, you subconsciously accept what you think you deserve, whether that’s what you consciously believe or not.

    I wonder sometimes why I believe I deserve scraps.

    I was talking with my therapist, and we were discussing abandonment issues. I know several people who struggle with this, but I don’t feel I have it myself. I don’t worry people will leave. If it’s not meant for me, it’s not meant for me.

    And she goes, “Well, see. There’s an opposite side of the coin. You don’t fear people abandoning you, but you fear abandoning them.”

    Even after my breakup, I still think about him and how he’s doing. While I’m fine, I worry I hurt him somehow by realizing my standards and recognizing they were not being met. If he hurt me, that was okay. If I hurt him, I was at fault.

    I’m not a people pleaser. I say no quite frequently, and more often than not, I’m called selfish. But I will stay in something longer than I should just so I don’t inconvenience others, whether that be a job, a relationship, or even a conversation.

    In conclusion, maybe it’s not that I feel I don’t deserve a high threshold of love. Maybe I feel I have to be extraordinary in order to earn it. Maybe I’ve always seen love as conditional, and that’s what I need to work on. Or maybe it’s simply that my purpose is to help others realize the love they deserve. How lovely it is to show others that they are worthy of being wholly accepted and loved.

    But also how lonely.

  • A Brief Case Study on How She Always Finds Out

    Dear Digital Diary,

    I now present my information.

    Background

    Whether it was karma or just my luck, I somehow managed to piece together everything that was happening during my relationship without ever getting a straight answer from his mouth.

    Women always know. Some like to call it anxiety or self-sabotage, but I’ve always found that my nervous system reacts to something that’s not right, even if I can’t figure out why yet.

    Now, I wouldn’t call myself a professional stalker. But I am someone who hacked into my mom’s iPad at ten because I figured out the password. I’m not crazy — just observant enough to figure out how someone might be feeling based on reposts, recently played songs, and whatever movie suddenly becomes their favorite.

    The funny part is this: none of what I found was particularly difficult to find.

    And here’s why.

    Case Evidence #1:

    “I Don’t Need to Tell You Everything”

    This is an immediate red flag.

    Honestly, he pretty much just told on himself.

    “I don’t need to tell you everything” usually means, “I’m actually hiding very specific things.”

    In his case, this revolved around a social media platform that I wasn’t allowed to follow. I’d tried to find it, but as most people do, it wasn’t under his actual name.

    I later learned that I probably would’ve been able to find it, but couldn’t because I had been blocked.

    Where he went wrong: I have three accounts on that platform.

    And for some reason, he hadn’t blocked me on the others.

    So to block a woman from your social media platform, only for her to find everything on her second account, and then delete the evidence after she’s already seen it?

    Be so for real.

    And may I mention — there were obvious reasons he didn’t want me to see it. The persona he had online was nothing like the person I thought I knew in real life.

    Case Evidence #2:

    Following an Ex and Thinking No One Would Notice

    Yikes.

    It’s things like this that make me wonder if I presented myself in a way that appeared naive.

    Following an ex from years ago on Instagram is one thing.

    Spotify?

    That’s a whole different ballgame.

    Especially when there are only two other people in your following.

    I love Spotify. I wasn’t even trying to be sneaky. Something just told me to look.

    And there it was.

    Her name.

    Interesting.

    It didn’t take me long to figure out that the name matched the profile that kept getting suggested to me on Instagram.

    And he had never told me her name.

    Case Evidence #3:

    Logging Onto Dating Apps While in a Relationship

    This one killed me at the time — that stomach-dropping feeling I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

    But in hindsight, it’s almost funny.

    I wasn’t on dating apps because I was in a relationship.

    My best friend, however, was.

    And he knew that.

    So of course it took less than a day for his face to pop up on her profile.

    Unfortunately, I was there and saw it in real time.

    That being said, even if I hadn’t seen it, she would’ve told me anyway.

    At that time, I also had two other friends on the app.

    Which I was pretty sure he knew.

    But clearly this wasn’t very thought out.

    Case Evidence #4:

    Trusting Two Women Not to Compare Notes

    This might’ve been the biggest strategic error of all.

    Women process things externally.

    We talk things through, compare notes, and piece things together.

    So if you leave one woman in a room with another woman who knows you well and assume she won’t break girl code to protect your bad decisions, that’s just poor judgment.

    During this time, I was told things my gut had been nagging me about — things I was trying very hard not to pay attention to.

    It was a confirmation conversation.

    Later, he asked what was wrong because I was acting off.

    Maybe it was because this woman told me I deserved better.

    And for the first time, I accepted that I did.

    Analysis

    The craziest part is that none of this required some elaborate investigation.

    It was all just there.

    A blocked account that wasn’t fully blocked. An ex followed in a place he assumed I wouldn’t check. Dating profiles shown to people he knew were connected to me. Information shared between women he somehow trusted not to compare notes.

    At a certain point, it stopped feeling like bad luck and started feeling like a massive overestimation of his own intelligence.

    If you’re going to lie, at least be good at it.

    Because every attempt to hide something only made it easier to find.

    Conclusion

    Maybe it was karma.

    Or maybe it was a massive misjudgment of my intellect and intuition.

    Either way, maybe the next girl he tries to punk will figure it out quicker than I did.

    *please note that, additionally, a writer will always write. to not write about what she is compelled to is to go against her own authenticity and what drives her sense of being. please know that I had to, for c’est la vie.

  • I Never Need It, But I Want It

    Dear Digital Diary,

    if you bury your feelings enough, it will surface in dreams.

    About a month ago, I had one of those nearly-lucid dreams where it feels so real that you wake up and wonder if it was a memory or just wistful thinking. It went like this:

    It was my birthday, and I was hosting a party in my house. The lower floor had been covered in a thin layer of ice, turning the wood planks into an ice skating rink. (Now it’s important to note that my birthday was two weeks after this dream, and I cannot, in fact, ice skate.)

    My boyfriend, at the time, was upstairs. I wanted him to skate with me, so I went up to ask him. But when I opened the door, a plume of smoke hit me in the face. He was there, on the bed, stupidly stoned with a joint in his hand. There were three others in that room: a guy who I knew as his college roommate, a lesbian blonde skater chick (that looked a bit like Rikki from H2O), and a tall skinny brunette whom I knew, in the dream, to be his ex-girlfriend. 

    I wanted him to skate with me after the trio had left. But he said he was too tired, and went to bed instead. Hurt, confused, but not willing to let it ruin my birthday party, I went downstairs to skate by myself. I had the DJ play ‘Stateside’ (heavily influenced by Alysa Liu’s Olympic performance, no doubt), and I tied on my skates. 

    Now remember how I said I couldn’t skate? In the dream, I was graceful. I skated around the stairs, I spun around, I could do the jumps. I was skating beautifully. And in the dream I remember thinking, “I knew I could do this, but I was hoping he’d watch or skate with me.”

    I woke up. 

    Conveniently, I had therapy the next day. When I relayed the dream to my therapist, she said, “You know that you’re talented, and beautiful, and will likely be successful on your own. But it seems that you still, like most people, wish to be wanted, too.”

    She could’ve at least held my hand before telling me that. 

    It was true, though. 

    Even the smartest, richest, prettiest, people in any room wish to be wanted. To feel seen, to be loved. It’s human nature. There’s an irony in self-sufficiency, I think. The people who have learned to carry themselves so well are often the ones who most want to be held.

    Maybe that was the point of the dream.

    It wasn’t trying to tell me that I needed him, or anyone at all, to prove I could skate. Somewhere deep down, I already knew I could find my footing on unfamiliar ground. That I could glide through things I’d never done before and still make it look effortless.

    The dream was reminding me of something else entirely: there is a difference between needing someone to validate your worth and simply wanting to be witnessed in it.

    I skated beautifully, even alone.

    But independence doesn’t cancel out longing. That being capable on your own doesn’t make you any less human for still glancing upstairs, hoping someone might come down and watch.

    Nobody did.

    And still, I skated.

    – Mia

  • 22 Things I Learned During My 22nd Year

    Dear Digital Diary,

    tomorrow is my birthday.

    1. I still have no idea what I’m doing. And I probably won’t next year, either.
    2. At 22, some of your friends live with their parents, some are married, some are having kids, and some are working their summer jobs. And all of those are okay. Life isn’t linear.
    3. As long as you live and act authentically, you will never feel shame for how you live and act.
    4. ALWAYS trust your gut. Trust your dreams. Trust your intuition.
    5. A high ego is only stable when the subconscious is acknowledged.
    6. It’s impossible to consume media and create authentically at the same time. To create, I need to sit with myself instead of other people’s thoughts.
    7. Nostalgia will always find me in quiet moments. It’s a silent killer.
    8. I will never regret the love that I give. To be human is to love and be loved.
    9. We accept the love we think we deserve.
    10. I never worried about people abandoning me. I always fear abandoning others.
    11. It is a beautiful thing to have kind friends that support you at your highest, lowest, and everywhere between.
    12. Some people can’t meet you where you’re at, but you can’t pull them up there with you if they aren’t willing. Doing so will only pull yourself down.
    13. A good therapist who sees through bullshit is life changing.
    14. Living with my parents after college is…more difficult than I thought.
    15. Going to bed early and waking up early feels better than going to bed late and waking up late.
    16. I yearn for a slow, calm, life. 
    17. My first dog will be named Snoopy.
    18. I’m so glad I never got plastic surgery or fillers. I have completely grown into my face.
    19. Brave New World might be my favorite book of all time.
    20. Mac Miller’s music has spoken to me in a way other artists have failed. The same goes for Noah Kahan.
    21. I believe in God. I just had to redefine what that meant to me.
    22. I will always yearn for the sea.

  • Time Isn’t the Enemy (I Am)

    Dear Digital Diary,

    I’m just now learning how to be here.

    It’s a funny thing, time. It’s ironic how you can feel you’re doing something productive and still use it up, just the same as you would if you wasted it.

    We are taught to plan for the future, and we hyper-fixate on things from the past; whether it be people, or memories, or mistakes. As a society, it feels as though we put a lot of emphasis on how we use time. How time is precious.

    I’ve always said that nostalgia might be the thing that kills me eventually. I’m often missing things, and it feels like a deep hurt, even if it was good. I miss people I hate, too, sometimes. Or I miss who I was, even if that person no longer has a place in my life, and shouldn’t have. I made a lot of mistakes before now. Things like that happen when you’re growing, and even when you’re sure you’re grown.

    You get older and you start to have regrets. And it’s not things like wishing you had bought that one sweater, but they’re terrible regrets that eat you up inside until everything is dark.

    Grief works like that, too. We miss somebody and have a difficult time feeling as though we can continue to experience happiness. It comes in waves, as do most things. Even on mood stabilizers, everything fluctuates. It’s the same as the tides, the moon cycles, the amount of rain that comes from a rainstorm.

    Time isn’t the enemy, is what I’ve begun to realize. It’s the perspective. Existing within it is a fact of living, and to not live is almost offending the time we’ve been given. One cannot predict the future just as one cannot recreate the past.

    The present, as once said in a beloved childhood film, is today. And today is a gift.


    However you choose to live it is up to you. But today we are alive. Today we will live.

  • I Love Life, Thank You

    Dear Digital Diary,

    in the Fall of 2023, I wrote a poem.

    “I Love Life, Thank You“

    Come Back to Earth and remember to look to the sky

    whether it’s blue or orange or starry.

    Gaze at the moon,

    though it’s just a sliver.

    Turn on the radio,

    stations 99.7 and 105.5.

    Listen to Mac Miller,

    so you can sing the words with me.

    Inhale the pollen of spring flowers,

    lilacs that cause sneezing.

    Smell the snow in the air

    or try to, because only some can.

    Taste the spice in pumpkin pie,

    cinnamon, clove, and ginger.

    Lick the salt on skin,

    brine of the sea.

    Run through the grass,

    spiny from the heatwave.

    Touch the arm of your mother

    and give her a hug

    because someday you will be just a soul

    who cannot hug their mother

    or eat pumpkin pie

    or smell lilacs

    or look at the sky

    or listen to Mac Miller —

    Though it’s possible a soul can still listen to Mac Miller.

    But that’s not for us to know just yet:

    I’ve got two tickets to his show

    that he plays in heaven,

    but not until the world Spins enough to make us old.

  • The End of the World

    Dear Digital Diary,

    this is my manifesto.

    Yesterday, I was on the phone with one of my closest college friends. We were talking about everything that’s happened in the past few months, where we are now, and where we expect we’ll be. It’s a funny thing to play catch up every few months, when she and I used to spend the mundane moments of our days together. 

    I was sick for most of February, and my immune system was so shot, that I was also sick this past week. In January, I had a few ribs out of place and I also had to get a new bumper for my car. In the first quarter of the new year, it felt as though I couldn’t catch a break. It’s like my world was ending and I could barely keep my head above water long enough so I could take a deep breath before plunging under once again. My personal world was drowning me.

    Besides my internal world, the outside world is also drowning me and everyone else in it. The “unprecedented times” seemed to expand past 2020, and continue at a greater, more alarming rate. It seems that every day I turn on the news and see a headline that is much too similar to something I read in a dystopian novel. It’s eerie. 

    It’s something that seems so fictional, to watch the world around me shift into something unrecognizable, that I start to lose a grip on reality. Not only is the world around me ending, but my ability to feed my sanity lessens too. 

    I can’t help but want to fix everything. Maybe it’s the eldest daughter in me, or the fact that I refuse to believe that my future will die before I’ve even gotten the chance to live in it. And this isn’t to undermine myself, but at the end of the day, I studied writing. I’m a creative. I did not study political science, or law, or would survive long enough to say that I won any sort of war. But I can do this. I can write. There is something still valuable about opinions, especially in a world in which opinions are so easily swayed by how much one is paid to say it. 

    Nobody is coming to save us. Humans put themselves at the top, and we refuse to work with anything we see as below us. We are the only ones who can save ourselves. Now if a superhero decides to show up, I would greatly appreciate it. But I think the Avengers would’ve assembled by now. 

    At some point in the phone call, my friend said, “It feels like the world is ending. And I’m in New York City.”

    The kind of city that only ever seems to fall apart in movies, but someone always swoops in to save the day in a spandex suit and other worldly powers. But Spider-Man only exists in theaters, and the rest of us still have to wake up the next morning and go to work, check the news, and pretend everything is functioning as it always has. 

    This is my manifesto. It’s not a call to action, and in no way a solution. It’s just proof that I was here, paying attention, refusing to look away while everything collapses. Because if the world really is ending, at least I’ll have said something real while it happened.

  • Sketches from Italy

    Dear Digital Diary,

    when I lose myself, I always find a pencil and a sketchbook.

    As I flip flop between what I want, what I thought I wanted, and where I’ll probably end up, I think about the two weeks I spent in Florence, Siena, and Rome, a few months after I turned 21. I had hit rock bottom mentally, applied to study abroad for kicks, and got an interview for the experience all within the same month.

    But I was chosen to go. And flying abroad for the very first time without knowing anybody but myself was one of the greatest things I could’ve done for myself at the time.

    So while I’m trying to plot out my next moves in my life, I reminisce on a time where I tapped back in to my fine art side, and was truly happy for the first time in months. Drawing was an escape for me. And when I need an escape from my current reality, I look through my camera roll.

    The sketches from Italy. June 2024.

    *Not available for commercial use.

  • Toughest Pills to Swallow

    Dear Digital Diary,

    The side effects are insurmountable.

    (JE, AU, and JG, freshman year of college, eating lunch and keeping me company while I rotted, very ill, in my bed.)

    When I was a child with a sinus infection, the doctor gave me antibiotics in the form of a bubblegum flavored liquid in a syringe. Unlike my sister, I loved those meds. It tasted like candy. That’s why they do it, though — they make the medication palatable for a child. A sick child needs medication to get well again, but doctors know they can’t handle unpleasant things, like a horse sized pill that makes your stomach hurt.

    When I was a junior in college with strep throat, the doctor gave me antibiotics in the form of little orange pills. I had to take them twice daily for a week. They left a bitter coating on my tongue. They made my stomach hurt. But I could handle unpleasant things.

    What I can’t handle is coming home from college and living with my parents again. I exist in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by my childhood things, but the girl who lived there has been long gone. Under the light blue paint is the yellow paint that used to be the color of my nursery when I slept there as a baby. I repainted the room when I was fifteen. I rearranged the room several times in the eight months I’ve been home. And something feels not quite right.

    Sometimes I look at my face and notice the faintness of a wrinkle next to the corner of my eye. My father has them. My face has lost it’s baby puffiness, and my cheekbones are apparent now. I look like a woman. I’ve outgrown the girl I used to be. I’m no longer growing up, I’m simply getting older. And what I didn’t realize, is that so are my parents. And they have been, this entire time. They stopped growing up before I was born, and this whole time, they’ve been adults growing older. The lines go deeper in their face and gray has begun to pepper their hair more and more. They’ve started talking about ‘after’ quite a lot. They’ve written a will. They aren’t old…just older.

    I expected my cousins to grow up. There were four of us: me, my sister, my cousin born in ‘05, and my other cousin born in ‘08. I was the oldest, and between me and my youngest cousin, there’s a five year age gap. Because I was first, I was always the first to grow up. The first to graduate high school, go to college, then graduate college. It’s natural that they’d follow but some part of me didn’t believe that they would. All of the sudden, as if overnight, my youngest cousin turns eighteen this summer. The baby of us, heading to college. Maybe Miami, maybe California. My other cousin lives on the big island, surfing on the weekends, going to school, and life guarding in between. My sister is studying to be an actress. I’m still here. We all have lives now. And the little kids that used to chase fireflies in the summer with muddy feet are nowhere to be found.

    Tough pills to swallow also look like pictures. Snapshots of moments in time all collected in a camera roll, a scrapbook, a photo album, a pile of print-outs on a desk. And in those pictures are the girls I’m not friends with anymore, and we’re sixteen. Or it’s a picture of my grandfather, who passed away two years ago this May. But he’s young in the photo, his hair still dark and less wispy. Some of the pictures are my friends from college, snapshots of the stupid moments, but we were laughing, and now we all live in different states. It’s proof those moments happened, but it’s also proof that it only exists in that frame.

    And the side effect of all of this is nostalgia. That pretty little word with its terrible little meaning. It’s a heavy longing, nostalgia. And it only exists because of how it once made me feel. There was something about these moments that made me happy, and how wonderful it is that I have something to miss. But God, does it hurt.

    I wish there was an easier way. An easier way to tell me that my childhood will forever be withheld now, at farther than an arm’s length. That I take pictures to remember moments that will only happen once, and that it’ll never last how I want it to. How my cousins and I will never be as close as we once were, no matter how much we try or how badly we want it. An easier way to show me that my parents weren’t the only ones adding numbers to their age on birthdays, and how they’re beginning to hint at the likeness of their parents.

    I don’t want bitter orange-colored pill-shaped antibiotics anymore. I need the sugar coated version. I think I’m reacting badly.

    I can’t stop the feeling that time is fleeting and it’s slipping out of my hands before I’ve gotten a grip on it.