I’ve decided to crack open a door most people keep locked. And already, I can sense the emotional gravity in what I’m about to write. This is a personal message to myself.

We’ve heard the saying a thousand times: when life gives you lemons… But what if the focus wasn’t just on making lemonade? What if it was on the lemon itself, the small, golden fruit that takes time, care, and the right climate to thrive?

I didn’t sit down to write this for anyone in particular. Not at first. I just needed to put something down and to make a shape out of the ache. But as I was halfway through, I wasn’t sure who I was talking to anymore. Is it you? Or is it the version of me I hope someone else will understand?

There’s a kind of change that doesn’t ask permission. It arrives unannounced, slowly at first, then unmistakably. A slightly longer pause before recalling a name. A meeting that exhausts more than it energizes.

Watching Frasier again, I’m amazed I didn’t fully appreciate it back in the 1990s. I never realized how quietly powerful the relationship between Frasier and Niles was.

I’m not just grieving. I’m running mental diagnostics on every conversation, every silence, every what if, as if clarity were hidden in the mess. Turns out, my grief isn’t just sorrow.

Losing someone, or something, changes everything. It cracks open the way I see the world, shifts what matters, and forces me to rethink where I stand.

It’s 2:17 a.m. A cup of espresso on the ottoman, too cold to drink, and, while I believe in second chances for many things, reheating espresso is not one of them.

I have spent most of my life measuring my worth by what I can do for others—by the work I produce, the relationships I maintain, and the way I make people feel.