There Will Be Feelings
Working Subtitle: Navigate This, Bitch.
Since I haven’t been traveling, it feels like every time I sit down to write this blog, I have so much to say—but then I just don’t know what to focus on.
The thing is, when I first started Skewed North, it was really just on a whim because I was traveling through Europe. I wasn’t really thinking about what I would do after I was done traveling or how this would evolve. All I knew was that I love traveling because it opens me up to so many new things, and my brain really needs that. That is what I wanted to share, the wonder of the moment.
There was a post a while back where I talked about the feeling of awe, and how the brain likes to take in the feeling of awe because it helps us process traumatic events. I am sure there are other reasons too, but this one stuck with me.
I’ve been off work for about a week and a half now. We were snowed in from the Snowmageddon of 2026. I was supposed to leave town, but I decided to take a staycation instead of trying to go through Buffalo up to Saratoga Springs. Even though all I have been craving is a good long drive to feel alive again.
Since I have been home for a week, I’ve managed to clean every single inch of my house. I’ve gone through drawers and dressers I literally haven’t touched in years. I found some of my late husband’s things that I thought I had thrown away—or had completely forgotten I still had. It brought up a lot of memories.
I cleared away and moved some things out because I guess if I can’t physically travel somewhere, then I have to at least keep moving. The other thing on my mind is that it feels like the world is burning down around me. I don’t talk much here about political things, but I will say that I’m not ignoring them. This is just my corner of the world, and I want to create here—what helps me feel better, not worse, about life.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about what my next moves are. Life, for me, has never played out in any kind of linear way. It’s been abstract, and I’ve been following breadcrumbs for a very long time. For me, life is more like a treasure hunt—but I never get the treasure. Or maybe the treasure is the moment. I think that’s the answer.
My current rabbit hole of purging led me across a blog that I had started right after my husband died back in 2017. The thing is, even back then, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. Part of the reason is that I don’t really feel like I’m a master at anything. I’ve spent 25 years painting, and I would still consider myself just a student. But I think it’s time for me to recognize that that has value.
I see people out there who have been doing something for just a couple of years and staking claim that they’re the master of it. I think to myself: I have ten times the experience you do, and I would never call myself that.
So I found this old blog and decided to read through the whole thing. It was called “Red on the Road”, and reading it felt like it was Skewed North in its infant stages. I chose to write it in the format I did because way back in 2001, I had fallen in love with someone. He was an avid traveler who inspired me greatly. Once he told me the best advice he had ever got while traveling was for every person you meet, write a paragraph about them—because you’ll forget them along the way.
As I went through my house and looked at all the things I had collected through the years, things that make no sense to anyone but me, each one has its own little story. As I excavated the interior of my house, I realized I have piles of writing stacked up—paragraphs of people, places, and times in my life. I’m a documentarian. I think, in a past life, I must’ve been a scribe. The number of things I’ve written down actually frightens me at times.
I’ve always felt that when someone leaves this earth, the saddest part is that their stories die with them. Even if I can re-tell them, it’s just not the same. That was part of my reason for starting Skewed North. I wanted to tell my story—but what do you do when your story is so riddled with so many escapades, detours, and epiphanies?
I guess the world is just too big for me to write about all the things I want to write about, so I’ve decided that I’m going to change things up here—because that’s what I do.
For those of you who understand the planets, Pluto is three degrees away from my sun sign. Pluto is the planet of transformation, and transformation is the whole reason I exist. So I hope you hang out here. I hope you keep following along.
My new posts are going to be more structured, more focused, with deeper content—not on the things I’m a master of, but on the things I’m still learning myself. The only thing I can honestly say I’m an authority on is how to live life fully—and sometimes, I get scared to do that too.
If my life came with a navigation system, it wouldn’t be calm or reassuring. It would just say: Proceed anyway.Or more accurately: Navigate this, bitch.
There are people who treat feelings like weather alerts—something to mute, avoid, or reschedule until conditions improve. I am not one of them.
I operate under a different assumption:
There will be feelings.
Not as a threat. Not as a flaw in the system. Just as a fact of being alive and paying attention.
This has always been true for me—on the road, in love, in grief, in art, in rooms where everyone else pretends they’re fine while silently checking for exits.
I don’t.
I’ve learned that feelings aren’t the thing that derail us.
Avoiding them is.
No Map. Active Weather.
Skewed North was never about finding the straightest path. It was about learning how to move when the compass spins—when clarity disappears, when certainty evaporates, when the road does that thing where it dissolves into fog and intuition.
Feelings, like travel, have weather.
Sometimes it’s light turbulence.
Sometimes it’s a full storm system moving through the body.
I don’t mistake that for danger.
I don’t ask, How do I get out of this?
I ask, Where am I, and what’s the next true step?
That’s the difference.
Sit With This
My real way of being—the one I use on myself, not as a performance for others—could be summed up as a quiet directive:
Sit with this.
Not because it’s pleasant. Not because it’s noble. But because it’s already here.
I don’t rush to fix the feeling. I don’t dramatize it. (Okay, maybe sometimes for story sake, but hey, can you blame me?) I don’t disappear from my own life when it gets uncomfortable.
I stay long enough to understand the terrain.
Most people want resolution.
I want orientation.
And that, my friends, is why I put myself on a time-out. Because even though I don’t disappear from my own life, sometimes I have to disappear from everyone else’s to recalibrate.
Navigation Over Exit Strategies
There’s a particular kind of maturity that comes from realizing you don’t actually need to escape every hard moment. You need to stay present long enough for the meaning to reveal itself.
I trust that.
I trust myself in emotional weather the way I trust myself on unfamiliar roads:
slow down, observe, adjust, continue.
Or—when it’s clear that shit just got real and the rearview is telling me I’m not getting out of this one—
pedal to the metal and get the hell out of the way.
No panic.
No theatrics.
No pretending it didn’t happen.
Just navigation.
Why This Matters
I don’t believe in a life without friction. I believe in a life where friction doesn’t have to knock you off course.
There Will Be Feelings isn’t a warning. It’s a reassurance.It says:
You don’t have to be fearless.
You just have to be willing to stay.
Stay curious.
The road doesn’t need you to be numb.
It needs you to be awake.
Closing (Jolene style)
If you’re waiting for the moment when things stop being complicated before you move forward— you’ll be waiting forever.
There will be feelings. There will be weather. There will be moments where the compass tilts and the map stops making sense.
Good.
That’s not being lost.
That’s being alive.
Navigate this.
For Paid Subscribers
If you’re here, you deserve to know what’s actually been happening behind the scenes.
I just came off 113 days of shooting—six months of putting most of my life on hold. Social things. Writing things. Quiet things. I postponed finishing my memoir. I set my script aside. I said no to a lot of what feeds me, so I could say yes to something foundational.
I did it for one very specific reason: