Everything Money Can’t Buy: On What Real Wealth Looks Like (with photos!)

I’m scaling back on Instagram, which means Substack is becoming the VIP lounge for all my adventures in their full-length feature, unfiltered, occasionally unhinged glory.

If you’d like to support my dreams and get exclusive content, behind-the-scenes magic, and more of my strange-but-true Mad Hatter brilliance, consider becoming a subscriber — free or paid.

Your support means the world (and supplements my non-negotiable coffee habit).

Like many others, my partner Jake and I often lob an insane amount of memes, reels and gifs back and forth on Instagram. It’s one of our many love languages, right next to long, romantic walks through used bookstores, surprising each other with coffee, and the language I am most fluent in: poetry.

Recently, he sent me a couple pizza reels and thus, the subconscious need to consume it was planted. So when he asked me the other night about grabbing pizza for dinner, the answer was obvious. (*I will add the disclaimer here that he misspelled Lupi’s Pizza, and he was not, in fact, referencing the autoimmune disease. 😅 )

I took this idea and ran with it (as I often do), when I suggested we take the whole pie to the lake and watch the sunset.

Mother Nature did not disappoint.

I bitch a lot about living in Tennessee (only because I’ve been here for close to 20 years and I have a wandering soul; the exploration is strong with this one), but I am grateful that I live in a beautiful part of the state with a plethora of gorgeous spots where I can post up with a book, sigh over sunsets, and swim in rivers and creeks a mere fifteen minutes from my house.

Nature is medicine, but it’s also a form of abundance.