The Nuance Diaries

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"I bet your feelings for her will go away as soon as the play ends.

You’re probably not actually gay."

The first time I wondered if I might like women, I was playing Hermia opposite a girl playing Lysander (traditionally played by a man) in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For the first time in my 21 years, I was questioning my heterosexuality.

The circumstances are both poetic yet unremarkable, having my first crush on a girl playing my lov...

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Welcome back to The Nuance Diaries!

I’ve been playing around with how I describe what I write about here, and recently landed on this:

“Unfiltered alchemy from your most unhinged group chat. Consider my vulnerability a permission slip for yours.”

I kind of love it. Thoughts?

I wrote this song around 3 years ago now. It was inspired by a conver...

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Me all of last week, “The amount of think pieces we are about to see on LinkedIn about the Knicks…

Fast forward to me, last night, writing this between Q2 and Halftime to avoid freaking out.

As a Broadway Baby, I have often likened sports arenas to theater performances in order to understand the appeal.

When the Chiefs were in the Super Bowl a few years ago, for Taylor Swift’s first appearance in Travis Kelce’s box, a creator on TikTok made an analogy between...

Less than 0.1% of the global population will ever write a book. Not publish — write.

Someone told me that statistic recently, at an event where I talked about my book.

Around 0.0086% are published authors.

Over 50% of U.S. writers are women, which is major, major progress.

And when we filter by Black women?

We make up 4% to 7% of published authors in America.

Regardless of the exact stats, which are changing all the time and differ based on where you collect them —

I’m in very rare compan...

This is less of a speech, more of a pep talk, and really — just some reflections from someone coming up on their 10-year college reunion who feels like graduation was just yesterday.

Instead of picturing me on a podium in regalia, let’s pretend I’m sitting next to you on the floor of your dorm as you pack up your things, or sitting across from you at brunch after graduation, or in the backseat of the car on your drive back home, or wherever life is taking you next post-college.

To the Class of 2026,

T...

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I’m going to list out some different kinds of people. I’ll tell you what they all have in common in a second— but you can guess first for fun if you want.

* People with chronic illness

* People with PTSD

* People with Complex PTSD

* Trauma Survivors of any kind

* Disabled people (physical and/or mental)

* Parents

* Caregivers

* People who are gr...

Have you read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3? If not, I recommend doing so!

So, what does a girl do after the worst panic attack of her life leads to a broken mug, a surprising amount of clarity, and a new song?

She stays up all night so that she won’t miss her early morning flight, and then takes her first flight in forever to Missouri, for her middle school bestie’s wedding.

It was absolutely beautiful. I cried a lot.

While I was on the trip, I got a lead on a...

A week or so ago, a new subscriber told me that the following piece really resonated with them.

The sentiment behind that piece has never felt truer, and these reflections came from the same chamber of my heart as that piece did.

I saw the Wild Party on Sunday night. It was indeed a wild, wild party. It was so good and so intense.

Earlier that day, I watched another intense performance — Hippolytus (in the arms of Aphrodite), an immersive augmented reality theatre experience. I’ve seen countless exceptional performances at Cult...

Have you listened to Part 1 and Part 2 yet? If not, start there!

Broken things have long been romanticized in humanity’s search for renewal and redemption. The Japanese art of kintsugi is probably my favorite example.

""KINSUGI" literary means gold (金 KIN) stitching (つぎ TSUGI) in Japanese. It is a Japanese art form of mending broken porcelain with lacquer (URUSHI), dusted with gold, or silver. The broken object gets revived with gold patches.

The broken part is truly accepted and cherished as a history of the object, a form of art, rather than getting disguised with imm...

If you haven’t listened Part 1 yet, go ahead and do that first, HERE.

______________________________

While my memories from the night of the panic attack are sparse, the ones from the following morning are vividly clear.

I woke up thinking I had Covid. I felt like I had been hit by a truck ten times over in my sleep.

I tried to shake it off and get ready for work, but my body made it very clear that that wasn’t going to happen. Calling in sick...

On the eve of the lunar new year, three days before my birthday, I finally threw out the jagged glass pieces of a mug that I had broken six months ago.

I never thought it would take me six months to throw out a reminder of one of the worst nights of my life, but here I was.

I held it in my hands one last time.

I took a few pictures (even though I already had plenty.)

I outlined the pink handle and some of the remaining pieces that were...

Happy Pisces Season. Happy New Year. Happy Ramadan. Happy Lent. Happy Lunar Eclipse.

And happy “my birthday is in two days!”

I wrote this song (which can also be read as a poem) almost exactly a year ago 2/26/25, around 2 AM. I had just turned 30. Here I am, about to be 31.

I could ramble on quite a bit about how much I like this song, and how surprised I was to revisit it after a full year of, quite honestly, forgetting about it. I could talk about how, even though it’s Pisces season, I thin...

“Cause not everything means something honey/ so say the unsayable/ say the most human of things.”

Transcript at https://thenuancediaries.substack.com

**Part 2 available at https://thenuancediaries.substack.com - embedded in this post.

Hi.

I did something I’ve only done twice before.

I hit record and start talking.

And then I hit publish.

You can listen to Part 1 above, and Part 2 below (embedded.)

And then you can go listen to this song from a few months back.

It’s such a cheesy saying — love and light.

But I am genuinely sending you as much love and light as I can humanely muster.

Talk...

I want to tell you a story.

It is 2018, and I am a recent college graduate.

I’m 23 years old. My high school best friend and I decide to take a little trip to Montreal. We’ve never been. It seems like a really fun idea. She knows French. It felt like a cool thing to do. And we’re in New York City, so it’s a short flight.

We get on the plane early in the morning. It’s a very full flight. Boarding was hectic. I remember it being really hard to ge...

I’m so ‘scited*. I’m ‘scited to share this new thing I made.

*Scared and excited, as Glennon Doyle would say.

More excited than scared, though.

When I thought about posting on Instagram, threads, and even TikTok, I felt more scared than excited.

And so, I’ve decided to share this with you, and only you, first.

What is this? What’s she sharing?

Cards. Custom, handcrafted cards. Created by me, with new oil pastels, and an old Emily Brontë quote (Head to substack to see them!)

What if the wind was a knife?

Swooshing around

Slicing invisible cuts

Inside you, right through you

Everyday

What appears to be

a breeze to everyone else

is lethal for you

Thousands of invisible cuts

Countless invisible cuts

No one can understand

They ask, “What’s the matter?”

Because they can’t see you bleeding

That same wind that circles you like a hitman

Transf...

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Hi everybody. Happy New Year.

I can tell 2026 is going to be the best year ever because nothing objectively horrible and unimaginably awful has happened yet. It’s all been sunshine and rainbows everywhere.

I, for one, am bringing a squeaky clean slate into the new year. New year, new me. 2025 Alexa? Never heard of her. I want to be unrecognizable.

The sky is also green. And I’ve decided I don’t like Wicked anymore. And I actually don’t think Jonathan Bailey i...

Check out this post inside the https://thenuancediaries.substack.com for further reading and listening!

The days are getting shorter

The nights are growing long.

The birds will be migrating

Taking with them all their songs

The air is crisp and chilly

We’re trading shorts for scarves

‘Tis autumn, ‘tis autumn, ‘tis autumn.

The leaves are changing color

Look at their vibrant hues

The tree branches will be bare

But they’ll bloom again, too

...

“I’m tired of being amazing. I don’t want to be amazing anymore.”

The single sentence becomes the crux of the show and of modern motherhood. Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning), a hardworking publishing executive, meets Marissa when they’re hiding out in the bathroom at a school event. The two forge a friendship over twinning in the same dress and dealing with the same dilemma. They are tired of the platitudes their husbands serve them, of doing it all at home and at work, and being told they can have it all if they really work for it.

I saw a stranger with really kind eyes a few months ago on the Lower East Side.

This man with kind eyes looked like he was in love with this girl.

I thought to myself, Will anyone like that ever fall in love with me? Would they love me if they knew who I was? What I’d been through? The dark shit clogged inside me?

I realized a year or so ago that whenever I pictured my future self, she looked different from how I do now. She had straight long hair, an...

The basic answer? I don’t want to.

If someone wheeled a beautifully decorated tree into my house, I wouldn’t turn them away.

If I woke up to a perfectly decorated Hallmark movie-style house in Vermont, I’d be delighted (and also a little terrified that I’d been robbed/kidnapped.)

But because life is not a holiday movie, the job of decorator/mover/organizer falls to me. And this year, I’m putting in my notice.

I really do historically love the holidays. I love cheesy Christmas movies, gorgeous, elaborate...

Important housekeeping update over here about paid vs. free subscriptions!

I sometimes look in the mirror and think, “Weren’t you supposed to make something of your life by now?”

It might sound mean — but it’s one of my tamer negative thoughts.

I try to think of all the things I’ve accomplished and the friends I love, who I know love me back.

It’s not that I’m not grateful — there’s just this boulder in my path that I keep coming up against again and again and again. And I can’t q...

I thought I was going to wrap up the “The Best Showgirls are a Wicked Kind of Wonderful” series this week, but after seeing Wicked For Good last night —- that’s not where I am mentally; I want to reflect on this iconic film in a different way. (I will finish that series soon though, don’t worry!)

Below is a thread that I posted (on threads, where I’m posting more commentary) before passing out on my couch last night. I woke up to thousands of likes and reposts and shares and replies. I’m so grateful my...

I hate this part of internet culture where something happens and we all immediately want to comment on it and give our hot takes. And I especially hate how quick society is to make light of something very scary and serious just because it happened to a celebrity.

I also hate how righteous people can be - as if having a keyboard gives us the right to say what kind of behavior is okay and not okay.

I will say, though (at the risk of sounding righteous), that it’s deeply unsettling to be seeing me...

Welcome back to The Nuance Diaries! I write what sensitive, deeply feeling people are thinking but don’t say. AKA the stuff you usually save for the group chat.

Free subscribers receive occasional free posts, and paid subscribers ($7/month) receive at least 1-2 essays a week + access to The Authenticity Library + my full archive of 150+ posts.

I spent yesterday, November 4th 2025, desperately trying to keep my anxiety at bay.

I turned the oven on and forgot to put my dinner in. On the subway, I very nearly yelled out, “We all voted right? For...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thenuancediaries.substack.com

I wrote this song before and after one of the worst anxiety attacks of my life. The first verse or so came to me on the F train, coming home from Gowanus, Brooklyn. And then the rest came to me very quickly, almost 24 hours later, when I was back in my body.

It was the first time that I had really, really intense physical anxiety that wasn’t accompanied by depression. They are the best of friends, depression and an...

Dylan Mulvaney didn’t change her name when she transitioned — but her one-woman show inspired me to change mine.

The name of my newsletter, that is.

Dylan briefly discusses nuance at the end of her iconic one-woman show, The Least Problematic Woman in the World. Something about hearing that word, in the context she presented it in felt like a lightbulb moment.

I was like, ‘Oh, right, nuance. This very nuanced world we’re living in.”

I really can’t tell you how I jumped from that thought to, “I should change the nam...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thenuancediaries.substack.com

If you’re new here, welcome! Here inside the nuance diaries (formerly Wild Cozy Free), I write the things that highly observant, deeply feeling people are thinking, but rarely say aloud. Writing is how I attempt to make sense of this sharp, messy, imperfect, wild world.

Paid subscribers ($7/month) get at least one essay each week + access to my archive of 140+ posts and podcasts + other fun perks, while free subscribers get an occasional free essay (like today’s!) and prev...

If you’re new here, welcome! Here inside the nuance diaries (formerly Wild Cozy Free), I write the things that highly observant, deeply feeling people are thinking, but rarely say aloud. Writing is how I attempt to make sense of this sharp, messy, imperfect, wild world.

Paid subscribers ($7/month) get at least one essay each week + access to my archive of 140+ posts and podcasts + other fun perks, while free subscribers get an occasional free essay (like today’s!) and previews of paid ones (like this.)

You can learn more about me here, and the vibe of m...

People are often taken aback when I talk about my time at The Mountain School. I don’t really blame them; if I met me, I would probably be surprised that I’d spent four months on a farm in Vermont when I was 16, too.

But I did. And I loved it.

I loved seeing the stars at night. I loved the community that my semester formed. I even grew to love the animals that horrified me at first. (I still don’t get too close to cows, goats, or chickens. I give them their space...

The swiftie in me kind of died writing that. But it’s true. She can’t.

To be clear, Taylor has saved my world many times over. I vividly remember hearing ‘Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind’ in my childhood/teenage bedroom, and being forever changed.

And yet, as powerful as Taylor’s music has been for me, she alone cannot save the world, and we have to stop acting like it.

We have to stop acting like Taylor could end wars and genocides with social media posts, ral...

I wrote the song Storybook Undone almost exactly two years ago after signing a copy of the Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 2022, an anthology in which I’m featured.

Here in this book you will find 70 very diverse monologues written for women. These pieces present great acting challenges, and actors will have the pleasure of sinking their teeth into this sublime material while continuing to perfect their craft in their online or in-person workshops. The monologues all come from plays. Read these pieces, act these pieces. They will seem familiar to you as you hold the mirr...

I am *not* a licensed mental health professional.

RESOURCES available at AFSP and 988 and NAMI and one of my favorite resources for Black women and non-binary individuals, The Loveland Foundation. (These are also copied again at the end of the post.)

Today is suicide prevention day. As I sit here writing this, it’s the night before. I had no idea that today was the exact day, as I was writing all this- truly. Eerie.

I was going to publish this another time, but now I feel like it has to be today.

Hi there,

A lot has changed since I wrote this post back in August ‘25. As I sit here writing this update, it’s November 30th, ‘25.

The first change, the name of this newsletter! It’s now The Nuance Diaries!

The second thing, a post I never thought I’d publish, went viral.

The third thing, and perhaps the most important —

I went against pretty much everything I said in the essay below.

Yes, I have posted some paywalled posts. But a lot of them have been free. I go to payw...

Do I at least remind you of every girl that made you mad?

Florence and The Machine, Dream Girl Evil

Dear Men,

When you piss a woman off, you are splashing a well of rage

You are tossing a pebble into a fiery, red-hot pond filled to the brim with righteous anger.

Maybe you don’t deserve to be the target of our rage (that day, at least.)

Maybe our reaction is out of proportion. Maybe the rage doesn’t fit the crime.

I wouldn’t have said that I was a Frankie Grande fan before today. Not out of animosity, but unfamiliarity. I only knew him as Ariana Grande’s very funny, supportive older brother.

I learned more about Frankie throughout the Wicked press tour, as I continue to learn more about Ariana. Before Wicked came out, I mostly knew her through her hit songs. After falling in love with her performance in Wicked, I went down the rabbit hole quite a bit. Hampstead is now one of my favorite songs ever.

Suffice it to say, I was...

Hello!

I’m writing/recording this around 7 or 8 PM on Pride Sunday, eating chili on my couch.

I could not be more comfortable in my denim and my t-shirt.

I'm gonna go on a date in a little bit, but I thought we'd chat first.

I feel so free.

I feel so good in my body,

That’s kind of crazy to say, considering some of the personal stuff I'm going through right now. I'm going through some really, really hard stuff.

But in my body...

Thank you so much for being here! It would mean so much if you shared this episode with a friend.

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Buy My Book

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Tip Me on VENMO or KO-FI (both linked)

Quick announcement - I’ve decided to throw out my strict posting schedule. I’m still going to limit myself to emailing you once a week because I refuse to clutter your inbox. BUT in the meantime, over on Substack, I will be posting as much as I want, whenever I want.

What does this actually mean, Alexa?

I’ll still show up in your inbox once a week. Sometimes, I’ll post something and opt out of emailing it to you, and it will just show up on the Wild Cozy Free homepage. Whenever I email...