Olivia Reese 
Traveling alone sounds terrifying to some people and sounds like the only kind of vacation worth having to others, and that split usually has very little to do with confidence. It has more to do with what a person wants from time completely unmoderated by anyone else's schedule, opinions, or need to be entertained on …
Two people can book the exact same flight, stay at the exact same hotel, and come home having had completely different trips. One of them had a spreadsheet. The other one deleted the itinerary app somewhere around day two and never looked back. Neither of them is doing travel wrong. They are just wired differently, …
Say the word adventure to ten different people and you will get ten different mental images, and almost none of them will line up with each other. Someone hears it and pictures a rope and a cliff edge. Someone else hears it and pictures a week alone in silence with no phone signal for miles. …
Some people can walk into a party full of strangers and leave with three new numbers and an invitation to something next week, and it has almost nothing to do with being the loudest person in the room. Magnetism gets confused with charisma constantly, and charisma gets confused with extroversion even more often than that, …
Ask anyone which year they'd live in if they could pick, and they almost never hesitate, because they're not choosing a date so much as a whole mood, candlelight or neon, a ballroom or a disco floor, a handwritten letter or a phone cord stretched all the way to the bedroom. Ballrooms and Brand-New Streetlights …
Somewhere in your house there is a box you have not opened in months, and you probably already know what is inside it. A stack of records you keep meaning to alphabetize. A tin of buttons that used to belong to your grandmother. Forty postcards from towns you have never visited in your life. Everyone …
Almost everyone has a version of if I just disappeared for a while tucked somewhere in the back of their mind, usually surfacing at the worst possible moment, like the middle of a meeting or a long line at the grocery store that will not move. What is interesting is how specific the fantasy is …
There is the version of you that shows up on a resume or a first date, polished and slightly edited for the audience in front of you, and then there is the version that shows up automatically in a crisis, before you have had time to think about how it looks to anyone. That second …
Ask someone what their best quality is and they will usually name something safe and obvious, kindness, maybe, or being a hard worker. Ask the people who know them well and you will get a completely different answer, something quieter and less rehearsed, the kind of trait that shows up in how someone behaves rather …
A friendship bracelet did something no group chat quite manages. It made a friendship visible, right there on your wrist, for months at a time. A lot of old trends carried something small and useful like that, and they took it with them when they went out of style. The one you should bring back …