37 today and somehow still learning how to be here.
Here’s my annual list of things I’ve learned in my time here on this giant rock.
1. Confidence is mostly just deciding to go first.
2. Most people are just scared kids in adult clothes.
3. Love is not rare. Safe love is.
4. You can leave. You’re allowed to leave.
5. Dogs > most people. Still true.
6. Your body always knows before your brain does.
7. Say the thing. The true thing. 8. Being misunderstood is part of being real.
9. Silence says a lot. Listen to it.
10. Growth will outgrow people. That’s okay.
11. Love out loud. Regret stays quiet too long.
12. Malort will always be a mistake.
13. Fear gets loud right before something good.
14. Parallel parking is 90% confidence, 10% prayer.
15. The best outfits are built on audacity.
16. Closure is a luxury item. Not a requirement.
17. Sunscreen is non-negotiable.
18. Nostalgia lies a little. Be careful with it.
19. Your phone is stealing your life in small increments.
20. Your people will find you when you stop performing.
21. Growth is quiet. Ego is loud.
22. The body keeps receipts.
23. Momentum beats motivation every time.
24. The life you want is built in boring moments.
25. Music can fix your mood faster than logic ever will.
26. Everyone has a favorite burner on the stove.
27. Drink the water. Send the text. Take the walk.
28. You don’t always miss things, you miss how they felt.
29. You’ll feel the weight of things you never said.
30. The wrong tone can undo the right words.
31. You’ll crave quiet, then wonder why it feels so loud.
32. Sometimes the healing IS the aching.
33. You’ll practice a conversation perfectly and then say none of it.
34. The hardest apologies are the ones you owe yourself.
35. People hear what they’re ready to hear, not what you said.
36. You’ll want to be seen and hide at the same time.
37. Somehow, it all keeps working out anyway.
What did I miss?
She said yes 💍
I asked Ren to marry me in Cancun and somehow the moment turned out even more perfect than the one I had been quietly imagining.
It started with dinner. I told her I had pulled a few question cards to set intentions for the trip and read her something I had written. She had absolutely no idea what was coming.
After dinner, we walked down to the beach and found this huge glowing heart you can step inside. She suggested we go in, and the second she said it I knew that was the moment.
I told her there was one more question card I had pulled, but it was one only she could answer. I handed her the card, dropped to one knee, and asked her to marry me.
She said yes immediately and started crying.
A couple strangers walking by offered to take our picture and when we told them we had just gotten engaged they handed us a celebratory tequila shot.
So the first toast of our engagement was inside a giant glowing heart on the beach in Cancun with two strangers and a really good bottle of tequila.
I wouldn’t change a single thing. Cheers to forever 🥂
Ring: @shopvenvs
Location: @atelierplayamujeres
Card deck: @the_skindeep
Nails: @johnny.nailguy
Photography: @elinstantemx
This is me the night I hit go live on the first Only Humxn shop.
Hands pressed together. Eyes closed. Praying it would work.
Because I had just spent the last $700 in my bank account to make it happen. Not the last $700 of a budget. The last $700 I had. Period.
I didn’t tell a lot of people that part. The version of the story people saw was the launch. The excitement. The brand going live. What they didn’t see was the fear sitting right underneath all of it. The very real possibility that I had just made the worst financial decision of my life.
But I had something a lot of people don’t give themselves credit for needing: someone on the other side of the screen who believed in me more than my fear did.
That’s my best friend @beck_gay in the corner of that screenshot. Grinning from bed because she was just as excited as I was. Cheering me on like the outcome was never in question, even when it absolutely was.
Here’s what that $700 turned into.
$4.5 million in sales. 77,000 orders shipped. 42,965 customers. All 50 states. 54 countries.
I don’t share those numbers to impress anyone. I share them because I want you to understand what lives on the other side of the moment you almost don’t hit go.
The scariest launches are usually the most important ones. Not because the fear means it’s right, but because the fear means it matters. You don’t shake before the things you don’t care about.
If you’re sitting on something right now, a business, a post, a pivot, an idea you’ve been calling “not ready” for months, I want you to look at this photo. Find your Beck. And hit go.
Beck, I love you more than I’ll ever be able to say. Thank you for being my loudest voice when mine went quiet. And thank you for being order number one in our system. The whole thing started with you, in more ways than one.
There are whole chapters of me written in the margins. Not secrets exactly. Just truths too tender for the centerfold. I’ve had to rebuild from pieces I never expected to break. Cities, jobs, names for love, definitions of home.
It’s strange, how quietly a life can come undone. How you wake up one morning and realize the shape you were holding no longer fits. So you let go. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes because you have no other option. And in that letting go, something else begins. Not a grand revelation. More like a whisper that say “try again”.
So I did. I tried again. In unfamiliar places with a familiar ache. I found new versions of safety in people who didn’t need me to shrink. I let grief walk beside me without asking it to leave. I started calling my softness a strength. I stopped editing myself for other people’s comfort.
What I’ve learned is this: starting over isn’t failure. It’s faith. In yourself. In your capacity to begin again. In the idea that home isn’t always where you started, but where you decide to stay.
And I’ve decided to stay here. In this life I’m still writing. In this chapter with no title yet. In this moment where I finally feel like the story is mine.
Today the universe made Ren.
And somehow it keeps getting that right, every single year. You are my calm, my chaos, my favorite place to land. The person who knows when I need silence and when I need a beach and when I need to laugh until it hurts.
Another year of you feels like a gift I never stop unwrapping.
Happy birthday, my love 💙
Four years ago, I packed up my life and drove toward a city I hoped would hold me when everything else fell apart.
I didn’t come to Chicago chasing a dream. I came here trying to stay alive. Trying to breathe. Trying to find myself after losing so much I didn’t know who I was without the wreckage.
Chicago didn’t fix me. It gave me room. Room to grieve loudly. Room to rebuild slowly. Room to become someone new without asking me to apologize for it.
This city held me through endings, through becoming, through learning how to choose myself again and again. It gave me chosen family, deep friendships, hard lessons, belly laughs, long walks, and a version of me I’m proud of.
Four years later, I’m still here. Softer. Stronger. More honest. Still growing. Still choosing the life that chose me back.
Thank you, Chicago. You saved my life.
_____
📸 @cassie.gibbons.photography
20% sitewide sale is live with code LASTCHAPTER, including the last of our $5 tees and $1 stickers.
I wanted to highlight one of my favorite Stay; releases ever. Each year we reimagined the theme, but the Life Sounds Better With You In It tee will always hold a special place for me. That year was all about how music saves lives, and we partnered with Sounds of Saving to bring that truth forward.
We only have a few of these tees left, and I’m going to be genuinely be sad when they’re gone. If you grab one of the last ones, I’ll include the matching enamel pin set for free!
Use code LASTCHAPTER and take home a piece of Stay; while it’s still here. Life really is better with you in it.
What most people don’t realize about Only Humxn is that it started in my tiny one bedroom apartment in 2015. Before the community, before the merch, before the events. Before any of the magic. It was just a doodle in my notebook and a dream I was trying to convince myself I deserved.
In 2015 it was simply a website with free resources. It was called Only Human Fitness because I was trying to crawl out of my own rock bottom. I had just been laid off from a job I loved. I had lost a home after a breakup. I was living alone with my dog Mika in an apartment that felt too quiet for the amount of grief I was carrying. I was the heaviest weight of my life and my mental health was barely hanging on.
In 2016 I made the biggest and wildest decision of my life. I quit my full time job with the steady paycheck. I invested my last $700 into inventory. I sold almost everything I owned. I strapped a tent to the top of my car. And I started driving.
Pride festival to Pride festival. Town to town. State to state. I sold shirts out of my car and had new shipments sent to whatever city I landed in next. I slept under the stars, cried in parking lots, laughed with strangers who became family, and slowly watched a tiny idea start to grow legs.
What I didn’t know in that moment, sitting on top of my car in that tent, was that the last $700 I had would grow into a multi million dollar company in four years. I just had to try. I had to bet on myself. I had to believe there was a bigger story waiting for me.
And there was.
OHX did not just become a company. It became a community. A home. A heartbeat. A decade of connection that changed my life.
If there is anything I hope you take from this part of my story, it’s this. You do not need the perfect plan. You do not need the perfect timing. You do not need permission. You just need a dream that keeps tugging at your heart and the courage to take the first messy step toward it.
I turned seven hundred dollars into a multi million dollar company because I believed in something that did not exist yet. And you can do that too. Your idea, your passion, your spark might be the thing that changes everything.
There’s a part of my story I don’t talk about often, but it changed everything about the way I build brands today.
Only Humxn didn’t crack slowly.
It collapsed in a single moment.
August 14, 2021.
The day everything fell out from under me.
The photo on the top is August 13.
I was smiling. I thought I knew what my life looked like. I thought I knew who loved me. I thought I knew who was standing beside me.
The photo on the bottom is August 14.
I was awake all night because my world had just changed entirely. Like I’m talkin’ fully shattered. I lost my best friend. I lost my community. I lost the version of OHX I poured myself into. And I had to face the truth that nothing was ever going to look the same again.
People talk about heartbreak like it is poetic.
It isn’t.
It’s the silence between calls that never come.
It’s the friends who disappear because your pain is inconvenient.
It’s the loneliness of realizing you were not held the way you held others.
And here’s the part that hurts to say out loud.
OHX didn’t survive that day.
And it hasn’t survived the years after it either.
Even after everything I poured into trying to revive it, trying to rebuild it, trying to breathe life back into something I loved so deeply, it is still failing.
And I think 2026 will be the year that the doors close forever.
That truth breaks my heart.
But not as much as the people I lost along the way.
The ones I thought would be there, who weren’t.
The ones I had to learn the hard way were only around when things were easy.
And I want to say something here, because I know how easy it is to scroll past sadness online.
I don’t share photos like this to make anyone feel heavy.
I share them because this is what vulnerability actually looks like.
Maybe it reminds us that being human is not an aesthetic, it is an experience.
If you’ve ever had a single moment split your life into a before and after, I hope you know this:
You’re allowed to grieve what didn’t survive.
You’re allowed to cherish what did.
And you’re allowed to move forward even when the ending still hurts.
