What, Like It's Hard?

A note from your favorite "Legal Office Specialist"

Apr 15, 2025

Let’s try something different here.

I’ve been cultivating an online presence for years, and if you’ve been here a while, I’m sure you’ve noticed an evolution of many phases and personas: The flirtatious artist, the stoner mirror priestess, the mystical devotee, the desert anarchist. Each one has been uniquely crafted through experimental aesthetics, my own personal inquiry spoken out-loud, and lots of stark, subtle and sometimes vague poetic musings. Although my background in graphic design has brought all these personas a certain inevitable distinctiveness and polish, they’ve all still been ‘me’ and how I’ve seen my most prized facet of my identity in any given moment.

But the truth is, I’m actually not interested in evolving a persona anymore. There is a ‘me’ that is still not here online, and while that’s probably to be expected, it also feels incongruent in a way that now repulses me. Some part of ‘me’ has been missing here, and it’s just not fun anymore to be anywhere where that part isn’t.

As I’ve pursued integrating mediation into my body of work, it’s also made great timing for me to step away from the internet for a while — for most of the last year I’ve stopped launching programs, making look-at-me-I’m-smart content, and teasing virtual voyeurs from the kitchen of my inner thoughts and consciousness. I have stopped the indulgent routine of adding and subtracting different spices to the concoction that has been @fionanodar, and instead I’ve been exploring a different kind of experiment.

I’ve been exploring

Who I am ready to be

to my self

to the world around me

and how can the

who that I am already

ease my organic changing,

encourage something fruitful

for this ecology to emerge

like new seeds

from propagated wisdom,

like belonging not by

intrusion or adaptation

but by quiet extension,

by listening to

the way my own music

already reaches for

relational harmony.

Which brings me to calling out the part of me that’s still been missing:
where the hell is the humor?

In the fleshy, earthy, eye-to-eye existence, I am rarely trying to prove myself as an artist to the outside world. You may only ever catch me waxing poetic in front of a particular aspen tree during a particularly stunning late-summer sunset. Most of the time I’m simply noticing the nuances of this wacky world just so I can tease out some levity from it all. Usually I am laughing, sometimes at the expense of some innocent-enough party, though almost always with and at myself. It feels kind of weird to come back online and find that I’ve created a formal-attire sort of sala spot when in my waking, walking world I have been wearing the same sports bra I bought at Savers for $3 for two weeks straight.

There is an incongruence I don’t know what to do with, other than call it out. Why is this place I’ve created so serious? Am I just reading the room of the broader self-help internet landscape, or am I still trying to prove something?

I suppose I say that out-loud because there’s a sort of agreement I’ve made with myself in order to come back into this online world more regularly: to discover a more playful, honest and openly unsure way of participating in online creation and community building. To gently dismantle the structures and foundations that were slowly made over time by a once twenty-something year-old who was really needing to remember herself as an artist, a devotee, and an anarchist. Over time I’ve grown less attached to identities and more interested in grasping the hands of those around me. I hope that starts to become more expressed here, even if awkwardly.

So what have I been up to?

Reality started to really settle in late last summer when I finally stopped smoking weed, while also walking away from a dear friendship that was enabling my bigger delusions about how success works. All this happened right after my 33rd birthday, and a couple weeks before I started studying mediation through the Harvard certification program.

The fall came with a lot of grief. I still sometimes really miss that vivid place of delusion — I miss my old beliefs of grandeur, my psychedelic and silly practices for awakening my wildest ideas, and my much lower standards for myself when it came to my work ethic. Unbeknownst to me, I had granted myself a second, less traumatic window into being a bit of a teenager again. Of course I would eventually stumble into a painful closure of that chapter, though fortunately it would steward me into a more matured version of responsibility and adulthood than the one I’d once cultivated in my 20s.

By winter’s arrival, a fresh sense of excitement started to filter out the fall’s grief. I found a well-rounded sense of purpose in my mediation training, while also discovering that I wasn’t actually attached to that sense of purpose at all. There is a calm here, a sense of duty, and very little rumination or story about some sort of divine mission I’m supposed to be on. I just wake up and do my work without overthinking it, over and over again. I also fell in love with a new partner, and felt the ease of being cherished from close emotional proximity. For the first time in a long time, I became romantically entangled with someone who seems to have arrived here with the eyes that can just see me without strain. Opposites may attract, but two people with three shared Virgo placements have a real love for critique (fine, sometimes it’s straight-up judgement) and getting shit done, all while appreciating where the carnal and the ethereal meet.

Today I’m doing work I really never thought I’d do. A couple weeks after finishing my program, I walked into the local courthouse and asked for a job as a mediator. It turned into them creating a position for me, which I’ve started this spring. I’m now working at the courthouse on a part-time contract to help them build out a district-level mediation program, while they are supporting me to get additional training to also work with families in conflict more intimately. Three times a week I put on one of my three shirts that isn’t a crop-top, heeled loafers, and walk around a courthouse (well, mostly sit inside a cubicle) interviewing, shadowing, researching and planning. What a truly fascinating and yet shockingly mundane adventure I’m on.

I’m also still building a private mediation practice under the name ‘Mercy Me’, and still working with coaching clients who find me when they’re trying to create new ways of relating to their work and sense of purpose. As a humble brag, I also recently completed a mini ICF (International Coaching Federation) training that involved me having to record and share a coaching session to be graded and reviewed. My feedback session was 30 minutes of mostly praise about some pool of “mastery” I’m swimming in. All to say, I’m still quietly coaching, loving it, and seemingly doing it very well.

I anticipate sharing here more like this — with less pressure to put an impressive sheen over my words or share some profound insight. Feel free to share your thoughts or feelings in response to anything I share!

Below are some ways to engage with my work, and some of my favorite things:

Career Coaching

To me, the benefits of coaching are often in discovering your own resourcefulness, activating your latent courage, and building compassionate awareness for your own human experience. I bring an adaptive presence that will follow the current of your session’s unfolding, while also poking into your inner landscape intuitively with a gentle but firm curiosity. We will explore the nuances of your belief systems and various identities with precision and levity. Prepare for many metaphors and giggles.

Book a discovery call

Mediation + Conflict Guidance

Here’s my website to learn more, and a link to book an intake session (which you could also use as a one-off 1:1 session to ask for conflict guidance and advice).

My favorite book

The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace
I wrote on the margins of almost every page…

Still obsessed with this planner

Get 10% off when you buy through my link here, which will also give me some points to buy my next planner at a discount. Truthfully, there’s no way I would be adult-ing so well without it.