I keep telling myself it’s fear.

That I don’t jump.. don’t go all in on the thing I’m building, don’t say the parts out loud that I actually think.. because I’m scared of getting fired.

And that’s true.

It is fear.

I need this paycheck.

I have debt.

I have a life I’m still building.

Losing this job isn’t a hypothetical, it’s rent.

But I sat with it longer this week and something didn’t add up.

It’s not that I think what I have to offer is bad.

I know it’s not bad.

I know exactly what it’s worth.

So if it’s not, “I’m not good enough,” what is it?

It’s this: what I have to say is inconvenient to the system I still work inside of.

Not dramatic.

Not a scandal.

Just.. the more honest I get about what actually helps kids, what actually helps parents, what the day-to-day inside a classroom actually costs a person, the more that honesty starts to look like an indictment of the place that signs my paycheck.

I’m not trying to expose anything.

I’m just trying to tell the truth about what I’ve lived.

But truth about the inside of a system, told by someone still inside it, reads as a threat whether you meant it that way or not.

So I stay smaller than the thing I’m building.

Not because I doubt the thing.

Because I know exactly how good it is, and some part of me knows that’s precisely the problem.

Here’s the part I don’t say out loud very often: I’m not protecting the work by staying quiet. I’m protecting the paycheck by pretending the work is smaller than it is.

Those are different things, and I’ve been letting the second one hide inside the first one..

So, no.. it’s not just the fear of being seen.

It’s the current paycheck.

If you’re circling the same thing:

Name what you’re actually protecting. It’s usually not the job. It’s the paycheck the job produces. Those aren’t the same thing, and separating them tells you what you’re really negotiating with.

Being “too honest” for a system isn’t a flaw in you. It’s information about the system. If your clarity feels dangerous somewhere, that place has a low ceiling.. not you.

You don’t have to jump to get bigger. You can build the thing at the size your income currently allows, without pretending it’s smaller than it is. Staying small and staying quiet are two different choices. You can stop doing the second one before you’re ready to do the first.

I know exactly what I’d post if getting fired weren’t on the table. I know exactly which parts of my classroom, my kids, this system I’d finally say out loud.

I haven’t written it yet.

But I’m working on it.. and so should you.

If this resonated, I invite you to subscribe to follow along.

With love always,

Amanda Marie Jung

Here’s the number nobody wants to say out loud when they’re telling you to build multiple income streams: my teaching salary is $59,700 a year. Substack made me $14 last month… So like, subscribe and buy me a coffee each month. 😉

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If you’re doing math right now and thinking that doesn’t add up to a plan of a $200,000 reset… Lmfao.. You’re right. Obviously.

It doesn’t look like a plan yet. It looks like a teacher’s salary and a rounding error. I’m telling you the real numbers because if I don’t, you’ll read this and think I have some income stream you don’t have access to, and you’ll feel behind for a gap that isn’t actually there. You’re not behind. Most of us are starting from a number this unglamorous.

So here’s what actually changed.. not the income, the decision underneath it.

Every extra dollar I have goes into an investment account.

Like, any time I want to impulse buy something from Amazon.. I stop myself and put that money towards my investment account

Not extra debt payments.

Investments.

That sounds backwards if you grew up believing debt is the enemy and the enemy gets killed first.

I believed that too, for years.

Here’s why I stopped.

If you throw every spare dollar at debt and nothing else, you’re betting your entire financial future on staying in survival mode until the number hits zero. I already spent nine years in survival mode.

I know exactly what that does to a person.. it doesn’t build discipline, it builds a nervous system that’s braced for the next emergency, permanently.

That’s why I haven’t felt not even one thing when my boyfriend got fired last week.

The thing is… is I wasn’t willing to spend another decade like that just to say I paid it off faster.

The debt didn’t put me in scarcity mode.

Scarcity mode is what almost kept me there for life.

There’s also just the math.

Some of my $200,000 is high-interest.. the credit cards from the year I was eighteen and surviving, not building.

That part gets paid aggressively, on purpose, because no investment beats that interest rate and pretending otherwise would be lying to you.

But not all of it is that kind.

Some of it is lower-interest… the kind of debt that costs less to carry slowly than it costs to starve myself to kill it in a year.

That portion, I let sit, and I put the difference into an account that’s actually building something, instead of just erasing something.

You don’t need six figures to start this.

You need to know which parts of your debt are the ones trying to eat you alive, and which parts are just sitting there quietly.

Treat them differently.

Stop treating your whole number like one emergency.

Now, obviously, I’m no financial professional. Do not take financial advice from me, please.

I don’t need your failure on my conscious.

But, here’s the part people usually don’t tell you, because it makes them sound careless: I still spend money on things that aren’t the debt.

Botox, peptides, hair extensions.

If you’re picturing vanity, that’s not actually what’s happening for me.. the peptides are something I take because of what I’ve personally experienced with my blood sugar and my Hashimoto’s.

The hair extensions are because an autoimmune disease took my hair, and getting it back isn’t optional softness to me, it’s part of feeling like myself in my own body again.

I’m not saying skip your own version of this.

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I’m saying I refused to let debt take every single thing that makes me feel like a person, because that’s exactly the kind of survival-mode thinking that kept me stuck for nine years in the first place.

If you’re waiting until your number hits zero to let yourself feel like a person again.. stop waiting.

That’s not discipline.

That’s just another version of the spiral, dressed up as responsibility.

The plan isn’t dramatic.

It’s a percentage into investments, aggressive payoff on the debt that’s actually dangerous, patience with the debt that isn’t, and a hard no to erasing myself in the name of getting out faster.

It’s not a program.

It’s just the first thing that’s ever made sense to a body that spent nine years being told the only responsible move was to disappear until the number said zero.

You don’t need the whole plan today.

You need to know which part of your number is actually urgent, and which part you’ve been treating like a five-alarm fire out of habit, not math.

That’s next.. What I actually decided was worth protecting, no matter what the debt still says.

So here’s to you 🥂, here’s to me 🥂 & here’s to my $200,000 worth of debt.

We got this.

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

So the thing about me, is that I’m a binge eater. I used food as a way to cope for the shitty things that happened to me in my life.

I mean food is easier and better access than meth, right?

So gaining and losing anywhere between 0-70lbs was a yearly occurrence for me.

Cue… Autoimmune disease.

Gaining and losing that much weight every year for 5 years in a row, is well.. not well.

So I tried peptides for the first time to help with the food noise, of course aesthetics at the forefront of my brain, always… Ever since I was 12 years old really… But that’s for another post.

So anywho.

I tried peptides for the first time last year (March 2025) in hopes it would cure the food noise and regulate my blood sugar.

My A1C was at 6, hellloooo prediabetes.

But in actuality, I would feel faint by 11 am at my teaching job if I didn’t eat a full course meal.

My doctor said to eat that full course meal.

Bitch, I was 70 lbs overweight.

I needed regulation, not to keep the cycle going…

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So, I heard that peptides help with food noise and regulate your blood sugar.

I found the person I trusted the most online helping others with their peptide journey and followed the leader.

And I’m so glad I did.

Following the leader always came with a negative connotation.

But in this instance, it saved my life.

I lost 50 steady pounds and lost my food noise.

I regulated my fucking blood sugar…

And didn’t need to eat at 11 am to not pass out in front of my students.

Something my doctor didn’t help me with.

My autoimmunee disease (Hashimotos) is back in remission.

And a year later, I’m take the smallest dose every other week.

Not only do I feel as energetic as I did back in high school, I have more energy.

I wake up at 6 am, I can complete an entire day working with my students with severe autism who have such diverse needs. I can come home, cook dinner, and do a work out.

I can be me.

I can be the person who works a full-time job, has the energy to create a business on the side, and work out.

Not to mention, break some generational cycles along the way.

So yes, my weekly injection has become a ceremony.

The self-love my peptides taught me... is way more than just a shoot in the tummy.

I’ve slowed down in the aspects of my life I’ve always envied how others did, sped up in daily tasks, eliminated food noise, and haven’t felt like I needed to faint by 11 am in front of a classroom full of children.

A spirituality like no other.

As always, this is just my story.. What worked for my body, with my doctor, in my situation. I’m just telling you what it did for me.

I’d love to continue the conversation. If you have questions about peptides or want to know more details, I’m always available to chat one direct chat away…

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

Here comes the familiar tightening in your chest.. It’s not envy exactly, more like a quiet accusation.

Am I still playing it safe? When is it going to be my turn?

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Here’s what’s true: you still have your full-time job.

You’re still clocking in.

Still getting a paycheck every two weeks, one that shows up whether the thing you’re building on the side has a good month or a slow one.

And for a long time, that felt like a confession.. like you were still waiting for permission to call yourself a real entrepreneur, still not quite qualifying for the version of “building something” that gets the fire emojis.

But sitting with it, I want you to realize you’ve been measuring the wrong thing.

You’ve been treating “still employed,” as the visible failure to explain away, instead of looking at what it’s actually buying you.

Your paycheck isn’t a consolation prize while you wait to be brave enough to leave.

It’s the floor you get to build on without panic.

It’s the reason you can grow the thing on the side at a pace that’s actually sustainable instead of the pace fear would set for you.

It’s the reason a slow month is inconvenient instead of catastrophic.

It’s not the thing standing between you and your real life.. It’s the thing making the real life possible without gambling everything on a version of yourself that isn’t fully built yet.

Quitting isn’t the proof of commitment it looks like.

It’s just one version of commitment.. the loud one, the one that gets the comment section.

There’s another version that doesn’t post as well: staying exactly where you are, on purpose, while you build something slower and sturdier underneath it.

You don’t know yet when.. or if.. leaving will be the right move.

That’s not what this is about.

This isn’t an exit plan.

It’s just you, done believing you’re blocking your money portal because of your job and done treating your own safety like something you have to justify to a comment section that will never see the actual math of your life.

Your job you tolerate isn’t what’s stopping you from building something beautiful.

It’s what’s letting you build it without burning yourself down in the process.

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

If this made you exhale in any sort of way, I encourage you to follow or subscribe for more Saturday In-Betweens.

I wasn’t.

I was managing.

Choosing my words carefully, softening the delivery, making sure everyone stayed comfortable.. and calling that growth because it felt like effort.

It was effort.

It just wasn’t the right kind.

It was the effort of staying quiet in a way that still looked like trying.

What actually changed wasn’t a decision.

It was exhaustion.

I got so tired of the same pattern.. the swallowing, the softening, the rehearsing.. that by the time the moment came, there was no version of me left that could do it the old way.

I had to talk someone through something at work.

Not a conversation I planned to have differently.

Just a normal task.

And this time, there was no physical option except to use my voice.

The old way wasn’t available anymore.

My body wouldn’t do it.

So I did the thing plainly. No cushioning. No pre-apology.

Just.. said it.

And now I can’t shut the fuck up.

That’s the part nobody tells you about regulation.

It’s not a calm, controlled unlocking.

It’s not graceful.

It’s closer to a pressure valve.

Years of a swallowed voice don’t just quietly resolve once you let one sentence out.. they come out.

All of it, a little messily, a little too much at first, because the body has been storing the cost of every unsaid thing and it is not interested in rationing the relief.

I used to think using my voice would feel like confidence.

Like arriving somewhere. It doesn’t.

It feels like exhaustion finally winning against fear.

Not, “I am brave now.”

More like: I literally could not keep doing it the old way, so my body did the only other thing it knew how to do.

And I couldn’t stop smiling throughout the entire experience.

I think that’s actually more honest than confidence.

Confidence sounds like something you build on purpose.

This was closer to my nervous system quitting a job it never wanted in the first place.

I don’t fully know yet what this means outside of work.

I know it happened once, somewhere it mattered, and I know I felt the difference in my body.. not just in what I said.

I’m not going to pretend I have the rest of it figured out.

But I know I’m not going back to the old pattern, because the old pattern isn’t available to me anymore.

And it shouldn’t be available to you either.

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

That advice goes against every moral code I have. I’m also a Catholic.

But on the other hand, I used to want everyone to like me.

I feared if they didn’t.

That fear didn’t stay contained to one area.

It ran everything.

It was in the job I stayed too long at because leaving might disappoint someone. It was in the money conversations I didn’t have.. with myself, with anyone.. because wanting more felt like it needed an apology attached. It was in the body I kept shrinking, literally and otherwise, because taking up space felt like a risk I couldn’t afford. It was in the home I told myself I wasn’t ready for yet, and the things I wanted to say to my own family and didn’t.

How you do one thing is how you do all things. I didn’t used to believe that. Now I think it’s the only thing I actually believe.

Somewhere along the way, being liked became the job.

What I actually needed, what I actually thought.. that came second.

Every time.

Then my supervisor said something to me that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.

I was telling her about a new person starting under me at work.. how I already knew they were either going to really hate me or I was just going to have to hate my four weeks at work.

But the truth is, I was only going to be working with him for four weeks. I was spiraling about it like it was a real problem to solve: do I just accept a miserable four weeks, or do I make everyone’s life super uncomfortable.

My supervisor didn’t hesitate. She said maybe I, “instead of succumbing to what people want to hear, why not lean into being the bitch they think you are instead?”

I thought she was joking.

It was not as a joke.

She said it as advice.

She said it doesn’t change what I know or what my intentions actually are.

It just takes my power back from other people.

It’s not harmful.

It’s just letting them think a certain way, just the opposite of how I allow them to think I am while I’m actually just ruining myself by protecting them in the meantime.

I sat with that one for a while. Because underneath it, what I actually heard was: the fear of being seen as difficult never once protected me.

It just cost me my own voice, over and over, for a version of “liked” I didn’t even get to enjoy.. because I was too busy managing what everyone thought of me to be present in my own life.

So I tested it.

I stopped explaining myself to the person I was working with.

I stopped softening every instruction into a question. I used my voice.. flat out, no cushioning, no, “does that make sense, sorry if that’s confusing.”

And this colleague thanked me for it.

Turns out he wasn’t looking for a friend.

He was looking for leadership.

What I’d been so afraid was going to read as “bitch” was actually just.. being a strong, powerful leader.

Which I already am.

I just can’t exude that passively.

I never could.

Softness was never going to communicate it.

Only the direct version of me could.

So now, I’m practicing it in the other aspects of my life. Not just work.

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Because I thought staying soft, staying agreeable, made sure no one ever thought badly of me.

What it actually did was protect an image.

And the image was never going to hold me at night.

It was never going to lead a room.

It didn’t know my real intentions.. only I did.

It doesn’t feel like becoming someone colder.

It feels like the opposite.. like I finally get to know who I am without a translator standing between me and everyone else, constantly softening the message so it doesn’t get misread.

My intentions haven’t changed.

What I know about myself hasn’t changed.

What changed is I stopped outsourcing the final vote on my character to people who were never going to know the whole story anyway.

Maybe you’ve done this too.

Made yourself so easy to be around that you disappeared a little.

Maybe you’re doing it right now, rewriting a message for the fifth time, or deciding not to say the thing because it might land wrong.

I’m not soft anymore just to keep the peace.

I’m direct because I finally trust what I know.

And the people who needed a leader were relieved I stopped pretending to be anything else.

So now, I take it to the next Sunday family dinner.

Wish me luck.

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

I would’ve opened our bank accounts before I opened my mouth.

Started calculating how many months we had.

Wondered if we’d have to postpone everything we’d been planning.

Convince myself that one bad thing meant ten more were coming.

I’ve spent enough of my life in survival mode to know how quickly your brain can mistake uncertainty for danger.

But this time... I felt calm.

Not because getting let go is easy.

Not because losing an income doesn’t matter.

Because for the first time in a long time, I trusted that we’d be okay before I knew exactly how.

That surprised me more than the departure itself.

Last week, his boss called him into the office. His first written warning in three years. He was told he had a month to improve. Six days later, he was fired.

The timeline almost makes me laugh now.

Not because it’s funny.

Because it makes the previous conversation feel like theater.

Two months before that, he’d been promoted into a senior role.

A promotion. A new title. More responsibility.

Looking back now, it feels painfully obvious.

He wasn’t being promoted. He was being positioned to train the person who would eventually replace him.

Sometimes hindsight doesn’t change the story.

It just confirms the one your gut already knew.

One of the things I love most about my partner is that he doesn’t bend himself into someone else’s version of success.

He isn’t interested in performing for people. He doesn’t chase approval. He doesn’t become smaller just because someone in authority wants him to. He’ll admit when he’s wrong. He’ll work hard. He’ll stay late.

But he won’t spend his life trying to convince someone to value him.

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I’ve always admired that.

Especially because I used to do the opposite.

For years, I believed that if something fell apart, it must somehow be my responsibility to hold it together. Relationships. Money. Jobs. Housing. People.

If I just worked harder...

If I just explained myself better...

If I just became a little easier to love...

Maybe nothing would fall apart.

It took me a long time to realize that not everything that’s ending is asking to be saved.

Some things are ending because they’re finished.

This job feels like one of them.

I don’t think we lost something.

I think we got released from something.

There’s a difference.

The strangest part is that I still feel like I’m standing on two feet.

I keep waiting for the panic to arrive.

It hasn’t.

Maybe that’s what healing actually feels like.

Not the absence of difficult circumstances.

The absence of urgency inside them.

It’s realizing that your nervous system no longer treats every unexpected turn as proof your life is collapsing.

It’s trusting yourself enough to believe you’ll figure it out.

That’s a kind of wealth no paycheck can buy.

Maybe this experience becomes the reason he finds a way to make money that actually serves him.

Maybe it’s the beginning of something neither of us can see yet.

Maybe it’s simply the universe closing a door he would’ve kept trying to hold open.

I don’t know.

What I do know is this.

We’re both in our Saturn returns.

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Everyone describes Saturn returns as a season of destruction, but I don’t think that’s quite right.

I think they’re a season of honesty. The relationships that aren’t built to last begin to crack. The careers you’ve outgrown become impossible to ignore. The identities you’ve been performing start asking to be replaced with something more real.

Life stops negotiating.

It simply asks, is this still who you are?

This week, life answered that question for us.

His job ended.

Our future didn’t.

If anything, I think it just became a little clearer.

I have a feeling this is where we begin stepping into the next versions of ourselves.

So Greece, I’ll see you soon.

Xo,
Amanda Marie Jung

You’ve been avoiding it the same way I was.

Not because you don’t know the number exists. Because as long as you don’t say it out loud, it doesn’t feel as real, and you get to keep living like it isn’t sitting there.

Mine came to just over $200,000.

Some of that is loans and cards from years I was surviving, not building.

But a real piece of it is the down payment I don’t have.. the gap between renting and owning, the checks you write every month to a landlord’s mortgage instead of your own future.

If you grew up with a mom and dad who could hand you a down payment, or co-sign, or let you move home for a year or two to save.. you don’t know what it costs to not have that.

You don’t know what it’s like to watch your own family’s house get taken by the bank, and understand, young, that nobody is building a safety net under you.

Whatever you build, you build from the actual bottom.

No inheritance.

No fallback.

No head start.

So when you finally see your number.. whatever it is, $30,000 or $300,000.. you’re not just looking at debt.

You’re looking at every year you spent starting later than the girls who got a running start.

You’re looking at every “responsible” decision that still left you behind, because responsible was never the problem.

The problem was that nobody handed you the same starting line.

Here’s what nobody tells you about the day when it doesn’t take over your physical body anymore: it doesn’t feel the way you think it will.

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You expect to cry. You expect the number to break you a little. Again.. for the 1,000,000x.

But the day when you’re ready to start actually taking control over it… What actually happens is smaller and stranger.. You just look at it.

That’s it. That’s the whole reaction.

Not because the number got smaller. Because you’ve grown into it. You’ve grown into paying that amount back. Your self worth has risen.

There’s no more flinching past a certain email. No more hoping this month’s paycheck will make the dread go away on its own.

And when your self worth starts to become at a certain level, that number has no more control over you.

Now this isn’t going to be the part where I tell you I fixed it in a year. I haven’t. I’m not close. If you’re waiting for the after-photo, this isn’t that.

What I can tell you is this: the day you stop flinching away from your own number is the day you actually start building something real, instead of just managing the shame of not looking.

You just need to know exactly where you stand and have done the work of building your self worth up to that number.. because you can’t build a life on top of a number you’re too scared to look at.

And now that I finally have it.. The self worth.

That’s the reset.

And you know where yours started too.

Maybe it’s not the exact same story, but something put you here without a map. Mine: I was a teen when my dad died and my mom went to jail, and the actual house.. the one I grew up in.. got taken by the bank, because there was no adult left standing to keep it. No one was catching me. So I put my life on a credit card, because that’s what you do at that age when the alternative is not eating. A real piece of my $200,000 comes from that year. Not irresponsibility. Survival.

If some of your number came from a year like that.. a year where you weren’t building, you were just staying alive.. stop calling it a mistake. It wasn’t reckless. It was the only move you had.

For a long time you might think you have to out-earn your number before you’re allowed to feel okay.

Here’s what changes that: the next time a bill comes and your stomach drops, don’t run the spiral.

Ask yourself one question instead: did you survive worse than this already?

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If the answer is yes, and for most of you reading this, it is, then a bill isn’t the thing that takes you out.

You already know that, somewhere underneath the panic.

You just haven’t said it to yourself yet.

That’s not the universe returning what you lost.

That’s not luck.

That’s proof, plain and boring and true: you’ve survived worse than the number in front of you, and you have the receipts to prove it.

If you’re still in this phase one.. still spiraling every time an envelope shows up.. that’s okay.

That’s not behind.

That’s just where you are right now.

So here’s your reset: you don’t need the number gone to stop being run by it.

You just need to remember, out loud if you have to, that you’re not new at doing hard things. And your self worth will rise there.

Because the truth is, you’ve already done the hardest version of this.

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

Click here to read Part II.

And you don’t need permission to want more than the room gave you.

Read more

I was maybe seven. My teacher called me up to the front of the class.. twice.. to lead the room, to stand in for her while everyone practiced following directions. No one was ever chosen twice. I remember the sighs. Not loud, not dramatic. Just that specific exhale a room full of kids makes when someone gets picked again. I don’t remember what I did up there. I remember the sighing.

That’s the whole memory. That’s it. But somewhere in my nervous system, a very clean lesson got installed that day: being seen costs you something. Getting chosen makes people sigh at you. It is safer to not be up front.

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I know how inner child work usually gets talked about. You go back to the five-year-old, you tell her she’s safe now, you give her the hug she needed. And I’ve done that version. But I forgot, for a long time, that I have a teenage self who needed just as much.. maybe more.. and I never went back for her.

Because here’s what that seven-year-old’s lesson turned into by fifteen: I was in the back left corner of every cheerleading formation, every single time. Not because I lacked the skill. Because back left corner is where you go when the rule you learned at seven is now running the show.. don’t be the one everyone’s eyes land on. I got good at making myself easy to overlook while still technically being on the team. Present, but not seen. That felt like the safest place a body could be.

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And the bigger thing.. the thing I’m only now willing to say plainly.. is I never let myself have a real teenage heartbreak. Not because no one liked me, not because nothing ever almost happened. I just wouldn’t let it get far enough to be seen. Heartbreak requires being visibly, humiliatingly wanted or wanting someone back out loud. It requires being watched while you feel something big. I had already decided, at seven, that being watched was the dangerous part. So I skipped it. An entire category of teenage experience.. the messy, formative, embarrassing kind.. and I opted out before it could even start, and called it maturity.

That’s the part inner child work usually misses. We go back for the little kid because she’s easy to love, easy to picture, easy to comfort with a bath and a bedtime story. The teenager is harder. She’s not asking for comfort in the same language. She’s asking why you let her disappear into a corner for three years. She’s asking why you never let her have the phone call that lasted till 2am, the note passed in class, the crying-in-the-bathroom-over-a-boy experience that everyone else got to have and complain about later like it was nothing. She doesn’t want a hug. She wants to know you noticed she wasn’t there.

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I’m not writing this because I’ve resolved it. I’m writing it because I only just realized, this week, using my voice in rooms that make my chest tight, that the reason it’s this hard has very little to do with the room I’m currently in. It has to do with a room from twenty years ago and a sound a group of seven-year-olds made that I decided, permanently, was information about what happens when you’re chosen.

If you’ve done inner child work before, chances are you went back for the little kid and stopped there. Here’s what I’d actually do with that today:

Find your own “back left corner.” Not the feeling.. the behavior. Where in your current life are you technically present but positioned to not be seen? The meeting where you don’t speak first. The photo you step out of. The promotion you don’t apply for. That’s not a personality trait, that’s a seven-year-old’s decision still running on autopilot. Name the specific place you do it.

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Trace it back one room, not to a theory. Don’t go hunting for “my childhood wound” in the abstract.. that’s too big to locate. Ask instead: what’s the earliest specific moment I can remember where being seen went badly? A classroom, a dinner table, a stage. You’re looking for a scene, not a diagnosis.

Do one visible thing today that your teenage self skipped. Not a grand gesture.. pick something sized to an actual teenager. Speak first in a meeting instead of last. Post the photo instead of the flattering-but-safe one. Tell the person you like them instead of waiting to see if they notice first. The point isn’t the outcome. The point is proving to her, on purpose, that the sigh doesn’t come.

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

The first time I lost it, I broke my body doing it.

I didn’t know that yet. I thought I was winning.

I was restricting. Over-exercising. Doing everything the internet told me a woman who wanted to be smaller was supposed to do. And it worked.. until it didn’t. Until my thyroid stopped cooperating. Until my body, which had been trying to tell me something for months, finally just... stopped playing along.

I gained it all back. And then some.

Seventy pounds.

I want you to sit with that number for a second because I spent a long time not being able to say it out loud. Sixty pounds lost. Seventy gained. The math of that is humiliating in a way that doesn’t fully go away just because you understand the biology behind it.

But here’s what nobody tells you about gaining it back.. it’s never just about the food.

What I Was Actually Feeding

My dad died.

And I ate.

Not because I was hungry. Not because the food was good. Because food is the most accessible source of comfort available to a human being at any given moment. It is fast and it is reliable and it does not require you to explain yourself to anyone. You don’t have to call it grief. You don’t have to name it at all. You can just.. eat. And for a few minutes, something in your nervous system quiets down.

I know why binge eating happens. I understand the science of it better than most people because of what I do for work.. reinforcement, dopamine, the way our brains learn to reach for the fastest available relief when everything else feels out of control.

Understanding it didn’t stop it.

That’s the part nobody talks about. You can know exactly why you’re doing something and still do it. You can watch yourself reach for the food and know on some level that it won’t fix the grief and eat it anyway because the alternative is just sitting inside the grief with nothing.

So I sat inside the food instead.

For a long time.

The Second Time Was Different

When I decided to try again I was different. Not fixed.. different. Tired in a way that had moved past the acute grief and settled into something quieter and more permanent.

I started peptides. I regulated my blood sugar. I stopped eating the way Americans eat and started eating the way my specific body needed to eat.. which sounds simple and is actually one of the hardest things I’ve ever done because it required me to pay attention to my body instead of punishing it.

My thyroid needed extra help now. The first round of loss had seen to that. So I got the help. I stopped being precious about needing it.

That was its own shift.. deciding that needing medical support wasn’t a failure. That my body wasn’t broken, it was just dealing with the consequences of what I’d put it through, and there was no version of healing that didn’t include actually addressing that honestly.

The weight started coming off.

Fifty pounds this time.

But the number isn’t the story.

The Morning Everything Changed

Eight months in, I woke up and got out of bed.

Just like that. Legs over the side, feet on the floor, upright. No hands. No huffing. No negotiating with my own body just to get vertical.

I stood in my bedroom and thought: I don’t ever want to feel anything besides this.

Not thinner. Not smaller. Not the dress size or the scale number or any of the metrics I’d spent years chasing.

Just.. ease. The radical simplicity of a body that was finally on my side.

That’s when I understood what I’d actually been chasing all along. Not a body. A feeling. The feeling of living inside yourself without it being a constant fight.

The inflammation was gone. The exhaustion was gone. The food noise.. that relentless, background hum of thinking about eating, not eating, what I’d eaten, what I was going to eat.. had quieted down in a way I hadn’t even realized I was waiting for until it stopped.

I wasn’t punishing myself into a smaller shape anymore.

I was just living in my body. For the first time in a long time.

Three Things I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then

1. The food noise is not a willpower problem.
It’s a biology problem. When your blood sugar is dysregulated, when your body is inflamed, when your nervous system is in a constant state of stress.. your brain is going to reach for the fastest available relief. Every time. That’s not weakness. That’s how human nervous systems work. Before you try to change what you’re eating, understand what your body is actually asking for. The answer is almost never “more discipline.”

2. Grief lives in the body and it will find a way out.
I ate through my dad’s death because I didn’t know what else to do with it. I’m not ashamed of that anymore. Food was the thing that was available. If you are eating in a way that feels out of control, it is worth asking what you are actually trying to feed.. because it is almost certainly not hunger. That’s not a judgment. It’s an invitation to get curious about what’s actually going on underneath it.

3. Needing help is not the same as failing.
My thyroid needed support. I needed peptides. I needed to actually understand my blood sugar instead of just eating less and moving more and wondering why nothing was working. Getting the help that my specific body needed was not cheating. It was the only thing that actually worked. Your body is not the same as anyone else’s body. Stop trying to fix it with a solution that was designed for someone else.

Fifty pounds down. One ordinary morning at a time.

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Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

Not because you have it figured out.

You don’t.. nobody reading this does, and that’s not the point.

But somewhere along the way you became the one who jumps first.

The one who left the comfortable thing, started the scary thing, said out loud the thing everyone else was only thinking.

And so the calls come to you.

And you take them.

Because you love these people.

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Because watching someone step into a larger version of their life is one of the best feelings you know.

Because you genuinely believe in the people around you and you want to help them into their next tank.

But here’s what you haven’t said out loud yet: nobody is doing that for you.

You keep helping people drink water you haven’t drunk yet yourself.

You keep pointing toward shores you’re still swimming toward.

And you do it surrounded by people who are standing exactly where they were last year, and the year before that.. not because they’re failing, but because the tank they’re in still fits them fine.

They’re not uncomfortable yet.

They don’t need more room.

You do.

There’s a specific loneliness in that.

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Ugh. F*ck.

I’m doing it again.

It’s late.

The bank account is overdrafted.. I’m in the negatives. Like $-346.76.

And I am lying here scrolling Zillow like that’s a completely rational thing to do right now. Five acres. Two million dollars. A house that has a long driveway and enough land that the noise of everyone else’s opinions can’t reach it.

I know how this looks.

I also know it’s mine someday. And I can’t explain that knowing in a way that would satisfy anyone who asked, which is part of the problem.

So I keep scrolling. I do the math that doesn’t work yet. I screenshot a listing I will never send to anyone. And I stay in it just long enough to feel something.. sharp and real and slightly embarrassing in its specificity.. before I close the app because it starts to hurt.

And then I open it again.

Here’s what I haven’t said out loud until right now: the spiral isn’t really about the house.

It never was.

The house is just the place I go when the life I know is mine starts to feel too far away to trust.

I open the app and I look at the proof.

I remind myself it exists.. that someone built it, that someone lives there, that the thing I can feel but can’t touch yet is at least real in the sense that it’s on a screen with a square footage and a zip code.

It’s not delusional. It’s loyalty.

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Here’s what nobody tells you about wanting a life that looks nothing like your current bank account: the hardest part isn’t the money.

The money is actually the easy problem.

You can make money.

People do it every day from laptops and spare bedrooms and ideas they were embarrassed to say out loud six months before they worked.

The hard part is the cost of being right.

Because there are people in your life.. specific people, people who share your last name or your holidays or your history.. who have quietly, without ever saying it directly, placed a bet on you not making it.

Not out of cruelty.

Out of something more complicated than cruelty.

Out of what happens when someone else’s ceiling becomes their comfort, and your ambition starts to look like a comment on their choices.

You know who they are. You can hear their voice before they’ve said a word.

And so you don’t build.

Or you build and stop.

Or you go back to the safe thing.. the thing that makes sense on paper, that other people understand, that doesn’t require you to explain yourself at dinner.

The thing that pays the bills while quietly costing you something harder to name.

You tell yourself it’s temporary.

You tell yourself you’re being smart.

You tell yourself a lot of things at 6 am when the alarm goes off and the dream from the night before is already dissolving.

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The Zillow spiral happens when the knowing refuses to die.

That’s actually what it is.

Not delusion.

Not irresponsibility.

Not a woman who doesn’t understand her own finances.

It’s the part of you that will not, no matter how many times the alarm goes off, fully release the other version of your life.

And that part is not wrong.

The burst of energy you feel at midnight when you close the app.. that’s not a trick your brain is playing on you.

That’s not false hope dressed up as inspiration.

That’s information.

That’s the part of you that actually knows the difference between what you’re settling for and what you’re capable of, and refuses to let you confuse the two for too long.

The problem isn’t the knowing.

The problem is that the knowing has to survive the morning.

It has to survive the commute and the fluorescent lights and the inbox and the version of your life that is loud and immediate and has direct deposit.

It has to survive the aunt who is in the same field and somehow your success feels to her like an accusation.

It has to survive every person who asked about your qualifications when what they meant was: who do you think you are.

You don’t need their answer to that question.

You already have yours.

The house on the screen isn’t the dream.

It’s just the place you go to remember you still have one.

And the woman scrolling at midnight, overdrafted, with a burst of energy she doesn’t know what to do with..

She’s not lost.

She’s not delusional.

She’s not behind.

She’s just in the part of the story where the knowing is louder than the proof.

That part doesn’t last forever.

But it does require you to stop closing the app in shame and start treating what you feel in those moments like the information it actually is.

The cycle breaks when you stop letting the morning have the final word.

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

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It’s time to press post.

The first post is the deepesttttt.. cue Sheryl Crow.

It’s time to post to the people who need to see you.. and eventually build a seven figure business, of course.

But every family member, every high school bitch, and every cousin is about to make fun of you.

My hands were shaking when I did it.

Not metaphorically. Actually shaking.. the kind where you miss the button the first time and have to press it again.

Ordinary Tuesday. My bedroom. Nothing significant about the day at all.

I filmed something for the education brand I’m building, pressed post, and threw my phone across the room like I’d just found out someone was cheating on me.

I didn’t want to look at it.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about building something.. the fear isn’t about the business. It’s not the algorithm or the lighting or whether your niche is dialed in enough.

It’s about who already thinks they know who you are.

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The People Who Filed You Away

There are people in your life who decided who you were a long time ago.

The responsible one. The teacher. The girl with the stable job who has her head on straight. They’re not bad people. They love you, probably.

But they filed you.. neatly, cleanly.. into a category that made sense to them.

And they’ve been comfortable with that version of you ever since.

Pressing post is the moment that file gets ripped open.

Not because you said anything controversial.

Not because the content was even that bold.

But because you showed up as someone with something to say.

Someone building something.

Someone who thinks she might be more than what they decided she was at 22.

And that is a specific kind of terrifying that has absolutely nothing to do with entrepreneurship.

What You’re Actually Scared Of

It’s not failure.

It’s visibility. Specifically, visibility to the people who knew you before you knew yourself.

The aunt who will screenshot it. The cousin who will bring it up at Christmas with a tone that sounds like a question but isn’t. The group chat you’re not in but know exists.

You can handle strangers watching you figure this out. Strangers don’t have a before version of you to compare it to.

The people who do.. that’s where the hands start shaking.

What Pressing Post Actually Is

It’s not content.

It’s an announcement.

I am more than what you decided I was.

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Every person who has ever built something real has had to make that announcement.. not to the internet, but to the room of familiar faces in their head that they carry everywhere. The ones whose imagined reactions have been quietly running the show.

My phone hit the wall on a Tuesday and I sat there on my bed and thought.. this is it.

This is the actual cost of entry.

Not the strategy or the consistency or the perfect brand aesthetic.

Just this.

The willingness to let people who have known you forever watch you become someone they don’t have a category for yet.

Three Things That Actually Help

1. Name who you’re actually scared of.. out loud.
Not “I’m scared of judgment.” Whose face do you see when you imagine pressing post? Your aunt. Your college roommate. Your old coworker. Name them specifically. The fear loses about half its power the second it has a name instead of a faceless audience. You’re not scared of the internet. You’re scared of one or two specific people.. and that’s a much smaller problem than you’ve been treating it as.

2. Film it like they’re not going to see it. Post it knowing they will.
The mistake is trying to create content that won’t give them anything to say. That’s not a content strategy.. that’s self-censorship dressed up as professionalism. Film it for the person it’s actually for. Post it knowing your aunt might see it. Those are two separate moments. Keep them separate.

3. Let the first one be bad.
Not bad content.. bad feelings. Let your hands shake. Let yourself throw the phone. Let the next hour be uncomfortable. That discomfort is not a sign you did something wrong. It’s the exact feeling of becoming someone your family doesn’t have a file for yet. It passes. The post stays up. And the next one is always slightly easier than the last.

Because the seven figure businesses didn’t start with a perfect plan.

They started with shaking hands and a phone thrown across a bedroom on an ordinary Tuesday.

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Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

Not daintily. Not in the soft, barely-there way some people do when they’re surprised or curious. I mean fully, completely, dramatically raising them.. forehead crinkled, lines deep, the whole production.

Every emotion I’ve ever had has lived on my forehead first.

And for the last few years, it physically hurt.

Not in a way I talked about. Not in a way I even really named until recently. Just a low, constant tension that I had filed under this is just what my face does.

The kind of discomfort you absorb so slowly you forget it wasn’t always there.

I had told myself.. genuinely, sincerely.. not until 30.

It felt like a line I was drawing.

Like I was honoring something.

Thirty felt like the right age to make that kind of decision.

Adult enough. Certain enough. Not reactive.

I’m turning 30 in a month.

Yikes, close enough.

I want to be honest about what I thought I was walking into versus what I actually got.

I thought I was getting botox because of the lines.

I have forehead lines that showed up early and stayed.

I also have lines around my eyes and my mouth.. the kind that come from smiling too much, laughing too loud, spending years making faces at kids who needed someone to be expressive for them.

I don’t actually hate those lines.

The ones around my eyes and my smile feel earned.

They feel like evidence.

A fun life leaves marks, and I think I’d rather have them than not.

The forehead was different. The forehead just hurt.

So I made the appointment.

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But what I didn’t expect.. was the quiet.

Not silence.

Not numbness.

Just... less noise.

The constant low-level effort of holding my face in whatever shape my feelings demanded, gone.

My forehead stopped working so hard.

And when your forehead stops working so hard, something else happens: you slow down a little.

You can’t lead with every reaction anymore.

There’s a small pause built in now, between the feeling and the expression.

I keep noticing it.

A moment at work where I would have furrowed, and instead I just... breathe through it.

A split second in the car where I would have raised my eyebrows at something and instead I sit with it quietly for an extra beat.

It’s strange to say that something cosmetic gave me that.

But it’s true.

Maybe it’s not the toxin.

Maybe it’s the reminder.

My face got fast because my life got fast.

I was reacting constantly.. to my classroom, to my bank account, to my body, to the gap between where I am and where I thought I’d be by now.

Every feeling expressed immediately, physically, fully.

My forehead was just keeping score.

And now it can’t.

I’m walking into 30 a little slower.

A little quieter.

With laugh lines I’ve decided to keep and a forehead that finally rests.

I promised myself I’d wait until 30.

I was a month early.

But, fuck it.

Xo,

Amanda Jung

There’s a version of me that existed before I needed anyone’s help.

She was loud in the right ways.

Confident in a way that didn’t need to justify itself.

She knew what she liked and said so.

She took up space without apologizing for the size of it.

She was who her parents made her.. genuinely, cleanly, without interference.

Then things fell apart.

The kind of apart that requires other people’s roofs and other people’s rules.

And when you need someone’s shelter you learn very fast what the rent actually is. It’s not money.

It’s smaller than that.

It’s you.

You shrink to fit.

You adopt their ceilings as your own.

You start to believe that the way they see you is the accurate version.. because why would you trust yourself over the people keeping you warm?

I identified so hard with my mom during that time that when they diminished her, they diminished me too.

And I let it happen for years after I stopped needing the roof.

That’s the part that gets me.

I kept paying rent on a house I didn’t live in anymore.

Letting them go.. quietly, completely, no announcement.. felt like taking a full breath for the first time in a long time.

Not dramatic.

Not a fight.

Just... gone.

And what’s left is something I recognize.

She’s a little older than the last time I saw her.

She has opinions about skincare and a person she loves across an ocean and a life she’s building on her own terms.

She’s ahead of the curve in ways that used to get her mocked and now just get her going.

She’s who I was before I needed them.

Turns out she waited.

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Here’s what I’m learning about getting her back: it’s not about blocking anyone.

I thought it was.

I wanted the clean gesture, the digital door slam, the satisfying removal.

But that’s still giving them the power.. it’s still organizing your life around their presence, just in reverse.

What actually works is reps.

Writing when you’re scared they’ll see it.

Saying the thing anyway.

Building a body of work that exists completely outside their opinion of you.

And then.. this is the part I’m still working toward.. taking that work straight to the people who actually need it.

Not their audience.

Yours.

You don’t block your way back to yourself.

You write your way back.

And eventually their voice in your head gets quieter.

Not because you silenced it.

Because you got loud enough that you stopped being able to hear it.

Xo,
Amanda Marie Jung

Kendall and Kylie, cruising around Los Angeles in matte black everything, looking like they were born inside those cars. Maybe they were.

For girls my age, the G Wagon became shorthand for a very specific kind of arrival.. the kind you couldn’t fake, couldn’t finance your way into without people knowing, couldn’t justify on a teacher’s salary without a long, uncomfortable explanation.

If you had one, you made it. Full stop.

I don’t know exactly when it crossed over from “celebrity car” to “cultural benchmark,” but at some point it did.

It stopped being a vehicle and became a verdict.

You’d see one in a parking lot and do the math on the person inside.. what they must earn, what their life must look like, how far they must be from the version of themselves that worried about money.

The G Wagon became the physical proof that you were no longer in the thick of it.

I have wanted one, loudly in my mind, for years.

Last year, for my 29th birthday, I rented one.

People looked. Heads turned. I caught eyes in rearview mirrors. Someone at a gas station asked me about it.

The attention was real.

But here’s the thing.. Obviously I noticed the looks but something else was happening inside the car that turned out to be louder than any of it.

What happened was that I got on the highway, and the road got quiet.

Not literally.. a G Wagon is not a quiet car.

But something in me got quiet.

I wasn’t rushing.

I wasn’t running through tomorrow’s to-do list or calculating how many hours until the weekend.

I was just driving.

This enormous, solid, unapologetic machine, and me inside it, and nothing else asking anything of me.

I felt safe in a way I don’t usually let myself feel.

I felt luxurious.. Not in the fake Instagram sense, but in the original sense.

Like I had more than enough.

Like time was mine.

Like I could actually slow down without something falling apart.

Driving this machine allowed me to be too busy feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Fucking free.. And just, myself.

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So, here we are. A year later and what I’ve been thinking about since.

The G Wagon became a status symbol for women my age because of what it visually represents: the ability to move through the world unhurried and untouchable.

Heavy.

Safe.

Unapologetic.

Taking up space without apologizing for it.

That is not about the car.

That is about what most women in their late twenties and thirties are quietly starving for.

We have spent years making ourselves smaller.. in jobs that underpay us, in apartments we’re not sure we can afford, in bodies we’re at war with, in lives that run on cortisol and obligation and the low hum of not-quite-enough.

We are exhausted from performing capability while privately running on empty.

And then someone drives by in a G Wagon and something in us goes: that.

Not the car.

The feeling the car represents.

The weight of it.

The slowness.

The security.

The sense of being someone who has enough room in her life that she can drive a machine down a highway and just... breathe.

We’re not chasing a car.

We’re chasing the version of ourselves who isn’t rushing anymore.

But the car is a reminder to be that version of ourselves.

I know that’s the real answer because when I was driving it, it was just me and the road and this ridiculous, beautiful car.

And I felt.. for a few hours on my 29th birthday… like my life finally caught up to the life I was trying to build.

Like I wasn’t behind.

Like I wasn’t waiting.

Like the freedom I keep working toward was something I could actually touch.

That is worth naming clearly: what the G Wagon represents is not wealth.

It’s spaciousness.

It’s the physical sensation of having more than enough.. enough room, enough time, enough safety, enough self.

And here’s the other thing I want to name clearly, because I think we’re allowed to say it: It is also just an incredibly sexy car.

Not everything has to be a metaphor.

Some things are just excellent.

The engineering is obscene.

The way it handles is absurd.

The sheer audacity of the thing.. a tank that costs more than most people’s first homes, designed to go off-road and instead sitting in LA traffic looking like it owns the city.. is genuinely, objectively beautiful.

We are allowed to want nice things because they are nice.

We are allowed to love a beautiful object without needing to justify it with a lesson about self-worth.

We are allowed to say: I want that because it is incredible and I deserve incredible things and I’m going to get there.

I still really want a G Wagon.

Not because I need anyone to see me driving it.

Not because I need a status symbol to prove I made it.

But because that afternoon on the highway, for a few hours, I felt like the version of myself I’m working so hard to become.. unhurried, safe, free, taking up exactly as much space as I want.

And also because it’s a fucking sexy car.

Both things are true.

And we can be allowed to want both.

Xo,

Amanda Marie Jung

I got upsold by my botox lady into the ZO Skin Health hydration cleanser.

Walked out feeling fancy.

Used it for two weeks and went back to my $10 Good Molecule because the expensive one isn’t doing anything she said.

Currently doing more for my skin than the La Mer peel my boyfriend’s mom brought me from Greece: a Dr. Perricone brightening peel from TJ Maxx.

Yes that TJ Maxx.

The one everyone says don’t buy skincare from because it could be expired.

I am buying skincare from there.

My face looks better than it did when I was using the fancy stuff.

Also from TJ Maxx: a Caudalie moisturizer that’s quietly doing everything.

I’m not telling you to shop in the discount aisle.

I’m telling you that I have a La Mer peel sitting on my bathroom shelf while I reach past it every morning for the $16.99 find I grabbed between a discounted throw pillow and a Le Creuset.

My face isn’t where I want it yet.

I still want the laser. Don’t get me fucking wrong… like hello.

But in the meantime I’m out here being a little rat about it and honestly?

It’s kind of working.

Xo,
Amanda Marie Jung

If I can’t have the version I actually want, I’d rather wait.

I’ll skip the starter version, the practice run, the stepping stone.

I’ll hold out for the real thing.

And while I’m holding out, I’ll rent.

I’ll wait.

I’ll keep the dream pristine and untouched and completely out of reach.

I’ve been doing this with houses for years.

There’s a $2 million version of my life that lives in my head.

Land.

Space.

Something that feels like arriving.

And because that’s the version I actually want, I can’t bring myself to look seriously at the $250k house on a quarter acre that’s actually available to me right now.

It’s not the dream.

So what’s the point.

The point, I’m starting to think, is that the $2 million house doesn’t appear out of nowhere.

It gets built toward.

And you can’t build toward something when you’re standing still waiting for it to come to you.

The $250k house isn’t the dream.

But it might be the first sentence of the story that gets me there.

Buy it.

Build equity.

I’ve been treating the stepping stone like a consolation prize.

Like touching it means giving up on the real thing.

But what if not touching it is the thing that’s actually keeping me from the real thing.

The dream house isn’t the cap. Waiting for it is.

But fuck being a landlord.

Xo,

Amanda Jung

I watch it happen in real time.. the announcements that aren’t announcements, the vague Instagram stories, the sudden disappearance of couple photos, the text from a mutual friend that starts with so I don’t know if you heard...

I have not gotten divorced.

I have not gotten married.

These are not the same thing, and I’m only recently starting to understand the difference.

For a long time I thought I was just late.

Running behind on a timeline everyone else seemed to have gotten a copy of.

They married at 26, 27, 28.. some of them knowing, some of them hoping, most of them just doing the thing you do when your life is stable enough to take that kind of risk.

When you have parents who modeled what a marriage looks like, even an imperfect one.

When you have enough ground under your feet to leap toward something without checking first if the ground is actually there.

I was busy checking if the ground was there.

I spent my twenties surviving.

The quiet, constant work of building a floor under myself while everyone else was already decorating.

I was learning things at 27 that most people learned at 17.

How to trust my own judgment.

How to take up space without apologizing for it.

How to want something without immediately talking myself out of it.

Teenager things.

Except I was doing them in my late twenties, in a grown woman’s life, with a grown woman’s bills.

The grief isn’t about the marriage.

I know that now.

It’s about what I didn’t have that made the marriage possible.. the stability, the modeling, the runway.

They got to make that mistake because they had enough safety to afford a mistake that size.

I didn’t get to make it.

Not because I was smarter or more careful or more selective.

Because I was surviving.

My boyfriend was married once, too.

He had the runway.

He got to make the leap and learn what it cost him and land somewhere on the other side of it.

He’s in his second chapter.

I’m still writing my first one.

And I’m trying to decide if that’s the tragedy I used to think it was, or if it’s just the shape of a life that had to build itself from scratch.

If the people who married at 26 and divorced at 32 got something I didn’t.. and they did, they got the years, they got the experience, they got to find out.. or if I got something too.

Time.

To figure out who I am before I attach my life to someone else’s.

I’m not sure that trade was fair.

I’m not sure it was a trade at all.

Some people just get more runway and some people don’t, and the ones who didn’t spend a long time watching everyone else take off.

I’m still on the ground.

And if you’re still reading, I have a hunch that you might be too.

Xo,

Amanda Jung