Style & Serenity

June 2026

Anxiety doesn’t knock. It doesn’t announce itself or wait for a convenient moment. It just shows up, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, in the quiet space between one thought and the next, in the chest, in the stomach, in the place behind your eyes where the pressure builds before you even have a name for what’s happening.

I know this feeling well. And lately, it has been showing up more than I would like.

I am someone who presents well. I walk into rooms, I engage, I show up for the people I love. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. That is the thing about anxiety that nobody talks about enough, it is almost entirely invisible. You can be sitting at a dinner table, laughing at something, and simultaneously feel like the walls are closing in. You can look completely fine and feel completely undone.

That disconnect is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it.

Anxiety has many faces. For some people it’s a racing heart and a sense of immediate dread. For others it is quieter, a low hum of worry that never fully goes away, a tendency to catastrophize, a mind that will not stop running through every possible thing that could go wrong. Sometimes it is both, depending on the day.

Where does it come from? That is the question I keep asking myself. Some of it is the accumulation of loss, grief has a long tail and it touches everything. Some of it is the uncertainty that comes with this season of life, the questions that don’t have answers yet. Some of it is just the world, which asks a lot of us right now. And some of it, if I am honest, comes from inside, from a nervous system that has been running on high alert for so long it has forgotten what calm feels like.

There are things that help. Movement helps, not for weight, not for any other reason, just for the way it pulls you back into your body and out of your head. Breathing, real deliberate breathing, helps more than I ever wanted to admit because it sounds too simple to work and yet it does. Talking helps, when you have someone safe to talk to. Prayer helps.

But I want to be honest with you. These things manage it. They don’t cure it. There are still mornings I wake up with that weight already sitting on my chest before I have done anything to deserve it. There are still days when I do everything right and the anxiety shows up anyway. And on those days I don’t have a solution. I just have the willingness to keep going anyway.

I think that is what nobody tells you about anxiety. It is not something you fix once and move on from. It is something you learn to live alongside. Some seasons it quiets down. Some seasons it gets louder. Right now, for me, it’s loud.

And I am writing about it anyway. Because I know I am not the only one sitting with this. Because somewhere someone is reading this at 2am feeling completely alone in it, and I want them to know they are not.

That is enough. For tonight, that is enough.

My daughter is studying abroad this semester, living her life, as she should, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And I am proud of her. But pride and peace are two different things, and a mother’s heart doesn’t always know how to hold both at once.

So when the worry crept in quietly at 3am the way it always does, I did what mothers do. I booked the flights. My sister didn’t hesitate for a moment. That’s the thing about the people who love you. They don’t need a long explanation. They just say when do we leave?

And so we went.

Amsterdam doesn’t overwhelm you. It opens, slowly, graciously, like a book you can’t put down. The canals wind through the city like quiet conversations. The streets hum with cyclists and flower stalls bursting with tulips, and the light that falls over the water in the late afternoon is unlike anything I have ever seen.

It is the kind of place that makes you walk slower, breathe deeper, and look up. The people match the city, unhurried, warm, genuinely kind in a way that stays with you long after you’ve gone home.

Amsterdam is a city that feeds you well…just not always in the way you might expect. The real culinary magic lives in its extraordinary diversity. The Indonesian rijsttafel, the Surinamese roti, the Turkish kebabs, the Moroccan tagines, this is a city shaped by centuries of global trade, and its food tells that story beautifully.

But what made this trip extraordinary wasn’t the architecture or the cuisine. It was the people who showed up.

My cousins drove three and a half hours from Germany just to be with us. No grand gesture, no announcement, that kind of love simply shows up.

And my best friend since childhood, who lives just outside Amsterdam in Rotterdam, met us with the kind of ease that only decades of real friendship can produce. We have lived entire lifetimes since we were girls together, raised children, buried parents, laughed and cried and survived.

To sit across from her again, after all this life, laughing over a long meal like no time had passed at all, that was the whole trip right there.

Reunited after so much life lived.

Bicycles at every corner, the true pulse of Amsterdam.

Amsterdam runs on two wheels. And woven through all of it, every canal walk, every neighborhood, every crowded dinner table was my daughter. Watching her move through that beautiful city with confidence and grace, seeing the world she had quietly made her own, gave me something no itinerary could have planned.

I came to make sure she was safe. What I found was that she was thriving.

For a mother who has watched her only child walk into the world, suitcase in hand, there is no greater gift than that.

King’s Day flowers on the canal

Amsterdam gave me breathtaking canals, welcoming friendly people, vibrant neighborhoods and some of the most stunning scenery I have ever witnessed. But what it really gave me was a reminder of who I am. Connection. Family. Friendship. The extraordinary miracle of people who love you enough to show up.

Even in the rain, Amsterdam is magical.

If Amsterdam is ever on your list of places to see move it to the top. Walk its streets without an agenda. Let the canals slow you down. Eat your way through its neighborhoods. And if you can bring the people who matter most along with you, do that too. Those are the trips that don’t leave you.