During COVID-19, I felt the walls closing in. On the outside, everything seemed fine. On the inside, I felt an overwhelming need to leave. To leave the routines, the noise, the expectations. To find space, clarity, something deeper.

So I took a sabbatical. I wandered between Long Island and Tennessee, searching for peace, for meaning.

But what I found instead was myself. Not the version I'd been to everyone else. Not the daughter, the sister, the girlfriend, the executive assistant. The real me. The me who had never stopped long enough to ask what I actually wanted, what I actually enjoyed, who I was when no one else was defining it.

Part of that meant sitting with things I'd never fully processed, like the loss of my mom. But mostly, it meant learning to guide my own life for the first time.

Healing didn't arrive all at once. It unfolded over long nights and quiet mornings, like the slow, inevitable turning of the seasons.

I found grounding in small rituals: lighting a candle, sitting with myself without needing to escape.

Minerva was born from that space. A reminder that you can return to yourself. Again and again.

Each candle is an invitation: to pause, to breathe, to reconnect, and to honor your own seasons of becoming.