Firstly, I want to thank you for being here and choosing to read these words. I’m truly honoured.

The journal was a space birthed from grief.

I never saw myself as much of a writer (I still don’t), but writing became something quite cathartic for me. A space to help me understand what it is I think, what it is I feel. A way of expressing what I no longer wanted my body to hold.

It became a knife for me when life felt like a noose.

As I began sharing some of my experiences from the depths of grief, I found that sometimes my words gave language to something another person was feeling but didn’t quite know how to express.

And so… I kept writing. Kept sharing.

Somewhere along the way, writing became something connective for me. Not only a place to process the complicated rollercoaster we call life, but a way of finding one another within it.

And so, the alma journal was born.

I hope these pages can be a place for curiosity, reflection and honest conversation. For the parts of ourselves that are tender, complicated, unfinished — that make us all the more human for it.

We live in a world that increasingly asks us to smooth out our edges. To be productive, efficient, regulated, optimised. To package our lives into neat little squares and find a solution for every discomfort.

But being human was never meant to be so tidy.

We grieve. We rage. We fall apart. We fall in love. We lose people. We change our minds. We lose ourselves and find ourselves somewhere entirely unexpected. We carry contradictions. We make mistakes. We ache for things we cannot name.

Life is messy. Volcanic. Wildly inconvenient. And perhaps we aren’t meant to become better at controlling it, but to surrender to life and become more available to actually experiencing it. To allow creativity to be birthed from meeting the rawness of life as it is.

There is power in that.

In allowing what has wounded us to become part of what we offer the world. When the things we have lived through become words, art, conversation, connection — perhaps even medicine for someone walking a road we once walked ourselves.

This is, in many ways, what alma is to me.

And I hope it becomes an invitation for you, too.

If you’re looking for answers, this probably isn’t the place for you. I absolutely don’t have them.

But I do have many questions… so if you too are looking for a space to reflect on life and what it means to be human, I hope this space keeps us always close to those questions.

From my alma to yours,

Aimee