So it’s a little funny to admit that for the past couple of months, I’ve really been in my Nester and Sensualist bag.

First, I rearranged my ladycave/office with things I already had in there save for the new plant table that I had to buy for my big boy (the name for my plant with this big ass pot shown below).

Then I made minor edits to the vibe of the sunroom so I can spend more time in it comfortably.

And then I redid my entire master bedroom closet (we have small his and hers closets on opposite sides) of the mini hall leading to our master bath). I bought all new storage, organizers, and such to make room and a home for all my new things I’ve been thrifting (more on that later).

It ended recently when I redid my bathroom drawers. I wanted to make my new beauty routines easier for someone like me with ADHD who often struggles to start tasks or stick with them.

I’ve spent more time this summer thinking about drawer organization and lighting fixtures than I have thinking about my next trip, and if you’d told me a year ago that this was coming, I would’ve laughed you out of the room.

Now if you’ve read The Sensualist’s Guide to Building a Signature Scent Wardrobe or The Sensualist’s Nervous System Reset Guide, then you already know I went through my own reawakening with color and scent and texture one my nervous system regulated.

But something I didn’t really share was, around the time I started getting into thrifting, I also started wearing cute, satin headscarves that match my outfits. I have almost twenty of them now, and I match them to my purse and my shoes like it’s a small daily ceremony, and it makes me stupidly, disproportionately happy in a way that has nothing to do with being a Wanderer at all.

I see so many comments on my posts on TikTok and IG asking if it’s normally to be more than one type or what if you’re all 5 and I wanted to share it’s completely normal. This year, I’ve needed to be a Nester just as much as I’ve needed to be a Sensualist. And I’m still, underneath all of it, a Wanderer who hasn’t lost her love of movement, she’s just been needing more than an escape in this current season.

If you’ve ever felt that in yourself, needing something outside your type, wondering if that means you got it wrong on the quiz, or if you’ve changed, or if something’s off, I want to tell you right now: nothing is off.

You’re not less of a Wanderer or a Ritualist or whichever type you took the quiz as just because you’re not gravitating towards things relevant to those styles. There’s a reason all 5 of these exist, and it was never about picking one and staying there for life.

That’s what I want to talk to you about.

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Normally when I travel, I bring my work laptop and I actually use it. My brain is on all the time at home, thinking about the business, running lists, half-present in whatever room I’m standing in, even on vacation. This time I didn’t open a laptop once except to watch a show I was obsessed with at the time. But there, I just lived in whatever book I had going, whichever world it dropped me into, and it was some of the happiest days I’ve had in a long time.

I didn’t plan for it to be a lesson in anything. I just wanted something to do on a long flight, a way to pass the time between tour stops without pulling out my phone. But coming home, I noticed how loud my own head had gotten again within a single day, and how quiet it had actually been the entire time I was reading. That contrast is what stuck with me.

That is what I want to talk to you about.

The soft life and wellness world only ever shows “unplugging” one way, a phone-free retreat somewhere expensive, a curated digital detox weekend with a hashtag attached to it. Most women look at that and assume they’re not really Unplugged, because their real life doesn’t look like a cabin with no signal and never will.

But an Unplugged woman was never defined by total abstinence from her phone. She’s defined by whether she has real pockets of depth and uninterrupted presence built into her actual days, at whatever scale her life allows. A Kindle on a bus counts. So does a Rubik’s cube on a nightstand. That’s actually the whole point of what’s ahead.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about my own nervous system, and what the research backs up for Unplugged women specifically…

At home, every notification pulls a little piece of my attention and doesn’t fully give it back, even after I’ve closed the app or answered the text. It stacks up over the course of a day without me ever registering each individual cost, until the whole day feels frayed even though nothing dramatic actually happened in it.

There’s a name for that pattern, and there’s real science behind why something as ordinary as a paperback or a physical timer can reverse it.

So here’s the framework I use to understand my own need for depth, and to protect it even on the weeks I can’t get away:

• Recognizing your specific pattern, the exact toll constant interruption takes on your attention even when each individual ping feels small

• Understanding the science behind why analog activities aren’t a nostalgia trip, they’re a documented way of giving your attention back to you

• The spectrum of protecting your depth, from a full week fully unplugged down to the one small object that can anchor a single afternoon

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Not a decorative one, a functional one, the kind with a setting that mimics a sunset, giving off this warm, orangey glow instead of plain white light. I plugged it in that first week and it really set the tone for the small changes to come.

Before that lamp, my whole life had quietly gone monochrome…

I wore A LOT of black (or white or grey), I always had, even as a high schooler, but once I started my business in 2020 I built an entire capsule wardrobe in my brand’s earth tones on purpose. It was that boring efficiency I wanted to have so any photo or video I took could double as content without me having to think about it. I didn’t realize that that over reliance of efficiency and “not having to think” was an early sign that my nervous system was out of whack.

And it didn’t stop there, I got sisterlocks so I didn’t have to do my hair. When my mom always offered me shoes or jewelry, since we wear the same size, I said no almost every time. I told myself I didn’t like clutter and I didn’t have enough room, when really, I just didn’t have room in me to care about how I looked or my personal style.

Everything in life just became functional, not at all for enjoyment or personal expression.

That lamp was one of the first things that made we want a little more, and when I say more, I don’t mean more stuff, what I really mean is more feeling and that lamp symbolized a warmer light in a room I got to choose for myself.

That is what I want to talk to you about.

The soft life and wellness world only ever shows sensory living one way: expensive candles, spa days, a life that looks curated for the senses in a way that costs real money.

Most women look at that and assume they’re not really a Sensualist, because their days don’t look like a bath commercial and never will.

But a Sensualist was never defined by luxury. She’s defined by whether her senses are actually online, whether she can taste something and mean it, see color and register it, feel a texture and stay in her body while she does. A $2 in a warmer tone can do real work here and that’s really the whole point of what’s ahead.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about my own nervous system, and what the research backs up for Sensualists specifically…

When I was living in that optimized, neutral, efficient version of my life, I wasn’t just being practical. Colors had gone flat without me noticing. Food didn’t taste like much of anything in particular because I was eating all the same shit. I was basically moving through my days without really experiencing them.

There’s a name for that pattern, and there’s real science behind why bringing your senses back online, even in small deliberate doses, is regulation and not indulgence.

So here’s the framework I use to understand my own reawakening, and to keep rebuilding it in the seasons where it starts to fade again:

• Recognizing your specific pattern so you recognize the exact signs your senses have started dimming without your permission

• Understanding the science behind why sensory richness isn’t vanity, it’s your nervous system’s way of registering that you’re safe enough to actually feel

• The spectrum of savoring, from a full, years-long sensory rebuild down to one 60-second moment with one object when that’s all you have

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It doesn’t matter if I’m full or if I wasn’t even craving something sweet ten minutes earlier. The lollipop isn’t really about hunger. It’s the thing that tells my brain the working part of the day is over, that whatever I was typing or scrolling or fixing can wait until tomorrow, and that it’s finally safe to let my shoulders drop.

I didn’t build this on purpose, not at first. It just became the thing I reach for every night, the same way, at roughly the same point in my evening, no matter what the day itself looked like. Good day, hard day, day where nothing went the way I planned it… the lollipop still happens.

That is what I want to talk to you about.

The soft life and wellness world only ever shows ritual one way. And it’s going to be candlelight, a journal with a ribbon in it, a slow morning that looks like it was shot for a magazine, with the matcha in a ceramic mug and sunlight hitting the counter just right. Most women look at that and assume they’re not really a Ritualist, because their version doesn’t look like that and never will.

But a Ritualist was never defined by what her ritual looks like. She’s defined by what the ritual does for her nervous system.

A $2 bag of sour lollipops from Five Below does exactly the same job as a curated candlelit evening, if it’s consistent, if it’s hers, if it happens the same way regardless of what the day threw at her. That’s actually the whole point of what’s ahead.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about my own nervous system, and what the research backs up for Ritualists specifically…

When my days stay unpredictable for too long, when nothing bookends them, I don’t just feel overwhelmed, I feel unsafe, in a low grade way I can’t always name in the moment. My brain doesn’t get the signal that it’s allowed to stop working.

This has been especially true as a solo entrepreneur who’s worked from home for the past 7 years.

There’s a name for that pattern, and there’s real science behind why a small, repeated sequence can regulate a nervous system that a whole day of unpredictability cannot.

So here’s the framework I use to understand my own rituals, and to rebuild them on the days everything else falls apart:

• Recognizing your specific pattern, the exact signs your body gives you when your days have gone too long without a predictable start or end.

• Understanding the science behind why ritual isn’t decoration, it’s regulation, and why even a tiny, repeated sequence can do work an entire relaxing day sometimes can’t.

• The spectrum of bookending, from a full two part morning and evening system down to the single anchor you keep even when everything else is falling apart.

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So I moved things. The desk went against the wall. The plants went to the corner where the light actually hits them, and the printer landed somewhere I could reach it without standing up.

The treadmill got repositioned so I’d actually use it instead of resenting it from across the room.

What opened up wasn’t square footage, it was feeling.

The office part became its own contained zone, almost like a cubicle, tucked into its corner and out of the way. The rest of the room exhaled into something that felt like mine again. There’s a vinyl record player in there now. LED lighting I can change depending on my mood. A floor pillow, because I prefer sitting on the floor, and there is a floor pillow in every single room I spend real time in.

That is what I want to talk to you about.

The soft life and wellness world only ever shows sanctuary one way, Le Creuset on open shelving, matching thread counts, spaces so aesthetically perfect they look like they belong in a magazine spread rather than a life anyone is actually living in. Most women look at that and assume they’re not really a Nester, because their space doesn’t look like that and never will.

But a Nester was never defined by what her space looks like. She’s defined by what her space does for her nervous system, and what that looks like in practice is entirely hers.

It might be a floor pillow and a long phone charger. It might be half of your son’s old playroom, claimed and made intentional. It might be one drawer with your journal in it. That’s enough and that’s the whole point of what’s ahead.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about my own nervous system, and what the research backs up for Nesters specifically. When my space stops holding me, I feel it in my body before I can explain it in words…

Brain fog shows up out of nowhere, I get impatient over small things, a pile on a shelf starts to feel like a weight I’m carrying around all day, even though it’s just a shelf.

There’s a name for that pattern, and there’s real science behind why a Nester’s space isn’t decoration, it’s regulation.

So here’s the framework I use to understand my own resets, and to rebuild them when a whole room isn’t available to me:

• Recognizing your specific sanctuary failure pattern, the exact signs your body gives you before you consciously register that your space has stopped working for you.

• Understanding the science behind why your environment functions as a nervous system tool, not an aesthetic preference, and why that’s especially true for a Black woman’s home specifically.

• The spectrum of micro-interventions, from a whole room worth rearranging down to a single drawer, so you have real options regardless of what you’re currently working with.

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There was a coffee shop on the corner, the kind you don’t plan to fall in love with. We ended up back there every single morning for the rest of the trip, same order, same table if we could get it, same nod from the woman behind the counter by day 3.

A piece of the Berlin Wall was practically next door. We’d walk past pieces of it and even the holocaust graves like it was nothing, like history was just another thing you passed on your way to coffee. And everywhere we went, there were Black Germans, just living, just existing in their city the way you exist in a city that’s yours.

I felt safe in a way I don’t know how to fully explain to someone who hasn’t felt the absence of it. My shoulders came down from around my ears and I didn’t notice they’d been up there.

And then it happened. I couldn’t tell you the exact moment, only that it was somewhere around that coffee shop, somewhere in those 1st few days, when my senses came back online. I could smell the air, the bread and the cold and the city. I could hear sound again, layered and specific, instead of background noise I was tuning out. I could see in full color instead of whatever washed-out, Technicolor version I’d been living in.

My brain went quiet for the first time in longer than I want to admit, because on a trip there are no responsibilities of the titles I hold at home. Not mom-duty, not wife-duty, none of the roles I carry like luggage I never set down. Just a woman standing on a street, smelling food, feeling her shoulders where they’re supposed to be. Just Latesha.

That is what I want to talk to you about.

If you’re a Wanderer, you already know this feeling even without language for it. You know what it is to move through your own life feeling slightly underwater, and then to land somewhere new and feel the volume turn back up on everything, your senses, your thoughts, your actual self.

Most of the soft life and wellness world doesn’t talk about this in a way that fits you. It shows you bubble baths and candlelit evenings and Sunday resets that assume your nervous system calms down when things get quiet and still.

If you’re a Wanderer, stillness is sometimes the exact thing that’s breaking you.

I want to be clear that none of what’s in this article is prescriptive.

Your version of this might involve a passport, or it might involve nothing more than the route you take to the grocery store, and both of those count just the same. That’s actually the whole point of what I’m about to walk you through.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about my own nervous system, and what the research backs up for Wanderers more broadly...

There was a stretch where my marketing business, the thing that used to genuinely light me up, started to feel hollow. Not because the work changed, but because I was trapped in the mundane with no outlet, and a Wanderer with no outlet starts losing her color from the inside out.

Movement fixed it every time. Germany sparked the idea for Banked and Balanced. Ireland, where I went alone for my 40th birthday celebration, unlocked the final version of the club, sitting on a trip with no real agenda except to see what was there.

There’s real science behind why this happens, and understanding the mechanism is what lets you build your own version of the reset instead of copying mine.

There’s research on self-directed movement and what it does to repair the brain. There’s research on optic flow, the effect of moving forward through space while taking in a wide, panoramic view, and what that does to calm the amygdala. And there’s research on what happens to the brain’s ability to generate new cells when it’s confined versus when it’s exploring.

Three different scientists, 3 different angles, and they all point at the same thing a Wanderer already knows in her body. Staying still past your threshold isn’t peace. It’s a slow kind of stagnation.

So here’s the framework I use to understand my own reset, and to build it on the days I can’t get on a plane.

1. The first piece is recognizing your specific entrapment pattern, the exact signs that tell you the gray is creeping in before it fully takes over

2. The second piece is understanding the three science-backed mechanisms that actually shift your nervous system, so you know what you’re triggering and why

3. The third piece is the spectrum, the full range of micro-interventions from the biggest version (the flight, the solo trip, the weekend away) all the way down to the smallest (the different route to the same grocery store), so you have options regardless of what your week, your bank account, or your life actually allows right now.

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It wasn’t one moment where I walked past someone and thought, I want to smell like that. It was more like a slow accumulation — saved TikToks I didn’t remember saving, algorithms that kept showing me videos about signature scents and dressing for your feminine energy and what your Venus sign says about your personal style, and me watching all of it with this quiet feeling of... yes, but I don’t know what mine is yet.

Have you seen any of that content around TikTok lately?

At some point I opened my saved folder and realized how many of those videos were in there. And I thought, “why do I keep saving these and never doing anything about them?”

The answer, when I finally sat with it, was uncomfortable.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care about how I smelled or how I dressed or how I moved through the world. It was that somewhere along the way, I had stopped having the bandwidth to care. I had a capsule wardrobe with everything in my brand colors from my marketing business, everything mix-and-match, everything designed so I didn’t have to think. I got sisterlocks so I didn’t have to spend time on my hair natural hair which was previously in a haphazard fro or style. I stopped reaching for the perfume I owned, my good old Burberry, because putting it on felt like one more thing to remember each morning, and I was already doing too many things.

I realize, I’ve had that same perfume for at least 5-6 years all because I ONLY wore it for special occasions. Now, it’s not even my style anymore.

I thought all of that optimization was efficiency and I was streamlining.

What I was actually doing was slowly disappearing from my own sensory experience. Not dramatically. Just... quietly. The way a candle goes out — not all at once, but gradually, until the room is darker than you realized and you can’t remember exactly when the light changed.

What it means when you stop caring how you smell

I want to say something here that I don’t think gets said enough, which is that the quiet signs of chronic stress are often harder to recognize than the loud ones.

The loud ones are obvious — the racing heart at 2am, the gut that won’t cooperate, the exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. Those get your attention. Those make you call a doctor.

But the quiet ones... the quiet ones just feel like practicality. Like you’re being reasonable. Like you’re a busy woman who has more important things to think about than what glass she drinks her kombucha from or whether her perfume feels like her or what color shorts she’s wearing.

Except that’s not practicality, that’s disconnection.

When I was at my most stressed — building a business, managing a team, being a wife and a mother and an entrepreneur and the strong one and the capable one and the one who had it handled — I stopped inhabiting my own body in the way that the Sensualist in me had always needed to. I stopped noticing things. I stopped reaching for things that felt good just because they felt good. I stopped caring about the texture of what I was sitting on or the scent I was putting on my skin or whether the light in the room felt warm enough for how I wanted the evening to feel.

The research calls what was happening to my body weathering — the accelerated biological aging that comes from chronic high-effort coping. Dr. Arline Geronimus’s work showed that Black women are aging up to 7.5 years faster than their white peers biologically, not because of genetics but because of what it costs to hold everything together for everyone else, all the time, without stopping. And Dr. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé’s research on the Superwoman Schema showed that the pressure Black women feel to be strong and push through and never show weakness keeps the nervous system locked in fight-or-flight continuously.

What nobody talks about enough is what fight-or-flight does to your relationship with pleasure. When your nervous system is running the alarm continuously, sensory experience becomes a luxury you unconsciously cut. You stop tasting your food because you’re eating at your desk. You stop smelling things because you’re moving too fast to notice. You stop feeling the weight of a good glass in your hand because you’re drinking out of whatever is closest. You are managing your life instead of living inside it.

The capsule wardrobe wasn’t efficiency, it was my nervous system telling me it didn’t have room for joy.

The moment the Sensualist woke up

I lost 30 pounds over the last year, and something happened when I did that wasn’t just about the weight, it was about permission.

I started thrifting with my mom. I started finding clothes in colors I had never worn before because I had only ever thought about my marketing business brand color palette, never my own. I started wearing shorts (which sounds small and is not small at all if you’ve spent years not wearing them). I started buying shoes — actual shoes, in different styles and colors — instead of just wearing whatever my mom handed me because we wear the same size and it was easy and I wasn’t really thinking about it.

And I started thinking about what I smelled like.

Not in a vain way, in a curious way. In the way that you start to wonder about yourself when you finally have enough stillness to pay attention.

I had been saving all those TikToks about Jackie Aina’s love of scents and her Forvr Mood fragrance line. I had been watching videos about people who smelled so good that strangers stopped them on the street to ask what they were wearing. I had been walking past women whose scent lingered in the air behind them and thinking... what does that feel like, to be someone people notice when you walk past?

And I finally just started figuring it out.

The full guide continues below for Savoring Room members — including the exact scents I wear and when, the complete occasion-based scent wardrobe I built from scratch, every specific product recommendation with where to find them, how to test whether a scent is actually yours, the non-obvious things that complete your scent composition, and how your sensory environment at home is either restoring your nervous system or quietly draining it.

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I made breakfast in the kitchen first…a full breakfast, unhurried, the kind that sets the tone for the whole day. Then I carried it out here to the bar, pulled up a stool, and ate while the backyard woke up around me.

The waterfall feature is running, I can hear it under the birds. There are chipmunks doing whatever chipmunks do in the yard (darting, disappearing, reappearing somewhere unexpected, digging their holes in my damn backyard). The room is shaded even though the sun is up, which means the light in here is soft and green and almost impossible to describe accurately except to say it feels like being held.

When I finished eating I washed my dish, made a coffee, and came back. I have a footstool I always bring in from my office and position in front of the loveseat just so. My Kindle is already out here. The door that leads to the yard has a mesh screen over it so the breeze comes through but the bugs don’t (we have so many mosquitos in Georgia). I did not plan this morning, I just created a room that makes this morning possible every time I need it.

That is what I want to talk to you about.

Not decorating, not staging, not the kind of home that looks intentional in photographs but doesn’t actually feel like anyone lives there (that’s specifically why I didn’t even bother editing the photos I took though I tried to turn on lights so you can see the space).

I want to talk about the specific, quiet, deeply personal act of building a home that knows who you are — and holds you accordingly.

The Nester understands something that other types take longer to learn: your environment is not a backdrop to your life, it is an active participant in it. The way a room smells when you walk in, the quality of the light at 8am, whether there is a surface at exactly the right height for your coffee. These are not aesthetic preferences, they are the difference between a home that restores you and a home that just houses you.

I have been building toward this for years without always knowing that’s what I was doing. Moving furniture at 10pm because something felt off, buying a specific basket for extra blankets because I wanted them visible and reachable without having to think about it, or even installing a mesh screen door on the sunroom so I could have the outdoor feeling without the outdoor pest interruptions. These were not design decisions, they were acts of self-knowledge.

What I have learned, slowly, through a lot of trial and a surprising amount of error, is that making any room feel like yours comes down to four things. And they’re not furniture, budget, or square footage.

4 Things That Make Any Room Feel Like Yours

1. Sensory intention. What does this room smell like, sound like, feel like on your skin? Most rooms are built for visual appeal and forget the other 4 senses entirely. A Nester never forgets the other 4 senses

2. Permission to need what you need. The heated blanket basket in my office exists because I am always cold and I wanted the solution to be beautiful, not just functional. The footstool I drag into the sunroom exists because I need my feet up to fully relax and I stopped pretending I didn’t. Your home should be built around what you actually need, not what you think you should need

3. Objects that earn their place. Not everything that is beautiful belongs in your home. Not everything that is useful belongs in your home. The things that belong are the ones that are both (or that hold a specific memory, or that make you smile every single time you pass them). Everything else is clutter wearing the costume of décor

4. A room for every version of you. The version that wants to work. The version that wants to disappear into a book. The version that wants to eat on the floor with the record player on (I’m this version often). The version that wants to sit outside and hear the water. A home that only serves one version of you will eventually feel like a cage

This is the framework. And if you are already nodding, if you already know which room in your house is almost right but not quite, then what follows is for you.

The full guide continues below for Savoring Room members — including the nightstand reset you can do tonight with what you already own, the complete breakdown of every room I’ve built and exactly how I built it, the specific products and where to find them, the lighting philosophy that changed everything, and how to look at any room in your home and know immediately what it needs.

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