I’m going to be honest with you about something right out of the gate.
I originally wrote a very different version of this piece. It had a lovely title. It had structure and flow and genuinely useful tips. It was warm and aspirational and it was going to leave you feeling inspired to craft your own beautiful opening and closing rituals for the home.
It was also, if I’m being real with you, a little bit of a performance.
So, I scrapped it. And I’m writing this instead.
I should tell you something before we get into this.
I am an interior designer. I think deeply about how spaces function, how environments support the people living in them, how the smallest details of a home can either work for you or quietly against you. I have built a whole body of work around the idea of intentional living.
And I was recently diagnosed with ADHD.
I say recently, though honestly it explains a lifetime of things. The hyperfocus and the scattered days. The systems I build with great care and the ones I abandon by Wednesday. The way I can design a perfect environment for someone else and then walk into my own home on a hard day and feel completely untethered.
What I’ve learned ( and am still learning ) is that the rituals I’ve built for myself aren’t a luxury. They’re infrastructure. And the hardest part isn’t building them. It’s being okay when I can’t execute them perfectly.
The Opening
My morning ritual is not elaborate. On a good day it has shape and intention and I move through it feeling like myself. On a hard day it barely exists.
But there are two things that happen no matter what.
Black coffee. Quiet. Twenty minutes, minimum, before the day asks anything of me.
That’s it. That’s the anchor. Everything else , the journaling, the walk, the slow and considered start I genuinely aspire to …those are beautiful when they happen and I’ve stopped punishing myself when they don’t. But the coffee and the quiet are non-negotiable. They are the signal to my brain that the day is beginning on my terms, even when nothing else cooperates.
I used to think a ritual had to be complete to count. I’ve since learned that an imperfect ritual you actually do is worth infinitely more than a perfect one you can’t sustain.
The Closing
The closing is where I’ve surprised myself most.
I need sound to end my day. Not background noise: intentional sound. I discovered solfeggio frequencies a few years ago and I cannot recommend them enough. If you haven’t explored them, start. The Calm app is another one I return to constantly, there is something about having a guided, gentle off-ramp for the brain that I didn’t know I needed until I tried it.
My family thinks this is hilarious, for the record. The weird music, as they call it. I have fully leaned into sleep headphones at this point — the flat, comfortable kind you can actually sleep in, which means I can do this anywhere. Hotel rooms, guest bedrooms, a red eye flight. My closing ritual travels with me now, and that has changed everything.
Because here’s what I know about my brain: it does not naturally power down. Left to its own devices it will keep going, keep processing, keep finding one more thing to turn over. The sound is a signal. We’re done. You can rest now. And remarkably, after enough repetition, it works.
On Imperfection
I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it matters.
There are mornings I don’t get the quiet. There are nights the headphones stay on the nightstand. There are weeks where the whole architecture of intention I’ve built feels like it belongs to a more functional version of me and I’m just doing my best in the meantime.
And I’ve had to learn …slowly, imperfectly, with a fair amount of self-criticism along the way that this is okay. That the ritual isn’t ruined because I missed it. That the anchor holds even when I can’t access the whole thing. That knowing what supports you and being able to execute it perfectly every day are two very different things, and only one of them is actually required.
I design homes that support the people living in them. I am also a person living in a home, doing that work in real time, with a brain that requires a little more scaffolding than I once let myself admit.
The opening and closing of my day are the scaffolding. Some days they’re beautiful. Some days they’re just coffee and the weird music.
Both count.
