For most of my life, I was somewhere else.

I was successful on paper — busy, capable, the person everyone relied on. But my mind never stopped. I'd lie awake at 2am replaying conversations from years ago. I'd be at dinner with the people I loved and miss the whole thing because I was already three days into the future, worrying. I thought that was just who I was. An overthinker. Anxious. Wired wrong.

Then everything I'd been holding together came apart at once. I won't get into all of it here — but there was a season where the life I'd built stopped working, and the noise in my head got so loud I couldn't outrun it anymore.

That's when I finally stopped running.

Not because I was enlightened — because I was exhausted. And in that stillness I'd been avoiding my whole life, I found something I didn't expect: I was still here. Underneath all the thinking, the worrying, the becoming — there was a quiet, steady part of me that had been there the entire time. It didn't need fixing. It just needed me to come home to it.

Tend is everything I wish someone had handed me back then. It's not about becoming a different person or adding one more thing to your morning routine. It's about learning to notice the voice in your head without believing every word it says — and finding your way back to the present, gently, again and again.

If your mind won't stop running, this book was written for you. Not to fix you. To remind you that you were never broken in the first place.