Hello, friend.
My name is Florrie. Thank you for being here with me.

I am an april-born daydreamer, a quiet-talker, and rabbit-hearted girl. I'm an enthusiast of handwritten letters, secret gardens, old music boxes, overgrown cottages, forgotten journals, and all things which can collect and safekeep memories. ↶ If this is your first time meeting me, hello! My name is pronounced /Flo-hee/. My pronouns are she/her. I am a half-portuguese and half-french third culture kid, and I am currently in my late-twenties. These days, I am working towards my M.Ed., so this website is being updated quite scarcely.I currently work as an early-childhood educator, and during my free time I enjoy reading poems, picking flowers, drinking tea, daydreaming, painting, listening to orchestras, and writing about everything I have learnt.

This is my little corner of the web. If any of this sounds interesting to you, you might enjoy it too. Feel free to explore and come back whenever you wish.

I was born mid-April, at the perfect time to watch the flower blossoms unfurl, and so my mother befittingly named me Florrie. Maybe that's why I feel at my happiest when I am surrounded by warm sunlight, barefoot upon the grass. Since I was a little girl, I have delighted in the company of books, flowers and teapots. Growing up an only child, I spent my childhood playing in gardens, imagining myself as a courageous princess of a forgotten land. ↶ My current delights are: Birds singing in the early morning. Evenings at the ballet with my friends. Reading books sitting by a window. Nurturing plants into flourishing. Public libraries. Music boxes with twirling ballerinas inside. Identifying constellations. Freshly picked blueberries. Old photographs of family members. The scent of rain in the air. Naps. The pages of a well-worn journal. My mornings began with sponge cake and chamomile tea sweetened with honey; my afternoons were filled with great imaginary adventures; and my evenings were a miscellany of fairytales read beneath the stars. Since then, I have dreamt of creating for myself a life that is equally peaceful and enchanting.

I am simply a very romantic person; not as the world understands romance today, but in the old-fashioned sense. That is, I see the world through a rose-coloured perspective and I try to find beauty in the quotidian. I love sharing these little wonders I observed, and that is the reason I write. I am always in pursuit of inspiration, and wherever I chance upon it, I leave a bookmark. Ultimately, my aspiration for this life is to dwell in its embrace, adorned with hopefulness and a childlike sense of wonder, each day unto itself, in hopes to enjoy the fleeting pleasures that are hidden in all the quiet little moments.

This is a now page. I am currently:

Delighting in: Empty journals with promising blank pages
Paying attention to: The consolation found in the moral of a fairytale
Spending time on: Discovering new habits and improving at old ones
Listening to: The chirps from a bird nest outside my bedroom window
Indulging in: Blueberry and coconut pavlova with white chocolate
Visiting: The children's literature section of the public library
Practicing: Listening to the language of birds, making an inventory of sounds
Looking forward to: The blessing of experiences I am yet to know

Latest Status:

2025

01 06 2025  ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ A Day in the Life of a Garden Tree

If you are reading this, I would be overjoyed to hear back from you!

✉ ‍ ‍ ‍ You can write me at dearflorrie (at) gmail (dot) com

It might take me a couple days, but all the messages will always be checked, cared for, and answered with lots of love.

You may also be interested in visiting:
⋅ My commonplace notebook: Where I collect assorted sources of inspiration for my future writing, for this site and elsewhere.
⋅ My status café: Where I share short and simple status updates with you, for both the major life events and the daily little happenstances.

I have this clear memory of the moments before I opened the classroom door on my first day working as a teacher. I was holding my notebooks tightly to my chest, my left hand hovering over the handle with trembling fingers and my heart beating like a bolero. I remember telling myself: "This is the sum of everything you worked for. This is the moment where the life of your dreams begins." But life has a way of transfiguring plans into surprises. ↶ Mary Oliver once wrote: "Someone I once loved gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift." Sometimes the clearest path forward is shown by understanding what we cannot bear to be. Yes, to wear down the edges of the spirit is painful, but it might be a necessary erosion to reveal the core within. What lay ahead wasn’t fulfilment, but a short-lived chapter in an environment that wore down the edges of my spirit, revealing to me, above all else, the type of teacher that I did not ever want to become. When I look at it in retrospect it's almost amusing. I was trying, quite desperately, to write out the novel my life as though each decision and every choice had led me directly into that place, like a carefully-written romance. I thought that I would look back with tenderness, seeing the turning point where everything aligned. But it wasn’t. Life, as I have learned, rarely unfolds so neatly.

This was a habit which I subconsciously I carried with me for years. As a girl, every accomplishment was attributed the purpose of bringing me closer to the grown-up I was inevitably fated to become. The first pair of bar shoes with small clicking heels. The first sweep of red ink across a school notebook. The first train ride without supervision and the wide world opening itself for discovery outside the window. In adolescence, it deepened. Each diary entry about a first kiss was written as the beginning of the perfect love story
"We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form." I would someday recount to our children. I believed my life was a novel, with its story slowly revealed in thoughtfully written chapters. And, by consequence, I was always waiting for the next page to reveal a hidden meaning about the previous. I envisioned myself as the heroine, constantly striding forward, always having perfect awareness of where I had been and exactly where I was going. But, with time, I started to notice that life doesn’t bend neatly into perfectly divided chapters. It sprawls and repeats itself, leaves pages blank, and abandons stories mid-verse. And when I found myself as an adult who couldn’t force it to be something it wasn’t, I began to wonder if I had lost the thread of my own story.

The emptiness I felt stemmed from my attempt to erase all the messiness. The contradictions between who I envisioned myself to be and the mistakes I actually made, the characters who entered and left my life without closure, the meticulously planned life changes that promised new beginnings and then led nowhere. Literature has long taught us to see life through the lens of a classic dramatic arc:↶ The dramatic arc is a classic literary structure created by Freytag and rooted in Aristotle’s Poetics. This structure is the reason we often expect each troublesome situation we face to have a cathartic climax that resolves itself in a denouement where the character (ourselves) is victorious and a life lesson is learnt. But, in real life, growth is not a linear ascent, it is a root tendril seeking moisture in dark soil, branch yielding to wind. Real life is a wild practice. A new situation arises, tension grows within it, it reaches a peak, then all subsides and a lesson is learnt. And, by consequence, it’s in these terms that we also frame our inner narratives. They are the measurement we use to attribute to our lives a personal sense of progression and emotional growth. But they also entangle us in expectations and self-assumptions. I reached a point where this perception of my life felt limiting and unrealistic. I felt a necessity to escape through the margins of my own story. But, fortunately, stories are not bound to having a single shape. They can meander, repeat themselves rhythmically, and divide themselves into verses. And these are the stories I always loved most. I came to the conclusion that I wanted my life to be something else, something untamed and free. My life was a poetry book, not a novel.

A poem doesn’t owe you clarity.
"I dwell in possibility /
a fairer house than prose."It doesn’t bend to the will of explanation or tie itself neatly at the beginning and the end. Instead, it moves in its own quietude, leaving pauses where the breath catches and the unsaid whispers secretively. When I started to perceive my life as a poetry book, I let go of the need for certainty, the craving for answers shaped into closed circles. I stopped demanding that every moment be a ladder to somewhere brighter, or that every turn be a declaration of triumph or defeat, each wrapped with a lesson like a bow. Instead, I linger. I allow the shoes to remain shoes, the kisses just kisses. I let the lines spill out spontaneous words, reversing all my anticipated syntaxes. ↶ To see the thing as the thing, freed from the burden of symbol or future promise. Not categorized, but lived. Ultimately, I think that to live well is to pay dear attention to the uncategorized, authentic moment; the poem of the present, forever being written. Some pages present me with restfulness, others beauty, loneliness, and gratitude. None greater or lesser than the next. There are occasions of happiness and disappointment, but they don't represent my full selfhood, only brief moments in time. When you define your life by way of a single narrative, its outcome will come to define you. And I do not want to live a life made to be categorised, I only want it to be authentic and well-lived.