you don't need a plan to live

if you’ve ever felt trapped by the version of yourself you explained to others, or if you’ve ever planned your future so carefully that you stopped acting in the present… this conversation will feel uncomfortably familiar.

listen to the episode here:

Cierra lives in Montana and works as a 911 call taker, but that is only the surface of her biography.

at her core, she is a collector of questions: someone who studies the brain not in a lab, but through the slow, demanding material of lived exploration.

so, neuroscience entered her life as a form of self-therapy, a language to make sense of patterns she could feel before she could name.

even though she’s not pursuing an academical path - or, maybe, because of this - learning how memory, emotion, and behavior actually work gave her something she had rarely allowed herself before: a kind of grace towards herself, and a quieter patience with her own complexity.

what fascinates Cierra the most about the brain is memory, especially as a process that continuously brings the past back into the present.

she is interested in the way memories reappear without being consciously summoned: how a song heard at night can interrupt sleep, how nostalgia can surface unexpectedly, and how growing older can feel like a gradual loss or reorganization of parts of oneself.

memories are not neutral records but emotional constructs that can change over time and are closely linked to identity; memory is not something static or passive, but it is a material we constantly handle, revise, and reinterpret while trying to understand who we are and who we are becoming.

one of the most powerful moments in the episode is when Cierra reads her own writing, asking a deceptively simple question:

“how often do we actually see media for what they are?”

in fact, media evoke emotions first - fear, anger, shame - and curiosity only later, if at all, and most people react, but a very few pause to ask why something stirred them. She is concerned because media, when consumed without awareness, creates separation between people, without passing through disagreement. It’s just separation, and separation scares her more than conflict.

instead of just critiquing media, Cierra stepped into reality.

after growing up on detective shows and police dramas, she chose to experience the field firsthand - becoming a 911 operator. not to chase excitement, but to confront the gap between fiction and real life. and yes, also because she needed to work.

what she found was of course quieter, messier and heavier than what we see in tv shows, and yet, this grounded exposure helped her rewire how she relates to stories, fear, and responsibility.

being a 911 call taker means that she has to handle emergencies of every kind, and this taught her something unexpected.

indeed, she learned that freedom doesn’t come from chaos, but from protocol: because in difficult situations like the ones she manages every single day, just clear procedures allow calm to emerge - for the caller and for herself. Even if counterintuitive, in those cases structure becomes a container for empathy.

again, differently from tv shows, when the call ends, though, she can’t know the end of the story. that’s matter for the police. For her there’s no final scene. no epilogue. so she moves on, clearing her mind, waiting for the next emergency.

Cierra never considered herself a writer - because her definition was too narrow.

what does it mean to be a writer?

you need to write books? newsletters? And if you don’t write those long pieces are you a writer?

well, yes.

you can be a writer also by filling your notebooks with questions, observations, fragments, insights. whatever passes through your mind. She learned it not long ago, but now she knows that she doesn’t need any permission to do what she loves.

for the first time in her life, Cierra doesn’t know where she’ll be in five years. and that’s intentional.

she’s finally ready to embrace what life is going to give her, not pursuing a fixed career or na predefined identity: just a commitment to learning, acting, and becoming more open than before. So we can say this: instead of a plan, she chooses a posture. Exactly like water running for the ocean - she doesn’t know the path, but she trusts she’ll find one.

Cierra embodies the Modern Renaissance not by being exceptional, but by refusing to collapse herself into a single definition.

she integrates neuroscience, media literacy, embodied practice, emotional intelligence, and lived reality - without asking permission to do so!

you don’t need to decide who you are before you start acting. sometimes action is what reveals identity.

stay curious.

pause before reacting.

and allow yourself to be more than one thing.

the rest will follow.