Month: July 2026

3. Who gets to tell the story?

/ Kristina Jansen / Leave a comment

This morning I got on a call with my former company, the lender, and the new development team that’s taking over one of the projects I spent years helping build. Before everyone else joined, my former boss called me separately for a quick ten-minute conversation. More of a coaching session, really. Here’s what we’re saying. Here’s what we’re not saying.

The funny thing is, none of it was technically untrue.

I don’t work there anymore. But for now we’re just saying that I’m “on sabbatical.” It’s a better story. It doesn’t raise unnecessary questions. It lets everyone keep moving.

I understand why.

I still hate it.

Not because I think every truth needs to be shouted from the rooftops. We all edit ourselves. We don’t tell strangers every detail of our marriages or our finances or our fears. Living with other people requires discretion.

But there is a difference between discretion and feeling like someone else owns the story. This morning, it didn’t feel like I was choosing my words. It felt like I was borrowing someone else’s voice.

After the meeting I closed my laptop feeling strangely flat. It took me a minute to realize I wasn’t reacting to the meeting itself. I was reacting to the familiar feeling of helping maintain an official version of events.

I’ve spent much of my life learning how to protect other people’s narratives. Every family has stories that are safe to tell and stories that stay inside the house. Every community has its mythology. Every organization has its carefully managed version of reality. You learn, often without realizing it, which truths smooth relationships over and which ones threaten them. Eventually you stop noticing you’re reading from the script.

Maybe that’s why leaving my job has felt bigger than changing jobs. Maybe that’s why I’m insisting on taking this pause. It isn’t just that I walked away from work I cared about. I’m trying to remember what my own voice sounds like when I’m not responsible for protecting someone else’s version of events.

I don’t have a grand conclusion here. I’m still sorting it out.

I just know that when I closed my laptop this morning, I had the overwhelming urge to scream.

Not because of the meeting. It was a perfectly reasonable, productive, professional call. 

I wanted to scream because I felt like I wasn’t allowed to talk.

Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com

2. Songs as Old as Me

/ Kristina Jansen / Leave a comment

I’ve held onto my CD collection all these years.

It’s one of those accidental relics from the pre-MP3 world. Not nearly as cool as the record players some of my younger friends have in their houses (which I secretly love, so no judgment), but six overstuffed binders of CDs that I haven’t really listened to in… maybe fifteen years? Twenty? The last time I owned a working CD player was probably around 2009.

Then, while clearing out my mother’s room before we moved her into memory care, I found an old Samsung mini stereo sitting on her dresser. Dusty, probably untouched for years. I plugged it in just to see. It worked.

So I packed it.

When we shipped our lives from California to Mérida — books, rugs, kitchen things, Tucker, my keyboard, my favorite coffee mug — I packed the stereo and all those CDs too.

Lately they’ve become the soundtrack to my writing sessions.

There’s something different about listening this way. With Spotify or Pandora, I had access to everything, but somehow I forgot what I actually liked. The algorithm would happily feed me an endless stream of songs that sounded enough like the last one that eventually they all blurred together. I stopped listening to albums. I stopped being surprised.

Now I put on an old CD and let it play. Even the songs I used to skip. Maybe especially those.

This evening it was a disc from an old Flower Power box set I picked up decades ago at Borders on State Street, back when Borders was still a thing. Joe Cocker. The Mamas & the Papas. Steppenwolf. Songs that were already old when I first bought the CDs, but somehow make even more sense to me now than they did twenty years ago.

I write while they’re playing.

Sometimes I look around my office and realize I’m listening to songs as old or older than I am, on a CD player from my mother’s bedroom, in a house in Yucatán that is slowly becoming my own.

It’s funny what survives a cross-border move.

Not just the objects. Its also the versions of ourselves that were waiting inside them.

1. Why would you do that?

/ Kristina Jansen / Leave a comment

A few months ago, I packed up the life I’d spent decades building in California and moved with my husband to Mérida, Mexico.

“Why would you do that?” My former boss asked me that question over and over again after I told him I was leaving California for Mexico.

There are a hundred reasons: love, family, immigration, grief, exhaustion, curiosity. Each one is true. None of them is sufficient on its own.

I’ve spent most of my adult life wondering how people build meaningful lives together. I’ve explored that question through journalism, research, intentional community, renewable energy, and hundreds of conversations around kitchen tables. Lately, though, I’ve become less interested in answers than in questions worth living.

That’s what Dostiyan Days is.

“Dostiyan” is a word I picked up when I lived in India in 1997. It means friendship, but not the casual kind. It’s the kind that survives distance, disagreement, and time. The kind that quietly becomes part of who you are.

This isn’t a travel blog, though Mexico will certainly find its way into these pages. It’s not a political blog, though politics shapes all of our lives. It’s not a memoir, though I’ll occasionally borrow stories from my own.

It’s simply a place to pay attention—to beauty, to uncertainty, to the people and ideas that help us remain human in a bewildering world.

If you’re curious too, you’re in good company. I think we’ll have plenty to talk about.

Author from a walk downtown
Author – June 2026