Hi, I’m Elina—though that name usually only comes out at work or when someone’s mad at me. Most of the time, I go by E.

By day I’m a social policy researcher and data analyst, studying human flourishing—how people meet their basic needs, build stability, and pursue lives of dignity and possibility. My research centers on the material conditions that shape daily life including cash, housing, and access to concrete goods in order better understand the foundations of health, opportunity, and well-being.

But in the in between I’m an alchemist—turning memory into meaning, feeling into form. I write about the quiet longings, sharp joys, soft griefs, and tangled truths of being human. About the messes and the magic, and the tender middle spaces of becoming. And because I tend to overthink and under-talk, a space like this blog feels like a necessary exhale.

And I have always had a blog— before Substack was all the rave might I add! I’ve had many blogs over the years (RIP to all of them), each one a little time capsule of who I was becoming. Welcome to this new extension of me!

E’s Journal is my little corner of the internet, a place to wander through my thoughts, capture what’ quietly brimming underneath, and give shape to the things I don’t always say out loud but need to get out. I love thinking in bigger, messier ways: about identity, memory, healing, design, longing, politics, joy. And this blog is a space for all of it.

Writing is my soft landing, a practice, a way to keep showing up for myself. There’s no niche here, really— just dispatches from a curious, sometimes-overwhelmed, often-dreaming mind. From time to time, you can expect me to write about policy and power, but also joy and interiority; about the small rituals that give texture to my days and about becoming someone I wasn’t sure I’d live long enough to see.

Some days the words come easy. Other days I wrestle them out. But either way, E’s Journal is where I remember that meaning doesn’t come fully formed. It reveals itself in layers—through noticing, through reflection, through telling the truth gently.

Thanks for being here. I hope you stay awhile.