A Moment In Time: Life Updates and Self-Publishing The Soul Search

It’s been a minute since I’ve come on here to share life updates, and like my diary, New Romanticism is a space where I feel like I can come and share my thoughts and they don’t have to be perfect, they simply get to exist as a timestamp of a moment I wish to capture. This is one of those moments I hope I never forget. 

A lot has happened since my last blog post. I’ve experimented with my writing, exploring new avenues of creation (such as a poetry video series I posted on Instagram, more on that later). I launched a Substack that I’m not ashamed to admit was actually a failure (as Taylor Swift says in “Opalite”, “failure brings you freedom”), and today I launched a guided journal I’ve been working on since the summertime.

It’s April, which means in a month it will be one year since I graduated college, and I know, I know, it’s going to get old to keep talking about how much I miss it. For me, passion projects have been a way of staying rooted in some of the things that made me love college. I love creating and publishing and doing so with a team. So when I had the idea to self-publish a guided journal, I hired my friend Francisco, who’s a marketing consultant for his company Huatl, to help me get better at social media. I had already hired my friend Michael to design the journal (he also designed my university literary journal during our senior year!), and then Francisco hired Michael as his content creator. Lo and behold I had a team now, and our weekends spent filming and brainstorming have been some of the most joyous times of this year. 

So about those poetry videos, in November I had posted pictures on Instagram of handwritten poems for a series I called “writing letters addressed to the fire” (inspired by a Taylor song of course). Francisco suggested we make videos for them, like music videos, but of my spoken word. I’ll admit I was hesitant at first–I never thought of my poems in a visual and auditory sense, but I figured I might as well try something new and take a leap of faith, and I’m so glad I did. Creating these short films drew together all of my passions: writing, acting, and filmmaking.

You can check these videos out on my Instagram (@saundri_writes) posted from February 2 to March 13, 2026. 

And now, the story behind my guided journal The Soul Search: A Compass To Discover Your Life’s Map.

What started as a routine escape to the pages of my diaries turned into a project I’m grateful I’m able to share with you. I came up with the idea for The Soul Search last summer, after I had graduated college and so desperately wanted to move onto the next chapter of my life. I wanted a job right away. I wanted to travel. I wanted to fall in love and finally find what I had been longing for my whole life. When nothing seemed to be working I did what I always do: I wrote in my diary. I’ve always felt like writing is such a magical experience. I open up a blank page with the intention of releasing my thoughts, fears, confusions, dreams–everything. I end up doing that and so much more. I often feel like writing is the avenue through which God speaks to me, especially in those goosebump moments when I look down at the words I’ve written that I did not expect to create, a moment of discovery and perspective I didn’t know I could unlock. 

I realized I had been so eager to dive into a new adventure, without giving myself credit for the things I had already done. My four years of college were intense in the best possible way, and no matter how many people told me they were proud of me, it wasn’t until I had no choice but to sit and write in my diary on gloomy June mornings where I started to be proud of myself, to finally look back at all I had done and become, and celebrate the joys that life had given me. I needed to look into my soul and know that who I am is enough, that whether or not I had graduated summa cum laude, that was never an identifying factor. That required me asking what my soul desires, what matters to my soul, what I actually want out of life and what I would do with everything I’d learned in the past four years. 

I had often heard of people who were interested in journaling but didn’t know where to start, and images of maps, compasses and stars started roaming through my mind. I hadn’t seen many guided journals tailored for transitional seasons of life, so I figured I’d make one. I ended up taking the themes I had written about in my diary and creating questions like “what makes you feel most alive?” and “what has been your biggest source of comfort?” to put together a journal where you can look inward and discover what your soul desires. 

I hope you love The Soul Search as much as I’ve loved putting it together. I hope you know the answers to these questions are deep inside your soul even if they’re hard to find at first. I hope that by the end of it your soul has been refreshed.  

I have more secrets to share soon, but I’ll save those for another time. For now, as I sit and write this on the morning of release day for a guided journal I spent months preparing for, I’m reminding myself to not rush this moment away, to not immediately think of the next project and check things off the to-do list like I always tend to do. Instead, like my professor/mentor/therapist/friend once told me, I’m going to simply be instead, and enjoy it. 

Click here to buy The Soul Search on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.