What can growing a flower teach us about looking after ourselves? And what does it take to feel close to another person when we have learned to hide so much of who we are?

Kayla Moon is a floral artist, writer, and founder of XFLOS, a floral design studio based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work includes floral installations, event design, and collaborative workshops that bring people together through making. She also co-founded Stay Soft Studio, a community market and coworking space for artists and makers. Through her writing, she explores honesty, belonging, sexuality, and our relationships with ourselves and one another.

In this conversation, Kayla shares how gardening gave her something to care for during a period of trauma, addiction, and poor health. Learning what a plant needed slowly changed how she understood her own needs. Flowers gave her a reason to look after her body, become curious about the world, and imagine a future she wanted to participate in. Their brief lives also taught her something about presence: watching a flower open and eventually die can make us more attentive to the life unfolding around us. We explore how this interest transformed her relationship with learning, and how the patience of people who believed in her helped her develop a sense of responsibility. Her experience raises a larger question about education: how much potential goes unrecognized when someone’s curiosity takes a form that conventional schooling struggles to accommodate?

The conversation moves into writing and the courage to tell the truth. Kayla describes how her journals became a place where she could acknowledge experiences she felt ashamed to share, and how inviting friends to read them helped her become more honest in everyday life. We discuss the discomfort of facing our past, including the ways we have hurt others, and the possibility of building closeness through those difficult admissions. That honesty carries into our discussion of sexuality, where Kayla questions whether the pressure to make our bodies more desirable helps us feel connected to them. We reflect on sexual performance, the vulnerability of real intimacy, and the habits that can make distance feel safer than closeness. Even as we change, those habits can return, asking us to look again at parts of ourselves we thought we had already understood.