Tessa Lindqvist

Tessa Lindqvist

Travel & City Life Writer

She/Her

Tessa Lindqvist is a travel and culture writer born in Stockholm, Sweden, and raised between Scandinavia and Australia. She studied journalism at the University of Melbourne and spent four years as a travel editor at Kinfolk magazine, where she developed a narrative approach to writing about places that goes far beyond best-of lists and hotel reviews. When the print edition folded, she moved into freelance writing full-time.

At VegOut, Tessa covers food cultures, sustainability, urban living, and the human stories within cities. She has lived in five countries and has a permanent outsider’s perspective that makes her particularly attuned to what makes a place distinctive, how food traditions reveal local identity, and why the way a city feeds itself says everything about its values.

Tessa is currently based in Los Angeles but considers herself semi-nomadic by temperament. She travels with a single carry-on, calls her mother in Stockholm every Sunday, and believes every place deserves a proper narrative, not a ranking.

Travel

How a war thousands of miles away is reshaping meals across India

Tessa Lindqvist
Apr 7, 2026

Travel

Lifestyle

The hardest part of setting a boundary with family isn't the conversation. It's the silence afterward, when you sit with the fear that love and approval were always the same currency.

Tessa Lindqvist
Apr 7, 2026

Tessa Lindqvist

Travel

How a war thousands of miles away is reshaping meals across India

Lifestyle

The hardest part of setting a boundary with family isn't the conversation. It's the silence afterward, when you sit with the fear that love and approval were always the same currency.

7 things people with genuinely healthy sleep habits gave up that have nothing to do with screens or caffeine

I stopped treating my body like a project when I realized every renovation had the same deadline: someday when I finally look right. That day was never coming because the blueprint kept changing.

There's a kind of cooking that has nothing to do with feeding yourself. It's the meal you make after a hard conversation because your hands need something to do while your brain catches up.

A letter to people who became the family's translator, not just of language but of emotions, tone, and unspoken expectations between cultures that never fully understood each other.

People who grew up in small towns and moved to cities often carry a specific kind of loneliness. Not for the place, but for the version of themselves that never had to explain where they came from

The real sign that someone has a sustainable relationship with exercise is that they can skip a week without spiraling. Flexibility with routine reveals more than discipline ever does.

If a person apologizes quickly but rarely changes the behavior, what they've mastered isn't accountability. It's the performance of remorse as a reset button.

Some people don't fear commitment. They fear choosing one life and mourning all the others they'll never get to try. That's not avoidance. That's grief wearing a different coat.

There's a version of trust that only forms when someone sees you handle something badly and chooses to stay. Not because they excused it, but because they watched what you did next.

The friendships that last decades almost never survive because both people stayed the same. They survive because someone had the grace to let the other person become unrecognizable.

Children who were told they were mature for their age often become adults who feel strangely behind. Early competence borrows from a future that eventually asks to be repaid.

I stopped trying to meditate like a calm person and started sitting with the noise. That was the year I finally understood that stillness isn't the absence of thoughts. It's the decision to stop chasing them.

The hardest part of setting boundaries with family isn't the conversation. It's the 48 hours afterward when your body is convinced you've made a terrible mistake.

The difference between a boundary and a wall is that a boundary still has a door. Most people who struggle with boundaries aren't struggling to build them. They're struggling to include the door.

9 quiet indicators that someone has developed a genuinely healthy relationship with being alone, not just a convincing way of hiding from connection.

The people who seem effortlessly generous with their time almost always went through a period where they gave too much and had to learn the difference between kindness and self-abandonment

There's a particular kind of loneliness that only hits people who are well-liked. It's the suspicion that everyone knows your personality but nobody knows your mind.

7 signs someone has quietly rebuilt their self-worth after leaving a relationship that slowly convinced them they were difficult to love

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