You don’t believe me.

I only exist inside of empty bottles that

feed me through a faucet

Medium pressure

My lips quiver with dehydration.

My skin burns from sun poisoning.

I clench a plastic Greek version of Aquafina in bed dramatically

I’m too lazy to get up

I’m dying of heat exhaustion

I’m not dying

I’m being reborn

Inside of a plastic water bottle

I know that sounds absurd

But I am one for the dramatic

I have a degree in it after all.

And having no one to blame but myself for not wearing enough sunscreen, running in the heat plus swimming miles- I am too lazy to get more water.

So I will err on the side of performance

this bottle as my holy relic — my sacrament of dry heat, exhaust… salty perfection.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I speak to no one

My parents at best

I swim for hours

Until I induce vertigo, head dizzy

I like the water in my ears

I like the silence of the sea and the noise

It’s volume exists based on the needs of my inner current

I splash when I want to play, I hear the tides crash when I’m feeling existential, I hear nothing when I want to run away

I like opening my eyes under water even though it burns

The sea is so blue I could stare at it forever

I could swim in it forever

I tire out and submit to going in

I stare at people and wander

And wonder

how many people notice my circling around their territory

Who cares

I resent them for imposing their judicious stare upon me

Let my light be

I’m under water I CAN’T HEAR YOU

AND I CAN’T SEE YOU I HAVE SALT IN MY EYES

my bug bites burn and heal

I goggle at the cats diminishing them to simply cute at first but then I learn my place

They see everything and they are not interested in being perceived

I rescind my cute speculation and change to that of a mentor mentee

There is almost nothing behind their eyes

I know that means the opposite

They burn in the sun all day

they tear each other apart

Mangled and feral

The heat is oppressive and the hills take my appetite from me

I climb a hill for no reason and want to swim

I think about jumping in naked

But I don’t want to be perceived either

I wish I could do whatever I pleased

I crave simplicity

I crave a life that allows me to run from comparison

To stop chronically viewing myself

But maybe I need to learn how to be around it all unaffected

Maybe I need to have nothing to find my truest self

Here I feel I’m in my truest form

At home I constantly play with flames that others light

I like feeling far away

maybe I’ll go away for awhile

Somewhere easy on the mind and tough on the body

Labor makes emotion fall to a hush

Should I head to the mountains?

Would you come with me?

Here are some ways to reclaim the enjoyment of things/places/objects your relationship took from you:

Watch that show with a friend and do not look at your phone. I find looking at your phone during a show enables your thoughts to wander. LOCK tf in. Escape into the world of the show so that you no longer feel like you need anyone there.

Bars and restaurants: this is something I’ve had a really hard time with. If you’re like me, you frequented certain places as a couple and therefore the staff got to know you as an item. It’s extremely vulnerable to face your old server - or dare I say you risk running into them (ON A DATE!!!) Go with a friend, tell the staff what happened, talk about it, laugh about it, and tell them how you have been nervous- I guarantee they’ll make sure you feel ok. Create a new environment there for yourself, and hey, maybe get their phone number! If you’re going to come in- ask them if your ex is also there. Nothing a restaurant or bar loves more than the hot tea.

Parties: If you share an inner circle with your ex, or know you may run into him, I would say skip the party if it’s fresh. Otherwise- have a back up plan ALWAYS. Let the person hosting know that you may feel uncomfortable, let them come up with a solution for you. If it’s a birthday, maybe they’ll ask your ex not to show up, or have your friends make sure to check in on you throughout the night.

If there are parks or movie theaters or any kinds of sentimental places - go there and write about how it makes you feel. The second I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) I immediately enter an analytical mindset vs an emotional one. The sadness and anxiety just kind of goes away when you address it.

Don’t force the things you liked together onto another potential person. You want the next person you’re with to enjoy different x snacks with you or b restaurants or c weird habits. Let that go. You have to trust and believe that your comforts will change and let it naturally emerge with whoever your next “person” is. It will be wonderful and specific to you two.

Whatever the thing is, write down what you like about it and how the sensation makes you feel.

Let’s go with a snack like ice cream. Instead of approaching it like this: “This is the flavor my ex and I always had therefore it reminds me of him therefore I will now rot and cry”. Go for simple logical descriptions that remove all emotions. “I like this flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream because it’s delicious and I tend to go for chocolatey flavors. It makes me feel feelings of happiness and like a naughty kid hiding a pint from my mom. I like the crunch combined with cool smooth cream”. Ice cream = friends again 🤝

Change up the feng shui of your apartment. Move your bed to the opposite side of your bedroom! Get some new little objects. The smallest changes can help make the space feel different and new for you. You’ll feel their absence.

TRY NEW THINGS!
Some new things I’ve been loving? Changing up my running route, hair clips, picnics at sunset in the park, violette FR matte lip stick, espresso instead of matcha, solo traveling, going to the beach by myself.

ThE MoRaL oF tHe sToRy iS: object/place/thing detachment is very possible. You just have to engage with the hard feelings, but I promise you’ll get there. You can and will take it all back! <3

The second wave is unexpected.

I’ve been so utterly busy.

I love when people depend on me.

I love being so busy that I start to break away.

Break down.

Crying but I’m unable to cry.

Not even on SSRIs anymore and I don’t cry.

I wonder if I’ll be a bad actress because I won’t feel

I’ve done the work too well

And I can’t let the feelings I suppress

live back on the surface —

the thick muddy world, it’s cold but it’s hot,

I’m never comfortable

always on the run

always comforted by a state of ambient static noise

always crafty, limber, able, fast, and exhausted —

Irish exit my way out of a situation I want to be in

but I choose not to

because I want to be alone

because I don’t want to be alone.

You get me?

I want to be held.

I want someone to choose the movie we watch.

I have a TV and all I do is stare at it.

I can’t decide anything.

I want them to choose a movie while I complain that I want to watch something else.

I want to watch Chopped.

I don’t want to watch it without you.

I want to see you but I know it’ll hurt worse.

The immediate relief will be nothing

compared to the pain I’ll feel tomorrow.

Or tonight, depending on the matter.

I want to text but I don’t want to be in your way.

I want my parents. They’re away.

I want my friends but I don’t —

because I don’t want to be distracted.

I want to be healed

and I can’t have other people do that for me.

How will I heal right now

I’m low energy.

I can’t keep my eyes open.

I have an article to write and I just can’t do it.

My legs hurt. My body is giving in.

Where will I go

and what will be left of me.

I love to hate to love to be alone.

I hate it.

But it’s me.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I haven’t written in a couple of weeks because I’ve been busy - but also because I made a huge leap in my healing process, and I wanted to actually feel it before I wrote about it. I began resisting talking about being dumped, because it was no longer consuming my brain. I don’t know if I’m just built differently when it comes to emotional regulation, but I started processing the loss of this relationship long before it was actually over.

When you’re in your early to mid 20s, dating is fun. It’s dramatic, it’s consuming, it’s everything. Heartbreak is painful but life moves - you have time, you’re not looking for a husband, and the world still feels wide open. As you get older, something shifts. You start to decide that this could actually be the path you want. You let go of the things that would’ve made you walk away before. You work through them instead. You enter a new era: dating for a partner, not just a boyfriend. What you don’t always realize though is that you are constantly changing, and you have never changed more than in your late 20s. You think you’ve met someone who finally made you want to stay - but really, you’re just growing up. You have more patience, people are less available, you’re busy, and you’re comfortable.

Losing the feeling of being loved by someone was the hardest part for me. But I question if I was really comfortable with myself. During the end of my relationship, I had an extremely hard time getting up in the morning. I didn’t feel depressed - but looking back, I clearly was. The romance had fizzled quietly, the way things do when two people stop choosing each other in the small ways. We weren’t making time for each other, and still, I held on because I believed that’s what you’re supposed to do in a long-term partnership. I convinced myself it was just a phase instead of being honest with myself that some things genuinely can’t be fixed, no matter how much you love someone or how badly you want it to work. I think we’re taught as women that we have to be the ones to fix things - because the fear of being abandoned is brutal, and because as we get older, we watch the people around us pair off and feel the quiet pressure of time. So we hold on a little too tight, and we stop trusting ourselves.

A lot of you asked me: was it truly out of nowhere? Something must’ve been wrong. No part of you saw it coming? Honestly? I don’t know if I could confidently answer that anymore. What I do know is that it had been too long to not fight for it, and we were both already exhausted by the idea of trying. What he gave me by letting go - instead of dragging us through more therapy that went nowhere, more fighting, more of a relationship slowly rotting into something we’d both resent - was actually a strange kind of grace, even if it didn’t feel that way at first.

I know 28 is young. But there’s a shift that happens in how you’re perceived when you start dating as a woman who knows what she wants. Longterm. And not every guy is ready for that weight, even when they swear they are.

What I’ve concluded is that I needed 3.5 weeks. To mourn, to process, and to slowly get comfortable being alone with myself again. I am genuinely surprised at how much can change in that time - and at just how adaptable we are when we’re forced to be. We always hate change. We resist it, we grieve it, we resent it. But it has a way of cracking us open and showing us something truer about ourselves than comfort ever could. I started to see that I had wrapped my entire future around one vision, one person, one version of what my life was going to look like. And letting go of that picture is its own kind of loss. But when I put my ego aside and really looked - life has so many different lanes. And there’s something quietly thrilling about starting over as this newer, older version of yourself, the one who’s been through it and come out knowing exactly what she will and won’t settle for.

Some of you might be three weeks in and still can’t get out of bed. Please don’t read this and feel like you’re doing something wrong - you’re not. Everyone moves through it at their own pace, and there is no timeline for grief. But if I could give you anything, it’s this: choose not to hate him. Start, slowly, to get comfortable with the idea of not loving him anymore. Hateful feelings are too heavy to carry - they will drain you, and he is not worth your crash. Cutting communication was one of the hardest things I did, but it changed everything. And if he really broke your heart, ask him to give you your city for a little while. Knowing you won’t run into him, that your streets are yours again - it does something for you that’s hard to explain until you actually feel it.

I still think about him. I reach out here and there, I won’t pretend I don’t. But I officially feel okay - like really, genuinely okay. So many of my needs weren’t being met, and I’m meeting them for myself now, and there’s something quietly powerful about that. Get busy. Start something. Take a class, say yes to things that scare you a little, go sit at a bar alone and just talk to the bartender. Let life back in. It isn’t the end of the world, even when it feels like it is. Don’t plot your revenge. Don’t map out your way back to him. There are so many paths still ahead of you, ones you haven’t even seen yet, and I am genuinely so excited to watch you find them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And then immediately wished I hadn’t, because now I’ll never know what he replied to my last text. I blocked him and then got angry that he hadn’t seen my story, hadn’t tried to reach out. I was refreshing every two minutes. One hour I’m iron. The next I’m on the floor. I unblocked him the next morning - not out of self control, but because I knew I’d randomly text him and pursue this friendly, alien way of communicating until it killed me.

It’s not a clean process. It’s bipolar and humbling and sometimes both in the same breath.

We started talking again after the breakup and it felt comforting. I say “after the breakup” as if it wasn’t 9 days ago.. But then it got too comfortable, and I started resenting that I’d given him any piece of me because he can’t have a piece. It’s all or nothing. So I blocked him (spiritually).
And I think it’s necessary. We can’t have anything holding us together.
We’re like ten split ends on one strand of hair, just waiting to see when it finally breaks.

(I also got a haircut yesterday and dyed my hair black. I’m FINNEEEE.)

Can we talk about breakup advice for a second? “Allow yourself to feel the pain.” Okay. are you kidding me. What do you think I’m doing? That advice drives me insane, not because I’m above it, but because I’m already in it. The feelings aren’t the hard part. It’s the loop. The re-breaking up every time you text. The cycling through anger, something that almost looks like friendship, then back to anger. The blocking and unblocking. The not knowing. “Distract yourself”, but also “don’t distract yourself too much”. As glad as I am to make some people feel like they’re finally Oprah, I’m not your target audience.

Some days I feel genuinely strong. I wake up early, I work out, I see friends. I get angry in a logical way. I know my worth and nothing about that wavers.
But that’s not the whole story.
Other times I collapse. Not dramatically. Just quietly. In the middle of thinking about watching something we used to watch together, or reaching for a snack we always got, or yesterday - having to leave a Knicks game in the third quarter because I couldn’t be there without thinking of him.

There is nothing more exciting than the Knicks winning. Nothing. I’ve been so excited. But putting on my cunty little diy Knicks outfit didn’t hit. So I sat on my sofa and stared at the wall, listening to screams from outside my window and checking the score on my tiny phone screen.

sometimes pain doesn’t know when it isn’t welcome.
It knocks on your door and asks for a couch to sleep on. You can’t argue with pain. And the part that confuses my anger is that I know he’s suffering too.
So the anger has nowhere to go.
I redirect it. I reach out. I feel better. I crash again..

What I actually struggle with isn’t the sadness alone. It’s the loss of control. I didn’t see this coming. And some small part of me still trusts, deep down, that he wants to be together - I hold onto it like a baby clutching a finger. Tight, but with ease. I know logically that this is what he chose. I know that. And then I don’t know it at all

I always felt alone in relationships. Until this one. And now I feel that specific aloneness again - but worse, because I know what it felt like to not feel it. Being alone is something I often choose. Feeling alone is something else entirely.

The first week is almost easier. You’re in shock, you have support, it feels like an event. Then you have to start actually living inside it. People move on. You’re still holding on. The wave hits later. And when you don’t ask for help, people show up - when you do, they go quiet.

What gets me, underneath all of it, is that everyone has felt this. Everyone has loved something completely and lost it. I think athletes understand it most - giving your whole body, mind, and identity to something, then having it be taken away. The grief isn’t just emotional. It lives in your habits and your Saturday mornings and the shows you can’t watch anymore.

I don’t have advice. I just want to be honest about the process, because maybe you’re in it too. It’s okay to be an utter mess. It’s okay to be strong and collapsed in the same day. It’s beautiful and devastating how much we need love. How primal it is. How it runs everything. We’re not weak for falling apart. We’re just human.

Dumped Girl Summer is an ongoing series. You’re not alone.

I just got dumped for the first time of my life. First time EVER. I want to respect his privacy and his process so I won’t get into what happened, but I will say- it is absolutely time that we reclaim being dumped as a form of power. For my entire life people always say break up with him before he can break up with you, like being dumped is some kind of scarlet letter. Complete victimization. I think in this era of being chronically online and being raw and being THAT girl, it’s time we view being dumped as the hottest thing anyone could ever do.

There’s a movement happening, and we need to grab the reins before it passes us by. If you’ve been dumped, this one’s for you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I’m calling this series Dumped Girl Summer:

And here is your first of many guides to reclaiming your fire.

1. Being dumped means you’re locked in. Commitment is actually so rare and you have it. The hardest thing to find in any relationship is someone who actually shows up and lets themselves be present. There is not a finer quality in a woman than being the one who tried to stick it out. You were dumped, which means you wanted it to work. You were ride or die baby. That is so rare. Own it.

2. You have been gifted your single era and you didn’t even have to do anything. I have literally never experienced this. Every other breakup I’ve been through it’s because things weren’t working and I was desperate to get out. And now suddenly I’m here and it feels so bizarre. But maybe it’s a gift. When you get dumped you are handed your freedom on a silver platter. You didn’t have to break anyone’s heart. You didn’t have to be the villain. This is your moment. Act accordingly.

3. The pity era is actually so powerful and so fun. You are going to get SO much love. So many texts. So much pity. Birthdays you get a week — dumped, your friends better show up for at least two months. It’s your world hun. Take every bizarre random text from people you haven’t heard from in a year and use it. Your social stock has never been higher.

4. Say yes to absolutely everything. Say yes to not getting out of bed. Say yes to that party you would never normally go to and walk in like you own the room. Say yes to the random last minute trip. Say yes to cutting your hair just because you can. You have no one to check in with, no plans that aren’t entirely yours. That is insane power and you need to use it immediately.

5. Get weird about it. This is your time to be a little feral. My friend asked what weird thing I was doing that night to distract myself and honestly? Correct question. Go stare at a dot on the wall. Attempt a cartwheel. Become a crocheter idk.

6. Dress up. This is not the time for sad girl outfits. Wear the thing that’s been sitting in your closet with the tags on. Wear the going out top to the grocery store. Wear the heel to sewer park. Get dressed like someone is going to take your picture because the world is watching and you look incredible.

7. Let people take care of you. This is not the time to be low maintenance. Ask your friends to come over. Let someone bring you food. The people who show up are showing you exactly who your people are. Take note.

8. Do not stalk his Instagram. Do it once, get it out of your system, then put the phone down. We are not going to pretend we’re above it. Look once, feel whatever you feel, close the app. Today I removed his location and that was huge for me. You are better than what you are about to find out.

9. Own it. Tell everyone. Buy a shirt that says you just got dumped. I got free drinks last night because a bartender overheard me. My baristas haven’t charged me in 4 days. It’s a lifestyle not a choice.

10. Treat yourself. Buy yourself flowers, book a massage. I personally love Pure Relax spa on Broadway - cheap and they do a banging job. Treat yourself like you are someone worth treating well.

Caroline Calloway got dumped the same day as me and she is documenting every single day of it publicly and I am here for it. All the hot girls get dumped. All the great writers get dumped. We are here, we are thriving, and it is going to be so unbelievably cunty. Dumped is finally in this summer.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Plus babe, you’re a pretty crier I promise <3

We spend so much of our lives preparing. We work on ourselves, avoid ourselves, distract ourselves -all in the quiet hope that if we just do enough inner work, pain will at least have the decency to announce itself. I learned how to communicate my feelings. How to sit with anxiety instead of running from it. How to regulate, reflect, repair. You think: okay. I’m ready. Whatever comes next, I can handle it.

Then something comes next. And you realize you were preparing for a version of pain you’d already survived. Not this one.

No one teaches you how to move away from something while you’re still moving through it. There is no workshop for that. No book. No breathing exercise that softens the specific weight of something you never saw coming. And that’s the cruelest part- not the loss itself but the proof it leaves behind. If it could blindside you once, you now know with quiet certainty: it will blindside you again.

Maybe next time it’ll come with a warning sign. Maybe I’ll learn some great big lesson. Or maybe I’m the lesson to someone else. The best thing they couldn’t keep.

The hardest thing to accept is that some people are still mid-preparation. Still somewhere in the avoiding, the distracting, not yet ready to feel what needs to be felt. And when the pain gets heavy enough, some people start to see the world in thick, ugly crayon. Everything shaded as if it were done during a bumpy cab ride. But I’ve always worked in oil. Slow, deliberate, deep, layers that take time to dry, colors that shift the longer you look at them. It’s messier. It asks more of you. But that’s the point. maybe if someone saw the palette, felt the difference in the brush, they’d want to paint that way too. But you can’t ask someone to abandon the technique they’ve found recent comfort in. The crayon is familiar. The crayon is safe. It’s theirs. If only it was mine too.

Loneliness is obviously a feeling. It rarely means you’re actually alone. In an age where we see people attending events, hanging out in groups, seemingly doing impressive things constantly, it’s easy to feel invisible inside of it all.

For me, I feel either most myself or least myself. I feel awake with nowhere to be. I’ll walk alone at night (sorry mom) and go through everything I haven’t done. I feel empty and like I’m the only one alive in the world, and New York feels impossibly small. I’ll notice a full moon and think, ‘I should put out some water, I heard that helps with intention’. I’ll forget to drink it and/or someone will throw it away. All of these superstitions are just a way of saying: I’m scared. I’m scared that I’m failing. That I’m forgotten.

When I’m alone at night, my mind melts into an orb of lost conviction. How is it that this strongly opinionated, energetic, people-loving person can feel like a body of water with nothing inside? The glimmer that once shined over sunset, replaced with hot cement. Grey, hard, absorbent of anything containing life. Sometimes that alone space turns into creative time. If my thoughts can stay quiet just long enough. You know when you’re alone at night and the whisper of the trees feels like the only thing talking to you? If you’re a morning person, you have no idea what that means, and that’s okay.

I began writing this with the intention of talking about how I moved out of my boyfriend’s apartment. This is not us moving backwards. It’s space for both of us to figure out the next chapter so we can come together more present, more ready. It’s hard living together as creatives, it isn’t just that alone time that is crucial, it’s having a space that feels like you’ve rotted yourself out that is. Every time I tell someone I moved into a place alone I get the same look. I tell them, oh we’re fine, it’s just preventative, it’s like retinol! -and they immediately understand. But sometimes I’m not sure if I understand it, and the more I see that look, the more I believe them.

When I lived in LA I would find myself sitting at the bar of a restaurant alone, bringing a notebook, becoming friends with the bartender, feeling a little embarrassed. I did this most of my time there- which is inevitable in such a lonely city. No one is last minute there. No one is a night owl. So I’d post up at bars alone and let time pass while I was around the energy of other people. The other day I found myself dining alone for the first time in years, and it felt similar somehow.

I thought I heard a meow twice today. I think it’s my conscience looking for an outlet, like a stray kitten, my dream to stumble upon. I’d entirely forget myself and rescue some tortured tiny soul. It starts to get humorous when you think signs keep happening to you. It’s scary and then you realize you’re just too hyper-aware of yourself. The world doesn’t revolve around you. You can rescue that little kitten but in a different way. Rescue the one in yourself first. Not to be corny, but that little girl needs you.

So here I am, I walk across the empty Brooklyn bridge. My favorite bridge, one that resembles entering my childhood neighborhood. But it feels different now- they polished its ancient limestone and now it shines too brightly. I feel the lights like too many gazes. I used to be able to hide on this bridge- camouflage between the passing cars, walking in slow motion, like time is moving forward and I am fighting against it. I stopped at my favorite childhood penny store before and picked up a Tootsie Pop. I remember how exciting it was as a kid to think about how many licks it takes to get to the center, as if there’s a fixed number. What a lie. I stare at its lumpy shape and think about how everything they fed me was a distraction.

Loneliness can feel pathetic. Like an eerily long stretch of regret. Like jet lag- you’ve missed out on hours you should have spent doing something else. Every day is just a day, but I should be looking at each one for what it is: complex, unique, its own thing. We are so narrow when we’re zoomed in, and so overwhelmed when we zoom out. How do we live in between?

I’m still figuring that out. Waking up after a night alone has made motivation hard to come by, especially if I’m sleeping in because I've spent hours doomscrolling. I want to love mornings, but first I have to actually be awake for them. Maybe tonight will be different.

If this resonated, I’d love to know.

I’ve been meaning to write something like this for nine years. Nine years of saying I’ll do it, committing to the bit, and then watching myself pivot to whatever new shiny thing floated across my screen. I don’t have an ADHD diagnosis, but I have an ADHD life — and at some point you have to stop waiting for someone to officially name the thing and just start moving through it.

So here we are.

The Stopwatch

I turned 27 and something cracked open in me. Not in a “spiritual awakening” way — more like a low hum that got louder until I couldn’t ignore it. Everything I watched, every album I fell into, every show I saw at some small venue downtown kept reminding me that I get one life. And I will die. Very fun to sit with at 2am. I have always been dark. I love my darkness — it feeds my art, my taste, my humor — but sometimes it feeds on me. As an only child with older parents, death is familiar territory. Suddenly I couldn’t move forward without thinking about my inevitable end.

Then 28 came quickly. I found my way through by finding life in something I hold very close to my heart. I started a company, GirlPox, with my soulmate of a friend Violet, and became a producer — something I never saw myself doing. But sometimes things fall into place and you cannot fight them, especially when the person doing it with you feels like the other half of your brain you never knew how to unlock.

Late twenties in New York is its own specific kind of existential. You’re surrounded by people who seem to always be in the right room — the ones whose dad has a friend, who met the director at a party in Tribeca, who got the thing simply by being there. You’re smart enough to know that’s how it works, which almost makes it worse. You can see the machinery clearly and still feel locked out of it.

I expected success to fall into my lap despite knowing, intellectually, that it never works like that. There’s something almost embarrassing about admitting that. But I think a lot of us are walking around with that same quiet shame — the gap between how capable we know we are and how little we’ve done with it lately.

At 28, I learned to let go of that. I stopped feeling humiliated that I hadn’t booked the biggest thing yet and remembered that I had always wanted to create things for myself — so I started. Without the backbone I find in my partner Marc and my business partner Violet, I’m not sure where I’d be. Newer people entered my world as Violet re-entered mine, and I learned what true friendship actually means. I used to go out all the time, searching for something, and eventually started to resent it. Now all I want is to see my five friends, go to a bar, and play whatever abstract strategy card game my boyfriend introduces. I have always been drawn to dorks and nerdy things.

The Sentimentality Problem

My thing is that I hold on. To people, to places, to old versions of myself that feel safer than the current one.

I grew up quiet. Genuinely quiet — the girl who didn’t speak in class, who moved in the shadow of the cool girls, who failed the SAT math section every time no matter how many thousands of dollars my parents threw at tutors. I was not going to Brown. I was smart, but the particular kind of smart that doesn’t translate to standardized tests — which, in the world I grew up in, might as well mean you don’t count. It actually took leaving the school I attended K–12 to discover that I am someone who raises her hand in class, who is obsessed with her grades. I just couldn’t know that until I left.

So I held onto childhood the way you hold onto something you weren’t done with. The part of me that made movies with her friends, performed constantly, created freely — before the audience in my head became a jury.

Now I’m almost 29, and I’m still letting people from high school haunt my decisions. People I haven’t talked to in a decade. People who are probably not thinking about me at all. If you’re reading this looking for parts to judge — I see you, and I’m finally okay with that. I’ll have an idea, something good and real, and then I’ll hear some phantom voice from 2012 and close the laptop.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s a cage.

Social Media Is Making Me Insane (Specifically)

I think about quitting social media at least twice a week. Then I remember that a significant portion of my actual work lives there. So I feel trapped — which is maybe the most 2026 sentence I’ve ever written.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. If you are chronically online, if you comment on everyone’s Instagram but also know exactly who didn’t comment on yours — down to the specific person, so specifically that you can make it a targeted thing — you are the problem. Not me. You.

I offer a lot. Kindness, gestures, energy, presence. The people who are the coldest to me are often the ones I’m kindest to in return — going out of my way to support them, praise them, show up for them, when really I am just hurt by them. It’s like an abusive dynamic: I will always come back to let them know I care, and they will always use that to remind me where I stand. My mom has a burn list and always tells me to stop engaging. I somehow cannot help it. Everyone must like me. I must be able to control it.

I’m drawn to chill people — quiet but sassy, sweet and empathetic, easygoing and non-competitive. And I’m probably the most intense friend in that group. The loudest one. The one who might accidentally generate competitive energy just by existing at full volume. For a while I thought I needed to change that. I’m learning it just comes with the territory of putting yourself out there. I’m also working on caring less about people who don’t care back. Both things are true.

The Part Where I Stop Apologizing

I’m done performing warmth for people who treat it like a weakness.

For a long time I kept myself off Instagram (my raw self) — it felt too exposed, so TikTok became my quiet little testing ground. A girl once asked me if I was from New York. I said yes — how could you tell? She said: when you grow up here, there’s a particular fear of putting yourself out there. You’re so in the know that it almost cripples you. You’ve seen too much, you know how things get received, you know exactly who’s watching. That stuck with me because it’s completely true. Growing up here made me sharper and more self-conscious in equal measure.

But I have big opinions and I like to share them. And I’m finally feeling comfortable doing that out loud. What I can control is where my energy goes. I’m done being endlessly encouraging to people who know, deep down, that they’ve hurt me. That’s not friendship — it’s a one-way emotional debt I keep paying. I hold on too long, I always have. I cannot make everyone like me. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time trying. Letting go isn’t failure — it’s just finally being honest about what’s real.

What I’m Trying to Let Go Of

The judgment of people who peaked in their relationship to me at age 16.

The idea that my work has to be finished and perfect before it’s allowed to exist.

The stopwatch. The death spiral. The compulsive comparison to people who “just happened to be in the right room.”

The part of me that thinks believing in myself loudly is the same as being arrogant.

The grief for a childhood I keep mourning — when actually, I carry it with me everywhere. The energy, the play, the curiosity. That didn’t leave. I just started apologizing for it.

I’m a natural healer, for better and worse. I see through people quickly and take that seriously. But I’ve been pouring all of that into everyone around me and leaving myself dry. The goal is not to stop caring — I will always invest deeply in the people I love. But I need to do it for myself first.

What’s Actually Next

I own a production company. I DJ. I produce events. I act. I love fashion + yapping online. I introduce theater to grungy downtown kids who swore they’d never set foot in one. I curate rooms — the storytelling, the music, the energy, the specific alchemy of people loosening up and actually being present — and it stresses me out completely and I love it completely.

I also want to write. Scripts, films, something that makes someone feel seen in the specific, embarrassing, granular way that only good art can. I’ve never shown anyone my writing — not because I’ve been told it’s bad, but because I’ve never shown it. The not-knowing feels safer than the knowing.

I don’t know where this Substack will go. I often start things and never finish them — which is kind of the whole point of writing this. Consider it a letter to myself, in public, where I can’t take it back.

I’m done shrinking for people who wouldn’t do the same for me. I need to write the thing, show the thing, fail at the thing if I have to. It’s not that serious. And also it kind of is. Holding both of those truths is maybe the whole point.

If you got here and you’re inclined to judge me — welcome. I’m not here to be liked by everyone. I’m here to try.