As “Father Figure” was almost over, and I was already feeling apathetic about what I’d heard of the album so far—and a quick glance at Ally confirmed she felt the same—I was holding out hope that Taylor’s infamous Track 5 (historically the most emotional and lyrically gut-wrenching track on each album) would redeem the experience for me.

I expected it to feel like the homesickness in “You’re Gonna Go Far” by Noah Kahan, the confusing melancholy of “Block Me Out” by Gracie Abrams, or the nostalgia that washed over any listener of “Landslide.” Taylor has even done it herself with “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and “this is me trying,” so I expected that my life would be handed to me on a silver platter of prose and stanzas: a song that could communicate how I feel being the eldest daughter of three, and stereotypically the family member who always finds herself with a one-way plane ticket, and is always acting like a mom around children.

I went into listening to this song expecting a life-changing experience and, unfortunately, have never felt less connected to a melody or verse. While folklore and 1989 are still some of my favorite albums of all time, this song truly turned me off from Taylor for awhile because the only emotion it stirred up in me was annoyance.

THAT BEING SAID…

The melancholy, nostalgia, quiet vulnerability, and resilience that Taylor has provoked in me through other songs—and that countless other artists have captured beautifully—made me realize exactly what I was looking for from this song. So, instead, I created the ultimate playlist for the eldest daughters who feel ultra-responsible, usually overwhelmed, and unable to sit still.

I hope this curation hits the spot that “But I’m not a bad bitch and this isn’t savage” fell short of.

1. this is me trying - Taylor Swift

I wanted to start out with this one because I attacked TLOASG pretty hard but this song is damn near perfect.

I was so ahead of the curve, the curve became a sphere.

Arguably one of her best lyrics, and one that encapsulates exactly what it feels like to be the overachiever throughout your childhood, only to somehow wake up one day and realize you feel behind in so many other areas of your life.

2. Dark - Dominic Fike

Puts words to the feeling that success sometimes comes at the cost of surrendering parts of yourself. A feeling all too familiar to older sisters who are constantly putting everyone else’s needs before their own.

I would break promises that I would make to my favorite people

3. I Know the End - Phoebe Bridgers

The ultimate “accepting something has ended” ballad, and one that hits especially close to home for the girls who have moved far away from home—even when they know it was the right decision. There’s something uniquely painful about realizing that leaving was necessary and still missing the life you left behind.

There’s no place like my room

4. The Long and Winding Road - The Beatles

A song that everyone has heard but maybe hasn’t realized how acutely its metaphor can apply to the unpredictable journey that eldest daughters tend to say yes to. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the road ahead, but the song carries this reflective, almost nostalgic tone that feels fitting for looking back at everything that brought you here.

Many times I’ve been alone, and many times I’ve cried

5. Seventeen - Sharon Van Etten

Looking back on youth and feeling empathy for your past self—Sharon Van Etten nails it. There’s something especially poignant about realizing that the girl you used to be was doing her best with what she knew at the time.

Afraid that you’ll be just like me

6. Vienna - Billy Joel

I mean, truly, this song belongs on every playlist, so it’s not surprising to find it here. It’s a beautiful reminder, in song form, to slow down—a reminder that girls like us need to hear as much as possible because it goes completely against our instincts. This was my lifeline as a 20-year-old overachiever who always felt the need to rush toward the next thing and have an answer for everybody’s questions.

Slow down, you crazy child

7. Melrose Meltdown - Suki Waterhouse

A woman in a new city trying to figure out what the hell she’s doing with her life. Sound familiar?

Handing out gold stars for tailor-made behavior

8. Right Now - Gracie Abrams

Don’t listen if you don’t want to be utterly gutted by the end. TW. But Gracie does such a good job of bottling up what it feels like to move away and start doing new things when you still love your family dearly—and maybe wish you had realized just how much you would miss them before it was too late.

What if my little brother

Thinks my leaving was wrong?

9. Willing and Able - Noah Kahan

This song captures the complicated feeling of wanting to be capable of handling everything life throws at you, even as the people and relationships you once knew so well inevitably change. It’s a reminder that sometimes you’ll always wish you had spent a little more time doing nothing other than living in the same house with your siblings.

Oh, we can fight like we used to fight

10. There She Goes - The La’s

A bit of an emotional break here after two crazy ones. But not at all less relevant for eldest daughters. This song feels like arriving in your new city: nervous, excited, confused, and somehow giddy all at once. Like you have absolutely no idea what you're doing, but you’re doing it anyway.

There she goes again

Racin’ through my brain

11. Running on Empty - Jackson Browne

The sound of a girl who’s just been going and going and going her whole life without stopping to ask herself if she’s okay.

I’d love to stick around but I’m running behind

12. She’s Leaving Home - The Beatles

This hits the nail on the head for girls who feel the duality of the desperate need for personal autonomy while still being unable to ignore others’ expectations of us.

Stepping outside, she is free

13. Back to the Old House - The Smiths

It’s normal to worry it’ll be too painful returning to a house, a place, or an entire town once you’ve left.

Here began all my dreams
The saddest thing I've ever seen

14. Matilda - Harry Styles

Being the parentified eldest daughter can sometimes be taken too far, and this beloved Harry song feels like permission to realize your chosen family whom you meet in your life away from home can be just as good if not better than the one you’re dealt.

You don't have to be sorry for leaving and growing up

15. Daughter from Hell - Gracie Abrams

This song was a slow burn for me, and I think I can finally understand why. It was forcing me to reflect on the ways I wasn’t the only victim of my childhood. I spent my teenage years convinced that I was the one hurting, and forgot that me hurting probably hurt my mom too.

This has now become one of my favorites on the album, partly because I’m grateful for the ego check. It acts as a reminder that my mom is living for the first time too, and that she was just figuring it all out as she went…just like me. And truly when I really think about my childhood, all I can remember is all the wonderful things she did for me and it’s really hard to place what any of our fights were about.

I’m sorry for the ways I didn’t always see that then.

And down to my bones, I hope that I make you proud

16. Older Than I Am - Lennon Stella

This song feels like an ode to forced maturity, that feeling of having to grow up faster than you should have. It’s common that older sisters feel way more responsibility than other kids.

For the girls who have handled some seriously heavy things before they even moved out, and wish they had had a little bit more whimsy and adventure when they were younger.

This one’s for you.

I don't ask for help, no
'Cause I don't need it

17. Sometimes you can’t make it on your own - U2

A tale as old as time: “If I have to ask for help, I’ve failed.” For eldest daughters, that belief can become almost second nature. That need to be capable, self-sufficient, and emotionally guarded, especially when keeping the peace in a complicated family starts to feel heavier and heavier on your shoulders.

Sometimes you can't make it
Best you can do, is to fake it

xoxo,

Campbell

So I started wondering: what if you could at least get a sense of America’s national pastime through something that’s already familiar?

For many, that’s music!

So I’m going to try to explain every MLB team through a pop song. Because you don’t have to understand everything about baseball to start caring about it. Sometimes you just need to know who these teams are.

Here’s the NL West!

(go dodgers)

So I started wondering: what if you could at least get a sense of America’s national pastime through something that’s already familiar?

For many, that’s music!

So I’m going to try to explain every MLB team through a pop song. Because you don’t have to understand everything about baseball to start caring about it. Sometimes you just need to know who these teams are.

Here’s the NL Central!

So I started wondering: what if you could at least get a sense of America’s national pastime through something that’s already familiar?

For many, that’s music!

So I’m going to try to explain every MLB team through a pop song. Because you don’t have to understand everything about baseball to start caring about it. Sometimes you just need to know who these teams are.

Here’s the NL East!

I don’t want to start a relationship with the barista, but I do want him to hope it’s me every time he hears the coffee house’s door open.

I don’t even feel attracted to the sweaty man running by me on a mountain trail, but he considered turning around, right?

I disagree wholeheartedly with the firefighter I met at a baseball game about politics, religion, and how I’d like to spend a week off, but there’s no way he’s not still looking at me after I walk away from our conversation.

My 70s haircut and no-makeup makeup emulates exactly what I want it to whenever I leave the house, and I don’t want to waste an evening with somebody who doesn’t think my look is killer—but every guy sees the vision, right? Their disinterest is more just redirection, and knowing they couldn’t handle it.

I wish I didn’t notice that I get hit on more when I have straight hair and my waterline drawn perfectly—particularly because I don’t like having straight hair, and my seasonal allergies mean I have to keep asking my friend to check that eyeliner isn’t running down my pollen-rejecting face.

I wish I could control my subconscious so it didn’t lean toward decisions that earn me more male attention. God forbid I go to the beach with unshaved legs. I’ve convinced myself it’s because I’m uncomfortable physically if my legs aren’t smooth, but I think the patriarchy rotted my brain and called checkmate again—men seem perfectly comfortable with their legs, and my skin would probably be far less irritated too.

I have labeled entire nights out as a “failure” because nobody asked for my number. Never wearing that skirt again, I’ll think to myself for a second. The men in this town just don’t care about style or quick wit, I guess. It’s a thought that is me—without realizing it—putting down other women who did get attention that night. But that’s not who I am! My friends remind me that men are probably just intimidated to approach me, and I let that comfort me, another hand reaching for the same approval.

These same friends call me a pretty confident person. I’m not a pushover and I’ll dress/act how I want, but I am hopelessly at fault for seeking a man to approve of me even though I won’t necessarily change if they don’t.

Will I ever not instinctively reach up to pull my hair forward when a man steps into an elevator with me? Will I ever speak my opinion in a group without a small part of me auditioning it? Will I ever leave the house not knowing, somewhere underneath everything else I know about myself, whether I look good today—until a man I don’t even like tells me I do?

xoxo,

Campbell

I remember being in the depths of getting my pilot’s license and just constantly having to shush the voice in my head that kept repeating: this isn’t fun anymore, this isn’t what you want to do with your life, you need a career path with more human interaction, you want to use your brain in other ways, and instead I let the voice (that for some reason sounded a lot like a toxic basketball coach I had…weird) screaming: if you start something you have to finish it, everybody will think you’re weak for quitting, your friends from high school will get together and make fun of you for trying something and not committing to it and for not being the best at it.

Thankfully, one random morning last autumn, I woke up and asked myself—out loud this time—Why the fuck do I keep forcing myself to do this when I’m not even enjoying it, and I know deep down I’m only doing it to appease others and a version of myself that isn’t me anymore?

I wouldn’t call myself a people pleaser, but I do think I get worried about letting my future self and my parents down a lot. It’s frustrating because I didn’t even grow up with them being on my case all that much when it came to grades, behavior, or sports. I just naturally held myself to certain standards that I deemed appropriate and most of the time—definitely not always—those standards aligned with theirs. I worked pretty hard, I had straight A’s until Chemistry and Pre-Calc, I didn’t get in trouble with teachers, and I was a good athlete, a good teammate, and super committed to my teams.

If you take away the month of October when the Dodgers are in the playoffs, my parents are not competitive people. My mom has never even had the inkling to yell at a referee or an umpire, and even though my dad coached my basketball teams growing up he never pushed me to be “better than everyone else” but instead to just be the best version of myself, and to always have fun.

I love you, mom & dad btw, you guys did the whole parents of an athlete thing right

However, even though I didn’t grow up in a competitive house, I got the gene anyway. I wanted nothing more than to win. I think I can pinpoint exactly when the shift happened and I started seeing my sports as not just a fun activity, but a performance and test of sorts. I was 10 years old, and the club soccer team I had played 2 year with made it to the championship game, and I scored the winning goal from what my dad insists was almost half field. My teammates dogpiled on me as the final whistle blew, and that rush of recognition and accomplishment was something I chased for the next 7 years.

My determination for this feeling that I continued to find through sports was an anchor in my life. It was one of my most active personality islands if you will, like Riley from Inside Out. My friends were my teammates, my fashion sense was not dis-similar to my 10 year old brother’s today, my goals had to do with performing better on the court/field, and my idols were female athletes.

Once I got to the high school level, and I finally had a coach who knew about the collegiate sports world, and had big dreams for me, it was really exciting at first. The entirety of my junior year and the first half of my senior year were taken over by trying to get recruited, watching and curating film, running at 8am, practicing for one sport at noon and another at 3pm, and then being in the weight room on the weekends. I laugh at that now because damn that girl had energy.

At some point during my last seasons though, I lost that drive to play at the next level and slowly returned to just being the 8 year old who picked up a basketball or shot a soccer ball for the first time and just wanted to keep running around with her best friends. Serendipitously, the last soccer game I ever played in, I scored an important goal from what my dad again claims was that same near-half-field spot. It was like my athletic career was bookended by the exact same motion—ball leaving my foot, changing the course of the game—followed both times by my teammates dogpiling on me, some of whom were there for both.

I’m proud of myself for not forcing it, and I’m honestly surprised I didn’t. It’s absolutely something I think I have the personality type to just grit my teeth and do because it had been my identity and my goal for so long. I feel so grateful for my parents, my teammates, and my consciousness that year who didn’t dismiss the fact that maybe I was curious about things that weren’t kicking or shooting balls. I wanted to explore the right side of my brain a bit more, and have the freedom to chase intuition and random interests that playing college sports probably wouldn’t have allowed me.

Now let me make something clear, sports was an area where I didn’t force the puzzle piece.. But boy oh boy when it comes to relationships I have all but broken the puzzle piece in half and glued it back together to try and get it to fit where it clearly doesn’t belong.

My high school boyfriend, who I can only hope has found his god-fearing woman by now, has become the blueprint of what I actively avoid in prospective partners. Sure, at 17, all of our issues seemed to get swept under the rug because playing house was just so fun! And he was obsessed with me so how wrong could we really be for each other?

Very wrong, babe.

I had the first intrusive thought that we should break up 8 months into our relationship. Spoiler alert: we stayed together for another 2 years. RED FLAG OMFG. Sure, It wasn’t all bad—we had fun, and he helped me learn a lot about myself I suppose, but even on paper we were just so incompatible. It’s hard for me to remember the feeling now because the solution seems so obvious in retrospect, but I’m going to try my best to articulate the one I had for those 2 years before we finally split; I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want to have the hard conversation, and I begrudgingly admit that I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find someone who was as obsessed with me as he was. He wasn’t on Nikki from Obsession’s level, but he put me on a pedestal and worshipped (pun intended) the ground I walked on. And sorry, but I loved it. I felt like an it-girl from the 90s with this boy following me around, who had been pining for me since the 7th grade.

Every time that doubting feeling returned, I would gnaw or pick at the puzzle pieces of our relationship so that from afar it might look like the puzzle was complete. But upon looking closer, anyone could tell that the parts of the cardboard I was destroying and coercing into the frame were just pieces of me that I was dimming in fear of diluting his limerence. And yes, it’s all fine now, and I’m more prepared for a future relationship having gone through it all. Even the matching tattoos we got the day I turned 18 have been rebranded. But I can’t help but regret those 2 years and harp on the fact that I could have been doing anything—or anyone—else besides playing the femme fatale in his life, and could have just lived my own life however I wanted.

With all of this being said, there is absolutely a time and a place for grit, and sticking with things you begin. I am by no means arguing in favor of quitting when things get hard—please don’t! However, I think we all know the difference between the feeling of something being difficult, and the feeling of it just being wrong. We have great guts us humans, and we should trust them. Mine is a whole 2 years ahead of my brain apparently.

So don’t stop working hard, don’t shrink your dreams, but also don’t hold yourself—or others—to versions that you/they might outgrow, or even just want to edit or put on hold. Especially in your 20s. I feel like I, and everyone I talk to my age has a different “dream life” every other month and we ultimately agree that life is way more fun and fulfilling when we just trust ourselves to know when to try another puzzle instead of forcing a corner piece in the middle of the landscape. Plus, you can always come back to that puzzle later. There's never a shortage of new ones to open and dump out on the table—and who says you can't be the person who has five unfinished puzzles at once? That's what this decade is all about.

I wasn’t friend-less, I even had had a couple of best friends at that point but I knew it wasn’t the die for each other, kinship bond that the D&D kids or other fictional groups like the Harry Potter trio had. But boy did I want it. In between sobs, I somehow got out to my parents my fear that I would never find a group like that where nobody involved had the slightest doubt about what they meant to each other, everyone was all in.

Spoiler Alert: Now, a decade later after the series has officially wrapped, so has this puerile fear of mine. No, I don’t ride bikes with 4 boys and play board games in my basement, but I have had the absolute honor of my life of forming the most incredible sisterly friendships in the past few years.

Yay! Problem solved! I got everything I wanted. Or so I thought.

Now I find myself in this conundrum where I am slowly realizing that in order to chase any new chapter that comes up in my life—for instance my recent decision to move solo to Europe—means that I must physically leave behind these people who helped form me into the girl I am today—more specifically the girl who was ready to take chances and say yes to to things like solo Europe.

The lessons they have taught me happened so gradually that I didn’t even realize they were helping form who I was until I had to face the reality that they won’t be there in person every step of the way anymore.

The story of how I met one of these people, as fate would have it, begins with a book. We laugh about that now because of course our friendship began with a book—and an Emily Henry book at that. She saw me reading People we Meet on Vacation in the Chicago airport where we were both waiting to board our plane to France, where we were studying abroad.

By the time we formally met, by way of getting “accidentally” separated from our group in Versailles, it felt like rekindling with a friend from another life—immediate connection, and shared sense of humor, values, and ambition. It’s crazy how chill we were about the fact we’d found each other when checking those boxes in a friendship seems so rare in retrospect.

It’s three years later, and we’ve been classmates, roommates, book club mates (of course), travel partners, and somehow remained one another’s constants in so many seasons of life. She has seen every version of me the past 3 years and somehow she’s loved each one. In a few months, I’ll live 9 time zones away, but will hold close to my heart the lesson she’s taught me: home has very little to do with where you are and almost everything to do with who you’re with.

One of the most frustrating things in life is meeting someone who you just long to have met sooner. I have one of those girls, and I can only imagine the trouble we would’ve gotten in together in middle school, or the dramatics we would’ve created together in high school.

Despite not knowing her from day one, she has taught me something that I don’t think I could have learned earlier anyways: my adventurous spirit was never something that needed to be harnessed. She saw my crazy ideas and raised them—an extra night in a New York snowstorm, or a round trip road trip with no sleep. She treated things I would be scared to even put in the universe, as an invitation. The most ridiculous ideas and adventures we’ve shared have led to the best stories.

She gave me the gift of realizing all those parts of myself that I had learned to apologize for (sometimes acting before thinking, being loud, saying “yolo” at least once a week) were never flaws to begin with, but were what made me…me.

Then there’s the friend who I met the way you meet a stranger you somehow already know. Being in that same study abroad group, thrown in with a bunch of unfamiliar faces, something about her instantly felt familiar and safe.

We got lucky enough to be partnered up as roommates in Paris and low and behold were tied at the hip for the rest of our semester. What’s strange about our dynamic is we have spent over 80% of our friendship being apart. But she has never let that be an excuse. Every other week or so, a letter shows up. Not a text, a physical letter that I get to grab from my mailbox, giddily carry home, and tear open and read words that she took the time to put pen to paper with.

She has taught me that showing up for those you care about has nothing to do with proximity at all—it’s about consistency. We have never had to convince each other how much we care, we have just showed up, quietly and wholeheartedly, for years.

I honestly don’t know how to end this in a way that isn’t heartbreaking and doesn’t just sound like a goodbye—but it really isn’t a goodbye. Physical distance doesn’t stand a chance against the bonds I’ve made with these incredible women, thanks to the values they have instilled in me.

If you are reading this, yes, I am going to miss you like CRAZY. But I can’t help but disrupt the melancholy with feeling overwhelmingly lucky. I spent so much of my childhood thinking I would never get a chance at this kind of friendship, let alone one that allowed me to be brave enough to say yes to crazy things like moving back to France alone. I couldn’t do anything without you, big or small, and I can’t wait to keep co-authoring our 20s together….and 30’s and 40’s etc…

Je vous aime <3

Campbell

Maybe “Drivers License” came out a couple weeks before you got your own. Maybe the line, you openly admit you're far away from healing is nearly a verbatim echo of a text from someone in your life who wasn't ready to commit. Maybe you're 21, closing in on 22, and all you can hear is how can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22. Maybe I hear it in your voice, you're smoking with your boys drops you right back into a phone call from a few autumns ago.

These are some of the songs I keep in a hyper-specific playlist—the ones where my heart skipped a beat the first time I heard them, because it felt like looking in a mirror. Or more precisely: like someone else had been looking at me inside that mirror.

The Paradox

The truth of songs like these seems completely backwards: the more specific a lyric gets, the more people it speaks to and resonates with. That precision is exactly what makes songwriters like Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, and Olivia Rodrigo so beloved. They’re able to articulate feelings none of us had quite managed to put into words ourselves. They take something universal and wring the last drop out of it, until you get these small, hard-hitting paradoxes: the specific sting of watching someone move on suspiciously fast, which Rodrigo nails in “Traitor”—ain’t it funny how you ran to her the second that we called it quits, or the quieter ache of loving someone who’s still someone else’s, which Swift captures in “illicit affairs” with an image so precise it almost hurts to picture—leave the perfume on the shelf that you picked out just for him. so you leave no trace behind. like you don’t even exist. Or the specific shame of wanting someone you shouldn’t, already replaying it before it’s happened—we’ve already done it in my head, from “Guilty as Sin?”.

That’s what I think makes these songs feel less like entertainment and more like a lifeline. Vague lyrics ask you to imagine a feeling. Specific ones hand you the evidence that this shitty situation is survivable—and that you weren’t crazy for feeling that way.

The Self-Reference Effect

The self-reference effect is a psychological phenomenon where people remember information better when they relate it to themselves. Maybe that’s why after one listen of Suki Waterhouse’s new song “Almost” on her new album, “Loveland”, which came out a week ago, I already have it memorized and can sing it without missing a beat everytime. It’s because her articulating how the fine line between resisting and giving in to a relationship that’s probably not that great for you has the grayest area and usually is going to end with a regret either way. This phenomenon explains why that song in particular gets encoded, saved, and added to a permanent playlist in my brain, because I can remember myself in a backseat with someone feeling the urge to give in to a forbidden romance…but didn’t…and I don’t think I’ll ever know whether it was the right choice. Addin the timing of it all: hearing the "right" song during the "right" heartbreak? The self-referencing effect goes into overdrive.

It’s not always about me when these moments happen though. Like most girls my age, I refreshed my Apple Music at 9pm sharp last month to listen to You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love, right when it came out. When I got to the 9th track, nothing in my own love life lined up, but I felt the same creeping feeling of familiarity and ache as I realized how descriptive it was to one of my best friend’s situation with her boyfriend. My dear friend is cool and forgiving and always seems to take what he’s giving…but Rodrigo says the quiet part out loud—that she knows she had to beg just to get some bare minimum reassurance, but takes it anyway because losing him feels worse. I've watched my friend do that exact calculation in real time, so listening to it felt just as gutting as watching her live it.

Two of the women best at this—Gracie Abrams and Olivia Rodrigo—have been asked about the phenomenon of clinging to lyrics (as artists and fans of others) in interviews. Abrams said that with a songwriter like Joni Mitchell, you can place yourself right inside the moment she's in, and that feeling close to an artist through their writing changes your relationship to everything they make afterward. Rodrigo's reply was even more direct: she said she falls in love with artists, not songs. That's the self-referencing effect turned into a relationship—not just "this lyric is about me," but "this person sees me," which is a much harder thing to let go of.

I also think this explains the frustration that can come with being a fan of people like Gracie, Olivia, and Taylor. People are constantly asking why you like them, why you listen to that music and all I can say is that it’s like a drug I think. It certainly isn’t the only music I listen to and it’s definitely saved for certain moods but listening to the eloquence these talented artists have that also seem to be excerpts from my brain—why would I deprive myself of that connection?

The Cultural Angle

“This is literally me” is something unavoidable at this point when scrolling on any platform. The ability to “clip” segments of songs/videos and then upload a reaction/analysis to said segment has allowed for the flourishing of sharing why something meant something to you—but for the first time—very publicly.

People have been underlining lines in books, making mixtapes with a common theme for ages. But it’s so constant now. The hyper-specific playlist used to be a private thing you kept to yourself or a loved one. Now it's a Notes app screenshot, a story, a whole identity/aesthetic you can claim and elaborate on in public without ever writing a sentence of your own. Parasocial relationships come big into play here—we don't know Gracie Abrams or Taylor Swift, but hearing them name something so precisely feels like being known. It's easy to mistake she gets it for she gets me.

That’s the real cultural shift here. Music isn’t better or more relatable than it was decades ago, there’s just more ways to reproduce parts of it that give meaning to a feeling we have or have had, and are saved the harder work of sitting with those feelings and putting words to them on our own.

I still don't know if that's comforting or a little strange. Probably both. Either way, next time a lyric catches me off guard, I'll take it as proof—again—that someone else has been standing in that mirror too.

The only catch is that my client is a girl I’ve never met.

On top of that, I don’t really know what she’s going to need. So far, all I’ve gathered is that she likes ‘60s and ‘90s silhouettes and is deeply afraid of being underdressed on a day that starts with running errands and somehow ends with meeting interesting people, drinking wine on a patio, and saying yes to plans she never saw coming.

She’s also incredibly stubborn and refuses to believe that packing three pairs of tall boots might be an unreasonable use of suitcase space. Frankly, she’s a nightmare to shop for. I’ve tried reminding her she still lives in Nevada. She doesn’t seem particularly interested. Instead, she keeps giving me increasingly specific assignments.

Find a white cotton blouse that looks like it has a story behind it, but absolutely cannot wrinkle.

Find the dress that’s appropriate for teaching sixteen-year-olds during the day but still looks acceptable if someone invites me for drinks afterwards.

Find shoes capable of surviving cobblestone streets but also looking good outside a café.

And under no circumstances are the Frye boots staying behind.

The pressure is unbelievable. She’s given me three months to build an entire wardrobe around a social calendar that doesn’t even exist yet. Every purchase comes with a hypothetical scenario. What if I get invited somewhere nice? What if I decide to spend the weekend in Italy? What if I accidentally meet the love of my life at a bookstore? What if someone says, ‘We’re all going to dinner after this,’ and I’m wearing the wrong pants?

Meanwhile, I’m standing in my childhood bedroom surrounded by moving boxes, photographing old clothes for Depop, wondering whether one person can reasonably dedicate a quarter of a suitcase to shoes while simultaneously trying to predict the lifestyle of someone who technically doesn’t exist yet.

The more I work for her, the more demanding she becomes.

Apparently every Saturday deserves dressing for the possibility that it won't stay ordinary. That a trip to the market might turn into dinner. That a train ride might become a friendship. That saying yes is easier when you're already wearing the right shoes.

I’ve considered reminding her she’ll also be grocery shopping, doing laundry, and spending an alarming amount of time trying to understand French bureaucracy. She has politely asked me not to concern myself with those details.

She’s also become unbelievably opinionated. Apparently we’re investing in pieces now. I don’t remember voting on this. She keeps talking about “cost per wear” and “timeless investments.” Somewhere along the way she decided we were above polyester. She checks fabric tags now. Every purchase comes with an interrogation. Would Jane Birkin wear this? Can you picture this on a train? Will we still love this in five years?

Last week she talked me into getting rid of jeans I’ve loved since high school because they “ew” have a rip in the knee. I’ve stopped arguing. She usually wins. Every time I find something she’d be obsessed with, something else has to go. One linen pant in, one college sweatshirt out. It’s becoming less of a shopping habit and more of a trade agreement.

I don’t even question it anymore. The blouse goes in the suitcase. The extra boots go into storage. Another tunic mysteriously appears in my closet.

Last week I finally asked her to just describe a single outfit. One look. Something concrete I could work with. She didn’t hesitate.

I have to admit, it was good. Annoyingly good.

“—And the Frye boots.”

I reminded her about the weight limit. She looked at me as though the weight limit was my problem, not hers. I checked the airline policy. She had already checked the airline policy

.

The boots are coming.

I’m beginning to suspect she’s been styling me all along.

The man standing outside Bates Hall certainly looked older than she remembered.

His hair was shorter. His shoulders broader. His clothes were far less dorky than anything he would have worn growing up.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

“Penny?” he asked.

And suddenly she was thirteen again, riding bikes around the neighborhood during lockdown, arguing over whether to rewatch National Treasure or Star Wars for the hundredth time.

When Penny was born, Steven was already nine months old. Their mothers liked to joke that those nine months were the longest they had ever been apart.

Every photo album told the same story. Penny and Steven covered in mud or paint. Dressed as Percy Jackson or Harry Potter characters. Forcing their families to sit through elaborate living-room productions nobody had asked for.

“You live in Boston now?” Penny asked.

Steven laughed.

“I’ve lived in Boston for fifteen years.”

“Right.”

“Still writing?”

She looked down at her Moleskine with various messy jottings.

“Trying to.”

The first time Penny realized Steven wasn’t just hers anymore was sophomore year.

People were starting to know and love him for the same reasons she had for over a decade.

At the time, Penny would have told you she knew Steven better than anyone.

Which was true, in the way childhood friendships are true.

She knew his coffee order before he did. Knew which teachers he secretly liked and which movies he pretended not to cry during. Knew every version of him that had ever existed.

What she didn’t know—what she never thought to ask—was what it felt like to be standing next to her.

Not because she didn’t care.

Because it never occurred to her that the experience of their friendship might be different for him.

“So,” Steven said, settling into the chair across from her, “what are you doing in Boston?”

Penny shrugged.

“Just here for the weekend.”

“Vacation?”

She laughed.

“Not exactly.”

“Work?”

“A little.”

“That sounds mysterious.”

“I’m a columnist. Everything sounds mysterious when I describe it.”

Steven smiled.

The smile caught her off guard. It was the same one. Older somehow, but exactly the same.

“So what’s the real reason?”

Without thinking, Penny twisted the engagement ring on her finger.

Steven’s eyes followed the movement.

Silence.

“My fiancé plays professional baseball. He’s got a game here this weekend.”

Steven blinked.

“You’re kidding.”

“I know.”

For the first time since he’d sat down, Steven looked genuinely speechless.

When they were sixteen, Penny had announced she was moving to New York right after graduation.

“I’ll get a tiny apartment with exposed brick,” she told Steven as they sat on the roof of his parents’ garage. “And I’ll write for a magazine.”

“You’ve never even been to New York.”

“That’s not the point.”

Steven looked up from the history book balanced on his knees.

“What’s the point then?”

“The point is that I belong there.”

Steven rolled his eyes.

“You belong here.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You literally know everyone here.”

“Exactly.”

“Well what about me? Maybe I like knowing everyone.”

“You don’t,” Penny said immediately.

Steven opened his mouth, then closed it again.

She was already talking and threw a Goldfish cracker at his head.

Years later, she wouldn’t remember what else happened that day, or what movie they ended up watching.

She would remember Steven catching the cracker without looking.

“So… your fiancé’s a ballplayer.”

“Apparently.”

“And you ended up in New York.”

Penny couldn’t hold back her smile.

“I guess I did.”

The first time Steven cancelled plans, Penny thought nothing of it.

The second time, she noticed.

The third time, she sat on her bedroom floor staring at the text message longer than she should have.

Sorry. Going to Jacob’s instead.

That was it.

No explanation.

Penny tossed her phone onto her comforter and told herself she was being dramatic.

Steven was allowed to have other friends.

He was allowed to do things without her.

She knew that.

Still, when she would see him at school and he had stories and memories to share where she wasn’t present, a new feeling started to stir in her gut.

Not jealousy. Not exactly.

Just the uncomfortable realization that for the first time in her life, she wasn’t automatically included.

And she hated how much it hurt.

Steven looked out one of the library windows.

“Do you ever go back?”

“Home?” Penny asked.

“Yeah.”

A short silence passed.

“Sometimes. My parents aren’t even there anymore, so it doesn’t really feel like going back to anything. More like visiting a museum of who I used to be.”

“I know that feeling.”

“Do you?” she said. “I feel like you never left.”

“I left plenty.”

“Not the way I mean.”

Steven didn’t answer that. He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve instead, a habit she recognized instantly, like finding an old photograph of a stranger and realizing it was someone she used to know better than herself.

By junior year, Steven had a group chat Penny wasn’t in.

She found out by accident, the way these things always seem to surface—a screenshot a mutual friend forwarded without thinking, a joke referencing a night she hadn’t been part of.

She didn’t say anything. She told herself it didn’t matter.

It mattered.

What she couldn’t explain to anyone, not even herself at the time, was that it wasn’t really about the group chat. It was about the math of it. Fourteen years of being each other’s default person, and somehow there was now a version of his life with a whole roster of insiders, and she had been quietly, invisibly, demoted to one of many.

She never said any of this to him. She just got quieter every time he brought up a name she didn’t recognize, until eventually he stopped noticing she’d gone quiet at all.

“You said your fiancé has a game this weekend,” Steven said. “Who against?”

Penny hesitated. There was something in the way he asked—too precise, too professional, the question of a man who thought in matchups.

“Why?”

“No reason. I just—I work in baseball now. Sort of. I do the numbers side of it.”

Penny stared at him.

“You hated baseball.”

“I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t get it. Someone explained it to me once. The math of it. Made a lot more sense after that.”

Something in her chest went very still.

“Who explained it to you?”

Steven looked at her for a long moment.

“You know who.”

Steven hated baseball before he ever understood it. That was the part nobody believed.

It wasn’t the game itself. It was everything that came along with it. Saturday mornings on the couch with his dad and his brother, the three of them lined up like a panel of judges, his brother narrating every play like he’d been born already knowing the rules. His dad would lean forward during the close plays, elbows on his knees, fully present in a way Steven only ever saw at games. Never at the dinner table. Never during Steven’s science fair.

So Steven decided, somewhere around age nine, that baseball, and sports in general, were the enemy. They just constantly reminded him of the kind of son his brother was, and he wasn’t.

Penny refused to accept this.

“It’s not about catching the ball,” she told him one June afternoon, dragging him by the sleeve to his brother’s Little League game even though he protested the whole walk there. “It’s about everything happening before the ball even gets there. Where everyone’s standing. What they’re guessing. It’s basically just a math problem wearing a uniform.”

“That sounds like something you made up to make me feel better.”

“Maybe. Does it matter if it works?”

They watched his brother take the field.

“Dad and Ethan always have something to talk about after games.”

Penny followed his gaze.

“So talk to them.”

Steven smiled.

“That’s not really what I mean, I just don’t have anything like that”

“Why not?”

He looked toward the bleachers.

“Never mind.”

Penny nudged his shoulder.

“You’re overthinking it.”

She said it so confidently that he almost believed her.

Penny had always believed the best possible version of people.

His parents. Teachers. Coaches.

Him.

Maybe she was right.

Or maybe she just couldn’t imagine a world where somebody wasn’t loved as loudly as she was.

Penny was eighteen the last time she and Steven spent a whole day together before everything changed for good.

They didn’t know it was the last day. Nobody ever does.

They’d driven to the lake they’d swam in as kids, with a bag of gas station snacks and listened to Wildflowers by Tom Petty—the only CD out of Steven’s collection of heavy rock Penny would tolerate, and the only format of audio Steven’s old truck had. Steven recited a fact about the bird circling above them—something about wingspan, something only he would know—and Penny laughed so hard she had to set down her drink.

“You’re going to be insufferable when you’re famous on Jeopardy for knowing useless facts,” she said jokingly.

“They’re not useless. You just don’t have a use for them yet. And what if I’m not famous?”

“Then you’ll work for me when I’m famous.”

Steven laughed.

“And what if I don’t want to work for you?”

“You’ll change your mind.”

“What if I don’t?”

Penny grinned.

“You always do.”

Steven smiled, but looked away towards the lake. For a moment, he let himself wonder what would happen if he didn’t.

“So you really do this for a living,” Penny said slowly. “Baseball. Numbers.”

“Yeah.”

“Because of something I said to you. Once.”

Steven shrugged, but it wasn’t a casual shrug. It was the shrug of someone trying to make something enormous look small enough to survive saying out loud.

“It stuck with me.”

“Fifteen years, Steven.”

“I know how long it’s been.”

“Do you?” she asked. “Because it doesn’t feel like you do. It feels like you walked away from me and just... kept walking. And then I find out you built your entire career on the one piece of advice I gave you before you disappeared.”

Steven didn’t look away from her this time.

“I didn’t disappear.”

“You absolutely disappeared.”

“I stepped back. There’s a difference.”

“Not to the person it happens to.”

Penny was sixteen the first time she noticed Steven choosing someone else.

She’d come by his house to drop off a sweatshirt he’d left at hers, let herself in the side door the way she always had, and paused in the hallway when she heard his voice through the half-open door of his room. He was on the phone, laughing about weekend plans she hadn’t heard about. Something about a girl from his chemistry class who was going to be there. Something about how it was easier without Penny around, because girls actually noticed him when she wasn’t standing next to him, soaking up the room the way she always did without even trying.

It wasn’t anything dramatic. He didn’t say it unkindly. He didn’t even say her name, not really. He didn’t have to.

She set the sweatshirt on the kitchen counter and let herself back out, and on the walk home she told herself it didn’t mean anything. People wanted to be noticed. People wanted a version of themselves that didn’t have a permanent asterisk attached. That was normal. That was supposed to be fine.

She believed that, mostly, for about another year.

“Why are you really here, Steven?”

“I told you. I work here. I study in this library because—”

“No,” she said, cutting him off, her voice sharper than she meant it to be. “Why are you sitting across from me right now. After everything.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

“I didn’t know you were engaged.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.”

Penny closed her book.

A week after Penny broke up with her high school boyfriend, Steven texted her out of nowhere.

Why’d you have to hurt him like that? He’s moving in with me by the way so you probably shouldn’t just be stopping by.

Penny read it twice, sitting on the floor of her room with her back against the bed, and felt something in her chest go cold.

Hurt him? she wrote back. I didn’t do anything to him. We just didn’t work, Steven. That’s allowed to happen.

He’s a mess right now. You know how he gets.

Nobody dies from getting dumped Steven.

You’re unbelievable, Pen.

She stared at the screen for a long moment, waiting for the rest of it. The part where he asked how she was doing. The part where it occurred to him that she might also be a mess right now, that two people break up and both of them are usually wrecked by it, not just one.

It didn’t come.

I’m not okay either, if you’re wondering, she finally typed.

I know. I just think you don’t always see how things land on other people.

What is that supposed to mean?

It means you’ve never had to think about anyone else’s feelings before yours, Penny. Maybe just try it for once.

She read it three times before it fully landed, and when it did, it landed like a slap. Fourteen years, and he’d never once said anything like that to her. Not when she was being inconsiderate, not when she deserved it, not ever—because it had never been true. And it still wasn’t. He knew that. She could feel him knowing it even through the screen, the words already typed and sent before he’d let himself think them through.

Wow, was all she wrote back.

Then started to add: That’s not what I—

Save it.—the incoming message interrupting her thoughts.

She didn’t cry right away. She just sat there, phone face-down on the carpet, turning the sentence over and over, looking for the version of it that didn’t mean what it so clearly meant.

This was Steven. Not some guy she’d dated for two years. Not some friend from dance or a coworker she liked well enough. This was the boy who had existed in literally every version of her life since before she had memories of her own. Fourteen years of him being the one person she never had to explain herself to, and he had just told her, in writing, that she was the inconsiderate one—that her ex got to be the one who was suffering, and she didn’t even get the benefit of the doubt.

He never apologized for it. Not that week, not that year.

Steven thought he had a choice to make. Choosing her ex cost him nothing. Choosing her, fully and out loud, risked everything he wasn’t sure he could survive losing.

He didn’t know how to say any of that at seventeen. So instead he said the cruelest, most untrue thing he could think of, and let her carry it for fifteen years instead.

She never brought it up again. Not because it stopped mattering—it mattered more than almost anything else that year—but because some part of her understood that asking him to explain it out loud would mean hearing him confirm it on purpose, and she wasn’t ready to lose him twice in the same conversation.

“Why did you do it?” she said plainly. “Why did my best friend decide some guy he’d known for two years was more important than 2 decades of our friendship? Why did you choose him?”

Steven looked down at the table between them like the answer might be written somewhere on its surface, fifteen years overdue.

“I didn’t choose him over you, Penny.”

She let out a short, disbelieving laugh.

“Yes you did. It might have been a long time ago, but I remember it. I remember exactly what it felt like.”

“No,” he said, more firmly now, but not louder. “I chose not to fight you for a place I didn’t think I deserved to keep.”

That stopped her.

“What does that even mean?”

Steven exhaled like the next part had been sitting in his chest for half his life, waiting for someone to finally ask the right question.

“It means I spent years watching you walk into every room and become the center of it without trying. Watching people pull you in five directions at once. And somewhere in there I decided that eventually you’d outgrow me too, and I figured it would hurt less if I left first instead of waiting around for you to do it.”

“That’s not true.”

“It felt true.”

Penny’s voice dropped, quieter than before, and somehow that was worse than if she’d shouted.

“So you punished me for being loved.”

“I didn’t mean to. I was just terrified of someday being someone you didn’t need to come back to.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. The library hummed faintly around them, indifferent to the fifteen years finally cracking open between two people at a small wooden table.

“You were the only person I ever told anything that actually mattered to,” Steven said. “And somewhere along the way I convinced myself that wasn’t fair to you. That I was just dumping my whole life on you instead of letting you have a childhood that didn’t revolve around me.”

“That’s what you decided,” Penny said. “Without telling me.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

Her jaw tightened.

“And you didn’t think I got a say in that?”

Steven looked at her for a long second before answering.

“I thought maybe you didn’t want one.”

Penny didn’t say anything to that. She didn’t need to. Her face said enough.

“You were always so easy to love,” Steven said. “Teachers. Coaches. Friends. My own family liked talking to you more than they liked talking to me, and I know how that sounds, but growing up in my house felt like constantly being graded against someone. And then there was you, walking into every room like it already belonged to you.”

“That’s not how it felt,” she said quietly. “Not from where I was standing.”

“I know that now,” he said. “But I was seventeen, and it felt like your whole life was speeding ahead of mine, and I thought eventually I’d just be the thing you grew out of. So I left first. I thought if I made you choose, I’d lose. So I decided to lose quietly instead.”

“I would have chosen you,” Penny said, barely above a whisper. “Over anything. You were more important to me than all of it.”

That landed harder than anger would have.

“I know,” Steven said.

“That’s the worst part. I know that now.”

Silence settled between them. Not comfortable. Not clean.

But honest, for the first time since they were seventeen.

“For years I thought maybe I’d imagined the whole thing,” Penny said finally. “Made us bigger in my head than we actually were. Because people don’t just leave their person like that. Not for no reason.”

“You didn’t imagine it.”

She nodded once, and there were tears in her eyes now that she didn’t bother hiding.

“I think I remembered being abandoned,” she said slowly. “And you remembered watching me slowly leave first.”

Neither of them said anything else.

Because it was true.

And somehow, that made it worse.

And better.

At the same time.

This is a short excerpt from a much longer story. If you'd like to see what happens next for Penny and Steven, let me know in the comments. I might just keep writing it. <3

We had wandered into an airport shop looking for gum. Somehow we left carrying copies of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and no gum. Armed with a blue ink pen I found at the bottom of my bag, we claimed a pair of seats nowhere near our gate and got to work on the crossword puzzles. For the next hour, we debated clues, second-guessed answers, and were completely unaffected by the people and devices around us.

By the time we finally boarded, instead of spending the first twenty minutes deciding what to watch, checking messages I already checked in the terminal, and scrolling through apps that aren't even loading, I just kept reading the newspaper. I flipped through the Arts section. Read articles I normally would have ignored. Looked at photographs. Followed stories all the way to their conclusions.

At one point, I discovered the LA Times had run a feature on my favorite baseball player, so when I got home I cut out the photo and pinned it to my cork board. I really like that about physical newspapers and magazines: when you're done with it, it still exists. You can fold it, save it, underline something, tear out a photograph, leave it on your kitchen table for three days. It becomes part of your life in a way a screenshot never does.

Tangible things like that have been on my mind a lot lately because in a month, my family is moving. Everything I own is currently spread across the floor of my childhood bedroom. This past week, I spent roughly five hours a day sorting through twenty-one years of physical evidence.

Birthday cards. Old journals. Various accolades. Ticket stubs. Notes from friends. Notes from a high school boyfriend promising our high school romance would last forever (lol). The strangest thing about the whole packing process is how specific some memories remain. I don’t remember every soccer game I ever played, but I could tell you the lineup of one game 6 years ago when we beat our rivals. I don’t remember every single birthday party but I can vividly imagine sitting on this same exact floor the night of my 16th birthday, so excited and sure that my life would truly begin the second I graduated. Now I’m sitting on that same floor feeling strangely similar.

Sorting through these memories—high school in particular—reminded me how big of a role sports played in my life. If you asked anyone who knew me then, athlete would probably have been one of the first three words they used to describe me. If you asked anyone in my life now, it probably wouldn’t even make the list.

My best friends didn’t see me score a goal from thirty-five yards out with my left foot against the team we hadn’t scored on in 3 years. My coworkers have no idea I still hold the 4x100 relay record at my middle school. The people I’ll meet in France won’t know how many afternoons I spent on buses, in gyms, or under stadium lights.

I found myself sitting on my bedroom floor staring at old medals and newspaper clippings, trying to reconcile that.

For so long, being an athlete felt permanent. The kind of thing people would mention when describing me. Now all the evidence of that identity is just sitting in a cardboard box next to a homecoming queen sash and photos from graduation.

In a few months, I’m moving to France and I’ll be a stranger all over again. Every time someone asks if I'm excited, I say yes. Every time someone asks if I'm nervous, I also say yes. The people I meet there won’t know how much I loved soccer, how many hours I spent conditioning in ninety-degree weather every summer, or how convinced I was that I’d play in college before I got hurt. They’ll just know whoever gets off that plane in three months.

Which is CRAZY because I haven’t even met her yet. I have already started assigning her personality traits, though. She’s much more spontaneous than me. She’s allergic to the word no. She speaks French with ease and somehow always knows which train to take. She takes weekend trips without first opening an Excel spreadsheet. She gets invited to things. She flirts in a language she’s still learning. She comes home with a story that starts with “so there was this French guy...” and never needs much more setup than that. Most impressively, she would never spend forty-five minutes making a decision that should have taken four. Frankly, her confidence concerns me.

I do have a few requests for her, though: I’d like her to stop making decisions based entirely on how much sleep she’ll get. I’d like her to say yes to the plan that starts at 10 p.m. I’d like her to miss a train because she was busy having a conversation. I’d like her to remember that she’s 21 not 41. I'd like her to spend a little more time giving herself something to write about.

Nothing life-altering. I’m not asking her to find herself or fall madly in love or become fluent in French overnight.But if she could come home with one good dinner-party story and a slightly higher tolerance for spontaneity, I’d consider the year a success.

A handsome French man wouldn’t hurt either. Part of the appeal of moving across an ocean is that none of my situationships can come with me. I know there are more important things to think about. Visas. Housing. But still, after several years of gathering data on the American male population—and realizing an alarming number of them seem to be working from the same disappointing script—I feel qualified to begin a comparative study.

Until then, I’ll be here:

Doing crossword puzzles. Packing boxes. Preparing to give French men the benefit of the doubt.

bisous <3

campbell

It’s 10 a.m. and already 83 degrees. I have the day off, the UV at Lake Tahoe is projected to hit 10 by noon, and the Daisy Jones & The Six soundtrack is blasting through my Subaru speakers, making the thirty-minute drive to the beach feel more like five.

A few hours later, after rotating between tanning, reading, and jumping in the water, I head home with a few new freckles and a complete sense of zen.

When I get back, my brother informs me we’re making homemade pizzas for dinner and that friends are coming over. I take a cold shower, slather on coconut-scented after-sun lotion, and throw on a white tank top, low-rise gauchos, and, of course, my Rainbows.

After a perfect evening of pesto, tomatoes, wine, and retelling the same stories for the hundredth time, we say goodnight to our friends and my sister and I go for a walk around the park—just as the sun begins to set and everything takes on that golden glow that only seems to exist in June. We get home right as it becomes too dark to stay outside and curl up on the couch to watch Arrested Development. When a movie/show is on, I famously cannot stay awake past 9 p.m., so I drift in and out for a few episodes with the comforting knowledge that tomorrow is Saturday.

My point is this: this was last Friday.

And yes, I bought a coffee. But the day I would happily classify as perfect was otherwise practically free.

Lately, it feels like every corner of the internet is trying to convince us that a good summer requires a shopping cart. A new wardrobe. A new skincare routine. A new hobby. A new personality.

So, as a small act of resistance against the constant pressure to optimize, upgrade, and purchase our way through the season, here are a few ways I think the cool girls are romanticizing their summers without breaking the bank:

1. Become a regular somewhere

This can be a restaurant you meet your friends at every week, a coffee shop where they know your order after a few visits, or even a stretch of beach, library corner, or walking path you return to so often it starts to feel like an extension of you. In an era where everything feels temporary, there is something incredibly chic about belonging somewhere. Not owning it. Not posting it. Just returning often enough that people definitely notice if you miss a day.

2. Bring back loitering

Okay, I’m imagining the type of loitering that New Yorkers accept will occur on their stoop, their neighbor’s stoop, and pretty much any stoop across Manhattan. Don’t go around saying Campbell told you to trespass, but I do think we should spend more time simply existing in places.

Hang out like you did when you were fourteen and nobody could drive. When the plan was literally just: The parking lot. The park. Somebody’s driveway. A random patch of grass. The destination wasn’t really the point. You were there because your friends were there. Modern society requires that every social interaction becomes an event. A reservation. A ticket. A purchase. I think summer is a good time to remember that sometimes all you need is a place to sit, some nature to look at, and a few people you like.

3. Become the friend who initiates

I know it’s not nonchalant, but that’s out anyway, right?

Stop assuming your friends are annoyed by you. Text them first. Suggest the beach. Suggest a walk. Suggest sitting on somebody’s porch for three hours talking about absolutely nothing. For reasons I do not understand, we’ve collectively decided that caring is embarrassing. That reaching out is somehow less cool than waiting around to be invited. I reject this.

Most people are far lonelier than they let on and far happier to receive a text than you think. And if nobody can make it? Great. You get to do exactly what you probably wanted to do anyway. Read your book. Go for your walk. Watch the sunset. The goal isn’t to fill every moment with company. It’s to stop acting like wanting company is something to be ashamed of.

4. Consume media from a different decade

There’s nothing like a great bad movie from the ‘90s. Or an actually great record from the ‘60s. While pop music is undeniably summer, try mixing in a few oldies here and there.

You never know what might spark inspiration or completely change the mood of an ordinary afternoon.

One of my favorite things about older music, movies, and books is how easily they can transport you somewhere else. Suddenly your trip to the grocery store feels a little more cinematic, your evening walk feels like a scene from a coming-of-age movie, and your day takes on a completely different rhythm.

At the very least, you’ll have better answers when someone asks what you’ve been listening to lately.

5. Have one weekly recurring event

This is one of my favorites because every summer seems to pass in the blink of an eye. One minute it’s June, and the next you’re wondering where all those long evenings went.

I’ve found that one of the best ways to make the season feel longer and more intentional is having a day of the week where you do the same thing with the same people.

For instance:

I’ve done Sunday dinners with old coworkers where we take turns choosing the restaurant but never miss a Sunday. I’ve done Tuesday morning walks with a friend where we meet at the same coffee shop and walk the same four miles every week.

There is something surprisingly grounding about having a standing date on the calendar. It gives your weeks shape. It gives you something to look forward to. And years later, you’ll remember the ritual long after you’ve forgotten where you ate or what you talked about.

6. Try to watch at least 4 sunsets a week

I get it. Sometimes you’re already inside and maybe it’s cold. Sometimes you’re busy. Sometimes the last thing you want to do is stop what you’re doing and drive to a lookout point or walk out on your street just to watch the sky change colors.

But summer sunsets are one of the best things this world has to offer.

There are only so many evenings each year where the sun seems to take its time leaving. The air cools down, the light softens, and for twenty minutes the entire world looks a little more beautiful than it did before.

I think part of what makes summer sunsets feel so special is that they ask absolutely nothing of you. You can’t optimize them. You can’t purchase a better one. You can’t speed them up or save them for later. The only requirement is that you pay attention. Take those twenty minutes. Sit on a beach. Pull over at a viewpoint. Walk around your neighborhood. Just look and admire.

7. Carry a notebook

Not because you’re trying to write the next great American novel, but because life is far more interesting than we give it credit for.

• Jot down the outfit you saw on a woman at the farmers market that you immediately wanted to recreate.

• Sketch the bookstore display that made you stop in your tracks.

• Write down the quote you overheard at the coffee shop that was too good to trust to memory.

• Make note of a restaurant patio you want to come back to, a flower you’ve never seen before, or a conversation topic that would make a great article someday.

I think journalists, artists, and generally interesting people all have one thing in common: they pay attention.

A notebook is simply a place to store all the little things that would otherwise drift away by the time you get home. And if nothing else, you’ll end the summer with a collection of observations that belong entirely to you. In an age of screenshots and saved posts, there’s something incredibly satisfying about having your own physical, handwritten archive of things you found beautiful, funny, strange, or worth remembering.

8. Read books in public

Not in a performative way. Not just so strangers will think you’re intellectual. Just because reading becomes more approachable when it becomes part of your everyday life.

One of the worst feelings is having ten minutes to kill between plans and realizing you don’t have a book with you. Those little pockets of time add up faster than we think.

Bring a book to the beach. To the coffee shop. To the park. Read a chapter while waiting for a friend. Read a few pages before ordering lunch. Let reading exist outside of your bedtime routine.

One of my favorite things about reading in public is how the stories begin to intertwine with your own memories. Years later, you won’t just remember the book. You’ll remember reading it in a beach chair with sunscreen on your arms or in a coffee shop on a Tuesday morning when you had nowhere else to be.

9. Discover your signature drink

As I get older, the more I care about a bev. Think Carrie Bradshaw and her cosmopolitan. Lorelei Gilmore with her coffee.

There's something undeniably cool about being associated with a beverage. I dare you to pick a drink for the summer that you’ll spend the next three months evangelizing to anyone who will listen.

If you’re running late and someone orders it for you before you arrive? Iconic. If a bartender sees you walk in and starts making it? Even better.

10. Create your perfect walking route

Instead of hyper-fixating on meals, I hyper-fixate on walking routes. I will walk the exact same loop every day for three months straight, and then one day I suddenly can’t stand the sight of it. I literally have to find a new one or risk dying of boredom.

But before that inevitable burnout hits, there is something incredibly satisfying about having your route. Find a trail, neighborhood loop, beach path, or collection of side streets that feels good to walk. Bonus points if it includes a nice view, a shady section for hot days, or somewhere you can stop and sit for a minute.

The best routes also have something you can keep track of over time. On one of my old routes, I watched the leaves slowly change color throughout the season. Maybe yours has a construction project you get to see come together in real time. Maybe it’s a lake whose water levels rise and fall. Maybe it’s a garden that seems to produce new flowers every week.

I think one of the great joys of walking the same route over and over is that you start noticing things other people miss. You become oddly knowledgeable about a very small corner of the world.

11. Create the ultimate summer playlist

Every summer deserves a soundtrack.

Not a playlist with 600 songs that you never actually listen to. A real soundtrack. The twenty or thirty songs that become so intertwined with the season that hearing them six months later instantly transports you back.

Mine usually end up being a strange mix of old classics, songs I’ve loved for years, and one or two tracks that completely hijack my personality for three months.

The beautiful thing about music is that it preserves memories in a way almost nothing else can. Years from now, you may not remember a random Tuesday in July. But the second that one song comes on, you’ll remember exactly how the air felt, who you were with, and what life looked like that summer.

AKA a time capsule you can dance to.

12. Write Letters

need I say more?

I know none of this is groundbreaking and you’ve probably already heard it on a wellness podcast but I guess that’s kind of my point.

Get off the Aritzia sale page. Stop treating Target like a recreational activity. Go breathe some fresh air. Get a little sunburned. Stay outside longer than you planned. Spend unscheduled, random, messy time with the people in your life who don’t care how expensive your car was.

The best parts of summer have never been available for purchase.

So here’s to a 2026 summer of being frugal but extremely present. Of sunsets and playlists and books with sand stuck in the pages. Of walks that take longer than expected and conversations that stretch past bedtime.

May we spend less money and pay more attention.

xoxo,

campbell

You’re my whole life”, he says. “I would never be happy again.

I start to object but he puts a finger to my lips. “It’s different for you.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be hard. But there are other people—

—“Hey.”

I look up from my book. Leaning against the bar next to me is that guy from marketing last year who I’m almost certain gave a presentation titled “Why Pickleball Is the Future of Networking.”

“Hi?” I say, not fully committing to my bookmark yet in case I can still escape this interaction.

“Did we have class together last semester? Mondays at four?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

"Dang," he laughs. "Why didn't I partner up with you for the project? You're obviously smart"—he gestures toward my copy of Catching Fire—"which honestly makes the beautiful thing even more unfair."

“Well thank you, but I already had a partner. Also, we were arguing opposite sides of the case” I reply.

He seems slightly thrown off that I don’t immediately collapse from the compliment.

“Yeah haha, uh…so what are you up to now?” he asks after a pause.

“Well…I’m trying to re-learn piano. I watch birds sometimes. I read a lot. I’ve recently become strangely interested in lighthouse history. I like wandering around the city, ooh and when it rains I love watching movie adaptations and then comparing the book and film. I don’t know, everyday is different” I shrug.

He just stares at me for a few seconds.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I say. “Did you mean for money?”

“Uhh–kinda.”

“Well, I’m getting my master’s in the fall and right now I work in a bookstore.”

His face immediately relaxes.

“Oh that’s so cool,” he says. “Is that where you got the book?”

I look down at my book.

“No,” I say. “I’ve had this since I was twelve. I just keep it in my bag because it’s one of my favorites and I read it when I’m bored.”

Another long pause.

“Well, what do you do when you’re bored?” I quiz him.

He laughs a little.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m not really ever that bored.”

“What do you mean you’re never bored?”

“I mean…” he shrugs. “I go to the gym. I answer emails, watch TV. I hang out with people. I’m usually doing something.”

Something about that answer makes me strangely sad.

Not because any of those things are bad, obviously. But because he says it as though boredom is something to avoid at all costs. Like every empty moment needs to be optimized or filled before his brain has the chance to wander off somewhere unexpected.

Meanwhile, I’ve just spent an hour and a half rereading Catching Fire because some part of me apparently never evolved past age twelve when it comes to Peeta Mellark.

I don’t know. One of us seems to be having significantly more fun.

And kids, that’s how I met your father.

Just kidding. A man who needed every moment of his life to be productive and a woman who keeps a dystopian YA fiction in her purse at age twenty-one were probably never going to make it.

When did boredom become so unfashionable? Younger me would be severely disappointed. If it weren’t for boredom, my friends and I never would have choreographed entire dances to every song from Hairspray or learned how to fold cootie catchers or spent hours making up fake reality shows for our Barbies.

Nowadays, silence and mind-wandering are treated like personal failures. Why just sweep the floor when you could sweep the floor while wearing a face mask and listening to a podcast about investing and have a baseball game on in the background for “noise”? Why sit and talk to somebody at dinner, and learn more about them when you could instead just show each other 15 second videos that made you laugh that day?

The death of boredom will eventually become the death of curiosity, which will become the death of individuality. Because if nobody ever allows their mind to wander off unsupervised anymore, how are people supposed to develop original thoughts, strange little passions, or personalities beyond whatever the algorithm handed them that week?

Nobody writes great novels because they mastered inbox zero. Nobody has chemistry with someone who treats all free time like a networking opportunity. Nobody falls in love while efficiently optimizing their Google Calendar.

That’s why boredom feels so sexy to me now. Not in a drooling-and-staring-at-the-wall kind of way, but in the way where you finish your responsibilities for the day and instead of immediately searching for another task to optimize, your brain starts wandering somewhere unexpected. You start fidgeting with something. You suddenly want to learn how to paint. Or memorize constellations. Or research the history of lighthouses for no reason other than the fact that your curiosity wandered there naturally.

I also think we forget that boredom is secretly responsible for a shocking percentage of human culture.

One day Andrew Wyeth looked at a field and saw an entire painting. Mary Oliver went for enough walks that generations of women now carry her poems around in tote bags. Somewhere in Portland, a teenager got bored enough to start messing around with chord progressions and eventually Elliott Smith wrote "Between the Bars."

Without boredom, there is no art, no mistakes, and therefore no intrigue. Writers need boredom for clarity. Artists need boredom for ideas. And children need boredom to figure out who they are.

Imagine having grown up in a world where every quiet moment was immediately filled with screens, noise, schedules, stimulation, content. When would you have used your imagination? When would you have invented that game you and your siblings played for a decade straight? When would you have learned how to exist alone with your own thoughts for a while?

You do not accidentally become an interesting person without a little boredom first.

And maybe that’s why I find it so attractive in adulthood too.

Because the older I get, the less impressed I am by people who are constantly optimizing themselves and the more drawn I am to people who clearly have an inner life.

People who are great at instruments they'll never perform professionally. People who can identify birds or trees. People who disappear for six hours because they got distracted researching the Salem Witch Trials or perfecting a banana bread recipe.

Boredom itself isn’t necessarily glamorous. BUT people who know how to be bored usually know how to be curious too. And curious people tend to build richer lives, better stories, more interesting opinions, and usually, really good outfits and playlists.

So yes. I stand by it.

Being bored is sexy.

xoxo,

campbell

Listening to games in the car with the windows down. Staying up too late when they go to extra innings. Planning entire vacations around Dodgers tickets. Baseball has quietly threaded itself through almost every stage of my life. And this May, in the middle of a very confusing season of my own, I found myself needing all of it more than usual.

Another constant for this time of year is that I swear everyday, I spend the first 10 minutes of my morning sneezing. I don’t understand how I haven’t built up an immunity to seasonal allergies after living in the northern Nevada desert for most of my life, but every Spring without fail, the second the cottonwood, and various brushes begin to bloom I am a complete mess. It’s as though my immune system thinks pollen is a Victorian-era toxin and responds with immediate hysteria.

Despite my ongoing biological war against the season of spring, May was quite wonderful.

I just got back from an LA trip with my dear friend for her birthday. Naturally, upon landing, we went straight to the beach. The Strand at Manhattan Beach truly never fails to take my breath away, and this trip in particular also took the soles of my feet away.

I’m trying to become a light packer, and since our trip was less than 48 hours total, I managed to fit everything into my giant red Kate Spade tote. Naturally, this meant there was absolutely no room for an extra pair of shoes. So, my tried-and-true Rainbow flip flops ended up enduring six miles of the Manhattan Beach Strand.

Somehow the beauty of the endless Pacific and the Santa Monica skyline distracted me from the fact that I was essentially sanding the bottoms of my feet down in real time. I didn’t fully register the damage until we got home and I realized I could barely walk. #worthit

The main reason for our trip however, was to utilize her birthday present and go to the Rockies @ Dodgers game on Tuesday night. Over the years of our friendship, I have successfully sucked Ally into the Dodgers fandom, and now her blood is just as blue as mine.

I always kind of feel like I’m on another planet whenever I’m at Dodger Stadium. It’s just a different level of joy that runs in my family. The culmination of memories I’ve made there, my weirdly intense passion for baseball logistics and traditions, the sunset over the palm trees, the organ music, the collective emotional instability of Dodgers fans — it all feels strangely sacred to me. Plus, my favorite player, Kiké Hernández, was making his season debut after being on the IL all year, which only added to the emotional significance of the evening.

Something about Tuesday night felt extra magical though. Ally and I kept looking at each other and saying, “Why have I literally never been happier?”

As I’ve rambled about in previous articles, I’m in a very uncertain stage of life right now. I have proven to be anything but above the classic post-grad identity crisis and instead am fully in the trenches of it. I’ve been waitlisted, rejected, uncertain, and on top of all that, my family is moving to Europe in less than two months.

But for nine innings, none of that really mattered.

Something about being at the stadium makes my future feel quieter. Maybe it’s because baseball is so ritualistic and predictable in a comforting way. There will always be a first pitch at 7:10. There will always be kids begging for foul balls and somebody keeping score on paper and a collective groan after a strikeout. Life can feel completely unstable, but baseball somehow never does.

There really are not many things in life I’ve loved consistently for that long. Entire phases of my life have come and gone: different schools, different friends, different plans for my future, different versions of myself entirely. But somehow, every summer, Dodger baseball is still there waiting for me in the exact same way.

So seeing #8 back on the field honestly felt strangely emotional. Maybe because it instantly brought me back to 2014, when ten-year-old me thought Kiké was the funniest person alive and decided he was my favorite player solely based on his personality and the fact that he looked like he was having more fun than everybody else. I remember thinking that if I had played baseball, I would’ve wanted to be like him.

I am by no means alone in this feeling. Baseball fans, and in my opinion Dodgers fans in particular, seem to become just a more authentic and heightened version of themselves.

There’s something about hearing “I Love L.A.” blasting through the stadium speakers after a win that genuinely feels euphoric. Suddenly thousands of people in Ohtani jerseys are practically skipping through the parking lot, strangers are high-fiving each other like lifelong friends, and fully grown adults are leaning out of car windows screaming “LET’S GO DODGERS” into the night air.

I think that’s one of the reasons I love baseball so much. No, I never played. And no, I’ll never truly know what it feels like to be on that field. But after loving this team for most of my life, structuring summers around game schedules, memorizing walk-up songs, mourning playoff losses like personal tragedies, and feeling my mood improve the second I see Dodger blue, it’s hard not to feel emotionally connected to it all in some way.

Baseball feels uniquely human to me because it’s one of the only places left where people still allow themselves to care fearlessly. Nobody at Dodger Stadium is worried about seeming too emotional or too invested or uncool.

People are genuinely devastated by losses. And equally elated the second they hear “Baila Conmigo” start playing because they’ve basically been conditioned to expect Freddie Freeman to emerge and perform at a near-superhero level. Entire sections rise to their feet before he even steps fully into the batter’s box. Everybody believes something good is about to happen–and most of the time, it does.

In a world where everybody seems terrified of being cringe or earnest or visibly passionate about anything, baseball fans still let themselves believe wholeheartedly.

They wear lucky jerseys for weeks. They boo the 2017 Astros every time they’re up to bat no matter what team they’re on now. They talk to people they’ve never met before in aggressive detail about where they were on October 25th, 2024 when Freddie walked off Game 1.

I love how baseball hasn’t been completely overtaken by tech culture yet, and how old-fashioned traditions still feel extremely prevalent. People still keep scorecards by hand, entire families wear matching jerseys, and fans still listen to the announcers in one ear even while sitting in the stadium, as if it’s still the Vin Scully era.

It also acts as this rare place where adults can behave like kids again — in the best possible way. Grown men pacing nervously in the walkways during the ninth inning. People eating hot dogs and drinking Coke like they’re twelve years old again. Complete strangers bonding instantly over Dodgers history,

There’s just a sincerity there that feels increasingly rare in other parts of life. Everyone is unguarded, completely in the moment, and genuinely so happy to be there.

That’s why Dodger Stadium feels so comforting to me, especially lately. Not because it magically fixes uncertainty or gives me a five-year plan or stops me from spiraling about adulthood the second I leave the parking lot. But because for a few hours, surrounded by organ music, a sea of blue, and fifty thousand people caring deeply and loudly about the exact same thing, life feels surprisingly simple again.

At least until my allergies start acting up tomorrow morning.

Text messages, DMs, sending Instagram reels back and forth, replying to things hours later with “HAHAHAHA” because you forgot to answer properly the first time around. This is what a lot of modern friendship looks like now. Hell, since iOS 10, you can communicate with another human being almost entirely through tiny emotional hieroglyphics. A thumbs up. An exclamation point. A heart reaction. Sometimes entire conversations occur without a single original thought actually being typed out.

And of course I participate in this. I’m a 21-year-old girl. It’s incredibly convenient to communicate without really having to pause your life anymore. Sometimes I don’t want to think of a thoughtful response. Sometimes I’d rather just send my friends a reel assigning us book boyfriends based on our zodiac signs and call it a day. Horrifying to admit publicly, but true.

Thankfully, I think some part of me resists the idea that friendship is supposed to feel this immediate all the time. That resistance is reinforced every time I walk to my mailbox and see my name and address handwritten by somebody I love. Before I’ve even opened the envelope, we’ve already exchanged something more intimate than most people do online all day: Effort. Attention. Time.

Getting to open a physical letter makes my day instantly. I can imagine Emma’s room where she probably wrote this, and can picture her walking down the steps of her sorority house and putting it in the mail, lifting the red flag for outgoing mail. It jumpstarts my brain into taking the time out of my day to consciously miss my friend, and remember our wonderful memories together—something the text message “imy” could never accomplish.

I think that’s why participating in something people rarely do anymore—like sending letters even when you don’t need to—feels so emotionally significant. These days it’s incredibly easy to overshare, or send an emotional text you no longer even agree with ten minutes later. Having to sit with your thoughts long enough to physically write them down before presenting them to another person would probably prevent an astonishing number of unnecessary conflicts.

It can also be strangely therapeutic to sit down and reflect on your day, week, or month long enough to notice the beauty in it—things you otherwise would have rushed past without ever properly appreciating.

Reflecting before communicating is certainly a lost art, and one that requires the discipline to slow down. We are constantly talking now. Sending, forwarding, reacting, but when are we truly saying anything? Somewhere along the way, communication became more about proving availability than expressing thoughts.

By the time Emma and I write to each other, and the envelopes have spent a few days travelling across the country, enough life has happened for us to actually have something meaningful to say. Not just updates or reactions, but observations. Patterns. Thoughts we’ve carried around long enough to understand properly ourselves.

And unlike text messages that get buried beneath years of notifications and forgotten group chats, I have all our letters tucked away safely in a box. Tiny physical archives of our friendship and the people we were when we wrote them.

What a beautiful thing it is to have a stack of physical proof that, at one point in time, somebody sat down and devoted an uninterrupted stretch of their attention entirely to telling me about their life and asking about mine.

I don’t think people are meant to communicate at the speed we currently do all the time. I really don’t. There is something psychologically exhausting about being permanently reachable and expected to constantly react to one another’s lives in real time. Maybe that’s why opening a letter feels so calming to me. Nobody is demanding an immediate response. Nobody is monitoring whether I’ve “seen” it yet. The entire interaction exists outside the urgency of the internet.

So go write a letter to that friend who lives far away—or at least call them instead of sending them a GIF. Human beings were not meant to communicate exclusively through glowing rectangles. It’s time to bring back the lost art of meaningful correspondence.

xoxo, Campbell Jules

I was maybe seven or eight, and I know that sounds incredibly obvious now, but at the time it genuinely felt like my brain had cracked open a little. I became intensely aware that I would never actually know what it feels like to be someone else—to have their instincts, their interpretations, their exact version of reality. Everything I experience will always pass through my own brain first. It was probably my first real understanding of autonomy, perception, and free-will. This idea that I would always be trapped inside my own perspective definitely terrified me a little.

I think about that moment all the time now, especially during moments of conflict or confusion where I can’t understand why someone reacted differently than I would have—and unless this is secretly The Truman Show, every person on earth is indeed walking around interpreting the exact same world through completely different internal systems. Different histories, insecurities, priorities, memories, personalities.

How many conversations have I walked away from with a completely different understanding than that of my counterpart? How many people have formed versions of me in their heads that are completely skewed because of a misunderstanding? How many people do I claim to dislike because I read their confidence and intelligence as egocentrism and manipulation?

I can’t think about that part of it all for too long, I’ll get depressed and want to go solve those conundrums immediately and get to the bottom of everything—but that is not how life works.

So at some point, everyone has to swallow the hard truth that somebody is going to misunderstand you completely, yet walk away feeling certain that they’re correct.

Someone is going to remember you as cold because you were shy around them once. Someone who met you during the year when your dog died, you got dumped, and failed a class, is going to think you’re an overly emotional person forever. Someone is absolutely going to think you’re an arrogant, annoying Substack writer because they came across one article where you spoke confidently about something you understood well and then decided they had seen enough.

And the frustrating part is that none of these people are entirely wrong. That’s what I think bothers me most about perception. People rarely invent versions of you out of nowhere. Usually they just mistake a fragment for the whole thing.

But I guess the alternative would be worse.

Literature has warned us about societies like this for years. The Giver. 1984. Brave New World. Entire worlds built around the elimination of contradiction, individuality, and conflicting perception.

Maybe it’s better that somebody dislikes you for reasons you’ll never fully understand…at least it means they arrived at the conclusion themselves.

While this quote has become “cringe” as it’s used frequently by friends to help each other get over their young love tragedies–I think it’s quite relevant here.

Every young person learns at some point exactly this. You just aren’t going to be everybody’s cup of tea, even if you’re plenty kind and genuine. That can seem existential for those who thrive on being liked, but the alternative would probably be much less human.

I’m so grateful that I have this vivid memory to carry with me. It hasn’t prevented me from trying to understand exactly what everyone is thinking/doing by any means, but I think it has at least slightly changed the way I walk through the world.

Not in a spiritual/enlightened way, but it has sometimes given me the ability to walk away from something and be at peace even without “getting to the bottom of everything”. In doing so, I’ve been forced to practice accepting that truth once again: not everybody is going to understand or like me…and that’s okay!

Plus, the older I get, the less interested I am in being universally liked and far more interested I am in being understood correctly by the people who matter.

Because truly—close your eyes and imagine—how weird it would be if everybody interpreted, reacted, remembered, and loved in the same way…it would take the life out of living.

I think that’s why hyper-uniform trends are so scary to me. All power to the people who want to buy the latest trend, and do the popular workout, and follow LTKs and Linktrees so that they can duplicate their favorite celebrities’ closets. But it does just make me wonder if we’re slowly but surely moving towards a world where individuality is considered to be inconvenient and against the grain, rather than the entire point of being alive.

This is so particularly prevalent in women’s beauty standards today. Every few months the internet seems to collectively decide there is one correct way for women to look, decorate their apartments, speak, exercise, age, eat, date, and exist. And people follow it because, obviously, being understood and socially rewarded feels good. Nobody wants to feel visually or culturally “wrong.”

A world where every girl has the same face, same body, same bookshelf, same skincare routine, same aspiration to “fit in” feels a little too familiar and way too concerning. Like The Giver except everyone has a Stanley Cup and a Corepower membership.

So when I think about that little girl getting ready for school all those years ago, quietly freaking out over the realization that life would only ever be experienced through her own mind, I mentally thank her–for her curiosity, innocence, and that she understood so young how fascinating it is that every person gets their own strange little CPU they carry around for the rest of their life that nobody else will ever fully understand.

And while that used to terrify me, I think now it mostly comforts me.

Because the entire beauty of being alive is that nobody experiences the world in exactly the same way.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand where that appeal comes from.
But I do know it’s one of the most all-consuming feelings there is.

How did we get here

I always dated older guys in high school. Not because they were particularly wise. Most of them weren’t, but because they could perform that maturity. They knew how to sound certain. How to take up space without apologizing for it.

And at the time, that felt like the same thing as being emotionally advanced. Of course, they always eventually revealed themselves to be just as emotionally unformed as everyone else—just better at performing certainty.

Once I had a better grasp on who I was in college, I became convinced that if I was going to fall for someone, they had to expand me somehow. I wanted someone who would alter the way I thought, make me see myself differently, and introduce me to a version of romance that felt deeper, smarter, and more cinematic than anything I had experienced before.

Enter: a dreamy, rugged, never-married single dad who always seems like he’s having a good time. We’ll call him Mr. Big. You know at least one.

“Faded” by Suki Waterhouse has one of the funniest and condemning lyrics about being a girl in this position:

In theory, an older guy was exactly what I needed in this certain stage of life: post-serious relationship, last semester of undergrad, an abundance of future pathways waiting to be chosen.

“Have fun” everyone says, “do it for the plot” my friends concur—brushing off how unreadable and manipulative even 30-something men can be.

Sooooo I did. I let him take up space in my head in a way that never fully made sense. I convinced myself that if I just adjusted enough, was patient enough, interesting enough, unbothered enough—we would eventually click into something real.

Meanwhile, I was trying to be a full person: working, studying, keeping up appearances, and quietly managing the mental logistics of a relationship that didn’t even fully exist.

And he was doing what he did best: staying just close enough to matter.

Because the thing about men like Mr. Big is that they don’t overwhelm you. They interrupt you just often enough to stay relevant.

Intermittent Reinforcement

“Don’t get me wrong, this is a dumb question,” he texted me once.
“And you probably get this all the time, but how come you don’t have some guy locked in yet?”

We had already decided, vaguely, diplomatically—that nothing was happening between us.

But suddenly, there it was. A narrative.

A suggestion that I was someone people “should” want. A subtle rewrite of reality I didn’t ask for, but still internalized anyway. And that’s where it gets dangerous. Because I would’ve been fine. I was fine.

Until I wasn’t just a girl living her life, but a girl being evaluated in the background of someone else’s attention span.

Of course I replied politely. Of course I acted unaffected. Of course I assumed it would end there.

It didn’t.

There were the occasional texts. The random check-ins. The Instagram likes on pictures I didn’t post for him, but suddenly saw through his eyes anyway.

And I hate admitting this part, but it’s true: It felt good. Not stable or real, but good enough to confuse me.

So I’d sit there thinking: Leave. Me. Alone. And also, infuriatingly: don’t.

Because the truth is: I care. Not in a naive way, but in a very human one. I read into things because I’m wired to look for meaning in connection. I trust most everyone because that’s what I know genuine relationships demand.

The problem is that those wonderful qualities don’t protect you from people who only ever engage in half-connection.

So I was left asking myself over and over again:

Why can’t I just move on? Why can’t I unfollow him in every sense of the word? Why does something so inconsistent feel so hard to release?

Why am I still changing my hair before I go to my brother’s baseball game—just in case I run into him?

I couldn’t help but wonder…

Eventually, I searched for answers on why older men feel so appealing in the first place and hopefully for something reassuring me that I wasn’t crazy.

The usual answers show up: stability, wisdom, experience, emotional clarity, fewer games. But here’s the part I discovered that nobody ever says out loud:

Sometimes they’re not even stable at all, but they know how to turn your uncertainty into the feeling of possibility, and if you’re already in an uncertain and transitional moment of your life—graduating, moving, shifting careers, etc—that can feel like direction. Even when it isn’t.

Time to be the girl he doesn’t get to know

So if you’re here too, caught in a situationship that doesn’t quite define itself but somehow defines you, I’m not going to pretend I have a perfect lesson.

But I am starting to understand this:

Sometimes what feels like being chosen… is just being occasionally noticed by someone who was never going to stay.

The hardest part isn’t letting go of him. It’s letting go of the version of you that only existed in his attention.

The girl who waited for the text. The girl who overthought the silence. The girl who turned ambiguity into meaning because she didn’t want to admit there wasn’t any.

At some point, you have to stop trying to become the girl he might someday, finally commit to.

And you GET to start becoming the girl who exists even when he doesn’t—who he never gets the privilege to know.

Because she’s already here!!!! She’s just been waiting for you to stop performing her in someone else’s story, and finally live her in real time.

Thank you so much for reading.

xoxo, Campbell Jules

Also there was maybe one day of April showers where I live but there better still be some May flowers coming my way soon—literally and metaphorically.

I thought it’d be fun to do monthly recaps of what I learned and loved, as well as what I’m bringing with me into the next one.

Chapters of April

• Central Michigan

• Lots of alone time

• Panicking About my Future

• Los Angeles

Chp 1 - Michigan

This was my first time in the midwest! I was finally visiting my best friend from studying abroad in 2023 at her university to see what her life is like. It’s been a long time coming to say the least. We went to her sorority formal together, I met her people, we constantly laughed till we cried, and basically just picked up exactly where we left off, despite not having seen each other in over a year when she last visited me. Aka the best kind of friendship there is. (miss ya already )

Chp 2 - Alone Time

There’s nothing like a house sitting gig to really force you to spend some time with just your thoughts. I saw a couple of friends and definately called my sister everyday, but I’d say 85% of the time for 2 weeks, it was just me, in a fancy house that wasn’t mine, left to my own devices.

And by devices I of course mean A. The stack of 7 books I brought along with me and B. The Giant TV with every movie I could ever want to watch and my fingertips. In theory this sounds like a dream to many—and to me too, and I was excited! Have some time to write, watch some old movies, read until the pages got blurry. So I did. But I lasted about 3 days before I got a little too existential for anyone’s good and ended up wrecking my sleep pattern and staying up until 3 researching article ideas and just losing my overall life routine since I had no interaction and no structure for a while. Hey, at least I learned that I’m definitely not suited for a completely remote job.

However, existential crash out aside I really did use my time to enjoy some fantastic work and so here were my favorite scrolless consumptions: (also great band name?)

Books (with a quote I highlighted for each to convince you to read them hehe)

WINNER: My #1 read this month…

Just Kids - Patti Smith

“Even though so much time had passed, we were as we had always been, breathlessly finishing one another’s sentences.”

I devoured this memoir and fell in love with both Patti and Robert. I had only known vaguely of their story and relationship so I learned so much from this book, as well as getting a beautifully tragic depiction of life in New York City in the 60s/70s.

The Wedding People - Alison Espach

“She is so good at predicting what will happen in books, so bad at predicting what will happen in life. That is why she has always preferred books - because to be alive is so much harder.”

The Future Saints - Ashley Winstead

“Writing songs is performing, on a small scale, what it means to be a being that exists as a temporary eruption of thought and feeling. We're fireworks, right? This beautiful glittering explosion that's dying as soon as it starts living. Once I understood that, it felt like there was no more meaningful thing to do with my life than create beauty with an expiration date. Art like us.”

Seduction Theory - Emily Adrian

“I would miss grad school. I would miss not knowing what was going to happen to me.”

So Young, So Old - Grant Ginder

“She was a human being. No single one of those identities would ever contain her. Instead she was going to wake up every day, and smile at her husband, and privately wonder whether he was the best or worst decision of her life.”

This was a FANTASTIC reading month for me, I loved all of these so much. If you’re bookish too I do much more in depth reviews on Goodreads

Movies

The Notebook - obviously a rewatch but I saw the musical recently and I genuinely detested it so I had to remember the original to not go crazy (also any excuse for ryan gosling)

Uptown Girls - I watched this with my friend in Michigan and can’t believe I hadn’t seen it prior

The Truman Show - This was SO good, another one that I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to see.

La La Land - another gosling rewatch, I had it downloaded on my ipad for my travels and it simply never fails to inspire and devastate

Songs

Fresh out the slammer - T.S

Desiree - Blood Orange

Give Me Love - George Harrison

The Boxer - Simon & Garfunkel

David Lyons - Dominic Fike

Back in Love - Suki Waterhouse

Haircut -Noah Kahan

***Podcast-Smartless with Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, & Sean Hayes. I fell off of this for a while but now I’m so back, they seriously make me laugh out loud.

Ch 3 - Panicking About my Future

One of the first lessons I remember accepting at a young age is that change is truly the only constant. I get that. I love that. But when change is coming at you at a million miles per hour, even someone like me who welcomes it and thinks everything is exciting—can spiral.

Here’s the issue: My parents are educators who love to travel. When I was a baby they uprooted our family of three and moved to Turkey to teach. That is AWESOME. I spoke fluent Turkish. I’m so grateful that my family is cool.

Fast forward to later this summer, they are doing the same thing with my two siblings but this time are jet-setting to Latvia. Great! So fun! Except my home we’ve lived in for 8 years in on the market and I’m waiting to hear back on a handful applications that could put me in Latvia as well, or France, or New York City or the unfathomable could happen and I don’t get in anywhere and I’m stuck. It’s a disorienting feeling when you’re the stereotypical eldest daughter who’s usually the one running away to the next thing and suddenly find yourself not knowing what country you’ll be living in in 4 months. The only thing I know is it’s gotta be something because I’m not staying in my hometown or where I went to undergrad any longer. I refuse. So…internally freaking out for the next few weeks while I linger by my email inbox, but I’m trying to recognize how beautiful and unique this era is, and how I will likely look back on it fondly once things are more clear (if that ever happens).

Ch 4 - Los Angeles

This was another successful year of my family’s annual trip to La La Land where we hit a Dodgers game, got sunburned at Manhattan beach while watching surfers for hours, drank Hailey Bieber Erewhon smoothies, and talked about how we should just move there. Plus, this time we also went to Disneyland for a day!

With the impending move, we wanted to really make the best of our last trip for awhile and it was so nice to be in the moment with my family and enjoy our favorite place together.

Let’s go, May

So yes, April absolutely flew by. I laughed a lot, read a lot, had some deeply unnecessary existential spirals, and still don’t know where I’ll be living in four months.

But I guess I’m getting better at existing in the in-between. Or at least…getting used to it.

Anyway…onto May.
Please bring flowers. And maybe just a part of a plan?

I’ve done this. I’ve tried this. I’ve failed this. And I’m finally giving up on this.

I’ve banned myself from buying anything retail for the rest of 2026 (except for underwear pls). You will have to tear my access to Depop, ThredUp, and Vinted out of my dead hands but I’ve been practicing this experiment for about a month now and I already feel drastically more in control of my spending, and also understand what I actually like much deeper.

This was my last winter in America before I move to Europe. I took that and ran with it by visiting some of the coldest and snowiest states in the US in the coldest months. Massachusetts, New York, and Minnesota all gave me (and my layers) a run for my money.

I hadn’t even noticed when determining my outfits while packing my suitcase, but there’s an definite repetition of silhouettes and colors just from this handful of winter outfits I constructed. There’s going to be black somewhere in my outfit if not most of it, there’s probably a pop of red, accessories are everything, and there’s certainly something that gives you a hint about my personality.

In order to block out all of the noise that comes with personal style and the trend cycle, I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible when it comes to being honest with myself and determining what I truly love wearing and communicating via my clothing. It’s a three step process that I’ve found to be pretty foolproof.

My process

1. Hone in on 3 people whose styles you admire and want to emulate. This can be people in your life, celebrities, and even fictional characters.

2. Brainstorm adjectives and distinctions that describe these styles (using what you constantly reach for/feel most confident & YOU in), then narrow it down and create your fashion archetype (adj, noun)

3. For execution: start with what you already reach for frequently, and even when you get to the closet expansion point, center your style around consuming less and uniquely.

Here’s my personal example for inspiration:

My Fashion Muses

Jane Birkin, Rachel Green, Cassidy Rippentrop (go follow her she’s the coolest!)

My Archetype

(Brainstorming) minimalist, boho, off duty, 90s, 70s, feminine, casual, nomad, tailored, simple, timeless, barely-styled, unstudied, undone, romantic, languid, worn-in, messy

(Narrowed Down (adj and noun))- Undone Starlet

Now that I have my archetype I can always fall back to it whenever I am considering purchasing something. It’s as simple as asking myself: Is this something an undone starlet would wear? How would an undone starlet style this? If the answers are no, and I don’t know/she wouldn’t, respectively, back on the rack/to the depop void it goes.

***some other examples of fashion archetypes just for more inspiration: the whimsical nomad, the polished socialite, the carefree minimalist, the colorful maximalist, the tailored maven, etc.

Don’t start online. Start in your closet.

Chances are, even if you haven’t put words to it until now, you have some sense of what you like to wear, what looks good on you, and the character you want your clothes to disclose. So, set aside a weekend morning or an afternoon where you enter the black hole that is your closet and A) get rid of anything that doesn’t fit your archetype and you’d never wear and B) create 5 outfits (accessories & shoes included) that you’re obsessed with and that matches your archetype well.

Once you have decluttered your closet and have tangible outfits that you already love, then you can make your way over to Pinterest and create a board that communicates clearly your archetype.

Limiting overspending/overconsumption

I like the idea of a capsule wardrobe due to the ease and simplicity, but I can’t live without accessories or pops of random and weird. Ergo, I can’t just have 3 tops, 3 bottoms, 3 shoes, and be all set. However, that doesn’t mean I have to always say yes to everything just because it fits my archetype—only when it’s something I feel I can’t live without.

My best advice for determining if you and your personal style truly can’t live without something is the same advice for most things that are running wild in my brain: to start another messy collection of words in the beloved notes app. Mine in this case is called “things I want to buy but need to cook on for a bit”. This is the first place I link or write something down that I really want to impulse buy, whether it’s from a curated ad, one of my secondhand platforms that is recommended to me knowing my style, or even something I saw and liked in person (it’ll still be there in a week I promise).

Sometimes even just adding it to that list is enough and I decide it’s silly and conclude I don’t need it later that day. Sometimes it sits there for days and the same yearn for it remains, but then after 2 weeks I’m over it and delete it from the list. On the rare occasion that something has made the list and remains, taunting me for multiple weeks and I still see it at the same value as the day I was made aware it existed, and have even conjured in my head multiple ways to style and execute it…then I can get it.

Another tip is to begin or continue to focus on the material and fit of the pieces you tend to reach for most often. That way, when you need to replace or add something to your wardrobe, you’ll have the knowledge to ensure it’s a fabric or cut that you know from experience is going to be flattering and comfortable for you.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that trends will come and go and it’s always great to try new things/step outside of your comfort zone, but it’s also important to develop the skill of being honest with yourself and filtering out the trends you actually want to participate in, rather than simply feeling societal pressure to do so.

If you try this process please comment your own fashion archetype I would LOVE to hear them all!

*paid subscribers stay tuned for an exclusive list of staple pieces I couldn’t live without;)

Lately, I’ve had to step back and ask myself what I actually enjoy and want to prioritize when it comes to “wellness”. The elitist wellness scene is…a thing. Privileged, rich white people have spent decades telling the world what “health” should look like, and meanwhile, up until now, it’s done a pretty good job convincing me that if I don’t hit 10k steps, meditate morning and night, eat 1,000 grams of protein, and drain my lymph nodes, I’ve failed, because I’m not health-maxxing? Fuck that. Life can be healthy without being optimized.

Here’s something that needs to stop: the idea that one choice cancels another out when it comes to your body and mind. This creates a false reality where exercise and diet are a pendulum that must balance perfectly. NEWSFLASH: your three-mile run doesn’t disappear because you ate a sandwich. Your healthy breakfast and lunch aren’t meaningless if you get fast food for dinner. These are just small, boring brushstrokes on pieces that make up the vast, not-at-all-boring, museum of you.

Some days, I wake up energized, go on an extra-long walk, hit pilates, eat something a wellness podcast host would approve of, drink all my water, read nonfiction, call friends, and from the outside, I look like someone who has it all together.

But boy oh boy, those supplement pushing wellness gurus should see the girl who looks forward to a Sunday when it’s pouring rain, stays on the couch watching movies and reading romance novels all day, and subsists on a beige-only diet. Or the girl who drinks her calories (gasp) and shares a cigarette (double gasp) with a boy she definitely won’t marry (triple gasp). And you know what? Those days don’t cancel the “good” ones. They make them feel even better. They make my life feel like real life.

There’s this quiet expectation that if you’re someone who “cares about your health,” you care about it all the time. In the same way. At the same level. With the same discipline.

I’ll never be able to do that. I don’t think it makes me bad at anything, it just makes me inconsistent. But also honest. And way more fun.

Maybe that’s what I’ll take away from the blue zones from now on. Wellness isn’t a checklist, it’s the feeling of movement, connection, and actual joy. Sometimes that’s being outside, meeting new people, and eating green things. Sometimes that’s my couch, chocolate, and sitcoms with my sister. How wonderful that I get to do both!