I was a ketchup girl, so it felt natural to grown into a tomato woman.

The fruits, with their taught and vibrant skins, gush with a taste that somehow strikes a balance between sweet and savory. It’s the perfect flavor profile in a simple package. Tomatoes, I think, are one of nature’s darlings.

So when I read a recent New York Times article suggesting that bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches, BLTs for short, should be enjoyed year-round rather than seasonally, I couldn’t help but release a few long blinks of perplexity.

The author’s thinking goes like this:

I have only so many summers left. Must I really consign the BLT to a hot-weather cameo in my sandwich life?

So recently, I’ve adopted Christian Petroni’s BLT philosophy. For Mr. Petroni, a chef and the author of the cookbook “Parm to Table,” the BLT is a bodega sandwich. He insists, for instance, on toasted white bread: “Take that ciabatta or brioche and take a walk with it,” he said, Bronx accent on full display. True to form, Mr. Petroni actually likes his BLTs made with “a tomato that’s praying for death in the back of the fridge.”

Crybabies, have you eaten an off-season tomato? A refrigerated tomato? I don’t know about you, but I long for a better time when I subject myself to their mealy texture and lacking juiciness. That better time is peak tomato season. And for the love of God, please don’t put those gorgeous girls in your fridge!

After reading this puzzling take on BLTs (maybe it’s rage bait??), I got thinking more about why seasonality matters when it comes tomatoes. I thought about it as I made my annual pilgrimage to the sandwich shop Middle Child in Center City Philadelphia. There, they serve an heirloom tomato-heavy BLT from late July until mid-August. Then poof! They’re gone until next July.

Honestly, I think that’s how it should be. Tomatoes — or any fruit, vegetable, or any gratifying parts of our lives, really — are not steadfast comfort blankets. They bring us pleasure and satisfaction because we know they are somewhat fleeting. They require our immediate presence. We’ve lost so much of that delayed gratification to internet shopping, social media, and delivery services. So why mutate a natural delight into yet another thoughtless tendency of the modern age?

Tomato, tomato the saying goes. It’s spelled the same both times, but pronounced differently: Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe. Not all tomatoes are equal. Not every piece of fruit is ripe for the picking just because you’re in the mood. No, the ideal fruit asks you to wait for its finest moment — as does the ideal BLT.

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

LOOSEY

Partying Through Plagues

A plague arrived last Saturday. Brown soot flooded from the sky and blanketed the streets, leaving gritty streaks against the exterior of my bedroom window like teary mascara. Smoke had drifted south from the Canadian wildfires, choking the city’s precipitation in an ashy veil, polluting the rain with opaque debr…

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a month ago · 104 likes · 8 comments · Brendon Holder

This essay on the relationship between personal ambition and personal values

This masterclass on socio-cultural analysis by Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the messaging of Kamala Harris’ presidential run

This analysis of Ariana Grande’s public image and what it says about fandom and pop culture

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Crygest is written by the real-life journalist Julia Naftulin, with help from her heart, brain, and fingertips. AI will never be used to create this monthly publication.

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One, two, three, and inhale. One, two, three, and inhale. One, two, three, and inhale.

I reach my left arm over my head then plunge it into the water ahead of me. I repeat the process, this time with my right arm, and make a mental note to keep my fingers pressed together as I scoop away the water beneath.

Soon, I forget the mantra I’ve been reciting in my head. Without thought, I blow bubbles out of my nose and flutter my feet while my arms wind around my torso. My lungs request air, so my head tilts sideways for an oxygen refill.

In the slightly slimy pool water, many of these strokes feel like second nature. Others remind me of childhood swimming lessons, when I would gasp for breath in the Jewish Community Center pool and pray class would end soon.

I’ve swam casually and for pleasure a lot since then — in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, in lakes and quarries and rivers — so I can say with certainty that I love it. The way the water muffles your sense of sound, the sensation of liquid replacing the air that just surrounded you, the feeling of breaking the surface after jumping in or diving under an ocean wave: It’s a freeing assault on the senses, a jolting submission to one of nature’s gifts.

I’ve done the same in the pools of friends’ parents, at bustling neighborhood swim clubs, country clubs, hotels, and even an AirBnB in Puerto Rico (I’m a lucky girl!). When a pool is beautiful by design, its call for enjoyment feels obvious, much like the harkening of the Jersey Shore’s waves on a mid-July day or the shiny ripples in a Vermont river after a day of hiking.

Now, I’m learning to love swimming laps too. For the past year, I’ve made a habit out of signing up for 30-minute sessions at my community gym pool. There, I slip on a slightly frumpy one-piece, grocery-store flip flops, and a rubbery swim cap before I walk off the basement pool’s deck and submerge myself in its chlorinated pit.

For the first few sessions, my body felt heavy and difficult to command. I knew the foundations of good swimming from years of lessons and play in the water, but the repetition of doing laps had me in my head. There are no vibey Spotify playlists or comedy podcasts underneath the water; it’s only your mind and body and maybe some fellow lap swimmers. Each 30-minute session stretched for what felt like an hour as I struggled to catch my breath and find reasons to focus on the task at hand.

Doing laps, I realized, is a lot like writing. Each lap is like a sentence. The first few can feel like a burden and there are plenty of distractions (a cell phone, an ill-fitting swim cap that needs to be readjusted) to avoid that burden. Once they’re complete, however, I have a paragraph or a streak of laps that felt good to bang out.

Once I’ve committed to a practice I like, it becomes less about accomplishment and more about exploration. The more I write, the more acquainted I become with my own voice, perspective, and blind spots. The words arrive more quickly on the page. The more I swim laps, the stronger I feel and the more mindlessly I stroke through the water. I’m hungry to see what comes next.

Of course, some days the writing feels extra sticky and the laps feel like paddling through mud. My form is off-kilter and I have to surrender to those feelings or else I’ll convince myself to stop altogether.

With swimming and writing, the practice is about the practice more than it is about the outcomes. They require a level of embodiment and surrender that is achieved through both will and curiosity. I want to do these things to get better at them, but I also want do them to find out things about myself I wouldn’t otherwise uncover.

Things like:

• I’m quick to turn my frustration into anger because it feels safe.

• Moving my body moves my brain.

• I want to be chosen by others, and I also want to rise above the desire to be chosen.

• I’m not a “my group of friends” type of girl. One-on-one connections are more my jam.

• I am desperate to create a legacy that transcends bloodlines.

• I need to learn to let go of perfectionism if I want to be more creative.

Swimming and writing are acts, yes. And they are also observational practices that ask your mind and body to constantly recalibrate, to consider the past, present, and future, and to face yourself even when you’re unsure what you’ll find.

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

I got to do some on-the-ground reporting here in Philadelphia as the city prepared for and hosted its first-ever World Cup. It’s been a goal of mine to do more Philly-specific reporting, and these articles really scratched that itch:

Philadelphia built a free, 39-day World Cup festival serving more than 425,000 fans. Take a look inside.

Read it here

A small-business mecca in Philadelphia is leaning into World Cup fandom

Read it here

Other July media faves:

This 2010s indie music playlist

The parasite panic didn’t stop thousands of nutrition experts from chowing down on salad | Gabby Landsverk for Business Insider

Jia Tolentino on ‘Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare’ | A Fresh Air podcast episode where New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino talks with NPR’s Tonya Mosley about how beauty standards have dovetailed with AI

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Crygest is written by the real-life journalist Julia Naftulin, with help from her heart, brain, and fingertips. AI will never be used to create this monthly publication.

Want to support human-made work? Read more from Crygest:

On my first day of high school, I was christened with a bible of sorts. The spiral-bound planner had a shiny black cover and the bulk of a sandwich you need two hands to support. It would sustain me in ways that fed my desire to plan, I’d soon learn.

I was good at it, at delivering on assignments and expectations set forth by teachers and eventually, the college admissions officers who I was told would pay attention to my grades and extracurriculars.

In my Parkland School District planner, I jotted down homework assignments, test dates, meetings for French club, soccer practice, and upcoming school dances with fervor. These were my promises to do well, to make something of myself, to figure out how I fit into the world unfolding before me.

I continued tracking my life this way throughout college; the act had become a part of my routine by now. During those four years, though, computerized notes and calendars were becoming popular. It started as a novelty that made mundane yet necessary tasks — like making flash cards, picking up my birth control prescription, or drafting an essay — feel important.

By the time I graduated, I’d developed a new system that I’d continue using for the next nine years: A personal Google calendar, a work Google Calendar, and a weekly breakdown of tasks in my computer’s notes app. The system was dynamic, so I could move meetings and assignments around quickly and with little thought. Life was moving fast and digitized planning just seemed to make the most sense. As time passed, planning felt less about my excitement for the future and more about anxiously going through the motions so I could arrive at the weekend.

But last year, I was called back to planning with pen and paper: While interviewing Gemmika Champion about her journal-writing habit, she waxed poetic about her Passion Planner. By then end of our hour-long talk, she convinced me to buy my own.

When I received the planner I’d picked, a dark green book embossed with ginkgo leaves, I felt like I held the key to rebirth. It was mid-December and I flipped through its weekly layouts and monthly journal prompts. I read the start-of-the-year goal-setting exercises, hand-wrote my answers on a sheet of printer paper, and hung it on the front of my fridge. The first assignment of my new, slightly more analog life was complete.

It’s been six months since I began my handwritten planning venture, and I'm not stopping anytime soon. I think my favorite thing is that it’s formatted to serve many purposes: It’s a yearly goal-setting and -tracking hub, a weekly planner, a monthly guided journal and calendar, and a space for everyday thoughts, doodles, and notes.

One thing I could live without (and Gemmika agreed here): The monthly habit tracker. Though it helped me start the new year with a few solid routines in mind, I found the daily monitoring a bit too…optimization-for-optimization’s-sake.

Still, I could see myself filling out a fresh Passion Planner year after year and accumulating a stack. I hope my nieces and nephews — or just some curious person — will one day flip through the pages and read my left-handed scrawl to learn who I saw, what I did each Tuesday, and what I desired, what I thought about.

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For now, Crybabies, I leave you with my observations from this 26-week long (and counting!) practice:

1. I’ve been feeling more prepared since I’m now forced to set the stage for my week on Sunday night or Monday morning. I don’t do anything special to feel prepared; I jot down the events listed my phone’s work and personal calendars, slot in gym time, and note errands and little tasks I want to complete, like writing a thank you card or grabbing groceries. Seeing a week’s worth of activities and responsibilities in one place helps me keep calm and realize I do in fact have time to get it all mostly done.

2. I noticed what matters to me and what’s a distraction from personal accountability. When I wrote the same task, meeting, or assignment week after week, I started to sense my internal reactions more. When I had drawing class on Mondays in the winter, I blocked off the time with glee. I felt uninspired while noting a networking call with an old colleague and a party I felt too tired to attend. I realized that sometimes, I say yes to things to procrastinate a big goal I’ve set for myself. I can get in my own way, and I like how this planner makes me see the cumulative effects of that pattern.

3. Intentions and goals are not the same. They’re both important to have, but daily intention-setting has done more for my mental health than goal-setting. My planner has daily spaces to record your “focus.” I’ve been using these spaces to write things like “presence,” “move", “organize,” and “fun.” This way, I can bring myself back to one overarching vibe of the day even if I don’t complete every task I set out to do.

4. I feel like my best, most balanced self with this weekly formula: Exercise 3x + social plans 2x + 1 day for errands and chores + 1 day to do absolutely nothing. It doesn’t happen every week, but I’ve found my personal ideal. It’s comforting to know I can come back to this routine if I start to feel off.

5. At any given moment, my plans are a snapshot of who I am and who I aspire to be. Collecting and memorializing them on paper with ink is an act that’s beautiful in its simplicity, especially in a world that’s always asking for more. Sometimes, when I’m writing in my planner, I think: If all I leave behind is this lengthy and detailed ledger of my little life, I’ll be happy.

Routine Breakdown

🥲 Simple steps for making life’s craziness a bit more manageable. 🥲

This month, I’m sharing the small things I do to feel chic/elegant/like that bitch. Need a quick pick-me-up? A reminder of life’s little luxuries? Try one out:

• Wear my handbag in the crook of my arm while walking around

• Keep extras of a fun drink at home for last-minute entertaining (for me, it’s bottles of wine and non-alcoholic seltzers)

• Drink anything and everything out of a beveled whiskey glass — kombucha, juice, water, a cheeky aperol spritz, etc.

• Put pen to paper — drawing, journaling, making reminders for myself

• Sign off emails with initials instead of my full name

• Mix metals, specifically with jewelry

• Prioritize eye contact when chatting with others

• Pause and consider my response rather than say the first thing that comes to mind

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Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

The Influencer-ification of the Bridal Party | Morgan Sullivan for The Cut

How to balance full-time work with creative projects | Jeffrey Silverstein for The Creative Independent

Aging Well Newsletter

The Stress We Create Without Realizing It

After my husband died, the need to do things perfectly increased dramatically, and my expectations of what I planned to manage were overwhelming - basically, my goal was to continue what we were doing by myself - a goal that was unrealistic and led to a great deal of negative self-talk. My body was also naturally aging…

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3 months ago · 57 likes · 25 comments · Janice Walton

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Crygest is written by the real-life journalist Julia Naftulin, with help from her heart, brain, and fingertips. AI will never be used to create this monthly publication.

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I was born on May 13, 1994 at “just after midnight,” as my mother would say. Not since then, but for at least the past 10 years of my existence, I’ve made my birthday other people’s problem.

Birthdays were a cause for celebration, I told my 20-something self. Why would I deny myself an opportunity to party with the people I liked and loved, in the city I long dreamed of living? So, at 23, I got into the habit of texting out invites a month in advance, dreaming up dance parties at the bars with the good DJs, worrying about who would or wouldn’t show up, and shopping for outfits that made me feel good , even sexy, in my body.

When I turned 21, I was in Paris. I’d been drinking French wine, European beer, and fruity cocktails since that start of the semester, so the night felt less about my age and more about the end of a shared chapter. Surrounded by study abroad friends, I ate tajine out of a clay pot at a Moroccan restaurant I’d been eyeing for months. We met up with more of our class at a bar, where the girls I thought were too clique-y for me gushed over my presence. I felt special. I couldn’t wait for 22.

When I turned 22, my parents, brother, and grandparents came to Syracuse. It was a few days before graduation. I thought about my high school graduation, how I only had a handful of pictures with my then-boyfriend. I arrived too late to take photos outside with my friends, since my father insisted on dinner out as a family before the ceremony. For 22, we went to a Mexican restaurant in an old church with vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows. My journalism professor recommended it, I don’t know which one, but they all had good taste. Everyone in my family said they enjoyed their meals. On graduation day, I got all of the photos I wanted with my family, my boyfriend, my professors, and friends.

23 was a dance party followed by a late-night diner run with my best childhood friends, who then slept over in my 400-square-foot apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 24 or 25, I can’t remember which, but I drank too many gin gimlets and ripped a friend’s weed vape and ended up puking all night in the bathroom, Nora rubbing my back and handing me a plastic cup of water. My then-boyfriend, the one from high school, practically dragged me home from the bar as I moaned “I want to die” and he begged me to stop.

For 29, I sobbed to my boyfriend of one year and said he’d ruined my birthday because he wanted to spend the afternoon with his college friend who was in town for the Taylor Swift concert. The next day, we laughed over dinner with my friends. For 30, I booked a private brunch to celebrate the milestone surrounded by my best childhood friends, my best friends from New York City, and my newer circle here in Philly. I felt like I’d arrived.

This year, on the night before 32, I tossed and turned like a child on Christmas Eve. When my alarm went off at 7:15 am and I turned it off, I didn’t feel the mix of anxiety and giddiness I had grown accustomed to on May 13. I felt more like me than I think I ever have, but there was also a familiar ache, a longing for who I thought I’d be by now meeting the truth of lived experience. The ache was all-consuming before. Now I felt it sputtering, idealism on its way out. By now, my best friends from year 30 were traveling for work, lived too far away, or no longer took that role in my life.

It was a Wednesday. I logged onto work and answered emails. I made myself a salad of raspberries, bananas, and tangerines and ate it while standing at the kitchen window with my eyes closed. The fruit tastes more delicious that way. I did a Yoga by Adriene video in my living room while crying. I walked the dog. I noticed who texted me, and who didn’t. I noticed that my mother called and my father texted.

A couple days after my birthday this year, I enjoyed a 9 pm joint on my back patio and titled my head back to see the stars. Suddenly, it came to me, as many things do during this nightly ritual: My birthday reminds me of all the things I’m still afraid of.

I’m scared to let things be. I’m scared that if I focus on myself too much, I’ll become isolated. I’m scared that if I focus less on my friendships, I’ll look up one day to see that I have no kindred souls in my corner. I’m scared to make something and find out it’s hopelessly awful. I’m scared to make something and have it be pretty good, so that the expectations mount and mount and mount until they are insurmountable and I crumble under the weight of expectation. I’m scared to let down the people I love and respect. I’m scared to see the people I love and respect differently now that I’ve experienced them at 10 and 15 and 21 and 27 and 31. And I’m scared that these fears keep me from me, the person who has to exist here and now.

Because when I read back how I’ve just recounted my birthdays past to you, none of them seem like the treatises they felt at the time. They are simply a collection of moments. I injected the meaning.

I suspect I’m getting tired of what I’ve been carrying on my birthday for the last decade or so. A need to prove, a fear of change met with invitations and parties that I begged would prove me wrong. I was desperate to feel like I belonged, so I tried really hard to be what I thought others wanted.

Now, I try to belong mostly to myself and expect less of others. Some would call this being cynical, or jaded. I think of it more like a hug. My try at an embrace of this monstrous life.

Special shoutout ♉️

To my May-born Taurus girlies: Lauren, Bianca, and Lindsay. With you, it’s felt like instant ease and understanding.

Routine Breakdown

🥲 Simple steps for making life’s craziness a bit more manageable. 🥲

How to curb your phone addiction without buying a Brick device

1. Download the free Focus Friend app and use a cute little bean to game-ify staying off your phone.

2. Put your phone into grayscale mode so your eyeballs and brain get a break from those vibrant, addictive colors on your screen.

3. Delete apps that you can’t seem to quit. For me, that’s Instagram and TikTok. I download when I need to post, then delete right after. It felt strange at first, but a year in, it feels like freedom.

4. Commit to a phone-free event once per week. I’m a fan of phone-free walks with the pup. If I’m meeting up with friends for dinner or a party, I set an intention before I leave my house: I’ll only use my phone to get to the location and get home. Otherwise, I’m keeping that thing in my purse.

5. Put your phone to bed for a nap, and/or the night. Last year, I started leaving my phone in my closet before bed, which I noticed helped me get back into reading for fun and fall asleep more quickly. Now, I put her down for nap in the closet when I want to focus deeply. Knowing I’ll need to stop what I’m doing, stand up, and go retrieve it creates a physical boundary that pushes me away from the instant gratification of a scroll.

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

Heart the Lover, a novel by Lily King | King is one of my favorite writers right now. Her writing is observational but not flowery. Each sentence builds to something that’s greater than the sum of its parts, and she writes about grief in a way that is reverent, not sympathetic.

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Crygest is written by the real-life journalist Julia Naftulin, with help from her heart, brain, and fingertips. AI will never be used to create this monthly publication.

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Do you ever find yourself day-dreaming about a simpler time? For me, the daydreams tend to come in the form of wishes for a pureness I haven’t felt since grade school.

In art and English classes, teachers showed us foundational concepts then assigned prompt-based projects — draw a landscape with a foreground, middle ground, and background; write an essay about an alligator who lives in a swamp — and leave the rest up to experimentation, to sheer process. The only necessary outcome was to turn in the project.

As adults, we don’t get those opportunities. Sure, there are chances to create without caring about the outcome, but societal expectation is ever-present, asking: Are you sure you want to use your time for that? Isn’t a waste of energy? Your resources are meant for real life, not the imagination.

And then there’s social media, a hazy cloud that that says our creative pursuits are worthwhile only when they’ve been beloved and consumed by the masses. Otherwise, creativity is simply an exercise in self-indulgence.

And yet, when I’m in it — when my fingers move in tandem with my brain — time seemingly melts away. The trying tends to create a feeling of ease, but to get there, I have to show up. And that, almost always, feels like mammoth task.

It requires hardly any thought at my day job, where I write and edit on deadline for Business Insider readers. But when I want to make something just because I want to try it, it’s hard to convince myself that it’s worthwhile. I spent the end of 2025 and most of this year wrestling with this difficulty, hoping I’d muster up a near-daily creative writing practice because it’s what I want, to no avail.

So when I got an email about a beginner drawing class for adults in my neighborhood, I stopped in my tracks. I remembered that I had free will, and could use it to do something creative and outcome-free.

$302, six classes, and dozens of graphite drawings later, I realized I thrive off of structure and mentorship. Soon after the last day of class, I told my therapist about my lack of novel-writing progress and how I felt like my own worst enemy.

My therapist agreed, but not in the way I’d expected. She said I could help myself more. Instead of trying to fit myself into the box of “regimented and self-starting writer,” I could toss out the idealized version of me and work with who I really was: Someone who wants to create among structure, camaraderie, and a bit of guidance.

Last week, I got another email. This one was for an online writing course. $350 to be taught about something I already know how to do? I tried telling myself it would be a waste, but also wondered what would happen if I just went for it.

I thought about drawing class. The pictures I made weren’t perfect or even great. What they were, though, was the sum of who I was in the moments I created them: The extent of my effort, curiosity, and fellowship in those 3-hour classes, distilled onto a few pages littered with graphite and pastel.

Yes, this was the feeling.

Routine Breakdown

🥁 Presenting 🥁 a brand new Crygest column! Here, I’ll walk you through the routines I use to make life’s craziness a bit more manageable.

How to pack for a long-weekend trip in just one carry-on suitcase:

1. Open your notes app or grab a pen and some paper. We’re list makin’, baby!

2. At the top of your page, note the high and low temperatures for the trip and the duration of your stay. It can also help to list any activities you have planned (ie: hike, beach day, museum day, shopping in town, cooking class).

3. List out the general items you need for the trip, based on the above. Perhaps there’s rain in the forecast, so you’ll list “rain coat” and “umbrella.” Maybe you’ll be walking a ton, so you write “gym sneakers” and “fashion sneakers.” For this part, I also list how many of each item I’ll need, like “tank tops - 2x,” and more obvious items like makeup, skincare, and socks.

4. Pick 3 colors to act as your core palette for the trip. Construct outfits by cross-checking your itemized list with your color palette. Here, remember that mixing and matching is your friend! We’ve got limited space in this puppy. This time, I went for various hues of blue, green, and black.

5. Compress the goods into packing cubes or, if you don’t have any, try the roll method.

Bonus tip! I list out pre-trip action items on my sheet so I can see everything in one quick glance.

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Here’s the packing list I made before my recent trip to Puerto Rico:

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

This month, the list is just one article — by me! At the start of the year, I set a goal to publish a story in a local Philadelphia outlet.

For The Fitler Focus, a newsletter that covers happenings in two of Philly’s Center-City neighborhoods, I wrote about a direct-to-consumer bra brand betting on Rittenhouse Square for its first store location. You can read it here:

The Fitler Focus

The Online Bra Brand Betting Its First Store on Walnut Street

By Julia Naftulin…

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4 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment

As Elle Woods would say, “We did it!”

Thank you to The Fitler Focus for this fun opportunity.

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Crygest is written by the real-life journalist Julia Naftulin, with help from her heart, brain, and fingertips. AI will never be used to create this monthly publication.

Want to support human-made work? Read more from Crygest, subscribe, and share with a pal:

• No one told me to want more in friendship

• The authenticity problem plaguing The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City

• How to start a journaling habit that you won’t want to quit

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As a child, I had two recurring dreams that I still remember well.

In the first, I would tip-toe downstairs from my bedroom in the middle of the night and open the basement door to find the carpeted stairs somehow transformed into a curved marble staircase softly aglow with orange light. Hearing whispers, I slowly descended the staircase and peered around the corner to see a small group of what I assumed were witches, creating a fiery potion in a cauldron. When one of the women spotted me, I would rush back up the stairs and awake from the dream.

In the second, a line of several cars and trucks drove up to the house during the day. Out of each emerged a few men, sometimes with weapons like baseball bats and guns and pitchforks. As I watched from a second floor window, they slowly stalked up to our home and surrounded it, peering in windows to see if anyone was home.

With the first dream, I awoke feeling unsettled yet exhilarated, often hoping that I could fall back asleep quickly enough to learn what would happen next (sadly, it never worked). But the second dream had a different effect: Often, while trying to fall asleep, I would picture these men descending and my heart would race.

Lying on my side, I would pull the comforter over my head so only my face was uncovered. From that hiding place, I’d listen closely and peer into the dark. Upon hearing the usual nighttime noises — old house creaks and blustery winds — my heart would drop into my stomach. I was certain that any minute now, something bad would happen. The men would come and I would be here, hiding.

With these visions from my imagination, maybe my young psyche was preparing me for this patriarchal world. Two decades on, I can recall many moments of self-assuredness and confidence — a feeling that I could and would achieve my dreams of seeing the world, creating things, and finding love and connection beyond bloodlines. I wrote English essays while sitting at the kitchen counter, played team sports, had slumber parties with my best friends, edited my high school’s yearbook and my college’s women’s magazine, interned at two digital publications and one print magazine, and moved to New York City where I started my journalism career as an on-staff editorial assistant. I learned a lot and because of that, I confused my achievements for the wisdom of experience.

Somewhere along the way, my feelings of self-belief were overshadowed by a growing suspicion that I could not achieve all I wanted on my own. There was a new story: My will was strong, but it was not strong enough to endure whatever life would bring next. I yearned to be wanted for all I was, and supported in all I desired.

So when I found a version of that at age 16, I kept it close. A goofy boy with a bowl cut and acne thought I was funny. He made me laugh too. And he was curious about what I thought. Our conversations had substance — as much as they can for a pair of high school sophomores. He felt different than other boys who I assumed did not, could not, see me. Perhaps most importantly, he felt safe, unlike the daunting ideas I internalized about boys and men and what they want from girls and women.

For 10 years, that goofy boy and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. Together, we grew into adulthood. Probably because of that fact, our relationship felt sacred and rare, like the most important thing to preserve in my life. Our relationship became my safety, which took precedence over making space for who I was becoming or what I wanted or what I did not want. Preservation of comfort was my north star. Often, it felt like adventure or a dream come true.

We moved homes twice together, lived in three cities together, and survived the pandemic together, but it wasn’t enough. In August 2022, he told me he had to move on, had figure out who he was on his own. I was in shock but I ultimately agreed, because I didn’t want to seem desperate and weak.

What I really wanted was to pull the covers over my head and keep hiding from the sum total of my romantic choices. I did the next easiest thing: Go through the motions of a breakup.

I leased an apartment of my own, moved out with my dog, went on a flurry of questionable yet thrilling dates, cried myself to sleep every night, got high off weed every chance I could, and weathered weeks of anxiety-induced diarrhea. After six months of settling into my new routine, I planned a trip to Europe with my best friend, flew to Amsterdam, got Covid, and quarantined in a hotel there for more than a week.

This year, I plan to write a novel based on this string of events, which kickstarted an awakening. Sometimes, I wish I had that awakening sooner so as to not waste time in a relationship turned stagnant and unfulfilling. But I see now that I was too stubborn, too focused on comfort and security, and that I needed a metaphorical slap in the face. Mine came in the form of isolation, emotional rawness, overpriced room service, a bartender from Barcelona, free-roaming sheep, and a Dutch industrial park.

Crybabies, I’d love your input along the way. I plan to use this newsletter to workshop my characters and storyline, so be sure to subscribe. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at a wary journalist trying her hand at creative writing for the first time. Haters are also welcome to follow.

Right now, I’m outlining my book using the Save the Cat method. More on that in April’s Crygest!

Here’s to returning to self-belief. May the journey be not frictionless, but illuminating.

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Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

• TheBodyTypeBlueprint on YouTube | I’ve been trying to curate my style without buying lots of new clothes, and stylist Nikko’s tips are just what I needed. As he dresses women using what they already have, he’s made me see my own closet in a new light.

• This 2025 essay by journalist Anand Giridharadas on “living well and fighting back in a time of terrors.” Read it here:

The.Ink

ARCHIVE: The opposite of fascism

We ran this essay a year ago this week, and it struck a nerve with many of you. I was re-reading it myself lately, and it helped me process my own choices over this past year…

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5 months ago · 88 likes · 17 comments · Anand Giridharadas

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë | I can’t believe I never read this novel in English class! A gothic banger, I tell you. To me, there’s comfort found in reading about insufferable, awful characters who illustrate the dregs of humanity. And it’s so much better than the movie (shocker).

Read more from Crygest

Crygest is written by the real-life journalist Julia Naftulin, with help from her heart, brain, and fingertips. AI will never be used to create this monthly publication.

Want to support human-made work? Read more from Crygest, subscribe, and share with a pal:

• No one told me to want more in friendship

• The authenticity problem plaguing The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City

• How to start a journaling habit that you won’t want to quit

During the last year of my relationship, I screamed at my boyfriend for the first time. I faced him while in the living room of our row home, felt agitation rising in my chest, and yelled something to the effect of: JUST SAY WHAT YOU WANT, THEN!

He blinked, eyes wide, then flatly stated, “Never speak to me in that tone again. You would never treat your friends like that.”

With his response, shame overtook my desperation, my intense desire to know to what he really felt and wanted. I knew immediately that he was right, and he still is: I would never scream at my friends out of desperation.

That does not mean that I’ve avoided feeling desperate in friendship. In fact, for most of my life, I’ve found platonic relationships confusing, intense, unfair, and heartbreaking — the source of powerful desperation. Yet, to this day, I can’t help but to want more in friendship.

The friendship lies I’ve told myself

When it comes to friendship, I gravitate towards other women. I love to have silly conversations and also get deep, and I find that the girls and women in my life have tended to fill these parts of my soul more than men. Women have also never used my friendship as bait for sexual gratification. With women, I’m more inclined to trust.

At the same time, I’ve found that female friendships come with many feelings and, typically, unspoken expectations. Since my earliest friendships, I can remember feeling known, invisible, cared for, discarded, admired, and disliked. Often, the same friend has incited these varied feelings.

The result? I’ve tended towards black-and-white thinking about what friendship is and can be. I’ve thought:

• To feel accepted in this friendship, I must keep certain parts of myself silent.

• To keep this friend, I must give them what they want at all times.

• If I give my friend what they want, they will recognize that and do the same for me.

• If a friend doesn’t show up in the ways I’ve asked, it means our friendship is nearing its end.

• If a friend doesn’t like something I did or said, it means they don’t like me anymore.

• I love X particular thing about my friend’s personality, so I must put up with the things that I don’t like about them.

• If a friend doesn’t seem to understand a part of me, there’s no point in being friends at all.

• If I’m disappointed by a friend, they’ll keep on disappointing me.

Pretty harsh world up there in my head, huh? Luckily, through years of therapy and introspection, I’ve learned that this type of thinking has limited my ability to see the true beauty of friendship: That it can be transcendent, but only if you allow it to be.

I’ve learned that friendship is complex. Although I’ve felt unprioritized and unimportant in friendships, I know it is not just my friends’ actions that have led to these feelings. I know that deep down, I am afraid of ending up alone. This fear — that I can have shared platonic intimacy and mutual respect, but I must censor parts of myself or I will lose it — has largely driven how I show up in friendships.

You see, I’ve never screamed at my friends because even when I’ve wanted to, even when I felt my body tense up and crave that type of physical release, my fear of losing my friends was greater than my desire for more depth, connection, and honesty.

With their support and care, I grew in self-acceptance, humor, and confidence. Wanting more than that felt perverse. Why be honest and ruin something so good when I could silently stew about my hurt feelings and enjoy the comfort I’d found?

What I know about friendship now

I thought that disappointment in friendship was par for the course, and it is. Just not in the ways I initially believed.

In my teens and twenties, my lost friendships felt like lost lifelines. I lost a high school friend because she met a cooler group of girls, ones who found me annoying and once told me to my face. I lost friends during my freshman year of college when they decided to join sororities and I did not. I lost another college friend because after I hung out with her and her friend group, she said that I could only return if she personally extended an invite. After college, I ended a friendship over text because, I told myself at the time, she only wanted to hang out on her terms. The mutuality of our college years fading away, I saw the writing on the wall and decided to get ahead of it.

Now I know to expect that people will waver — all of the time. I waver too. We make mistakes or show up as we really are. Either case can unintentionally hurt others’ feelings, and it’s not an easy pill to swallow.

But, at my big age of 31, I now find it more worthwhile to accept these facts — that I am imperfect, that I am not for everyone — than to blind myself with false comfort.

Don’t get it twisted: My newfound acceptance regarding the limitations of friendship has not protected me from feeling hurt, confused, misunderstood, disappointed, or alone. So often, we run or hide from these outcomes by staying the course and convincing ourselves it’s worse to be honest about our changing needs than to betray ourselves.

No one told me to want more in friendship, so I’m telling you: To secure the kinds of friends who can hold you as you truly are, you must move beyond desire. You must reflect, accept, and take action.

I wanted more in my friendships. Here’s how I got it.

These days, I try to think: Mastering friendship starts with understanding each friend’s capacity. Now what in the therapy speak do I mean by that???

Well, we all have our own unique talents, traits, and abilities that inform how we show up on any given day — for ourselves and for the people in our lives. This capacity can shift a bit based on a variety of factors but generally, a person’s capacity doesn’t change much throughout their lifetime. This means that you have little to no control over how a person acts toward you, even if you’re friends. You also have no control over when and how you uncover points of disconnect in a friendship, the unharmonious bits.

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What you can control is your ability to reflect on each friendship. How does talking to this person make you feel, generally? Do you leave time spent together feeling seen, energized, or some other positive emotion? Do you feel like every talk centers around their problems? Do you feel the urge to deny them a request, but talk yourself into doing it anyway?

All of this information matters, but it’s only useful if you’re able to move past judging yourself and your friend. For me, this means letting myself feel super judgmental. At first, I have the instinct figure out who was wrong. Surprise: This internal battle is not fruitful because friendships are rarely about right and wrong. But this is the path I personally take to arrive at my judgement-free zone. With a combination of time, space, and feeling my feelings, I’m able to eventually realize why I’m struggling with a particular friend.

Once that happens, I ask myself what I can control and take action from there — muting Instagram stories, deleting locations on Find My Friends, and reaching out and saying yes to hangs only when I truly want to. Sometimes, I’ll have an honest conversation with a friend and share my feelings, especially if it’s the second or third time I’ve had an experience where I leave feeling upset or confused.

Another free action within my control? Lowering my expectations of friends — by asking myself what I’d hoped for and figuring out how I can give that thing or feeling to myself.

Have these strategies saved me tons of friendships? No! In some cases, they’ve led to friendships fizzling out or breaking up. They’ve led to people misunderstanding my intentions and assuming how I feel. But wanting more in friendship has also strengthened some of my dearest connections. In all cases, wanting more has led to clarity about the types of friendships I desire.

When I’m much older, I want to look back and be sure that I lived by this story: A singular friend cannot fulfill your every need for connection nor understand every part of you. That is the beauty of adult friendships: You get to choose who you spend your time with and how much time you spend — and you’re not in trouble for how you choose or if you change your mind.

I’m all in on wanting more in friendship: More excitements, more disappointments, more comforting moments, and more unexpected changes. Because when I steep myself in this type of hope and humanity, no matter the cost, I know that I can never end up alone.

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

• Here’s how to disable Ring’s creepy Search Party feature | When you say “surveillance state,” I say, “No thanks!” As a Ring owner of many years, this article came in handy after I learned of the company’s creepy new featured that’s auto-enabled.

• My Weed Addiction | I’m a sucker for an honest personal essay. It’s even better when I realize I’ve previously interviewed the author about her sexploits.

• Two CBP Agents Identified in Alex Pretti Shooting | A beautiful and straightforward example of how journalism can hold power to account. If you can, check out the editor’s note at the end of the article and consider donating to ProPublica.

Read more from Crygest

Crygest is written by the real-life journalist Julia Naftulin, with help from her heart, brain, and fingertips. AI will never be used to create this monthly publication.

Want to support human-made work? Read more from Crygest, subscribe, and share with a pal:

• The women I love (feat. an audio interview with an iconic Pisces)

• The authenticity problem plaguing The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City

• How to start a journaling habit that you won’t want to quit

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Hi Crybabies,

Welcome to the first monthly newsletter of 2026! In this edition, I try my hand at cultural analysis with a look at one of my favorite programs of the modern age: The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (RHOSLC).

Next month, I’ll be back to our regularly scheduled Crygest programming: A reflective diary entry on friendship + the usual recurring column + maybe a new column?! The only way to know for certain is to ✨ subscribe! ✨

If you’re hungry for the old stuff, check out the Crygest archives. Now on to the main course…

Why I think The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City has an authenticity problem

Sara Paulson loves it. John Oliver loves it. Kristin Wiig loves it.

If “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” is your favorite celebrity’s favorite reality television show, then why are so many longtime fans seemingly falling out of love with it?

If you do a quick browse of RHOSLC-focused Reddit communities, you’ll quickly learn that fans find season 6, which is currently coming to a close, a flop compared to seasons past. They say things like:

So why do some many RHOSLC watchers purport that the most-touted reality show of 2025 is losing its spark? The answer lies in the concept of perceived authenticity.

What is perceived authenticity?

It’s a key strategy for influencers in content marketing, as a recent Harvard Business Review article explains. When I read about the concept, I couldn’t help but think of my own sneaking disinterest with the housewives I once obsessed over.

In a study by the article’s authors, they describe authenticity (which is really a viewer’s perception of it) as:

A holistic assessment by influencers, consumers, brand managers and influencer marketing agencies, based on five properties — namely expertise, connectedness, integrity, originality, and transparency — whereby the role and importance of each of these properties varies according to the stakeholder's own vested interest.

The more that an influencer delivers on an elusive combination of these properties, the more likely viewers are to perceive them as “real,” or at least worthy of attention. When someone feels real, the stories, ideas, beliefs, and even products they share can also feel worthwhile. Realness — perceived authenticity — sells.

Like influencers, reality television stars and producers also rely on the concept of authenticity. And right now, on the current season of RHOSLC, the five aforementioned properties don’t align. New fans might not see it yet, but the show’s longtime watchers are taking notice.

This problem isn’t something new for RHOSLC or Bravo, the network that created and airs all Real Housewives franchises. During RHOSLC’s season 4 reunion, then-housewife Monica Garcia revealed that she ran an Instagram account that bashed fellow cast mates, essentially shattering a season-long illusion that she wanted to be their friend and inadvertently priming fans for potential signs of overproduction. In February 2023, Louis Staples’ article in Rolling Stone explained why fans turned on Real Housewives of Potomac star Robyn Dixon, many calling for her firing:

Right now, there is a crisis of authenticity facing some of Bravo’s Housewives shows. For the most part, this is being driven by the perception among fans that the stars are too preoccupied with creating “storylines” instead of sharing their real lives. Fans have become hyperaware (to the point of being borderline conspiratorial) that Housewives are trying to control the way they’re portrayed on the show, or inventing storylines as a means of distraction or self-promotion.

My take? As the unscripted television industry becomes increasingly difficult to navigate due to factors like streaming service mergers and content over saturation, reality TV casts and crews arguably face more pressure to succeed than ever before.

So they focus on what they can control via unwritten “scripts.” Producers think up storylines and assign character archetypes to reality show cast members. This way, they can fit their unscripted concepts — ones they hope will reel in viewers — into neat formats. Well-told stories, no matter how genuine, need structure.

Therein lies the challenge for reality TV creators: How do you introduce structure without applying too much? How do you find the sweet spot between truth and drama and deliver it to the largest audience possible? And how do you convince cast members to play ball your way?

The Mormonism of it all

Though not every cast member on RHOSLC is Mormon, Mormonism remains a theme of the show. In fact, I find that the show’s Mormon undertones — shame as power, loyalty as religion, and wealth as worth — add an extra layer to the challenge of achieving perceived authenticity.

At first, these thematic layers provided many of the show’s main draws — at least, that’s how I got hooked. Mary married her step-grandfather to inherit his church empire; Lisa, who says she converted to Mormonism as a teen, name drops celebrities and her tequila brand constantly; Heather, a single mother and ex-Mormon, vies for fellow the housewives’ attention with high school-like zeal.

For awhile, the housewives consistently delivered on authenticity, which likely explains why John Oliver can’t get enough of the show: He probably started binge-watching from season 1. It’s in those initial seasons that we see Jen Shah’s FBI arrest and Lisa Barlow’s hot mic moment, just to name a couple unscripted gems.

But with season 6 at its close, it’s clear the overproduction demons have come for what was once considered peak reality television. Heather Gay, in particular, has leaned into her role as the show’s de facto narrator. Following her memoir Bad Mormon and her executive producer role on the docuseries “Surviving Mormonism,” it’s possible that Heather’s new behind-the-camera skills could be interfering with the RHOSLC’s potential. You can’t deny her tendency to orchestrate receipt-focused group takedowns and shield her true personal life behind meta-commentary this season.

The level of visibility these women face also has the potential to create a feedback loop. In Salt Lake City, a close-knit community made up of members who are known to maintain appearances, the pressure to perform as expected is high, even for the non-Mormons of the group. If the cast is more worried about how their community perceives them than they are worried about showing their “real” lives on camera, transparency, a key property of authenticity, disintegrates.

Is there any hope for a RHOSLC comeback next season?

The way I see it, RHOSLC’s focus on gang-up fights this season detracted from the show’s overall appeal. It’s simply bad entertainment to broadcast a bunch of grown women incoherently shrieking at each other for 10 minutes straight every week.

I also think that, for viewers, one-on-one conflicts and a focus on individual growth and change feels more realistic to the lived human experience. As opposed to gang-up fights, one-on-one storylines allow cast members to emerge as unique characters, friends, or rivals while remaining dynamic and open to change. And, back to the influencer marketing of it all, that’s the type of para-social relationship viewers are more likely gravitate towards.

If RHOSLC has any hope for a better season 7, I predict it will come from a casting shakeup that forces the women out of their current pile-on fight routine. I’m done with the constant blame-shifting and denial! I want to watch these women fight their own fights and face the consequences without a peanut gallery in tow. To me, that’s real woman shit.

If I had it my way for RHOSLC season 7, I wouldn’t change the cast quite yet. I’d let them have one more season to prove themselves, and mandate the following storylines:

• Heather’s dating life: Can she lay off on producing her fellow housewives and lean into dating as an ex-Mormon? That’s the messy vulnerability I wanna see, Heather!

• Whitney the host: I’m dreaming of fewer Bad Weather gang-ups and less crying about her failed businesses. I want more of the old Whit, of being that annoying yet supportive friend who’s into woo-woo shit. I want Whitney to get back to throwing parties and fun events that the older, more serious housewives don’t “get.” Maybe she and Bronwyn can tag-team a rager.

• Leave Lisa alone: At first, I loved how Heather and Whitney gave Lisa a taste of her own medicine. But by the season’s end, I grew to miss Lisa’s more mundane, accidental comedy — like her obsession with fast food and having a glam team at all times — which was overshadowed by circular arguments with various housewives. There’s a reason why producers play these moments back in recent episodes: The audience loved them. So stop it with the pre-planned “candid” moments that feel designed for TikTok.

The only thing I’m left wondering: Can RHOSLC producers re-engineer the authenticity of the show’s first seasons, even with a cast change? Or is the world of Salt Lake City too insular and culturally shrouded to penetrate? 🟨

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Bibliography

Duffek, Bryan, Andreas B. Eisingerich, and Omar Merlo. “How to Do Influencer Marketing That Customers Actually Trust.” Harvard Business Review, 8 Dec. 2025, hbr.org/2025/12/how-to-do-influencer-marketing-that-customers-actually-trust.

Gay, Heather. Bad Mormon: A Memoir. Gallery Books, 2023.

Kaplan, Juliana. “Heather Gay on the Reality of Mormon Wealth and the ‘Veneer’ of Perfection.” Business Insider, 14 Jan. 2025, www.businessinsider.com/mormon-reality-tv-influencers-fascination-anxiety-2025-12.

Lustig, Claire Spellberg. "The RHOSLC Season 4 Reunion Destroyed the Last Remaining Bricks in Bravo's Fourth Wall." Primetimer, 23 Jan. 2024, www.primetimer.com/quickhits/rhoslc-season-4-reunion-monica-garcia-heather-gay.

“An Unscientific Study About How People in Salt Lake City Insulate Themselves.” Reddit, r/SaltLakeCity, 14 Nov. 2022, reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/yuoa0o/an_unscientific_study_about_how_people_in_salt/.

Scott, H. Alan. “Heather Gay Defined Mormonism for Pop Culture and Now She’s Exposing It.” Newsweek, 26 Nov. 2025, newsweek.com/entertainment/reality-tv/heather-gay-defined-mormonism-for-pop-culture-and-now-shes-exposing-it-11090428.

Staples, Louis. “The ‘Real Housewives’ Shows Are in the Midst of an Authenticity Crisis.” Rolling Stone, 17 Feb. 2023, www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/real-housewives-series-authenticity-crisis-bravo-robyn-dixon-heather-gay-lisa-rinna-1234683210/.

Hi, Crybabies!

It’s time for the third edition of Writer’s Habit: Your antidote to writer’s block.

This time, I spoke with Gemmika Champion, an artist and harm-reduction worker in Philadelphia. I previously interviewed her about dating while living sober for Business Insider.

When I first met Gem a few years ago, I was immediately struck by her candor and confidence. As time passed, I noticed she had an interesting habit: At friend hangs and parties, I’d often spot her sitting alone and writing or doodling in a journal.

As it turns out, she’s been toting her journal everywhere since 2015 and has filled up at least five of them. As we near 2026 and reflect on 2025, I was keen to learn how Gemmika kickstarted her journaling habit and how it’s impacted her life.

If you want to get to know yourself better, write more without the fear of failing, or add more structure into your life, this interview is for you!

An interview with Gemmika Champion, a self-proclaimed journal-fanatic of 10 years

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Julia Naftulin: When did journaling become a near daily habit for you?

Gemmika Champion: I’ve written in journals since I was young. I had this habit of getting a cute new journal, writing 10 to 15 pages in it, and then being done with it.

Years later, when I was getting sober, I started to realize that I felt so much better after journaling — especially when I felt like myself getting emotionally clogged, anxious, or stressed. In the last four or five years, I’ve become very regimented. I don’t journal every day right now, but I have become more consistent: I write two to three times a week for at least 15 minutes per session.

After writing, I’m usually like, Oh, this is what I was stressed about. Before that, I lacked consistency because I didn’t see how helpful journaling could be. Once I was in enough pain around my mental health and realized that journaling made me feel good, it became a habit.

What made you decide on that 15-minute time period?

I didn’t want it to be too much, but I also felt like five minutes was too little time. Also, kind of random, but I used to think of time in terms of 30-minute Disney Channel television episodes. It’s not a lot of time, but you can still watch an entire episode, so I figured that half an episode was a reasonable amount of time to journal.

Also, at my job, we can take 15-minute breaks, so it’s a nice way to fit it into my daily life and feel like it’s a low barrier to entry.

There are frequent times when I go over 15 minutes, which is about one and a half pages for me. When that happens, I like to draw a little clock that says I’ve hit time. It’s a way to remember that I often have more to say once I get writing.

Tell me more about how your love affair with journaling began.

When the pandemic hit and isolation ramped up, my depression went through the roof. I was working with my therapist to figure out new coping skills in addition to my sobriety.

Getting sober for me was like, I’m not, like actively fucking up my life anymore, but now I need to take steps to actively improve it and be more intentional. I realized that I was struggling with a lot of the symptoms that drinking previously helped me feel better about.

We landed on journaling because it’s something that you can do no matter where you are, no matter what’s going on. So I’ve always had a journal that’s on the smaller side so that I can take it everywhere that I go. I always want to have that accessible because I frequently find myself overwhelmed. Like, if I’m waiting at the doctor’s office and I’m stressed, I have this thing that I can do, or I can doodle in it. There’s a tangible way for me to regulate myself and also to show myself, Look, you care about yourself.

And it’s led to a snowball effect. Every time I write in my journal, I’m adding to that sense of gratification. Even if it’s just a sentence or a drawing, seeing my journal grow week after week gives me a lot of satisfaction. I have people in my life that I feel like I can talk to about anything, but there’s something about talking to yourself on paper. When I became more consistent, I think it also came from my desire to have more self-reliance.

Also, the way that I talk to different people in my life is maybe more collected than the way that I talk in my journal. Like, I call my best friend whenever and tell her how I’m feeling about a bunch of stuff.

But when I don’t know where my irritation is coming from, or I don’t have a particular source and I’m not looking for a particular solution, journaling is how I take inventory of what’s going on.

Do you have any go-to journal prompts, or do you always write free-form?

When I’m not super inspired to journal, I’ll write down all my senses: This is what I smell, this is what I see, this is what I’m hearing, this is what it feels like, this is what I’m tasting in my mouth. It’s a grounding exercise where I can take stock of what I’m experiencing and feeling at the moment.

I also like to write down everything that I’m afraid of right now; If somebody’s pissing me off, I can write down why they’re pissing me off and this is why I think it’s pissing me off.

And I like to doodle because when I don’t want to write, it’s still a way to feel myself. Sometimes I start with little patterns or sketch something I see like outside. The drawing doesn’t have a rhyme or reason; it’s what makes me feel cool or like I can express myself in that moment.

I’ve struggled with procrastination throughout my life, which I’ve gotten much better with. Really, my procrastination is because I’m a perfectionist and I’m afraid to fail.

That’s why I feel good about my journal: it doesn’t matter how good it is, I just need to get it out. My journal doesn’t need to look a certain way like when I was a kid, which is to me a sign of internal growth.

You’re loyal to the type of journal you use. Once you fill it up, you repurchase the same one. So, where did you first get it? And how did you know it was going to be the journal going forward?

I got my first one for free from my ex-boyfriend that I dated for one month who was the only guy I ever cheated on. He was a graffiti artist and I got him addicted to cocaine. It was really nice of me.

And then he gave you the journal?

Well, he gave me this journal because he worked at a skate shop where they sold graffiti paint and art supplies. Right away, I liked that there were no lines, just blank pages. The company that makes them is called Art Alternatives and I order it every year.

When I got the first journal, I wasn’t even thinking about getting sober and my entries were more like commentary on my drinking. Eventually, I got into a car accident and that changed my thinking about it and led to my sobriety.

[Editor’s note: Gemmika recently celebrated her 10-year sober anniversary. At a party to celebrate, she and her friends all journaled.]

What would you say are the most impactful unintended consequences you’ve had from consistently journaling?

I’m proud of my journal. It’s sick to have this whole archive of my life that I created. I’ve learned to be more flexible as a person too.

Also, people will see me journaling in public and ask me about it a lot. It’s nice to feel like I can help normalize the practice as a helpful thing. I also get good laughs from it when I look back on old entries.

Ultimately, it goes back to getting personal insights. I trust that what I’m writing today, even though it might seem minute, could potentially say something bigger in the future. When I look back, I could be like, I was already thinking that and see the threads of what’s been going on.

We talked about your journal itself. Do you have any other journaling tools that you feel strongly about?

Here’s another thing: I’ve had the same paper planner for 10 years. Every day I write my sobriety date at the top, so if I don’t write anything else, I know that’s in my planner. I use the weekly Passion Planner, which also has pages to track more long-term things like finances and write free-form notes.

I view my journal as being more about emotion, whereas my planner is where I can be more regimented and set goals. For both, I don’t like to put work stuff into them — they’re just for me and I save work stuff for my work phone and computer.

For my planner, I include things like doctor’s appointments, friend dates, and even have my journal to-dos in there. I don’t use Google calendars, so it’s literally all in there. And I don’t miss shit anymore. I used to forget shit all the time, but now I’m the person telling my dental hygienist that she got my appointment information wrong, because I know I’ve put it in my planner right away.

[Editor’s note: After a passionate 15-minute aside focused on the unsung beauty of the paper planner, Julia purchased Gemmika’s longtime favorite Passion Planner. Stay tuned in the New Year for an update on how it’s going.]

What advice or wisdom do you have for Crybabies who want to journal more frequently?

I would say get a journal that’s small and cute to you. Get a pen you really like and make it the easiest thing you could do.

Also, don’t be strict on yourself about it. And if you want to make it more regular than what I do — I probably couldn’t do 15 minutes every day, but I could do three minutes every day. I feel like there’s this idea about what you need to be writing, what type of stuff you need to be saying, and all of these other things. But you could just write about your five senses every day. You could draw, or write a food journal. It doesn’t need to be profound.

I also like to think about the journaling process as an extension of who I am trying to be: Someone who is reliable and trying to be consistent and self-accepting. I come from a family of chameleons where it was like, You’re supposed to blend in. There was always this denial of self, like you didn’t want to carry all of yourself everywhere. A big part of my growth and my healing has been accepting who I am. Sure, I may change a little bit, but this is who I am.

And you’re literally carrying that acceptance with you, in journal form, every day.

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Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

• I Love LA, an HBO series created by Rachel Sennott | If you enjoyed Sennott’s satirical work in the movie “Bottoms” like I did, you’ll find I Love LA a delightful watch. The 30-minute episodes follow an insufferable clan of Gen Z pals who lack self-awareness and hunger for their own slice of success in a world fueled by social media and influencer culture. Consider it Girls for today.

• Pluribus, an Apple TV series by Vince Gilligan | Similar to Vince’s Breaking Bad, his characters here feel so real, even when you don’t really like them or fully understand them. This sci-fi show has filled the Severance-sized hole in my heart and mind, and I think I may like it even more.

• Below Deck Mediterranean Season 10, a reality TV series on Bravo | I’m not sure why it took me so long to get into this reality masterpiece. It’s got hot yacht staffers hooking up and fighting, over-the-top charter guests, beautiful views of the Mediterranean, and an inside look at the complex job of chartering.

A thank you note to my subscribers

As we close out 2025, I wanted to share the gratitude I have for all of my Crybabies. It’s your kind words of support, your readership, and your engagement that has helped me to continue writing this small yet growing monthly newsletter.

Whether shared online or in person, your expressed interest in Crygest tells me something wonderful: People still crave to witness others’ personal pursuits of creativity — and creativity, really, is the art of intention. In this case, my intentions are to tell small yet meaningful stories and connect with others through the written word.

Thank you for being with me on this continued journey; Really, I’m just getting started. See you in 2026!

With intention and love,

Julia

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Dear Crybabies,

A year ago, I launched this newsletter. I wanted to write more often, write for myself, and to find my voice — the one that exists outside of my day job as an on-staff editor.

So I created a Substack and branded it with a theme that I thought was specific enough to be intriguing and general enough to keep my creative juices flowing: Storytelling with an emotional appeal. Crygest, a monthly digest about crying, was born on November 19, 2024.

Today, I’m happy to report that I’ve published 13 posts this year and cried while writing at least 10 of them. I gained 95 subscribers and picked up some useful logistical newsletter-writing lessons along the way.

I hope my learnings can help you start your own long-term writing project, whether it’s a newsletter, zine, novel, or another amazing creation:

1. Be clear and reasonable about your goals. When I joined Substack, I noticed that many newsletter authors published multiple times per month or even per week. To me, that publishing frequency felt like a lot to manage alongside my work schedule, at least for the first year. So I asked myself: Why are you writing this? (Answer: To flex my creativity through writing) and Who is it for? (Answer: Myself, and anyone who wants to read). With these answers, I decided to sideline my urge to compete with everyone else and instead settled on publishing once a month. A year later, I can confidently say that this pace allows me to exist between a stream of steady planning and urgency; this way, I feel more excited than stressed about the project, another key for consistency. Of course, it’s helpful to update your goals, so I also committed to revisiting Crygest at the end of each year to create new ones — more on that below.

2. Consider inspiration-gathering your full-time job. I’ve got a real full-time job, don’t worry. But I act as if my daily mission is to collect feelings, scenes, artifacts, and conversations that move me. When I feel moved or my thoughts are provoked, I write that shit down in my newsletter-planning notebook. I answer questions like: Could this experience I’m having be the opening story in next month’s newsletter? Is this conversation potential fodder for a certain month or week when I know a something relevant will be happening? Is this something I could turn into a recurring series? Is this someone I should interview about their insights? These tidbits might not seem like much in the moment, but the practice of noting them can prime you for noticing more, which is the key to getting inspired and creating meaning out of words.

3. Lean on, and seek out, community. Before I launched Crygest, I shared the idea with my close friends and family, who reacted with excitement and encouragement. It can feel awkward or useless to express your uninitiated goals to others, but I found it helpful in keeping my goal a priority regardless of how much self-doubt I felt. Once I started writing, I talked about my passion project to anyone who would listen — a friend asking what’s new, an acquaintance wondering what I do for work, my Instagram followers. I also DMed a fellow Substack writer who was putting together a collaborative essay series and became part of her project. I left the experience feeling more connected to my craft and excited that another writer and I had the opportunity to yap about what we love and then distill our thoughts into an essay. The cherry on top? Some of her subscribers became subscribers of mine.

4. Start writing early. Write all month long. Similar to Lesson 2, I’ve learned that starting a new draft within the first two weeks of the month is essential for preventing overwhelm. Often, the first two or three drafts I write are garbage. I guess I need to get them out of my brain to uncover something better. Sometimes, if a moment of inspiration suddenly strikes, I’ll jot down sentences or paragraphs in the notes app on my phone and paste them into a Substack post later that day or week and play around with the passages from there. I also collect ideas for my “Fuck, that’s good” segment throughout the month by emailing myself links, which double as little inbox reminders to keep chipping away at the newsletter. I’ll pop into my draft post throughout the month to add brief outlines or expand on points. Once it gets to crunch time at the end of the month (cue to me writing this one at 10 AM on the last day of November, eek!), I’ve found that my final push feels more manageable because of the groundwork I’ve done.

5. Edit yourself. Don’t get trigger-happy and immediately publish your post after writing. I’ve found that letting my draft air out for at least 12 hours before I come back to it has allowed me to create more coherent and less rambling stories with fewer typos. I don’t know about you, but in a world overflowing with content, I prefer to distinguish myself by creating stuff with a certain level of quality control. I want to think about my readers with care, which includes how they’d most enjoy receiving my ideas.

So, what’s next?

As I enter Crygest Year 2, I have some goals in mind. If Year 1 was all about diving in and experimenting, I plan to use this second go-around as a more intentional phase. My goals are to:

• Launch 2 more series/segments/regular programming. Seeing how well-received Writer’s Habit, my advice series by and for writers across disciplines, has become in such a short time, I plan to lean into serialized formats in 2026. “Fuck, that’s good,” won’t be going anywhere either.

• Experiment with video. I’ve always been partial to the written word, but creating videos feels like a fun and creative flex worth trying. In the past, I told myself I’m “just not good” at videography and photography, but I’m choosing to ignore my prior doubts and embrace experimentation via CapCut.

• Grow my subscription base. I want to get more analytical about my readers, both current Crybabies and potential new ones, so I can create and promote my newsletters in a more strategic way. There’s not a specific number of subscribers I’m aiming for in 2026; I’d just like to grow that number even more than I did last year by learning more about all of you.

I’d love to know: What would you like to see more of in Crygest this coming year? No idea is off-limits, so sound off in the comments, or shoot me a DM:

Leave a comment

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

• We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat | Part-memoir, part-native folklore storytelling, this book is in the running for my favorite read of the year. I’m excited to see what Noisecat bring us next, after this and his Oscar-nominated documentary “Sugarcane.”

• These twins’ lives were identical, until one got colon cancer at 21 by Gabby Landsverk for Business Insider | Here, my colleague beautifully details the physical, mental, and financial challenges that came after a 20-something woman’s diagnosis and treatment. I admire Gabby’s ability to tell a gripping tale while peppering in useful information — here, she does it on the rise of cancer diagnoses in young people.

• Wendy Williams Wants Out by Jessica Bennett for New York magazine | Wendy Williams will always be a pop-culture icon. Bennett’s investigation into her recent guardianship — which has terms that bar Williams from leaving the ritzy memory care facility where she lives without permission — read like a masterclass in balanced reporting, new information, and intrigue.

• The Olivia Nuzzi Comeback Is Everything Wrong With Modern Media by Colby Hall for Mediaite | For all the chatter about Nuzzi’s new and poorly written tell-all memoir, I found this analysis to be one of the most salient. It answers the question: How can a political reporter have an affair with RFK Jr., be fired from her high-profile job, and yet be able to sell a book about those indiscretions? Hall discusses how frenetic changes in the media industry incentivized this outcome, and Nuzzi’s behavior in general.

In December, we’ll tie a metaphorical bow on the year with another edition of Writer’s Habit. This time, it’ll feature my friend and serial journaler Gemmika Champion. She’s got some primo advice for sticking to a journaling habit — just in time for intention-setting season!

If you miss me in the meantime, follow my silly little adventures on Instagram here.

With gratitude,

Julia

Hi, Crybabies!

Welcome back to Writer’s Habit: Your antidote to writer’s block.

For the second edition of my series by and for writers of various disciplines, I interviewed Brea Cubit, a seasoned lifestyle journalist and my former boss at Business Insider.

If you missed it, Writer’s Block is a series on Crygest where I talk to all kinds of writers — in journalism, poetry, academia, blogging, and more — about the rituals, techniques, and mental strategies they use to stay on track with their near-daily writing habits.

Before we launch into the good stuff, a few quick notes:

• Did you catch the first edition of Writer’s Block on writing a dissertation? You can check it out here.

• Who should I interview next? Want to share your Writer’s Habit, or know someone who would make for a great interview? Let me know by leaving a comment or DM!

Leave a comment

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An interview with freelance journalist Brea Cubit

When I hopped on a video call with Brea, she shared how her interest in storytelling began in her youth. She started a newspaper at home, where she wrote about her family members — and received threats of defamation from her sister (no legal action was taken, if you were concerned).

Since then, Brea has worked in local news, as an on-staff journalist and editor at Pop Sugar and Business Insider, and now as a freelance journalist with bylines in Elle, Vanity Fair, Delish, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As someone who has experienced many pockets of journalism, what are your thoughts on the state of the industry?

A lot of staffers are really swamped right now. I know people at different publications working with skeleton crews, and it just feels like companies aren’t investing in the longevity of their employees and the longevity of what journalism is supposed to be. To me, it’s a little alarming that there are quite a few legacy publications that are owned by people who probably shouldn’t have a stake in the way we report on the world.

The industry feels like it’s in this weird state of flux. It still exists, and there are people who are in the trenches working to keep it going, but there are so many external factors making it hard to find that.

There’s a mismatch between what we need journalism to be in what it currently is. Hopefully we figure it out at some point, but right now with the way the world is, it’s like we’re trying to build the bridge as we cross it.

So, what are you doing for work now?

What I’m doing now, which I started over the summer, isn’t really new to what I’ve done previously. Currently for Elle, I’m doing daily celebrity and culture coverage. That’s basically what I did for PopSugar: Writing the big news of the day regarding celebrities and style.

I also did a few stories for Vanity Fair that were news-focused. Earlier this summer, I was doing more feature-focused, reported stories. I wrote a couple for Delish, and then I did one for a publication called Creator Spotlight, which is a newsletter publication. That was really fun, challenging, and actually kind of new to me.

I’d never reported on the creator economy before. In a way, I think that was an advantage because the audience that Creator Spotlight wants to reach is people who know the creator economy, but also people who use the newsletter as their introduction into it. I think that’s the fun of journalism and reporting: You get to learn so much.

Right now in my freelance journey, I’m not doing anything that’s drastically different from what I’ve done before, but I am still still learning new things in terms of the subject matters I’m covering, or learning things about celebrities that I stopped tracking after I left PopSugar.

Can you talk a little bit about your process? When you’re reporting on something that you only have a little bit of knowledge about, how do you dig in, find the right sources, and ask the right questions?

Well, I open a blank document and I stare at it for a little bit. I’m going to use my recent Creator Spotlight story as an example.

I really enjoyed that experience because of the editor that I worked with. I initially sent a pitch, because I subscribe to a news editor who aggregates freelance opportunities and I saw one for Creator Spotlight that sounded interesting.

I sent a pitch to the editor and he said it wasn’t a fit. But instead of just leaving it at that, he was like, Here’s what we are looking for, and if there’s a way for you to kind of rework your pitch, let me know. I’m interested in working with you and interested in your work.

Based on his feedback, I sent a different pitch that I personally thought was interesting. I checked their website and they hadn’t really covered it before, and it was loosely tied to what I had pitched earlier. The editor said it looked really good, gave a bit more feedback, and gave me the assignment.

From there, I built an outline, which I don’t do for topics that I’m more familiar with. I started with: What do I want the final product to look like? How do I want the story to unfold? What do I want it to explore? What’s the crux of it? What’s the hook?

Once I wrote that down, I thought, Which sorts of sources would be able to provide insights that explore this theme on a deeper level?

One thing I wrote in my outline was: What makes a creator-brand partnership impactful in 2025? Obviously, creators are going to have a perspective on this, but it needs to be more than that. So I decided to reach out to talent managers and some brands that are working with creators. Having that 360-degree perspective on something, where you’re not only thinking about the obvious source, is important.

To find these sources, I did callouts on Qwoted, which you actually introduced me to, and LinkedIn. I provided as much detail as I could for those callouts, just to make sure that the responses I got aligned with what I was looking for.

You get some responses where you’re like, Did you even read the prompt? But for the most part, I got some really good responses after I did my vetting process. That entailed Googling the person, making sure they’re legit, and looking through their LinkedIn. For one creator that I interviewed, I looked through her Instagram account to make sure she actually did brand partnerships that she mentioned in her response to my callout. For talent managers who represent brands, I looked into what their companies represent, what their companies have done, and the campaigns that they have executed.

I love falling down rabbit holes, so that was fun. I also wanted a third-party perspective, which in this case was someone who is on the marketing side working with brands and creators in a more research-oriented role. I was thinking of all these puzzle pieces and how to bring them together to create the most well-rounded story.

The hard part was synthesizing all of that and figuring out the flow and what information to leave out. Honestly, I probably interviewed too many people, but it worked out because I had so much great information and details.

Obviously, you have a deadline where you have to submit a draft to your editor. Outside of time constraints, what are other signs that you know you’re ready to stop, or pause, your information-gathering process and start writing the draft?

When I feel like I’m going crazy and want to pull my hair out. I have a really bad habit of driving myself crazy. And when I start to feel overwhelmed, I’m like, OK, maybe it’s because I have too much information, or I need to write something out before I have the space to continue researching.

At that point, I start really thinking: How am I going to open this story? What’s my lede? What’s the nut graph? (Editor’s note: “Nut graph” is a journalistic term for a paragraph in a story’s introduction that contextualizes for a reader why the story is relevant and important. “Lede” refers to the opening line and/or scene of a story, meant to pull a reader in.)

From there, I fill in any blanks. In the beginning stages, if you get too deep into researching, you can start to lose your direction. Once you start writing, your path becomes a lot clearer.

How do you typically come up with your pitches? How do you decide which outlets to send them to? Tell me about the Brea Cubit School of Pitching.

I start with what I’m passionate about, as corny as that sounds. What I’m passionate about, and also what I’m interested in digging into more.

It’s a lot of looking into the types of stories that a particular publication puts out, the angles that they have, and really tailoring the pitch to that. Any time I send a pitch, I make sure that I include sample headlines.

I try to keep the pitch to a couple of graphs, nothing too short, nothing too long. And then I explicitly say that I am able to interview the subjects I mention in my pitch, or at least reach out to them for an interview. Really, it’s about establishing that I’m equipped to write this story in a way that makes sense for the publication.

I also leave it open-ended and say, If this isn’t a fit, that’s OK. I’m also open to other assignments or, If this specific angle doesn’t quite align with what you’re looking for, I’m happy to tweak it.

I think that it’s normal to feel overwhelmed while working in journalism, whether you’re on staff or freelancing. How do you deal with that?

Girl, I’m still figuring it out. It’s a lot of having to pull myself out of my own anxiety, and remembering that not everyone can be in this position.

It was an advantage to start freelancing after I held an editor position because it gave me perspective: Just because you have edits on your story doesn’t mean you suck.

I often have to tell myself worries and fears are only in my own head, and that I’m not a failure because I received edits. It’s a lot of challenging myself and combating those intrusive thoughts.

Also, the freelance world is a whole different beast in that it’s so much harder to draw boundaries. You’re worried about perceptions of you because you want to keep getting work to pay the bills. Like, if you say no to something, what happens if they don’t come back to you for more assignments?

My advice for freelancers and the freelance-curious is to give yourself grace. It’s cliché, but it’s true. Know that more times than not, you’re doing a much better job than you realize.

Have you implemented any boundaries to create work-life balance as a freelancer?

Yes, but it’s scary. As I try to become a better news writer -- writing faster, since I think I’m a slower writer, generally -- I need to be able to say no to things and recognize when I don’t have time.

I always want to be reliable for people, but I think if I’m too overwhelmed, then that eventually is going to affect my reliability and have an adverse effect. I’ve only recognized the boundaries I need to set and now I need to actually do them.

I’m starting to implement little things, like forcing myself to peel away from my laptop for a cup of tea or some fresh air. Even if it’s just three minutes of walking around the block, or switching the spot where I work in my apartment, I’ve found that change of scenery helpful. Also, I feel like music is something that changes my mood without my permission, so I will play some in the background while I work.

Recently, I’ve started to sit down and stare blankly at the wall until my mind slows down. My mind is a whirlpool sometimes, and I carry a lot of stress in my head so I end up getting awful tension headaches. It can take a while for me to mentally slow down, but I need to. Otherwise, I’m in a continuous cycle of stress.

I have a lot of favorite things about you, and one is how organized you are. For freelancing specifically, what do you do to stay organized?

Spreadsheet! I have lots of tabs: One for freelance pitches, one for commissioned assignments, publication contacts, general how-to’s for pitching. In that one, I aggregate publications’ guidelines for pitching, which come from things editors have tweeted or put on LinkedIn about the types of stories they’re seeking.

I have an ideas bank tab, where if I have an idea while out in the wild, I write it down in that. The freelance pitches tab is where I put specific pitch callouts that I see and ideas for those callouts, as well as pitches that I had in my ideas bank that I think would be good for a specific publication.

For commission assignments, I have columns for the headline, the publication, the editor, the file date, the status, the drafts, and the final published link.

Also, I track the rate, whether I’ve submitted an invoice yet, whether I’ve been paid yet, and the month that I was paid. At the bottom, I have the sum total of my 2025 freelance income. I also break down my month-to-month income.

Brea, do you have any final words of wisdom about journalism, freelancing, writing, or being a creative professional in general?

If you still have that fire in you, don’t give up. This industry is kind of a dumpster fire right now, but the fact that it’s still kicking is a sign that there’s still something to invest in, even if it’s your own little contribution in your own little way that makes you feel happy and fulfilled.

I don’t blame anyone who wants to pivot in their career and do something outside of journalism. I’ve heard a lot of my journalist friends say that. I’ve even had those thoughts. At some point, I might start to think about what else I want to do that’s journalism-adjacent, or maybe something completely new.

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

• Task, a series on HBO Max | A New York Times’ TV critic referred to the show as a portrait of “a downtrodden stretch of rural America,” but anyone from the Philly/Delco area knows that description isn’t quite right. Still, I loved the show’s moody, poignant cinematography and how the writing touched on social issues of today in a personal way. And how can you resist scruffy Mark Ruffalo playing a sexy-and-sad former priest turned FBI detective?

• kyliebytes, a newsletter by tech reporter Kylie Robison | In her three most recent newsletters, Kylie writes vulnerably about being let go from her journalism job and what she’s been doing since. In this topsy-turvy industry, journalists like her remind me why I choose to stay: The talented and earnest people who create the work.

Stay cozy and see you next month,

Julia

I’ve been out of school for nearly a decade now, but summertime still has a chokehold on my psyche. It’s a welcome grasping, a seasonal force that requires I tap into a more spontaneous and carefree attitude.

For me, the ideal summer is a mix of planned fun and unplanned frolicking from Memorial Day Weekend through September, when the first day of fall officially hits.

I took four trips to the beach this summer, and another to a secret and magical swimming hole (don’t ask me for the details). In June, I went to Nashville for my cousin’s bachelorette party, then Denver for the wedding in July. In August, I drove six hours to Virginia Beach, my dachshund in the back seat. We visited my high-school best friend for a whirlwind weekend of gossiping and shellfish. There was even, at my request, one line-dancing class before I headed back to Philly for some Leo/Virgo birthday celebrations.

As Labor Day Weekend approached, I didn’t feel ready for summer to end. Luckily, it didn’t have to: I had one final beach trip planned.

Long Beach Island had already turned sleepy for the season by the time I arrived on a Tuesday with my tennis racquets, beach chair, two library books, and journal in tow. The sun was warm and welcoming, competing for my attention with a near-constant breeze. The next day, I wore my fleecy gray sweatsuit. The next, I put on my new bikini top and ended up sunburnt on the right side of my neck. Later, I got sweaty playing tennis so I jumped into the pool. I got goosebumps from the chilly air, so I put on a crewneck sweatshirt before a frosé-drinking expedition.

For those four and a half days, I existed between the seasons.

On my last full day at the beach, I watched the ocean’s undulating waves while burrowing my toes into the sand, reflecting on everything I just told you here. I also thought about the oppressive humidity that stretched through June and July, the bittersweet goodbyes I said to friends headed on new adventures, and the confrontations with my past — in the form of journalism-industry news, a family reunion, and a long overdue yet unexpected run-in with my ex.

Then, I jotted down the lessons and realizations I had over the course of the past three months, memorializing another airy-feeling season.

No, it wasn’t the best of summers. Everywhere, it seemed, there was evidence of our world’s stifling realities. This summer, I realized, wasn’t an idyllic escape but a much-needed reminder: That I often feel my best when I’m able to relinquish some control and allow myself the space to just exist.

4 lessons I learned this summer, in no particular order

1. Like nature, life has seasons. They will come, they will pass, and they will come again, so stay present during the one happening now. You will be better for it.

2. Sometimes, feelings are a way to hold onto a fading connection or to reciprocate for a lost one. Closure can be admitting that to yourself.

3. You can’t outrun or out-think a feeling. You can either move through it, or face the consequences of avoiding it.

4. Taking a chance on yourself is where fear ends and fun really starts. If you desire something, it’s better to anxiously go for it than wait for the perfect conditions, which tend to never arrive. Building self-esteem in this way will set you free — from yourself, from societal expectations, and from wondering What if?

So, what now?

After allowing my mind to do some much-needed wandering this summer, I feel prepared to refocus.

Part of that is falling back into healthy routines and scheduled commitments, and part of that is making consistent time for curiosity, creativity, and stillness.

How are you preparing for fall?

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Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

“Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction” by Jack Hart | For anyone who wants to work on their written story-telling skills, Hart’s book is chockfull of advice and real-life examples of turning true events into compelling narratives. Though Hart’s focus is on journalistic writing, I think his tips can be used for all kinds of stories.

Office-outfit checks by Julia Constanzo, via YouTube | As I figure out my working-girl style as a 31-year-old, this woman’s videos provide much-needed inspiration. Her style is chic, playful, full of texture, and attainable.

This clip of Merrill Reese commentating the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jordan Davis | Super Bowl repeat omen?

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Dear Crybabies,

Welcome to the first edition of Writer’s Habit: Your antidote to writer’s block.

In this new Crygest series, I’ll be interviewing writers across disciplines — journalism, poetry, academia, blogging, and more — about the rituals, techniques, and mental strategies they use to stay on track with their near-daily writing habits.

First up: Political Science PhD candidate Daniel Confalone. He’s currently writing his dissertation (that’s like, 300 pages including original research, bro) and I admire his dedication towards this long and winding process.

We chatted about why he decided to pursue his PhD in the first place, how he plans and tracks his progress for this years-long project, and the strategies he uses to get over writing slumps.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Want to share your Writer’s Habit, or know someone who would make for a great interview? Let me know by leaving a comment or DM!

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What it’s like to write a dissertation with Temple PhD candidate Daniel Confalone

Julia Naftulin: There are two types of people: those who pursue a PhD and those who do not. I’m in the “not” category because, well, it seems so daunting. Where did your initial desire to get a PhD come from?

Daniel Confalone: Yes, it's a very intense and long process, and the intention is that it's that way. It’s the reproduction of knowledge, so it's not an easy thing. Anecdotally, more people start a PhD than finish one. And there's also a large cohort of people who have started and then don't complete it because they couldn’t for material reasons, or they realized it’s not what they thought it would be, or just realized they don’t need it to be fulfilled. It's not a universally fulfilling thing, but I did have a hole in me that I thought going to grad school would fill. It did for the most part, and I'm very happy it did.

Before grad school, I loved reading, learning, and the classroom environment. I would fantasize about myself being in front of the classroom, in the typical professor dress, you know: loafers and a beat-up leather satchel. I had a couple of different jobs but wanted something in a policy-related field, which seemed to require a master's degree, or to just have something more. Nothing against my day jobs, but I felt like there was another skillset that I wanted to use, with researching and writing. I didn’t want those skills, which you use in undergrad, to decline too much, so after 5 years working, I decided to go for my master’s degree.

JN: Why did you decide to take a 5-year gap between undergraduate and graduate school?

DC: Looking back, taking that gap was super important. I think a lot of people have a hard time if they try to go straight from undergrad to grad school because you're young, you don't have a lot of experience, and you've just been in school for a long time.

That time when I was working gave me a financial and professional leg up. I was able to save, and working in a corporate environment gave me tools to interact with colleagues and work through systems of hierarchy, which exist in corporate jobs and academia.

I also realized those jobs weren’t for me. Experiencing that — the alienating experience of working a job that wasn’t my field of study — I had the wherewithal to go through the trials and tribulations of grad school, like minimal wages and benefits. Once I was there, I was like, This is worth it. Some things suck or feel demeaning, but it's OK because I want to be doing this work and the alternative is a really boring and meaningless day job.

JN: I wanted to dig into the actual dissertation process. How do you even start?

At Temple, it takes about 7 years on average to finish. That also varies by discipline. But that's not all dissertation time; you do a master's and then you do a PhD. It’s 2 years of coursework, then qualifying exams so you can continue on to your PhD. Then, at least in my case, you have about a year to pitch your PhD, where you put together a prospectus that's anywhere from 15 to 50 pages and lay out the main themes that you're looking at.

You don't obviously have much in terms of results, but it's something you should have done over the course of the prior couple of years, some thinking and some reading, and have some idea about what you want to do. You pitch that prospectus, then you assemble a dissertation committee of, in my case, 3 people. They read the prospectus and decide if you pass, and if you do, you can officially start your dissertation. I started graduate school in 2020 and in April 2024, I completed my prospectus. I’ve been working on my dissertation in earnest for the past year or so.

But I’ve seen some other people in my program come in with a solid idea from day one, this is and that can help you work towards finishing faster. In my case, I bounced a bunch of ideas off the wall and got shot down a bunch. Or I would start to explore something and realize there wasn’t enough on the topic, or it’s all been done.

And you're gonna be with the topic you pick for a long time. It's like you do have to immerse yourself in a world and then at the end of it, ideally you are the expert for this thing. That's academics: carving out a tiny little stupid slice of ham at the deli counter and being an expert on that tiny little slice. So I picked something that I’m actually interested in waking up to every single morning to write about.

JN: So what are you waking up to every morning?

DC: I'm looking into if and how constraints on local government causes disaffection among Black Americans.

JN: Love it. You have your topic. How do you break the writing into stages? Is there a particular writing structure you follow?

DC: We don't have formal writing training, but I did have to take a prospectus class and that was kind of helpful. Every time I would ask professors about how to go about writing, they’d say, “It kind of depends.” But I like to see examples of things when I’m learning, so I would go on ProQuest, look up recently published papers in my topic area, and pay attention to the structure. I did ask ChatGPT about the normal layout of the chapters and it said that Chapter 2 is normally the literature review chapter, so you know, that was helpful.

Obviously, I made my own outline. An outlining process is always important, but especially with something so big and unwieldy. You're gonna have to have some sort of game plan for building on concepts over the course of 200 to 300 pages.

JN: Regardless of discipline, a writing habit is tough to form. What strategies do you use — mentally, emotionally, physically, or otherwise — to get over that feeling of, I really don't wanna write today?

DC: Writing is a muscle and like any other muscle, it needs to be used. Probably not a single sentence that I wrote initially is going to be in the final thing because they were bad. Sometimes I can tell when I'm writing junk and sometimes I can't. If I can tell, I'll highlight it in red so I know it's dog shit. I just need to move on to the next thing and come back to it.

But bad writing is also like a snake shedding its skin. Part of the reason why I haven't gotten sick of writing is because I would put things down, then leave them for a couple of months knowing I’m going to have to come back to them. I'll be like, I can rewrite this so much better now than I did six months ago because I know so much more and have developed my other arguments so much better in other chapters.

In terms of the day-to-day process, it definitely helps that I like researching and writing. It doesn't mean I like it all the time or I'm always happy to do it, but like if you were somebody who hates the idea, something like this probably isn't for you.

I also try to go into every day with a game plan. Usually the night before when I'm in bed, I'll be thinking about what I'm gonna do in the morning because if I sit down at my computer in the morning with a blank mind or feeling like there's a roadblock in place that I don't know how to address, I'm gonna not get anything done. I'm gonna find other things to do and distract myself, because I'm like, This is too hard.

When I get feedback from my academic advisors, it takes me a couple of days of looking at it before I come up with a game plan of how to approach it. I like to let things marinate a bit.

Writing isn't a linear process. Especially in this case, where every day that I sit down and “write,” I'm not necessarily typing out new sentences. I think a large part of it is unlocking these new neural pathways in my brain for how to approach a thing.

Sometimes I’ll have a day or 2 of nothing and think, Wow, I have really bad writer's block. Then something will hit me and I’ll unlock a new idea.

JN: I think that any consistent and good writer finds a balance between rumination and putting pen to paper. How do you strike that balance?

DC: There’s a saying: perfect is the enemy of good, or whatever it is. If you're waiting for the perfect sentence to come to you, and you have to write a 300-page thing, it’s gonna take you decades. Early on, I decided I was just gonna write paragraphs. I’d read enough and taken plenty of notes, so next was proving to myself that this wasn’t as intimidating as it seemed.

My notes doc is about 400 pages long and it’s organized by author, with either notes I personally typed or copy and pasted passages different from PDFs, quick reference stuff. It’s helpful for ruminating because if I feel stuck, I can look through the grand sum of my knowledge. I’ve been like, I totally forgot about this person who said it in this way, but it was in my handy dandy notebook.

JN: OK, Steve from Blue's Clues. What are the daily rituals that set you up for success?

DC: One of the true benefits of dissertation is that it's not a 9-to-5 job, so you get to set your own productive hours. I know that from 9 am to 2 pm is my peak productivity time, so if I sleep in late or I get distracted and I haven't done anything by noon, the chances I’ll do any work that day are pretty low. If I wake up and the first thing I watch is a minute-long TikTok, the gears of my brain are in such a way that it's gonna be very hard to go into that longer-form thinking.

I try to immediately get up and by the time the first cup of coffee is brewed and in my cup, I like to be at my computer and thinking about the writing I have to do for that day.

My phone definitely has to be in another room. If it's on my nightstand, which is within chair-rolling distance of my desk, that's too close. By putting it in another room where I would have to stand up and do a walk of shame there. Even if I do that, it’ll be just a few minutes break and I'm like, OK, this is the phone room. I'm gonna put my phone down and go back to the workroom.

By the time the clock strikes 11 am, I want to have made a decent amount of progress. And that’s when I eat my breakfast. I find that if I’m productive for two hours, like in a really powerful stint, I can get a lot of things done and then having that productivity out of the way in the morning makes me more likely to then continue being productive.

I've also been keeping a progress log in a Google sheet. I type in the date and the number of pages I typed, then it adds it up at the bottom. I can see the periods where I was writing consistently, or when I wasn’t. That’s been really helpful and it was satisfying to get to a point where I was watching the difference between what I needed to write and what I did have written ticking down. Like every day that I'm doing this, even if it's just a page, I'm getting closer to my goal.

I think accountability is self-directed, so you need to direct yourself because ultimately you are accountable to yourself.

JN: Would you like to leave the Crybabies with one last piece of wisdom?

DC: I mean, I'm gonna look really stupid saying all this stuff if I end up not finishing my PhD.

Really though, I don't see myself as particularly smart or hardworking. I don't think I'm the best at anything, but I also think that doesn't matter for writing a dissertation.

I'm not somebody who likes being stressed out or competitive, or hating my peers because they did something better than me. So I've kind of found a niche where I don't have to feel those things. I think I found a place and a program that fits my sensibilities well. Program fit is so, so important because you're gonna be in this thing for a long fucking time. Having a toxic environment, hating the other students, or being cutthroat is not a recipe for success; It's a recipe for being miserable or dropping out.

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

The Las Culturistas Culture Awards | An entertainment awards show by podcast hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Communion: The Female Search for Love | A book on the philosophy of love by social activist bell hooks

See you in September,

Julia

Amidst frenzied chatter about artificial-intelligence, summer storms and heatwaves, unfortunate and preventable deaths following floods in Texas, the US being on the brink of war with Iran, and congressional funding cuts to public media, I’ve been in my feels.

I know I’m not alone in feeling regularly tired, pissed off, frustrated, and sad over the state of things. So I’m dedicating this edition of Crygest to something silly and cozy: My ever-expanding collection of extremely oversized T-shirts.

The perfect Big T-Shirt, according to a sleepy cozy homebody

Before I get into the tour of my beloved baggy guys, a few notes on what I believe makes for the perfect Big T-Shirt:

• Large enough that when you put it on, the hem skims at least the bottom of your butt checks

• Material is soft enough to be worn to bed, or has the potential to be washed and worn to desired softness; Comfort Colors brand tees are that girl

• Features an illustration, saying, or other design that makes you laugh, feels personal, or makes you do a double-take upon spotting

• Found out in the wild, meaning you didn’t go to Brandy Melville, ASOS, Shein, or another retailer thinking “Today, I’m buying a Big T-shirt.” These babies tend to be best when you stumble upon them at thrift stores and yard sales, are gifted one, or steal it from a man’s closet and claim it as your own.

• Bought or procured with the intention of bringing yourself — no one else — joy and solace. Big T-shirts should be mainly enjoyed in the comfort of your own home; they’re not intended to be worn in public, except in extenuating circumstances (e.g. your little dog has to poop but you’re not ready to get dressed yet).

The origins of my Big T-shirt love affair

In my teens and early twenties, I made a concerted effort to become a jammies girl. Victoria’s Secret was all the rage, and I wanted to look like a cute, feminine, and desirable Angel in a matching silk or printed cotton set. But every time I tried to sleep in my “special” PJs, I lost my shit. There was too much fabric touching my skin, they bunched up in undesirable places, and I was too hot.

Jammies, I realized, were most suitable for Christmas mornings with my family. Otherwise, I took to wearing athletic-type t-shirts — think the mass-produced Gildan and Hanes tees printed for your adult soccer league or town’s 5K fundraiser — and gym shorts as PJs throughout most of high school and college.

In 2018, two years into living on my own post-college, my Big T-shirt love affair kicked off when I spotted actress Busy Philipps wearing a graphic tee on her now-defunct late-night show that I couldn’t resist buying for myself. It was plain white fabric emblazoned with a rainbow and the phrase “I Cry At Work,” which was written in a spray paint-inspired font. I hunted down the shirt online and bought it in women’s XXL, the only size that was still available.

When I put it on, any sign of my DD boobs disappeared. I couldn’t see my underwear. The message felt spot-on and was a visual reminder that I should give myself, and my emotions, grace. The cotton felt a bit starchy, until I found myself washing the shirt week after week, reaching for it each night after my post-work shower and TV binge. I didn’t even mind wearing the shirt to bed — Winnie the Pooh-style, of course.

The next Big T-Shirt came as a gift from my ex-boyfriend — merch from a favorite neighborhood sandwich shop, in a size men’s XL. From there, I was hooked.

Somehow, probably due to my ascension to a new level of coziness, my brain rewired to be on constant lookout for my next Big T-shirt. And I’ve been looking and collecting ever since.

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Behold, my collection of Big T-Shirts*

*They’re supposed to be wrinkly like that.

Fuck, that’s good

✨ A brief list of media that fed me this month ✨

• Addison by Addison Rae | The album of my summer. It’s bubbly, it’s blunt, it’s groovy, it’s a bit messy: everything summer should be!

• “Survival as a creative act” | This Substack video conversation between The Ink’s Anand Giridharadas and writer Suleika Jaouad had me feeling inspired and hopeful:

The.Ink

Survival as a creative act

A lot of what we do here at The Ink can be, well, depressing. But we just had a truly inspiring conversation with the writer Suleika Jaouad and almost 2,500 of you about the practice of journaling and the glorious awkwardness of life (and of live online conversation). Suleika, the author of…

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a year ago · 337 likes · 18 comments · Anand Giridharadas, Suleika Jaouad, and Leigh Haber

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During a recent therapy session, I shared my confusion over feelings I couldn’t seem to shake despite the passing of many months and personal efforts to acknowledge, then understand, the ickiness inside:

Why am I still so annoyed, so bothered? I asked my therapist. I could pinpoint the people who caused those feelings to bubble up, and the circumstances that surrounded them — things that I acknowledged in therapy sessions months, even years ago.

My confusion came from the persistence of my agitation. I know I’m someone who has high expectations, I went on, so I think it’s probably normal for me to feel regularly disappointed. Then, my voice getting higher: But I’ve adjusted my expectations. So why do I still feeling so fucking frustrated?

My therapist hit me with a bar I hadn’t considered: I don’t think disappointment is a bad thing. Actually, I think it’s a side effect of hopefulness. And I think you have a lot of expectations because you’re a hopeful person.

After that gem of a mental-health professional and I parted ways, I started to see my relationships — romantic, platonic, old, new, over, still kickin’ — from a new perspective. In all of them, I’ve always carried with me a fear: That I want too much, so I am too much.

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Over the years, I’ve refined that inner worry. I became someone who was justified in her high expectations and as a byproduct, silently judged anyone who didn’t meet them. Then, I became someone who saw that maladaptation for what it was: An attempt to protect myself from hurt. Or, in other words, disappointment.

For awhile, I tried to think myself out of feeling regularly disappointed. They’re just busy, I told myself. They’re tired and stressed and everyone is imperfect, so I might as well accept this slight annoyance. That felt inconsiderate of my feelings, but I know deep down that they care, so I’m not going to say I want to talk about it. I’m not going to say that I want more time, or more consideration.

Can you see how I inadvertently made my relationship to wanting more worse?

Now, I’m trying to be someone who says I’m disappointed. Literally, my therapist said I should say it out loud to myself when I feel like a situation or person doesn’t meet my expectations. It can also be useful, at times, to share your disappointment with the person who caused it. But, as a newly minted 31-year-old, I’m starting to realize that sharing my disappointment can be futile. There’s a balance to be had between acknowledging disappointment and accepting it.

What I really mean is: There is nothing wrong with wanting more. And with every year that passes, I want to say that with more conviction than I did the year prior.

In forthcoming editions of Crygest, I’ll do a deep dive into the three main areas of life where I’ve struggled to be OK with wanting more: Romance, friendship, and career/self.

They’re gonna be juicy tear-jerkers you don’t want to miss (I’m basically gonna gossip with you about my own life mishaps!) so subscribe below if you haven’t already, and share this post with someone who you think can relate.

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New column alert!

Introducing Writer’s Habit: Your antidote to writer’s block.

Want to write more often but feel stuck? Tired of your proclivity for perfection and instant gratification holding you back from just creating something, anything?

Then this upcoming column is for you. (It’s definitely for me!) I’ll interview writers in various disciplines — journalism, poetry, academia, blogging, and more — about the rituals, techniques, and mental strategies they use to stay on track with their near-daily writing habits.

First up: Political Science PhD candidate Daniel Confalone. He’s currently writing his dissertation and I admire his fortitude in what seems to be a long and winding process.

Want to share your Writer’s Habit, or know someone who would make for a great interview? Let me know!

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Fuck, That’s Good

✨ A brief list of content that fed me this month ✨

Intermezzo | A novel by Sally Rooney

I’m new to Rooney’s writing, and can now see why her work is so beloved. The way she bottles up emotions like grief and desire with her pen is exacting, lovely, and aspirational. I’ve made it halfway through this novel and can’t wait to see how it unfolds as I finish it over the next few days.

party 4 u | Song by Charli XCX

When I first started to get into Charli’s music in late 2020, party 4 u was a song that had my ears in a metaphorical chokehold from my first listen. I think it’s interesting how it’s recently gained heightened online popularity. (Perhaps a sign of growing discontent about our hyper-individualized and lonely society.) And Charli creating an emotionally charged music video for the track 5 years after its release? An amazing idea I’d like to see more artists execute.

When I debuted Crygest in January, I wrote about my desire to have more rituals.

I did this with the hope that infusing more intention and repetition into my day-to-day life would help me feel less anxious, more purposeful, and generally more content.

My dear Crybabies, I’m happy to report that the rituals are in fact working. I feel more energized and purposeful than I have in months. Maybe there’s something to being a rigid bitch, after all.

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Logan Ury, a behavioral scientist and dating coach who I’ve had the pleasure of once interviewing, explained how our increasing access to on-demand services like DoorDash, Netflix, and dating apps has led to a loss in appreciation of delayed gratification.

“I’m not complaining! I love my on-demand TV and fast WiFi. I’m waiting for pad thai as I type this,” Ury wrote in one of her recent newsletters. She continued:

But the cost of all this instant gratification indulgence is that we expect all aspects of life — including dating — to work the same way. We expect dating to be easy, fast, and on our terms. We look for instant chemistry and partners who fit perfectly into our busy lives.

I think the same can be said for our collective increasing expectation for instant happiness, belonging, validation, success, and even perfection in our work, friendships, communities, and family dynamics. Online, we see others’ glitzy vacations, pristine homes, career and family milestones, and brand new clothes. But we rarely get to witness the longterm resilience of these people’s minds and bodies, the disappointments they had to overcome. Nor do we recognize that overcoming difficult moments does not assure us material rewards.

But overcoming difficult moments through action — striving, if you will — comes with an internal reward that no TikTok or Instagram post can convey. That’s why I decided I needed more ritual, more routine, in my life. I was sick of hoping to feel fulfilled, tired of thinking One day, it will happen.

Rituals, I believe, can shake us out of this internet culture-induced trance. Rituals force us to slow down and focus on process rather than immediate outcome. They require a level of emotional fortitude and physical work brought on by mental strength. Rituals can only exist if the person doing them shows up, acts, learns, adjusts as needed, and repeats the process.

So I took stock of the things that make me feel icky, like scrolling on Instagram and being a bi-weekly Amazon customer. I also zeroed in on the stuff that makes me feel purposeful or, at the very least, engaged in the physical world: Reading from pages I can touch, shopping at small businesses where I can ask for recommendations in person, making art, and collaborating with people who have shared interests and values.

Since January, I’ve read three books that had words and sentences so beautiful, I spontaneously cried upon reading them. I met another Substack writer who I admire, and we’ve been working on “Yellowjackets” essay together that I can’t wait for you to read soon. I deleted the Amazon and Doordash apps off of my phone and instead saved a chunk of that impulse-purchase money for few home projects. I conceived of a new Crygest every month this year so far, wrote my ideas into existence, and published them. And I started coaching youth soccer in my neighborhood, which has been a delightful practice in taking initiative and trying new things, even when I feel anxious and uncertain.

Of course, these little processes and activities can only serve us to an extent. Every few days, regardless of my newfound rituals, I still find myself in emotional pain over the state of our country and our world. I can be with great company for hours yet I still often yearn for the ability to sleep my life away until things feel more normal, more manageable, again.

But that’s not possible. That’s not real life. So I force myself to come back to these outward acts, these rituals. In my moments of despair, it’s my discipline that keeps my sense of hope tended to.

I’d love to know: What rituals are helping you feel better right now?

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Fuck, That’s Good

✨ A brief list of content that fed me this month ✨

WTF Is Spiritual Care for the Non-Religious | An episode of the Culture Study podcast by journalist Anne-Helen Petersen, featuring guest expert Vanessa Zoltan who is currently teaching a class at Harvard on the subject

Headphones On | A perfect pop-R&B song by Addison Rae that I’ll have on repeat until September. The music video is also super fun.

Yellowjackets - Season 3 | WHAT A FINALE. I have an essay collaboration looking at fan-favorite character Natalie coming soon, so stay tuned for that!

I pop a Tylenol, then climb the stairs to my bedroom while listening for the click-clacking of Gretchen’s toe nails — a sure sign my little dog is following me. I kick off my orthopedic clogs, scoop up G, and hop into bed just as another gut-punch unravels inside of me.

I pull my forest green comforter up to my chin, then stare out the square window to my left. It’s mainly a view of the sky, which is growing less cloudy and increasingly tinged with blue.

I opened the window earlier, upon waking and seeing the mild forecast on my phone. Now, I get to enjoy the simple work of my morning self. I inhale through my nose while I close my eyes; I exhale and flutter them open.

Such gratitude I have for this place, with its unadorned white walls, cherry wood floors, and golden hardware. My home.

As I lay there, I remember the years I spent wincing quietly at my desk with the same cramps. In an open office layout surrounded by coworkers and fluorescents lights, I silently prayed that I wouldn’t have to use the communal bathroom for another unsavory period poop (if you know, you freakin’ know).

My home is place where I get to work — and exist — in a way that works for me. I can pull my laptop onto my lap after a bout of thought-stopping period symptoms and get back to the work, rather than feel a wash of anxiety over trying to conceal my pain in the office. I can ground myself — in turn, feeling more creative and clear-headed — because I have slow mornings and meetings punctuated with walks around my neighborhood.

On my walks, I watch people. They aren’t snatching their desk salads for lunch or taking business calls outside; There are parents who play with their children at the park, pups who pull their owners down the street to sniff trash, and older adults who carry bags of produce towards their homes or smoke cigarettes on their stoops. Commuters wait at the bus stop, some dressed in jeans or dress pants, while others don leggings and sweats. The spectrum of life’s possibilities — work, play, coziness, professionalism, connection — lives right outside my door, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

So I walk back into my home, the one I bought for myself after a 6-month search and help from my parents. Home, with my 12-pound wiener dog and the things I’ve accumulated over the years: Furniture from my grandmother, framed art from my mother and my own travels, books I’ve collected and been bestowed, and so many throw blankets (you can never skimp on coziness).

Sometimes, I feel a bit selfish living this way. Family, acquaintances, and strangers ask: Do you live with your boyfriend? Or they assume we’ve bought this house together. No, I say. It’s all mine. No boys allowed. I try to make light of their assumptions using playfulness. Really, I feel a deep conviction about this choice I’ve made to own a house and make a home by, and for, myself.

It would be simple to follow the playbook so many do. Sometimes, I still find myself seeking that comfort: Of tradition, or of a life lived linear with courtship then love then marriage then children and a home built around it all.

I don’t want simple, though.

As a child, I was obsessed with home design.

I flipped through my mom’s Pottery Barn catalogs, folding the corners of the pages that especially spoke to me, as if I’d return there soon to purchase the $5,000 armoire 9-year-old Julia was lusting over. I frequently asked my dad to help me rearrange the furniture in my bedroom to give my space a brand new look. Every few months and unprompted by any authority figure, I emptied out my bedroom closet to reorganize my belongings. Then, I asked my mom to take me to Goodwill so I could donate the items that no longer served me.

When other girls my age daydreamed aloud about their future weddings, I tried to think about what mine would look like too — but I never landed on any solid details. Mainly, I viewed it as an exercise in imagination. Creating a living space — one in my image, for the sole purpose of living out my life’s dreams — seemed more concrete, so it took priority over nuptials in my budding brain.

More than 20 years later, it feels like I’ve actualized a long held dream. I spent the years in between trying to convince my high school sweetheart that we should get married one day, then ending up broken hearted when he ended our relationship 10 years in.

Now I know that I wasn’t broken hearted over losing the prospect of marriage to someone I loved. I was broken hearted about losing what I thought was a surefire ticket to security, comfort, and a life created rather than prescribed.

When I signed the deed to my house 4 years later and committed to making my home, a sense of relief washed over me.

I was giving myself permission: To find that security and comfort, and to create a life without staying within the guardrails so many do.

I was making plans, and they were all mine.

Fuck, That’s Good

✨ A brief list of content that fed me this month ✨

Apple Music’s Lady Gaga Interview at one of her favorite Lower East Side bars

Curiosity Cafe’s insightful essay on that White Lotus Monologue scene and what it tells us about men + desire

Sam Sanders’ podcast conversation with novelist Torrey Peters on exploring gender as an invitation to better understand yourself

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When I’ve encountered my life’s most difficult moments, I’ve tended to turn towards the women I love.

I often feel more emotional about these relationships — with my mother, grandmother, closest female friends, and teachers — than I do about romantic love. My most cherished relationships with women feel hard-earned, complex and challenging, and — probably because of those things — the most rewarding and soul-filling bonds of my life.

With these women and because of them, I’ve made meaning out of my life, found inspiration, built a career, and grown into a more self-assured person. So I’m dedicating this month’s newsletter — inspired by Valentine’s Day — to all of them.

These women have seen me cry, cried with me, and/or have been the reasons for my tears. You’ll never know them the ways I do (that’s the beauty of relationships, baby!). Nonetheless, I’m sharing my thoughts on what makes them forces in my little life:

1. Barbara. My mother, and a woman who shows me that growing, changing, accepting, and loving are lifelong assignments worth taking on. She’s always championed my independence and autonomy, but I know she will always be there when I need her. I see more of her in myself every day, and it brings me a sense of peace.

2. Marian. As the eldest grandchild to Marian, I like to think that we share a special bond. Equal parts caring and brazen, my grandmother is one to quickly make friends and capture hearts, no matter her circumstance. And to me, she is the original “product junkie.” As a girl, I loved looking at the collection of lotions, cosmetics, and perfumes she left scattered throughout her home’s three bathrooms. Marian shows me that I will always find my place, so long as I go there with an open heart, a bit of chutzpah, and just the right amount of blush on my cheeks.

3. Katherine. My 9th grade English teacher and the then-advisor for the yearbook, of which I was editor-in-chief in 12th grade. She was the first teacher I considered a mentor. Though we aren’t in touch any more, her belief in my ideas and leadership helped me see those things in myself, too.

4. Kaitie. My roommate for a semester abroad in Paris, Kaitie is my California-based bestie. Together, we’re certified yappers who can go from making silly jokes to getting super serious — and I fucking live for it. The Gemini Sun to my Gemini Moon; No matter the time or distance, I truly believe we were meant to meet each other in the City of Love and spend the rest of our lives growing together.

5. Brandi. When I met her, she was the editor-in-chief of our college yearbook and a student-run magazine. Oh, this bitch has got it going ON, I remember thinking about her take-charge and self-assured energy. When she graduated, she passed both titles on to me — not just because we got along, but because she trusted my abilities. I will always look up to her. Living in the same city now is such a blessing and I cherish our easy connection.

6. Bianca. Another friend who, like Brandi, I connected with instantly. She moves with a quiet strength that I admire and try to emulate more with each passing day. Bianca is someone who finds patience and grace, even in the face of life’s most challenging moments. To me, her poise and humility seem unbreakable, making her a force to be reckoned with.

7. Nora. A friend who sees my intensity, matches it, and loves me for who I am. She helps me see life as one big adventure. Before Nora, I didn’t know a friend like her existed.

8. Blake. A friend from my early journalism-career days in New York City. In recent years, she’s showed me how physical distance and diverging life paths do not mean the end of a friendship, a fear I’ve long held — until her. With Blake, I know loyalty can be quiet yet feel powerful.

9. Ashley. My friend since we met on the bus in 7th grade. We went our separate ways for college and our careers, but have visited each other and stayed in touch throughout it all. Recently, our individual life choices have resulted in us living closer, so we have much more time to yap and have fun together, like we did making the following Crygest segment.

New this month: Audio!

Listen along as I interview my bestie girl circa 2007, Ashley Williams Nixon.

Ash and I got together last month to see a live conversation between Keke Palmer and Tierra Whack. Beforehand, we brewed some tea and talked about practicing gratitude, our high-school romances (if you can even call them that), and Pisces season. And of course, we bonded over being crybabies through and through.

I’m a words-focused girl who is still on the learning stages of her podcasting journey, so please enjoy this unedited audio clip:

Who should I interview next? Leave a comment and let me know:

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Fuck, That’s Good

✨ A brief list of content that fed me this month ✨

I’d be remiss to not mention the women who I admire from afar, the ones who I learn from on the internet and through my television screen and earbuds.

I’m dedicating this month’s Fuck That’s Good to them:

1. Angie Katsanevas. Over 5 seasons of “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” hair salon owner Angie K rose from the ranks of friend-of-the-housewives to one herself — and a central cast member at that. This season, Angie reminded me to embrace all facets of my personality as she unveiled a scroll of her grievances (petty), had tearful heart-to-hearts with fellow housewife Mary (caring), coined the phrase “high body-count hair” (ingenious), and shared a text message where she wrote that fellow housewife Bronwyn’s 65-year-old husband “has one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel” — to Bronwyn’s face (provocative x2). More please!

2. Charli XCX. I don’t think I need to say much about this woman. She created a potent album that became the soundtrack to so many of our lives. Her art made me feel alive and her way of being helped me embrace chaos, imperfection, fun, and uncertainty.

3. SZA. Solana sings about the tough emotions we don’t like to talk about: Feeling lost, possessive, stuck and confused. She consistently describes feelings I find hard to put to words. I feel so lucky to witness her genius in my lifetime. Did I mention she has a song called “Crybaby”??

4. Keke Palmer. Is there anything this woman can’t do? It’s nice to be in constant awe of someone as multitalented and poised as Keke Palmer.

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Jalen Hurts is a beautiful — no, GORGEOUS — man. He has gleaming, straight-toothed smile that makes the sun itself jealous. He nails press conferences with lines like, “I had a purpose before everyone had an opinion,” followed immediately by, “Yeah, I know y’all like that one” and a nonchalant smirk. And now, he is a Super Bowl Champion.

Hurts, Philadelphia’s quarterback, has been known to frequently say some version of: “Winning is the only thing that matters.” When said to reporters at press conferences and on the field after games, his motto is taken, understandably, at face value.

After this Super Bowl victory, I sense that Hurts means something more profound than winning a simple game of football. I think what he really means is that “winning” is his lifelong mentality. It’s a mindset that cannot be satiated by the validation of a single W or even 18 wins, which the Eagles achieved this season.

For Hurts, winning looks like moving with intention and facing himself over and over. After victories, yes, but after losses too. It’s about actualizing his personal power without allowing it to delude him, and instead using it to amplify his community’s power. Winning like Hurts means remembering where and who you came from. It means recognizing your blind spots and limits because doing so is not an admission of inability; It is an emblem of humility and the first step towards life-altering growth. And winning like Hurts means knowing that the work of a true champion is never complete.

Hurts said it best himself, when a reporter asked him to share his favorite moment from his team’s Super Bowl LIX takedown of the Chiefs: “All of it.”

Journalists ask athletes these questions because they want to capture little moments and stories that their audiences can quickly grab and digest online. But Hurts kept things conceptual with his response: "It's a journey. And I've still yet to arrive. We still have yet to arrive as a team."

The reporter, it seemed, asked Hurts for a snack of information. But Hurts, the gorgeous man he is, fed the audience a whole meal. I’ve been crying ever since.

Actually — did you know that crying makes for an excellent team sport? With that in mind, I leave you with some of my favorite Jalen Hurts sound bites:

“I’m starving for this shit.”

“It’s always the beginning until it’s the end.”

“Keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing, for me, is daily deposits, chasing the growth, putting the work in, being consistent. And I think that’s our main thing as a team as well.”

Go Birds Forever,

Julia

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Fine, I’ll say it: I’m an intense person.

I’m the loudest bitch on the soccer field. I cry frequently at museums, the movies, and concerts, and while riding Amtrak. When I finished watching “The Substance,” I had an immediate urge to rewatch it. I can go from sobbing with existential dread one minute to laughing the next — just ask my boyfriend about last night. I’m an eldest daughter, I can be prone to anger, and I write a newsletter about crying.

I’ve perpetually oscillated between enjoying and loathing this part of myself.

But this year, I want to try something new: Accepting it, and harnessing it. The inspiration? My father.

He is many things, but one for certain: A man on the move. He works 60 hours a week, if not more. He falls asleep during any and all movies, and often wakes up at 5 am (“I’d sleep in if I still could!”). He runs, skis, golfs, and lifts weights in his free time. He regularly attends work conferences, goes to sporting events, and spends time with his family members — close and extended. He invests his hard-earned money and he reads about — you guessed it — skiing, golf, and investing. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

As a kid, it was often fun to have a playful, smart, and involved dad. But I also wondered why I didn’t really see him just hanging out around the house. He was either doing something productive to his work or life, eating, or sleeping. As a teenager and young adult who loved to sleep in late, read in her pajamas all day, and binge TV, I bristled at his choice to go go go.

Now I have an understanding and appreciation for his ways, but I can’t say that I relate to his seemingly innate drive for action at nearly all hours.

But this year, I want to challenge myself. I want to have a year of Doing The Most because I think there’s something to these many, many rituals my father has sprinkled throughout his life. They’ve served him socially, mentally, physically, and financially.

I hate to admit it, but my old man may be on to something. So here’s the plan:

1. Read more books. Anything! I keep forgetting how happy I am when I read. I’m so dumb, you guys! Anyway, I got this part-memoir, part-reported non-fiction out from the Philly Free Library, and I am thoroughly engrossed. Thank you, Rachel Aviv.

2. Continue to stay off the ‘Tok and the ‘Gram. (Except to promote this newsletter, of course.) It’s good for my boredom, and in turn, my creativity. Also, my brain/nervous system and wallet.

3. Write more, craft more. In addition to the newsletter, I want to write more letters to friends and family, and get some solid book ideas on paper.

4. Spend less. I’m saving up for a couple of house projects and trips (peep my mood board below 👀). It feels good to spend intentionally (fewer dinners and nights out, more at-home self-care and entertainment) and then enjoy a big, fun payoff. I’m focusing on building up my emergency fund too, so budgeting is top of mind. Metaphorically speaking, I also have the intention to spend less time caring about other people’s business.

5. Do stuff outside of my house — and in my community. I love my neighborhood, but I’m still a fairly new resident who mainly lurks on NextDoor. I want to change that, so I’m getting involved with a youth sports organization a few days a week. I’m genuinely so excited. I’d also like to keep my movie-going streak alive. Call it The Nicole Kidman Effect! Finally, I hope to keep up a running monthly dinner date with my Philly besties. We started midway through last year, and it’s been such a fun way to keep in touch without relying solely on our phones.

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If I start on any new rituals, I’ll be sure to fill you in. But I think 5 is a good amount for a girl who isn’t used to Doing The Most 😅

At some point, I want to add a ritual focused on physical fitness, but for now, I’ll stick to intermittently doing Yoga with Adriene YouTube videos. Does anyone have an exercise routine they truly look forward to? If so, plz share.

Ultimately, I hope these rituals act as outlets for my intensity. I know I can Do the Most emotionally, and I’m not trying to change that. But I think I’ll feel more satisfied — and useful — if I channel some of my intensity into tangible routines and goals.

~ New year, similar but better me ~

What’s on your 2025 mood board? Tell me in the comments!

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Fuck, That’s Good

✨ A brief list of content that fed me this month ✨

Walk on air against your better judgment | Caitlin Flanagan for The Atlantic’s January issue

The Substance | A film starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid

A Real Pain | A film starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin

Inside Paloma Elsesser’s Timeless Brooklyn Home | Architectural Digest

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Season 5 | Bravo

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Until next time, Crybabies,

JN