I picked my way through slowly, trying to store every corner of it into my mind, or at least my camera roll. Just as I was leaving, 4 actors dressed in 19th century garb stormed in and broke into an entire immersive play that moved through every room in the museum! Their exaggerated, almost Disney-esque acting style fit perfectly into the pretty pretty princess Paris aesthetic, a vibe that’s treated as corny in the US but felt so natural over there.

After the play I took the bus to Petit Palais, which is secretly huge. I was satisfied with the courtyard, sculpture garden, and giant upstairs gallery, featuring this very sexy 1866 lesbian scene by Courbet that I hardly believe exists:

1

Then I found the downstairs, which had an extensive permanent collection- a Pre-Raphaelites room that made me blush inside my hair, bathers and harpists and nymphs, three graces with their fingers linked, pietas with slack necks, Ophelia drowning again and again. I wish it had never closed.

Emerging from the Palais, I was hit with a view of Paris that I thought could ruin me, raising my standards for beauty to a level that would make anything else intolerable, like there is a maximum capacity for enjoying the view. No, I reminded myself, the capacity is infinite. I wandered to a gay bar on a boat on the Seine and got a little drunk on wine and romance before hopping the train to dinner.

I sat at the bar and had the duck, a suggestion from a friend who was recently there. I made friends with the 18 year old Irish boy sitting next to me so that he’d offer me a bite from his mountain of chocolate mousse- very worth him talking my ear off about MMA wresting, and the sweat-licking gym bag he is going to invent. I wandered to a lesbian bar in the Marais, met a couple from LA, and brought them on a 20 minute walk to another queer bar I’d heard about across the river.

This place was amazing- an old dungeon of a bar, where Oscar Wilde and many other 19th century male writers had scratched their names into the stoney wall, punctuating the nights they spent gathered with drinks and big ideas. “We wanted to keep the energy of this space, but make it for queer women instead” the owner Maya explained to me after hours of serving what had turned into a rowdy crowd of gay American women, bonding fast. One woman I met there turned out to be a NY wedding photographer- we realized we’d worked together in the past and made plans to coordinate my September wedding together. Cities are so big and so small all at once. The gay corners even bigger/smaller.

The next day was filled with similar magic, wandering, eating, meeting a new friend for a fancy lunch, stumbling into every baroque little mansion I passed (How are there so many!?). I walked along the Seine where there happened to be a photo exhibit featuring pictures of Coney Island! This cracked me up, because just a day before I had been teasing myself for so frequently saying that Coney Island is the most beautiful place in the world. Suddenly, there I am next to this famously glamorous river, and what’s being glamorized- humble Coney. (I can see her from where I am sitting right now and it’s true- she’s a beaut!) I ended my trip at the Louvre, where I stuffed headphones into my ears and tried desperately to lose myself in the art and ignore the intense crowd.

Something that blew me away between this trip and a weekend trip to Boston that I took with my mom a few weeks ago- there are so many masterpieces with multiples. Sometimes copies by students of the greats, but other times these artists painted their epic scenes over and over, drafting and perfecting and creating versions to be sprinkled around the world. I stumbled into Ingres’s “Roger Freeing Angelica” at the Louvre, shocked after obsessing over it at The National Gallery days earlier.2 Same with Ary Sheffer’s “The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil”, which at the Louvre is up high, above a giant Delacroix, but at the Wallace Collection was at eye level, so I could see that Francesca’s hair goes down to her ankles, and there is a single tear on her cheek. At The Wallace collection I had seen a small “Rape of Europa” by a student of Titian, after seeing the giant one by the man himself at the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston weeks before. I saw Uccello’s silly little painting of Saint George and a Dragon at the National Gallery and then again in a tucked away room in the back of Jacquemart-Andre, after having seen drafts of the figures profiles in Boston. At the National Portrait Gallery, I squealed in delight at the sight of Emma Hamilton, a gorgeous 18th century model who George Romney painted a lot; one such portrait is a favorite at The Frick back home. They are becoming my dear friends, these figures.

I spent long moments holding up photos in my camera roll to the duplicate paintings, playing spot the difference:

After one last indulgent french meal I hopped back on the Eurostar to London for one more night, before returning to NY. I was welcomed back by the britney smell of salt water as I waited 28 minutes for the A train at Howard beach. I loved every gorgeous moment in London and Paris, but I did miss my beach town.

When the A finally pulled up there were men, having staked their claim in the doorway, unwilling to move to let others in, a special type of unawareness I’ve only ever seen in American men. “Watch out” I snapped and shoved past them, a behavior I’d have never exhibited overseas but is so at home inside me. A thunderstorm was brewing- making me realize that I hadn’t contended with any weather the whole time I was away. This was sheer lucky timing, as I know intense weather happens in Europe too, but returning immediately to the tropical climate that has taken over NY added to the urgency I clicked back into- swinging my suitcase around and ducking into train cars. WOW it’s stressful the way I move here- shoulders thrusting through bodies just to make a point, legs whipping past each other, catching my exaggerated momentum. It’s easy to fantasize about a European life of ease and gorgeousness instead of American urgency and grit, but ultimately- it all can be my life. I go on vacation in NY every day, I’m writing from the beach as we speak. I was in ballet this morning secretly referencing the nymphs and princesses and goddesses I stood beside last week. There is no max capacity for the beauty I can swallow with my eyes and carry in my chest and unleash at any moment.

Painters are so lucky, the way they can hold sights like this in their fingers. I hold beauty in my chest and it makes me feel desperate. I have a job to do now that I’ve seen this, I think. I don’t know exactly what it is yet.

I came to London and Paris alone to look at paintings. I take 3 art history quizzes every morning, where I am asked to identify artists by tiny slivers of their works. When I get them right, I feel like the most knowledgeable girl in the world. When I find them especially beautiful, I look up the museums that house them. Here are some of the paintings that brought me to London:

Famous paintings hit me the way celebrity sightings hit teenagers. I’ll round the wall into a new gallery and get knocked backward by the sight of a giant femme nude, a sunset over waves, a reflective silky gown, an epic mythical freeze frame. My knees break forward and my head gets thrown back and my shoulders fly outward, the part of my chest that holds beauty cracking open to receive a hearty dose. I let out an audible OOF as if an invisible door is swinging back at me the moment I enter the room. It’s a seemingly endless energy source.

In between museums I am making myself at home in these quaint little cities. They seem comically easy compared to NY, like everything is casually within reach, nobody is straining.

The last time I was in London, I was 5. Our close family friends had moved there a year earlier, their son Pascal a year older than my sister, and daughter Marie-Pierre a year older than me. We’d shared a babysitter, and therefore every afternoon when they’d lived in Brooklyn, and we were thrilled to see them in their new home. 

I remember we were there for 10 days, because I remember arriving and Marie-Pierre asking me how long we were staying after showing me to our attic room. l told her 10 days, and then we counted to 10 together, and then we agreed that counting to 10 was for babies. I hadn’t necessarily thought so before, but she was older and taller, with long straight blonde hair and the beginnings of a fancy accent. I figured she knew what was and wasn’t for babies.

I remember a lot about that trip for some reason. A couple days ago I went to see The Royal Ballet, and the street performers in Covent Square gave me immediate flashbacks to sitting on cement, holding Marie-Pierre’s hand, giddy with the possibility that we’d be picked as assistants to hold the jugglers balls for them, and that they’d announce our names into their mics for the whole square to hear.

The ballet I saw was a program curated and performed by Marienela Nunez- the longtime prima ballerina of London, known by her hometown of Argentina as “the Messi of Ballet”. I had a ballet teacher in college who would constantly scold us by saying “no no no no, do it like Marienela”, as if that was within our reach. I had gotten one of the last available tickets to the show, a cheap seat placing me all the way up house left, the stage fully obstructed except for the downstage left quadrant. Every time she danced into that quadrant I saw lightning flash across her wingspan and through every turn of her head, cracking her chest open as if she holds beauty there too, and unleashes it each night for the hordes of eager fans. 

I took a ballet class in London a couple days after. “Connect each movement to your breath,” the teacher encouraged us “that’s the way to dance like Marienela- which is always the goal”.

I’m in Paris now, writing from the bus after a croissant and a shower which absolutely flooded the whole floor of my hotel room.  I’ll have to figure out how to avoid that tomorrow morning. In the meantime I’ll be hopping between baroque museums, fatty meats, and gay bars. Home to NY in 3 days, more updates on more beauty to come ♥️

*Posting this from here:

I’m an annoying person to be around in a heatwave, because while you are suffering I am gloating, joyfully glistening in my tiny clothes. I did, however, feel stressed for my guests about my AC’s lame attempts at cooling my house, not wanting to force anyone to push through horrible discomfort for the sake of a living room open mic. Luckily, the queers in my life are good sports, and we spent the whole evening sharing and sweating and cheering each other on, while I repeatedly mentioned that there was ice in the freezer. New connections bloomed in the heat, roommates ran into each other coincidentally, pick up softball team members reunited, new collabs broke out, major projects proposed brazenly. Violet was there too, her presence allowing me to see my world from an outside perspective, the thick air like an incubator for trans expression, everyone leaning in- ears searching through the loud hums of box fans for each vulnerable phrase being uttered as we pulled each others names from a bowl, no limits to our shareable material.

The glow of Sad Gay Songs beat down on me the next morning, indiscernible from the deliciously forceful rays of the unrelenting sun. My dad’s birthday plans shined in my future; I’m always thinking about the ocean, but first- I had a ballet class to teach. Several of the cuties from Sad Gay Songs did a miraculous 12:30am to 10:30am turnaround and joined me in the studio to dance as gayly (derogatory) as we had sung hours before. We were all so giddy nerding out on ballet technique after class, I had to tear myself away to get home for a quick wedding coordination zoom meeting before gathering beach materials. Finally, my cousin and I headed over to my dad’s, scooped up him, my sister, and Indigo, the 4 year old he cares for, and hopped in a car to the beach.

The beach was perfect. The sun shone on a deep slant, adding sentimental shadows and reflections to every scene. Little Indigo worked some socialite magic at the shoreline, her colorful beaded braids bouncing adorably as she roped some skinny punk rock boys into a long game of quasi volleyball, collected a crowd of toddlers who followed her everywhere and yelled when she yelled, and later challenged me to a series of unison cartwheels that could have never ended if I could only keep up. Violet took a nap in the sand while my dad and I sipped beers on beach chairs in the gentle waves, and then Violet and Indigo ran in and out of the tide, the sky beginning to purple in their honor.

It was hard to look away from all that joy, but when I did I noticed the heavy cloud approaching from behind, the sun pushing forcefully around the edges with the drama of a Turner landscape. We had to get out of there, quick!! My sister had left hours before, so my dad and I started consolidating chairs and coolers and bags for the bus journey home, while Violet was tasked with convincing the happy toddler that our perfect beach day was over. Unfortunately, there was no way that was going to happen quickly. We eventually figured out a system of bribing Indigo with yellow watermelon and made it to the boardwalk, but it was too late.

WHAM!!

We got smacked by a huge gust, as half the sand on the beach lifted into the air and swirled around us violently. I scooped Indigo up around the bags I was holding and broke into a sprint towards the bathrooms. My hat flew off my head. Violet went to chase it and caught it, only to have the head cushion from a beach chair ripped from her hands and carried yards away toward the ocean. “VIOLET JUST LEAVE IT” my dad and I screamed after her little body, charging towards the water, but our voices were swept up into the sky and she disappeared from our vision, dropping her bag of valuables on the boardwalk. Indigo screamed in my ear as my dad and I threw ourselves against the gate of the closed off bathrooms, no shelter in sight. “GO GET VIOLET” I screamed to my dad as he dropped his load. I pressed a hysterical Indigo into the wall, using my body to block the winds as I tried to soothe her, my own heart panicked thinking about Violet getting swept toward the waves.

Moments later, thankfully, they both emerged from the blinding sandstorm. Violet somehow located the bag she had dropped, and my phone told me there was a bus leaving in one minute. I scooped up the kid, hand tight against the back of her head to shield her face from our surroundings, and we sprinted again towards the bus, along with every other person who’d stayed on the beach just a bit too long. We weren’t going to fit. Indigo buried her screams into my neck as another bus approached, the wind now slapping juicy raindrops into us from all angles. Sandy bodies pressed into each other, as if we could all merge into one bus shaped mass and squeeze ourselves inside. “LET THIS WOMAN ON, SHE’S GOT A CHILD!!” a nearby gay yelled (God bless), and the crowd parted slightly to let me on. I squished myself up against the railing of the OMNY pad. The bus driver scolded me for putting my head in his sightlines, so I bent slightly forward, turning my arms into a hammock to support the terrified kid. I locked eyes with my dad, still outside the bus; “Just take her!” he yelled to me as the doors closed, Violet next to him, her bleached hair whipping in all directions. “It’s just you and me, kid” I thought to myself, hoisting up Indigo’s little body and preparing myself for the intense arm workout that was about to be this hour long crawl to Brooklyn Junction.

It’s a specific feeling, being in a tight crowd of people in survival mode, willing to work together and offer each other help, but with nothing really to offer. I asked the people next to me to please take the hat off my head and put in my hand, and they kindly did. At some point Indigo dropped a sandal, and we all agreed we’d get it on the way out. The woman next to me dropped her phone, and we made the same decision about that. After a few moments of quiet tears streaming out of Indigo’s eyes and down my chest, she curled into me, calming down. All I could think about while carefully adjusting my aching arms underneath her was how badly I can’t wait to be a parent. Even in an absolutely stressful disaster, getting to take on the role of a safe grownup for a scared child feels so unmatchably purposeful.

Eventually I found enough room on the bus to turn our bodies around and look out the front window, where fireworks mixed with lightning strikes mixed with the colors of a 100 degree stormy sunset. Indigo cheerfully listed her favorite colors as they appeared in front of us, Indigo and Violet at the top of her list. When we made it to the Junction, my dad texted me to get the kid a happy meal.

I don’t know if any of you have been to a McDonald’s in recent years, but I hadn’t, and I swear that place was more dystopian than trying to get on a city bus in the middle of a wind storm. Indy and I sat waiting for our food and our family for 40 minutes, but at one point she turned to me and said quietly “We had fun at the beach.” What a goddamn darling.

Eventually my Dad and Violet burst through the doors, and shared the journey they’d been on, walking blocks through the storm to an earlier bus stop, forcing their way into a bus that would proceed to stand still on the bridge leaving Riis. What a 61st Birthday, huh Dad? What a trip to NYC, huh Violet?

Violet and I ubered back to mine, and I convinced my dad to uber himself and Indigo home as well, another unpredictable bus ride being something none of us deserved. I’m so happy I was able to get Indy onto the first bus, and there wasn’t a four year old on the journey though the storm with my dad and cousin. It’s been so beautiful, seeing my dad parent a young child so many years after parenting little me, and the ways I can offer him support by lending learned care to this new kid in his life. I’m grateful to my body for being a shield and refuge for her through the storm. I am grateful to have built a home that was a cozy place for my little cousin, and safe place for the queers to share in the night before. My family and my community constantly teach me openness, toughness, and improvisation. I can be a good teacher because I’m practiced in these things; I can hold people in an environment, no matter the circumstances. I’m so desperately excited for my chance to parent ongoingly. The gay shouting “This woman has a child!” really churned something in me, and I spent the rest of my night feeling the echo sensations of Indigo’s braids against my neck. Heatwaves and thunder storms are such good excuses for tending to each other, and showing care is such a good way to remember how much care we’ve received. Summer is for tenderness and excitement and sometimes being closer than is comfortable or more active than is advisable… and I’m convinced we’ll hold each other through all of it.

I was bleeding lightly before I started posing tonight, but I figured I could use my will power to keep it from dripping down my legs while the people drew me. It worked. It’s crazy, the arbitrary things I can control with my mind. After I finished my first 35 minute set, the blood that had pooled inside me came rushing out, and I surrendered into briefs, not wanting the stain my favorite kimono as I straddled it, draped over a wooden stool. I sat upright and let them witness me, as the hands inside my pelvis squeezed my insides tight in their fists, and I dug my palm into the edge of the stool, trying to create an alternate sensation to focus on. I mentally dropped the plan I’d had to get a drink at my friend’s bar around the corner post session.

I put clothes on and left the studio, a rolled up drawing of a horse in my bag that someone had sweetly gifted me, as if I’d prefer that to one of the drawings she did of me. 10 steps forward, two steps back, dodging rats making a break for it. The park along Chrystie street is alive at 9pm on Tuesdays. Actually alive isn’t the right word, nor is lively, but the park is full of people. The elderly chinese couples have ballroom dance practice then, all of them moving in impossibly slow versions of recognizable latin dance styles with no clear leader, just focused, synchronized group practice. On one side of them, a ping pong tournament. On the other, a group of 5 singing karaoke, with a loud loud crackly mic and a screen on a rolly cart. On all sides of them, addicts are drooping, crumpling in slower motion than the dancers, the ground getting closer and closer, but never close enough to hold them. They levitate there, a few inches from cement, looking deader than dead. One asks me for a cigarette, I think, but it’s too hard to know for sure so I pass him by. Emergency vehicles set the whole scene in strobe, red red red and blue, as I wait to cross the street, pulling the waistband of my jeans away from the busy squeezing hands between my hips.

I didn’t go straight from Lidia book to Lidia book, I read 5 books in between. It’s shocking, how many books I can read now that I don’t go on instagram. I didn’t intend to binge read when I deleted the app, I’m just not sure what else to do with my eyeballs. Not consistently sharing images from my day to day life already has me feeling like I’m floating around, untethered, and filling every blank space with reading books that I’m not sure are nonfiction is definitely adding to that. It’s been a positive change though, if a little lonely, not having anyone clued into what the fuck I’m up to all week long. I don’t need other people to notice things for me to notice them myself, it turns out. And I don’t really need to notice other people’s things either. If it’s not important to them to tell me, it’s not important that I know. Or at least that’s the mantra I’m holding as I feel my circles getting smaller, more intimate. The people in my life will show me who they are I hope, or I’ll show them.

Yesterday it happened while I was dealing with a bunch of computer admin tasks at once. My internet wasn’t working or maybe I just don’t totally know how to use it right but either way things weren’t scrolling or uploading or refreshing quickly enough and all the files were too big or incompatible or something and I started getting a stabbing pain in my gut and all my hair follicles got bigger or smaller or wetter.

On Friday I was sitting in the Temple of Dendur at the Met where I kept getting in trouble with guards for sitting facing out the window instead of in towards the Temple, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of the children running through the sprinklers in the park so I ended up sitting with my head facing out and my knees facing in, my journal in my lap, and my hand scribbling down every autistic trait that I might have. My therapist tells me every couple months that she thinks I’m autistic as if it is the first time she’s telling me, and I tell her she’s told me before, but it hasn’t really gone anywhere because I’m just not sure yet how to make use of it as a theory. After I filled out my list I googled “autistic and overwhelmed by computer”, as if I somehow knew that in 12 hours the files wouldn’t be compatible and I’d be getting harsh pains in my gut and hairs. Google said not to push through when technology is causing dysregulation so I just woke up, dehydrated, from the nap I fell into after giving up on the computer tasks and trying to halt the pains. Pushing through is something I am generally bad at not doing, but in a computer context it’s a little easier because I can’t count on internet the way I can count on my own power of will.

Maybe I’m extremely anxious and maybe I’m masking all day and all my life and maybe I’m accidentally living a lifestyle that isn’t suitable according to my nervous system but really none of that feels accurate inside the part of my brain that communicates with language. The language-using part of my brain expresses constant gratitude for all the running around being passionate and excited that I get to do, for New York and all of its density and every subway ride back and forth to Union Square 6 times a day, and of all the skills I get to tirelessly hone and show off and teach and learn, the hundreds of people I get to see and see seeing me while I’m being publically private or privately public. The part of my brain that speaks loves eating food and wearing tiny clothes and hot hot sunshine on skin while I swim through humidity and flitting around at the party flirting with strangers and dancing when my body hurts and hurting when my body dances and sharing everything everything especially scary stuff. The part of my brain that uses words forms words all the time, nonstop, and writes them down when they are especially yummy and repeats them over and over so proudly, glowingly proud. It rehearses all the words it’s going to use later and gets them perfect and then replays all the words it used last time so that every time I’m alone I’m surrounded by every time that I’m not, like I’m floating in the thickest saltiest pool of joyful human encounters.

There is only distress in the form of the physical, my body systems functioning badly and my vagus nerve and cerebellum acting 911 style and actually physically injuring me, and if that’s the way my body is trying to communicate I think that’s really pretty childish and I’m not very motivated to reward that behavior with a response, but also that’s just an excuse because I don’t know what a proper response would even look like. I mean, it just seems like a really backwards and unproductive system of communication, and if I were in charge here I would create a better system. I know basically for sure that I’m not in charge here because in my experience, when I am in charge, I’m very good at creating productive systems, and like I said, this isn’t one. Babies don’t have words and so they cry and cry and make Mama move through the checklist of hungry or dirty or sleepy and usually by process of elimination she can figure it out, but if the checklist is infinitely long then process of elimination can’t exist and so then what? Saying NO is so important, but NO to what, I ask my body, and what instead?

One night, my mom and I were at the hotel bar talking about a past family trip in which we rented a canoe out in the Delaware water gap. We were not a nature family, so this was kind of an odd choice for us, but they were trying to make the most of the drive home from Pennsylvania after picking me up from gymnastics camp. I always showed up to camp with a long list of skills I needed to accomplish to prove to my home coaches it was worth missing summer practice. I also usually had crushes on my camp coaches, so I spent long hours in the gym each night, after regular workout hours concluded. Time not spent in the gym was spent running around the campus, swimming and jumping on trampolines, eating ice cream and singing karaoke. All to say these are two weeks after which an 11 year old girl needs to lie the fuck down.

Instead, I found myself in the middle of the water in a canoe during a horrible torrential rain storm. I don’t remember if there was lightning, but I do remember hearing my family strategize about whether it’s safer to be in the middle of water or under a tree during strikes, given those were our only two options.(Again, not a nature fam.) I was scared, cold, exhausted, and weeping in the back of the boat. My mom, sipping her hotel lounge martini, described turning around to see me sitting upright, face towards the heavens, tears mixing with rain and my mouth wide open in an almost Munchian despair. My parents felt bad for a rough judgement call that day. I felt bad for acting ungrateful.

On the morning of this car ride I felt similarly delirious. It had been a lovely week spent with my mom’s family, but had required very constant social presence with no breaks. My sister and I had spent the night before singing karaoke at the local gay bar, dipping out a bit early to the dismay of the friendly local queers. I got back just fucked up enough to not care that I wasn’t going to sleep, given that my mom had taken up snoring for the week that we were sharing a hotel room, and I have an upper back injury that feels like its on fire whenever I lay in a bed. I took the starchy ass hotel quilt to the living room couch in our suite, and dozed on and off while listening to 4 hours of Lena Dunham’s new memoir. At 6am I showered, made some eggs, and then folded myself into the car.

All week I’d been taking a break from the constant contact I had been in with a person that I knew I shouldn’t have started dating again, having literally not a moment of privacy to engage in unhealthy communication. Unfortunately, a 13 hour car ride was interpreted as 13 hours of full availability for receiving texts, and my compulsive need to answer every message as soon as I receive it communicated the same. My eyeballs were vibrating in my skull as I tried to read the transcriptions of voice memos in which she excitedly described her revelations about my psychological anomalies. I spilled water on my feet and thrashed around frustrated, mad at my mom for owning a water bottle. I was not in a place to receive or respond to this kind of conversation.

10,000 Maniacs started playing on the car radio and I tried to lighten the conversation, texting about how fun it’d have been if I’d been with her at the Chicago Lilith Fair stop in the 90s, instead of in Brooklyn, being a toddler. We fantasized about fucking in highschool, and then we started getting excited about all the plans we had coming up this month- fancy hotel stays and michelin star dinners booked. But before long came more voice memos, about who I am and what I want and how she is the perfect person for me to have met in terms of what I need. That was it for me. I was in an extreme mood, and I didn’t see a way out of this conversation without ending the whole thing. “You’re an extreme girl,” a college professor once said to me during an onstage rehearsal, “I’m going to need to learn how to talk to you”.

I sent a text, ending it all, and then curled in the tiniest ball and let my exhaustion win. Heavy convulsing sobs took over my body. I stuffed my down vest in my mouth and stuck my head between shelves of the upside down table on my right, its sharp edges poking into my aching neck in a way that felt just right for the moment. I heard my mom and sister lightly chatting in the front seat, oblivious to the breakdown happening in the other half of the car. I was two feet behind them, but many feet deep in it.

I wasn’t sad this fling was over, definitely more relieved. Chances are this day was leading to a dramatic crash out regardless of what happened during it, I was just at my wits end. After crying for a bit I started crying more about the fact that I was alone in my misery. I sat up, assuming the position of the 11 year old on the canoe, hoping someone would look back. I choked out an ask for tissues, and my sister offered me sinus medication for all the nose blowing. I was mad at them for not knowing how upset I was, and I snapped at the offer, and coughed up sharp “NO”s at every effort to include me in their conversation. I felt like an ungrateful little brat.

Eventually we stopped for dinner in Annapolis, Maryland— a place I’ve never been but pretended to be from for four years because that’s what my fake ID said. I had my hat low on my head, so that I was not a quite a person but more a cap rim with twitching lips. Eventually they saw my eyes, and I admitted to receiving texts that had upset me. They were sympathetic, taking my side and acknowledging how tired I must be, but unfortunately I was the kind of emotional that makes everyone nearby take 5 steps back. I thought of the hoodies girls used to wear around gymnastics camp that said “WARNING: GYMNAST COULD FLIP AT ANY TIME”.

One hour out of the car eating pizza in the sun did wonders for my nervous system, and I got back in feeling a little more in control. We stopped for gas shortly after, and I snuck away to take a couple hits of a joint, allowing me to switch to the front seat even, and participate in pleasant adult conversation. Tears still stung at the backs of my eyes, as I was sure they would for the next 24 hours, but by then I felt more like a wistful emotional adult, not a child floating in unsafe circumstances.

Sleep deprivation is a wild thing, and something that I often convince myself I’m immune to, having been an energetic bad sleeper for as long as I can remember. It’s so humbling, being vulnerable to bad circumstances, even if I played a role in creating them. It’s so jarring, resorting to my child-self when around my family, or when belittled over text by someone I thought might offer care. It’s so sad, being sad and alone in the backseat of a car, in the stern of a canoe.

One of the most gorgeous parts of sharing this show with my loved ones was how much they recognized me in every part of it. It was nerve wracking for me to admit how autobiographical the final presentation of this show would feel, but I didn’t need to admit it. My story was threaded through with each movement made, each sound uttered, and each word carefully chosen.

It began to feel even more personal when my mentor, Kelly Ashton Todd, came to a rehearsal of the first, oldest solo- Glass Sleeves, which I’d made in 2018. It was set to Aurora’s cover of Life on Mars- a slower, haunting, less sure version than David Bowie’s original. After expressing that she didn’t like the cover she said “I don’t understand why you aren’t just singing this, Emory.” This caught me entirely off guard, as I thought it was a wild thing to suggest without knowing for sure that I was capable, let alone brave enough. It also felt like an overly indulgent thing for me to do, and despite this being my show about me and my perspective, I felt sheepish about the idea of singing live when also directing, dancing, reciting my own poetry, and asking for some amount of sympathy around my own inner workings. After a few nights of ruminating on it and attempting the cover in the safety of my home, I realized it was a perfect idea. I sat in the audience and felt like the narrator of my own 25 year old trajectory, while watching it all play out on the body of Lily, who sunk beautifully into this young, naive, self conscious role. I loved having artistic control over the vocal choices made in the song while seeing Lily make her own performance choices, offering her a flexible and emotionally charged backdrop within which to perform. I even decided last minute to add some live harmonies into the Bob Dylan song (Mama, you’ve been on my mind) for the duet that followed, keeping my own literal voice present in a dance about imagining the validation and care we can only wish for from our audiences.

It was important to me not to be visible while singing, as the characters on stage needed the audiences full attention to ride from beat to beat. This show is all about these characters being watched. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that not being visible would mean that half the audience would assume that the vocals were a recording, diminishing the magic of a live mixed medium interaction. This is one of a number of things that makes me hope to remount this show, having knowledge now of what did and didn’t work.

I knew, both when performing these characters myself, and when resetting them on others, that making a performance about the desperation of being seen (performing) is asking for a confusing, emotional, meta experience. I couldn’t help drawing connections between the way I was feeling leading up to show week and the character arcs my performers were riding. For example: Theo’s character in the second piece, “The Show”, enters the stage with no intention to perform- they are helping another performer get ready and shoving her on stage despite her being clearly unwell. When that performer collapses and Theo’s character finds themself on stage in front of a waiting audience, they work themself up to take her place. We watch Theo expertly go from “I could never”, to “I could try”, to “I’ve actually been practicing for years”, to “I was made for this!!!”.

I left Theo a high voice memo in the middle of the night the week of the show, laughing about how that was my exact trajectory when it came to singing Life on Mars live on mic.

I bowed quickly and shyly after the first two shows, embarrassed about how much space I’d just taken up, and too eager to get to the part after changing when I got to hug my audience members, touching them physically and remembering that they are real people in my life who care about me. (By the last show I worked up the confidence to walk to the center and take a real bow, accepting my flowers both literally and figuratively.) I’d been nonstop daydreaming about that post-bow moment for weeks, and at each of the three shows it lived up to my dreams. Many folks approached me tearfully, telling me how moved they were by the whole thing. Some were moved because they could personally relate, some because it was hard to watch these characters hurt themselves for the sake of approval, some because they remembered what I was going through when I made each piece, and they got to see me use that to make something of beauty. I was told by many that they saw me in each and every character, like they got to watch me grow up throughout the course of the show. A choreographer I dance for told me he got to know and love me more through watching, and I think it’s fair to say that everyone who creates anything wants to hear that. People heard the words of the poem I recited at the end and treated them as a sad but also inspiring thread through every story in the show- the idea that my body is as fragile as it is beautiful. It’s both a work of art in itself and the doormat that gets stepped on to achieve the art. And, relatedly, that the desire to be seen and loved can be devastatingly insatiable.

I am so grateful for the feedback I’ve received. Throughout this process I insisted that I don’t think of myself as a choreographer. I build characters I want to perform, and I perform them. They exist only in front of audiences and they do a lot of movement, but to me they are people, not dances. However, after seeing my work turn into an evening length piece with a cast of 11, I am beginning to think of myself as a choreographer, and wondering what to do about it. I know that making this claim and turning it into a career shift would be a scary and vulnerable thing to do. Much of this process was spent trying to talk myself out of being so earnest, and open, and proud. Making more will lead to many more processes like this one, in which I spend the come up nauseous, self conscious, and full of doubt, and the come down deeply saddened by the folks who missed the show, or worse, those who came but said nothing to me about it. I can learn from the characters I make, but I’ll never stop being them. Right now the songs from Glass Sleeves are playing on a loop in my head as if I’m still rehearsing to sing them live. I’m actively living the life of Lily’s character, begging the audience members to catch me. I’m swinging high in the arms of those who do, and hitting the floor hard in front of each one who doesn’t.

Ultimately, I know better than to take anyone’s lack of response personally. I know from my own experience that going to see someone else’s show can be as emotionally loaded as making your own. We all have tricky relationships with presenting ourselves as artists, and that can sometimes play out in the way we are able to receive someone else’s success. I have huge empathy for that. That said, it’d be impossible not to take stock of the people who were excited to celebrate and congratulate me on my work, and those who were not. The communities who coalesced around my growth through this process are the communities that I will continue to be able to grow within.

I learned that I love setting work on others, that I’m good at both attracting and engaging an audience (3 sold out shows!!), and that I know how to build characters that touch a wide range of viewer’s hearts. I learned that I love creating paid opportunities for dancers to embody new characters, and I love coaching and supporting them through it. I learned that I love putting a large group of queer performers on stage doing the ballet steps I see them gorgeously performing in class each week, and watching them bring their own queerness into my personal queer narrative. All of this new love is begging me for continued push, continued wonder, and continued risk taking. As I realized when it was suggested that I sing- if the idea of something scares me, I know I’ll wind up doing it. I’m deeply and sweetly and tenderly excited about it all. Thank you so much to everyone who participated, came, or supported along the way.

All dance photos by Effy Grey Photography

Tickets are selling, my dancers are looking beautiful, and the characters are coming to life in their new forms.

It’s a bit sad, and a bit scary for me, trusting others to portray characters I built on my own body. I knew each of them so intimately when I was performing them. I never needed to verbalize who they were, or what they were going through, because I just lived inside them and let it all show. I feel so confident in my ability to control an audience’s perception of a character I’m inhabiting, just by holding eye contact when I catch it, making impromptu choices about timing and dynamics, verbalizing when it’s natural, and getting the crowd to laugh, or to startle. It’s so different asking other performers to carry the responsibility of getting an audience to love and care about these characters, who are built to be so flawed and needy.

I have taken some steps to separate these characters from myself to create room for the new performers to live inside them. My dancers have renamed them, causing me to embrace them as new roles, not replicas. I’ve had my dancers tell me their character’s backstories, what they are most proud of, what they fear. Their responses have surprised me, coming from left field compared to what I imagined, but unless their answers work against the narrative of the show, I try my best to not correct them.

There are a number of funny moments in these dances. As I said, the characters are flawed. They make big mistakes on stage, they get embarrassed, and they work sometimes comically hard to gain back approval and affection from the audience that they think they lost. A fear of mine is seeing these moments devolve the pieces into parody. I hate funny dance.

There is a big difference between funny characters in a dance and funny dance, which feels like it parodies the form itself. Bad ballet is often used in this context, and it hurts my feelings. I promise you’ve seen it- whether in dance, or a cartoon or a commercial- somebody pulling out poorly executed ballet vocabulary as the butt of a joke. They’ll put their arms up in a fifth position and start twirling around on their toes, or take quick dramatic pique turns across the space, or start flapping their swan wings furiously, eyebrows furrowed. It’s clowning, and there is a time and a place for it, but it’s definitely not what I am trying to do.

It can be a tricky line; a lot of ballet vocabulary is used in my work, and not always sincerely. There is one point at which a character in my show has recovered from a dramatic moment, where she is struggling with physical pain and navigating her relationship with harmful methods of dissociation. After we see her engaging with self destructive behaviors, she crashes, burned out. Suddenly, quick turnaround, she is up, performing for the crowd. It is another, albeit less painful to watch, form of dissociation, but it’s such a relief that it’s almost funny. Ballet vocabulary comes in, as a way of demonstrating grace, ease, and contrast to the harsh distorted movements in the previous section. There is a long moment in which the dancers does bourrees (little tippy toe walks traversing quickly through space, like floating sideways) back and forth across the stage. These are a risk, because they are a perfect step to use to make fun of ballet, make a silly joke out of the stylized movement. If they are poorly executed they look really foolish, with feet stomping into the floor at too fast a pace, whole body jiggling in response. Maybe some 90s kids remember Deedee, the sister in the cartoon Dexter’s Lab, who was made to be very annoying and ran around everywhere on tippy toes in her ballet outfit- she could easily come to mind watching bad bourrees.

So a huge part of avoiding the misread that we are parodying this step is execution, and given the incredible skill level of my dancers I know a good execution can be accomplished. Beyond that, I need to make sure they have full clarity on the intention behind the movement, and the depth of the characters’ arcs. They need to be so sure of why they are finding these light moments, feeling the darkness behind needing to get an audience to laugh for reassurance. They need to be so confident in every lapse of confidence that their characters experience. And to do that they need to love them just as much as I do.

I am so grateful to the cast I chose for the commitment they have already shown to arriving inside these roles. I know my own nervousness comes only from the separation anxiety of parting ways with my old imaginary friends and seeing them take on new identities that I didn’t manufacture on my own. This is my first time setting my work on other dancers, and I love control, so the growing pains are felt!!

It’s also extremely cool, seeing my babies grow up and become bigger than they ever could have been living inside only me. I can’t wait to see them all come alive fully in front of their audience in April; to laugh with them and not at them, to feel what they are feeling, and to root for them through it all.

Saturday night I showed up to play some songs at a folk night held by a crowd of people I met through a 2021 hinge date. The host seemed surprised to see me even though I RSVPed yes, but maybe she was just surprised by how punctual my friend and I were- again, aggressively dependable when it’s totally uncalled for. This crowd is a very earnestly merry group of people, in the way that mid-gen millennials who go to burning man often are. They all had really kind songs to sing, with sing-along choruses, and collaborative instrumentation. My songs had snarky lyrics about tantrums on the subway, and never again dating an astrologist, and I played them alone. When I am in rooms of very earnest people I feel like I’m my most cynical, and when I’m in rooms of cynical people I feel like I’m my most earnest. I’m not sure why I’m acting like those two things are opposites, because there are also a lot of folks who are very earnestly cynical. When I’m around those people I like to giggle a lot and see how they react.

…

Update: it’s the next day, and I didn’t have a massage appointment booked but my angel body worker gave me one anyway- a great reward for being dependable when nobody was depending on me. Then, after enjoying the most incredible sunset in prospect park, I got into bed for a night of very little sleep and many hours of obsessing over a stye forming in my left eye.

I am generally a very bad sleeper, and this week has been a big win for insomnia. Usually I wake up at 3am and fall back asleep around 6am, but because of daylight savings I woke up at 4am, which is too close to morning time. I’m very bad at lying around in my bed when I’m not high, but I don’t like smoking weed so close to morning time because then I feel all fuzzy when I get up, and I had plans to meet a friend at 9. Instead of smoking, I got up to wash my hands and put ointment in my eye repeatedly while listening to the audiobook memoirs of Anthony Bourdain, Michelle Zauner, and Elliot Page. By 5am I gave up, showered, and started boiling some eggs.

I boiled 3 eggs, two to eat right away and one to use as a warm compress on my stye.

I don’t know if it’s common knowledge that freshly boiled eggs make the best warm compresses, and if not I’m really happy to be sharing that with you! I learned about it last year, when I was playing the same folk night with the burners that I played on Saturday.

I was having someone retune my guitar (I’m too shy to tune a guitar while being looked at) and bantering about the song I was getting ready to play. The song was about an ex who was always claiming to be “underslept”, which was hard for me to sympathize with given that we shared a bed and I was very aware of how much more sleep they got than me. Anyway, as part of my banter I shared that the week I wrote the song I was in a horrible mood and had a bad stye in my eye. This led me to a rant about how google always says to use a warm compress for 15 minutes but no hot wet thing can stay hot for more than 5 minutes tops. That’s when somebody shared the boiled egg trick, and having just returned to the same folk night, it was fresh in my mind.

I’m hoping that the stye is better by tomorrow because it is observation week at the middle school I teach at, and I’m self conscious that without makeup I look too young to be a dependable middle school teacher.

A couple weeks ago one of my seventh graders whined that she was too old to do floorwork and I yelled “I’M 31” as I launched myself into a back roll. All the kids gasped and started screaming about how they thought I was 24.

Once, when I was 29, I had a therapist who thought I was 24, after months of sessions. When I responded with frustration that she didn’t know my age she suggested that we “unpack my aversion to 24 year olds”.

To be clear there is nothing wrong with 24 year olds, I’ve just never been sold on the patriarchal standard that youthfulness is hotter so being told that I’m thought to be in my early 20s does not feel like a compliment. Especially when I’m always going out of my way to be extremely responsible and dependable, a quality that is not generally attributed to 24 year olds.

I could keep freewheeling tangents forever, but I think besides sharing the boiled egg advice, this isn’t the main thing I need to be doing on such a GORGEOUS SPRING DAY. It’s so easy to earnestly enjoy a spring day, even while underslept with a stye in my eye. I hope everyone in NY is riding over the bridges and catching sunsets in the park with the unabashed merriment of mid-gen millennial burners at a folk night.

What threw me about the post was not the info, but more the framing. “Seek help” was the tone, around something that I have a hard time not viewing as a super power, or a magic trick. I can flip my brain from experiencing pain to experiencing deep pleasure just by putting my body in front of some eyes, just by moving while witnessed. I can disappear all of my past injuries just by inhabiting a character with a different physical history. I can successfully be a viewable object no matter what is going on internally.

This motivation of presentation makes it hard to get interested in movement that isn’t aesthetic-based, like somatic techniques, rehab, or exercise. There are popular dance forms that prioritize physical health and efficiency of movement over visual aesthetics, but in my opinion they are really ugly and bad to look at, so I don’t like doing them.

I was dating someone over the last couple of weeks who was determined to convince me that I have an emotional wall up to romance and depth. I knew it’d end quickly because her disinterest in anything other than heavy psychoanalysis of a person she barely knows was pretty uninspiring to me, and my affinity for lighthearted banter was clearly uninspiring for her, but she was older and willing to give me a lot of her attention. That in itself can be really attractive to a girl like me.

When I shared the post with her, half excited to have stumbled upon research so relevant to my current work, and half sad to have something I feel proud of reframed as a clinically harmful condition, she was giddy. She told me that she had entered my life at this specific moment to tell me I was hiding, drawing a connection between my reluctance to let myself feel physical pain, and my avoidant attachment style in romantic relationships.  On our next phone call she leaned in, asking me what I was going to do about healing myself.

I don’t think it’s impossible that my conditioned push-through mentality and my reluctance to lean in to romantic commitments are related to eachother, but I resent the idea that someone who hasn’t taken the time to know me could swoop in and solve my lifelong disdain for the fragility of my own body by dating me.

Maybe making One Body Per Lifetime and presenting it in front of all my loved ones will initiate a shift, but I doubt it. I feel like I’m sinking deeper into my dependency on being a viewable object the more I present myself this way. I hear, “it doesn’t matter what it looks like, let’s just find the feeling”, and sure, that’s a good tool to use momentarily to learn something new, but ultimately the goal is to use it to accomplish more beauty.

Everyone was blown away by Alysa Liu’s ability to win gold at the Olympics without painstaking stress and obsessive finesse throughout the entirety of her skating routine. She landed all of her tricks beautifully, and danced around with adorable abandon for the rest of the long program. I love this for her, I loved watching, and I think it was a really dope fuck you to the world of skating, where the judging is convoluted, and detail work/fluidity doesn’t pull in as many points as the tricks. It is a competitive sport more than it is an art form, so there is no reason to get caught up in aesthetic perfection when the nervousness around it tends to lose the athletes more points than it gains them.

Dance, in the way I do it, is entirely different, I am not dancing to be scored. I am interested in finesse, in presentation. I’m not just moving for fun regardless of whether I catch someone’s eye. Like in that cheesy quote “dance like no one is watching”. Why isn’t anybody watching? How sad! I wouldn’t dance whole heartedly if nobody was watching unless in preparation for the next time people will be watching. It’s sometimes necessary to practice in solitude, but it’s hard, painful, and frankly not that fun without an active imagination.

I’ve been thinking/talking about self-objectification incessantly without knowing it. It’s a really easy way for me to love myself. It’s a really easy way to feel proud of myself. It’s maybe a distraction from actually caring for myself. A physical therapist recently told me I should replace one of the 5 ballet classes I take each week with a workout class and I instead added a workout class without eliminating a ballet class, because waking up in the morning in pain and imagining going through the whole day without the chance to spend two hours in fantasy land sounds bad to me.

I’m spending around 3 hours a day crafting my show, putting my body in positions that I think are pretty from the outside, and then asking my dancers to match them, and then looking at my dancers from the outside. I’m giving them space to change anything that doesn’t feel okay in their bodies, obviously, because I’m not an abusive person. I am however way less likely to give myself the same space, and that’s been a good thing to take note of. I’m trying to teach my students about pushing through, about toughness, and about finesse without conditioning them to ignore pain for the sake of beauty or perfection. That’s a bit of a puzzle, but I think leading with care for the bodies of my students and my dancers could teach me about leading with care for my own. In the meantime I’m going hard and I really hope you’re watching.

In high school my family had one family laptop that we all shared, and I didn’t have a smartphone and so nothing was expected of me in terms typing shit up or attaching files to things. I just used my little notebooks and sometimes staples or tape. I think if everyone used a paper calendar instead of their computer calendars people would be way less flaky because they wouldn’t want to scribble out the plans they wrote in pen.

The other day I was singing with a friend, which is an activity I love because it’s such a pure real life in person experience. She was color coding our harmonies so we’d remember what parts to sing and every time she accidentally clicked out of the window I panicked, even though our color coded harmonies aren’t a very high stakes document. It’s scary how computer stuff can just disappear so cleanly.

It’s tough having a lot of computer to do being as I am never at home; I am always in dance studios because I set up my life to be mostly about real life in person experiences. I don’t think I was physically built to do computer because my upper back and shoulders are perpetually in spasm, and so carrying a backpack with a laptop in it from dance studio to dance studio has been hard, especially considering I also usually have a couple of pork chops in there or sausages or at least some salami. Eating meats is a really good real life in person experience.

If I were the kind of person who liked getting work done at night I could just leave my laptop at home but unfortunately at night I like to smoke weed and I’m already confused enough by email culture without being stoned.

I locked instagram on my phone last week so that I can only go on it 7 minutes at a time 6 times a day. I am trying to break my dopamine addiction to things that aren’t real life in person experiences. I don’t miss it much except that now when I am conducting business on there, like making posts or reaching out to professional contacts or looking something up, I have to do it in 7 minute intervals, and I usually run out of time. I have started making to do lists for my next 7 minutes on instagram which just feels like procrastinating things I could otherwise get done in the moment. At least now that I usually have a laptop nearby I can cheat and go on instagram.com.

In addition to my instagram to do list I have one for the next time I’m answering emails, one for real life in person experiences I need to go do, one that’s a list of friends I want to hang out with when I’m free someday, and one for vague general goals such as “get stronger” and “make music”.

I don’t really have time for the general goals right now because, on top of the show I’m making, I am in tech week for a surrealist psycho horror movement play called Scarecrow. (I’m performing 2/19, 2/20, and 2/21 if u wanna come see it). I fear I am being highly valued in that space, despite only making myself available for less than half of the rehearsals, and spending the rehearsals I am present for cracking jokes loudly and inserting my opinions with little context for what is going on. So far, nobody has discouraged me from doing either, so I guess it’s okay. The work seems insanely ambitious to me, but I am just a small part of it and the choreographer Mark continually surprises me with how many of his maximalist ideas end up making it onto the stage. Men are so good at not talking themselves out of things.

I have a single easel in my show as the only prop, which is way less ambitious, but I am still close to talking myself out of it. Everybody who hears about the easel tries to suggest that instead I use a projector, but they don’t know how much I dislike computer especially when it gets involved in live performance. Performances are real life in person experiences and that’s what I like about them.

I’ve been writing this from the B41. I obviously never do any of my writing on computer, especially because my space bar doesn’t work very well and I’m not a great typist so I usually type out full paragraphs without looking at the screen, and then have to manually add the spaces between each word afterwards. It takes forever.

I am on my way to assistant coordinate a wedding at a steakhouse owned by my aunts ex-boyfriend, who is now a family friend that usually sends a free plate over when my extended family is in town. I don’t think I have those same privileges when I am alone, but luckily, since I’m working the wedding, I’ll get a free steak regardless. I’m grateful that I didn’t have to carry one for myself in my backpack on this bus ride. I also didn’t have to carry a laptop because weddings are real life in person experiences and that’s what I like about them.

This show will include one new piece as well as three others that I’ve made over the past 10 years. All are solos and duets I choreographed originally on myself, and aside from the new one they will all be reset on some incredibly gorgeous dancers who have generously agreed to step into my very Emory choreo.

Here are the ticket links (6:30 and 8:30) as well as a GofundMe to help me fund this project. If you are feeling generous or excited and want to hop right on it, I would so appreciate it!! Also, if you want 10 dollars off on your ticket let me know and I’ll send you a discount code :)

I will be sharing and promoting this show incessantly, but in the meantime, if you are interested: here is the lore.

All four of the pieces I am presenting are pieces born out of characters I wanted, or felt like I needed to build. They are characters who need an audience, to validate their own existence, to help them understand their own experience, or to pull them out of what they are feeling internally. These characters could only exist in front of an audience- they are deeply presentational but disruptive by nature. They will do the same thing over and over until they get the response they are seeking. They will conceal nothing but they will fake everything. They will sacrifice wellness for attention, abusing their femininity, sexuality, physical bodies, and emotional privacy. They’ll live for your reaction.

Glass Sleeves

I made Glass Sleeves on myself when I was 24. I had come off of a couple of years of nude modeling for money, something I’ve written about on here already. My lack of carefulness doing that was aligned with my general way of being in my late teens/early 20s: saying yes to everything, especially things that would get me seen.

I was also at the time performing in an immersive show called Arcade Americana at Industry City, in which I was playing a character who was addicted to speed and opposed to rest and drinking water. The character was fully based off of me and a rant that the director heard me go on at the pre-workshop cast party about how I “hate self care”.

When offered the opportunity to make a solo that spring I dove deep into the idea of a character whose emotional trajectory was almost battery powered by an audience witnessing it. She starts the solo smitten with the attention of the full crowd and begins to test her hold on them, asking them to giggle with her, hug her, scream with her. This childlike giddiness grows until it becomes hard for her to control, and it carries her through frustration, rage, and fear. In an attempt to regain control and attention she leans into her sexuality, opening herself up and then closing off again, losing her sense of safety with this crowd.

Part 2 of Glass Sleeves was only performed once at the Ace Hotel in 2019. It picks up where the solo left off, with an angelic character coming in to represent the ideal feedback, a personification of the audience’s adoration and care. This character is everything she dreamed of, but is also fleeting, leaving her dependent on something she cannot control.

Glass Sleeves will be performed by Lily Gelfand, with the angel figure performed by Jack Blackmon.

The Show

The Show was always intended to be an extended section of Glass Sleeves, but having been made in Feb of 2020, its trajectory was halted by Covid and injury. I am so excited to see it sharing a program with Glass Sleeves all these years later.

The Show introduces two characters on opposite ends of their love affair with being perceived in their bodies by an audience. “Z”, a role originated on Marjorie Gross, is a famous celebrity performer. She has years of experience in the spotlight, years of conforming to the desires of her admirers. We see her on a red carpet walk, dripping in glamour and presentationalism, offering little pieces of herself to each person she passes. This giving and giving whips up into a momentous storm of expression, getting more and more distorted and scattered until, under a bright spotlight, she finds she has nothing more to give and collapses out of view.

All along our second character “S” has been admiring Z, mimicking her every move, dreaming of their own chance in the limelight. They see Z’s collapse as an opportunity, and step into her spotlight, absorbing the eyes of Z’s admirers. What transpires is an exhausting “look what I can do”, in which S pulls out every trick they can think of, begging the audience to clap along and show them the love they showed Z. S is on their own in discovering the ways that love can sour.

Z will be performed by Liney Frank, and S by Theo Armstrong

I wanna be Taxidermy

I wanna be Taxidermy brings us into the second half of the night, the post covid/post injury works. It was the first thing I choreographed upon getting back into the studio after a year of not walking due to a broken talus- and a couple years of intense chronic pain.

The thesis of this piece is a single question:

Would you rather be in a body that can be seen but has no physical sensation, or a body that can feel but is never seen?

During bad bouts of pain I found myself daydreaming about a life as taxidermy, still having access to my body and the ability to be perceived, but not actually having to live inside of it. This brought up questions of whether pleasurable sensations outweighed painful ones, and if experiencing pain could be seen as a worthwhile part of being alive.

The character in this piece begins as Taxidermy, moving as if hung on a wall, showing delight because their face has been frozen that way, moving with no consequence. Soon we see them returning to reality, where pain is real. They let us watch as they experience and respond to sensation in real time, creating questions about their wellness. Eventually they lean in to putting on a show despite the sensations they need to push through- showboating their experience of being alive in a body.

Taxidermy will be performed by Charlotte Aucella

One Body Per Lifetime

This piece is in the works!! It holds close to the themes of taxidermy: body as a viewable object versus body as a feeling object. This time I draw upon my years as a figure model for art classes, and my obsession with femme muses in classical art. It will be a duet and will include live figure drawing by the incredible Meiying Thai. My duet partner Emily Tarrier will represent “ideal form”, shaping her body into archetypal poses seen ubiquitously through centuries of art history, as Meiying draws her on a visible canvas. I will represent “fragile form”, the feeling side of Emily’s statuesque presentation, struggling to keep up.

That’s my show!

I feel grateful to be putting these tensions between the body I love to show off and the body I struggle to protect out there as one full thought. I’m hoping the next era can be about something else.

Thank you for reading, and I really hope you can see this all for yourself in April <3

Usually when I make a post I’ve already spent a day trying to talk myself out of it. I am being overly dramatic, I tell myself, revealing too much just for shock value. I try to figure out who I am writing it for and then remind myself who is actually going to be reading it. I encourage myself to just have a direct conversation about what I am feeling with someone instead of casting a wide net on the internet and hoping it finds the correct eyes. Ultimately, none of this slow methodical thinking matters at all, because the writing exists and it only takes one impulsive moment to copy paste it into the “new post” box and send it on its way.

After clicking “post” I throw myself onto the floor or run laps around my apartment screaming, trying to shake off the immediate regret and humiliation of sharing my feelings or quirks or recounting my own bad behavior. After I settle down I usually link the post in my instagram stories which triggers another round of throwing myself around and bashing my head into a wall yelling “NOW EVERYONE IS GONNA SEE IT!”

I love a thrill, so it is pretty obvious to me that this sweaty back and forth plays a major role in sustaining this thing. It’s been pretty fun posting scary stuff and then going about my life with no idea who does and doesn’t know my secrets.

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Almost everything I’ve ever shared on here has felt deeply private, like a major admission that I’m dramatic, or selfish, or childish. Inevitably though, within a few days of sharing I receive at least 4 or 5 texts from you guys about how relatable my recent substack was and I realize that my agony was totally uncalled for. Nothing is really that unique or shameful. We are allowed to share thoughts that aren’t 100% morally sound. Nobody is being forced to read this against their will. Everybody reading it probably either already likes me or doesn’t know me at all.

I love the opportunity to act out on here during my luteal phase, when my manic impulsiveness saves no time for consideration and my fiery hot concerns and complaints beg to be blasted out urgently as if I am deactivating a bomb. Usually around a week later I find myself rolling my eyes at those posts and how miserable I thought I was. Also though, I feel relieved that anyone who read it could potentially identify the days when I’m in dangerous hormonal territory and give me grace. It’s sweet when I post something concerning and you reach out in concern. It’s also sweet when I post something sensitive and feel gently held afterward with no outright acknowledgement of the post itself.

I really appreciate having all these diary entries organized and accessible. I have a suitcase full of old journals under my bed, and every time I open it I find out I’ve been making the same discoveries and working through the same shit over and over in every new journal as if it’s my first time. There is something about publishing and sharing that makes the discoveries stick in my head better, like now that it’s out there I can start moving forward from that point instead of cycling the same point through over and over again.

I lived finding out how many people could relate to all the writing I did on limerence this year. That shit has taken up 90% of my brain space for as long as I can remember, but I never found a way to connect with others about it until I started blasting it on here. Similarly with writing about hormonal mood swings and chronic pain.

The entries that were memoir-like retellings of periods of my life brought to the surface things I didn’t know I’d forgotten or buried. I surprised myself when writing “Modeling for Men”, a deep dive into the year I spent posing nude for creepy men, in that I had way more stories to tell than I’d thought. The night after I shared it I came harder than ever before in my life and I don’t think that release was unrelated. People really came out of the woodwork to share how they related to that one, which was equal parts sad and emboldening.

The biggest difference between substack and an under the bed journal (besides the fact that it’s easier to type into my phone while standing on the subway than to write in a journal) has been the task of finishing each entry. When I am not sharing, just writing as therapy, I usually don’t challenge myself to find an ending. It’s not really the point, and there is no reason to expect a moment’s rant to come to a neat little conclusion and be tied in a bow. But when I plan to share something, it does feel like it’s owed some kind of button about what I learned, or determined, or plan on doing about all this. Most of the time I don’t know what that is until I make myself write it. A lot of the time it feels corny as hell, and a lot of the time I have to acknowledge that that’s because I’m more interested in complaining about the issue than solving it in the moment- but it’s kind of cute to have a little solve sitting there for when I want it. Also I can’t really be like “oh this one section of sharing my feelings on the internet feels corny” because that can quickly become the way to shut down anything and everything I ever want to put out for the rest of my life.

So here is the button:

I appreciate you for reading these things. I like when you read one and then come back for more, or text me about what felt familiar, or made you laugh, or made you sad. I like being told about stories you were reminded of, or the time you did the same thing and were also really embarrassed. Thanks for telling me you remember when I was going through that, or you had no idea I was going through that, or that I wanted that, or that I was scared about that. Thanks for getting to know me like this; I do like being known.

Sometime it feels like I’ve never thought about anything but this:

We are all on the brink of irreparable damage and yet we are in the bodies we have to keep for the rest of however long we live. We will never escape sensation or the ghosts of every sensation we’ve ever felt. Our nervous system is inextricably linked to our emotional state which is to say it is out of our control. We are not the masters of our circumstances but our circumstances are the masters of our physical bodies, and we can’t live anywhere but inside them.

This month I started a residency to create a new dance piece, entitled ONE BODY PER LIFETIME. It’s based on a poem (linked here) I wrote while figure modeling with the above fears swirling in my head-- heightening the contradiction between loving my body as a viewable object and hating it as a sensory one.

During my first preparatory rehearsal I had the invisible knife in my leg. I tried to make every wobble and limp feel intentional, turning myself into one of those blowup guys with the wavey arms, or the scarecrow from Wizard of Oz. The rehearsal felt really bad; I spent a lot of it inflicting harm on myself punishingly. But when I got home and watched the videos I took I thought everything I did was beautiful.

For the second prep rehearsal there was still the knife, but also my stomach wouldn’t hold food that day, so I felt too shaky and dizzy and weak to climb the subway stairs on my way there. When I finally made it I laid on the floor and cried. Then I remembered what my piece was about, and I began working with the words of my poem as if it was an ancient text, something that everyone thought about, a mantra we all repeat in our heads as we push through every action. Eventually I warmed up and stopped crying and the room stopped spinning and I visited some comforting ballet steps-- the steps I know can carry me through no matter how bad my body hurts. I left having accomplished a lot, inspired by the reminder that I don’t have to feel good to be well enough.

Five days later, I threw out my upper back while sleeping. This happens a lot during my luteal phase, when my hypermobile body gets even looser and slips and sloops around while I’m just trying to exist. I spent the whole day dissociating on some painkillers I found in the back of my closet, leftover from one of the 6 recent surgeries I’ve had on my foot. By 8pm my buzz was gone and I was worried that if I didn’t go out I’d take more, so I put on a fancy outfit and makeup. This is a great hack because if I look beautiful I’ll immediately wish to be seen. I joined my sister and her friends at a karaoke bar to drink and sing and celebrate until sensation was irrelevant.

Today, January 2nd, I woke up again in spasm and deeply sensitive. I had planned on going to ballet and then to The Frick- my favorite museum- and there was no flexibility in that plan because I wouldn’t dare deprive myself of such a perfect day when I was already crashing out. I lost an airpod and got in an email fight all before 10am, but beauty always carries me through, and that’s what I knew I could find in both places. The way ballet is patterned into my body doesn’t require me to feel okay. The beauty in the form is like a magic carpet that floats above pain, my physical capabilities defying the human who is fragile.

And then the Frick. Body after body elegantly dressed or elegantly nude, contorted effortfully or precociously posed. Taking photos isn’t allowed there, so I stare urgently at each one, subtly mimicking the forms in an attempt to freeze them in my muscle memory. The act of viewing the most luxe rooms of art I can imagine just to have to turn my back and exit them justifies huge doses of melancholy, perfectly appropriate for a hormonal depression.

I desperately want to be every figure pictured, those who existed and those born from fantasy; The wealthy Gainsborough subjects with their necks held taught and gazes sharp, weighed down by reflective silks. The sculpted satyresses with their hoofed feet bent backwards around bronze clocks and fireplace mantles, made to be displayed. The round bellied Fragonard cherubs bouncing and floating before turning to stone at the glance of a human. The Vermeerians, always sitting by that same window, with sweet gestures of absolute engagement with one another.

These beauties were immortalized hundreds of years ago, made from materials more fragile than us, but presented beautifully because of intense care, protection, harm prevention, and restoration. Each figure depicted is a reminder of the privilege it is to have a gorgeous human body of my own, that can make all of these shapes and wear all of these expressions. One that can spend itself working with the flu, or throwing itself on the ground, or zoning out on the couch. One that is dancing with an invisible knife in a spinning room, but is starting to feel better. One that can see and be seen and hold and be held. I’m not inspired to take care of it, I’m just not, but I wish that I were, and I promise to try to be.

I performed at the Armory for the month of June, 2018 in The Let Go– a town hall style installation by the visual artist Nick Cave. That was such a joyful piece, all about using dance and nightlife to uplift our queer community away from oppressive forces and into embodied freedom. I thought it’d be empowering, returning for another presentation of the strength of our shared joy! Unfortunately I did not fuck with the show at all; It felt like a group of theater kids took the text and quickly devised blocking through ice breaker theater games, setting it all without much thought. I definitely still left the theater on a high though, not because of what happened (or didn’t) on stage, but because of the folks who gathered for it, taking me on a gay ass walk down memory lane from 2018-now.

I got the tickets with my dear friend T and their lovely husband, who shares my first name. T and I had been casually dating in the months leading up to the 2018 Let Go, and at the time I was really disappointed that they never took me up on my offer of a comp ticket to see the show. I told them I’d been mad about that on the way into the Armory Wednesday, a full 7 years after it was relevant. I think we lost touch that summer, and for a couple years after, before reconnecting and becoming the great friends we are now, dancing and seeing shows and leaving each other long voice memo life updates in between hangs.

As soon as we walked into the nostalgia inducing lobby I turned to my right and saw my sister, Helen. It was unsurprising that we’d both have tickets to this show, but having them for the same night and spotting each other is my favorite kind of serendipity (a word I got tattooed on my arm in 2018, with Helen by my side.) The last time we were together at the Park Ave Armory was during The Let Go, when she came to The Freedom Ball- a special installation/celebration for Pride. She had just recently come out to me as trans, and it was my first time hanging out with her fully embodied as Helen.

I remember feeling so proud to be working in a show that we could both feel held by during such a fresh and tender time. I remember a couple queens gassing Helen up on our way out, getting her to lean on the steps of the armory while they did a full blown photoshoot, suggesting cute poses and offering enthusiastic compliments. I watched from nearby, teary. I’d been living at my mom’s at the time and heard more of her processing the news of Helen’s identity than I had patience for, especially as the younger sister who had come out as gay 5 years earlier to way more resistance than I expected. I felt protective, and didn’t have space for anything other than the exact “right” reaction and language around transness, which in 2018 was new to my family. This moment that Helen and I got to share outside of the family dynamic was the very beginning of us getting to have a whole secret world that nobody else in our family is part of- one where we now 7 years later we get to run into each other at queer events around the city (or in the case of the Chappell Roan concert this fall, find out a week later that we were both at the same one).

After chatting a bit with Helen in the lobby, T, Em and I moved in to take our seats for the show, when another run in happened. This one requires a bit of context, so let’s cut back to the 2018 Let Go:

Because it was an immersive piece involving very vague improvisational scores set to a DJ’s house beats, I danced hard with a lot of strangers. Two such strangers were a trans masc actor/director,” L”, and their art director girlfriend,”P”. L cast me in another immersive show later that year, and I got quite close with the couple after months of rehearsals, film shoots, and shows. As soon as the show ended the two of them broke up and L moved to LA.

In L’s absence, P and I became very quick, close friends, with sexual tension that we worked hard to ignore out of respect for L. We spent the winter and spring going to every gay bar in North Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, flirting and wingman-ing each other through ecstasy fueled late nights and costume parties and stuffy lesbian meetups. Through a chain of more performances, more parties, and more hookups (never exclusively with one another but somehow always dancing near it) we found ourselves involved in an ever growing polycule that absorbed us through the end of 2019, and into 2020. When March of 2020 hit it became not only our polycule but also our Covid pod. (A Bad Idea, but at the time the only option?) There were a lot of examples of P and I not treating each other well during that period, so I was both sad and relieved when, suddenly, a straight married coworker of P’s left her husband and asked P to move in with her and her daughters. Some steamy workplace flirting had turned into a whole new life for P; she disappeared from the polycule and I hardly ever heard from her again.

Suddenly here we were back at the Armory in 2025. P was moodily leaning against the railing of the risers surveying the crowd with her arms crossed. As I walked over a woman who I assumed was K, the woman who’d left her husband, was tenderly tucking P’s hair behind her ear. P gasped when she saw me, scooping me up in the biggest, warmest hug, and then told K who I was. “Oh my God, THIS IS EMORY!??” K exclaimed, and announced she needed to take off her coat to give me a proper hug. She genuinely acted like she couldn’t believe she was finally meeting me, and even said she suspected I was Emory when she saw my curls approaching. P made a comment about how this was the space where it all began. “P really misses you, in her heart,” K said to me. It was so strange, like I didn’t even know my own lore, had no idea that my name would spark such a reaction, that I somehow play a big role in this relationship that had disappeared my friend from my life years earlier. And that this run in was happening in the very spot where we had danced together as strangers 7 years ago.

There is a part of me that is mad about the 80 dollars I spent on that ticket, but a bigger part of me is thrilled to have gotten to take part in a queer cultural moment on the other side of the looking glass from 2018. I’m thrilled to get to dislike something in community with such smart, beautiful gays from my past, present, and probably my future. My sister and I took the Q train home together, the same exact journey I’d take to get to my mom’s house in 2018 when the F train wasn’t running. We worked through the kinks of everything that felt wrong with the show, while I also basked in the glow of feeling like a gay socialite. T and Em and I sent voice memos back and forth the entire next day, dreaming up dozens of alternative presentations for a text we hold so close. I posted on Instagram about the show and a chorus of gays who had seen it on other nights responded that they too had been surprised by how bad it was. I shared views back and forth with the rehearsal director of The Let Go, who I now teach alongside at Ballet Tech. He’d liked the show, and I was happy to get to revisit some of the good parts in conversation with him.

I’m surprised I didn’t see coming- the way this one night back at the Armory would usher in a cast of gay characters with whom my relationship was shifted by that room. Both on stage and off, under lights and in darkness, the faggots and the women who love women and their friends have been looping in and out, communing and strengthening and complicating each others worlds. That’s really the thing about us queers, and our sisters, and exes, and friends old and new: we GATHER, in love and fun and celebration and mourning, in danger and in safety, and with a healthy dose of drama that lights it all up like a stage. Maybe the real “Faggots and their Friends” were the faggots and friends I made along the way…

I am looking around for someone to have a crush on to get me through the night, but the only gay caterer is definitely under 23 and I can’t get excited about that. Another caterer here asked me out during my last shift, and I had to apologetically come out to him. Now he acts super emo every time we cross paths.

A mother just came up to me excitedly because her daughter told her I was her dance teacher at school. I hadn’t noticed her daughter all night, probably because I was desperately dealing with all of the unexplained technical failings of the venue I’m supposed to be the manager of. During our conversation she offered to show me the girl’s high school audition video, which looked great but was interrupted over and over by texts from her daughter saying “I TOLD YOU NOT TO TALK TO HER” and “THIS IS WHY I NEVER TELL YOU ANYTHING”. I looked up in time to see her storming out of the venue, too embarrassed to say hi to me herself. When I was 13 I would have been thrilled to see my dance teacher at an outside of school function, but that’s because I love attention, and I guess a lot of 13 year olds don’t.

Things calm down for a bit, so I decide to reply to a family email chain, but famously every time I reply the email chain dies. I think I’m bad at email culture because I went to ballet school, similar to how I’m bad at trouble shooting audio systems in front of Roger Sterling. Anyway, I get really nervous about replying to emails, rewording them so many times because every version always feels strange. It’s confusing to me that we are supposed to structure them like a letter but send them like a text— a mix of formal and casual that ends up feeling insincere. Often I figure everyone would rather just all hear from each other and not me so I don’t reply, but then I feel guilty so I reply too late, and then it makes sense that the chain dies because actually it was already dead prior to my response.

Since I’m not great at emails I’m trying to be more of a phone call girl. This is hard too, because it feels unimaginable that two people could happen to be available for a chat at the exact same time without coordinating in advance. On the other hand, scheduling a phone call feels like a shame, because what if a real-life in person opportunity pops up during that time- am I supposed to still prioritize the phone call since it was the plan I made first? Generally I keep hard and fast to the rule that plans need to be prioritized in the order in which they were confirmed, with no flexibility, because otherwise we’d be forced to make too many hard decisions, but staying home alone so I can pick up my phone instead of going into the world seems kind of sad.

At this point in my shift I am dying for a dopamine hit and I already bummed a cig from a bartender so I decide to text my outside of mitzvah crush. Texting is something I am really good at, but my crushes are usually really bad at it, probably because as much as I like attention I also like to be desperate for it. It’s been a week since me and this crush talked about how we like desperation in the car, which led to me sucking on their knuckles while they drove with the other hand, which led to them putting a lot of their fingers into my mouth, until finally I was choking out directions to my apartment with their hand around my throat, eyes on the road. That gave me a lot to think about this week, or rather, one thing to think about a lot.

Okay, my shift is over. I spent the load out angrily filling out an event report about how if none of our venue systems are operational then I’m not really sure what my job is as an operations manager, and how being thrown under the bus in front of Roger Sterling and the stressed out Dad was far from ideal. Now I’m on a bus, pretending to be a Q train, riding down the same stretch of Flatbush ave as when I had my crush’s fingers in my mouth a week ago, at this exact same midnight hour. For some reason the driver is refusing to open the doors at any of the Q train stops, so we are all sweating together and banging on the windows. This is not the kind of desperation I like

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One such update last week was from a pilates teacher I once knew, who taught at a studio where I worked front desk in my early 20s. I hadn’t thought about her in a while, until I saw this picture of her next to an old man with a long white beard. She was sitting slightly below him and staring up adoringly. My immediate thought was either this girl is in a sus age gap relationship, or she’s joined a cult, but either way I didn’t like the look of it. I went to the man’s page and found out he is a teacher of meditation. His feed was all these videos of either him or his young female students emphatically preaching about how we are in control of creating our own identity in each and every moment; that there is no such thing as self, but only conscious reinvention of self- a common tenet used to make the impressionable more impressionable. In the videos with his students speaking, he makes sure he is always in frame, usually in the foreground nodding excitedly, egging them on, practically mouthing the words as they recite them. In one video a student says that learning from this man has made her realize that any advice she offered before training with him was “wrong”, to which he laughed, and momentarily centered his face in the frame.

It only takes one google search of this community to find yourself deep in a BEWARE OF CULT reddit thread. All members are required to post 3 preaching instagrams a week with promotional hashtags, and they all seem to have matching photos of them sitting next to (slightly lower than) the bearded leader man with adoring gazes. They all go on and on with suspiciously assured levels of gratitude and enthusiasm. Any positive experiences they have, or beauty they find in their day to day seems to be attributed to the lessons they have learned from their leader.

The day after I did a deep dive on this group, I found out that my ex is another new member. The required social media engagement is hard to miss, and though I don’t follow them, a friend brought it up to see if I knew anything about what was going on. I’m not sure if it’s coincidental that this cult came up twice in two days, or if it is an ominous sign that this thing is really growing- like the first murmurs of Covid-19 in the months before we all knew someone who’d had it.

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I know myself as someone who is deeply cynical of spirituality- sometimes to a fault. I was raised devoutly atheist and I see religion most clearly as a conflict. It even took me a long time to not get prickly during conversations about astrology, but as a queer artist in Brooklyn I had to open my mind up to that one. I try to work on acceptance that others find clarity through faith, and stories, and traditions, and community. I think we all do, but I don’t have a lot of space for what feel like fantastical elements that so often result in power grabs for men. I certainly don’t have space for spirituality that comes with a price tag, or that requires believers to engage in marketing, or preaching of their tenets to those who haven’t chosen to engage. I’ve watched way too many documentaries about scientology, synanon, Black Bear Ranch, Buddhafield, and etc. to not feel heat in my chest at the familiar language patterns of the token charismatic leaders. Words like “blessed”, “transformation”, “inner freedom”, “upward momentum”, and “demons” make my ears go red, with their implication that there is a desired state that can only be reached through this specific set of teachings, and that rejecting these teachings is admitting defeat.

I could not give a shit- both the pilates teacher and my ex are people from my past who I no longer see, no longer need to have contact with, and I can trust or at least hope that they have friends or family outside of this group keeping them grounded. I could have let it go entirely and not continued peeking at the leader man’s instagram every day since finding it. I also could have watched one cult documentary in 2015 and not watched every other one and listened to every podcast and audiobook on the topic since. Frankly, I think my cynicism is the thing that keeps me so interested. It is so deeply unrelatable to me, meeting a man like that and not wanting him to feel shut down by my gaze. I’m having daydreams of making him feel stupid, making him feel dangerous, just generally knocking him down a peg. I’m having daydreams of running into a friend of my ex’s on the outside and saying “ARE THEY OKAY!?”, but I know that wouldn’t be me earnestly checking in. It would be me searching for validation that there actually is enough here, on ground level. That we are distinct individuals, with worthy advice to give based on our own experiences, our unique learnings and development. That we fit ourselves into collectives not because we are only valuable as agents of a collective mind, but because it is fun to share our individualism with one another. That if someone is finding New York beautiful, that is because New York is beautiful, not because they are blessed to have been enlightened by their practice. And that I can adjust to the changes thrust upon me by the world while still staying the same ME, metrocard or not. Why reinvent yourself every day when you could just love the self you have always been?

A couple weeks ago as part of a talent show I kicked up to a handstand after flipping a 2 minute hourglass and had the audience ask me quick-fire interview questions. One person asked my biggest pet peeve, and for some reason it took me a long time to think of one even though so many things annoy me. Maybe all the blood rushing to my head made me temporarily more tolerant. In any case, the first thing I came up with was when men get on the subway first but stay by the door because they want to be the person leaning on the door, meaning nobody else can get on the train. Today, a friend shared the same frustration on instagram, and we DMed back and forth about how unimaginable it is for us to have such an intense lack of spacial awareness, or lack of care that you are part of a larger system of people riding trains. I don’t think these two things are unrelated- being considerate when people are getting on the train behind you, and being considerate that someone’s schedule is hinging on you responding, and letting them open up a slot if you can’t take it. In short, I wish people would get out of my way

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I am sharing some songs for my sisters album release show this weekend, and in gathering the 3 or 4 songs I’ve written that feel closest to my fingertips, I realized that all of them are about separate exes being too depressed to meet my needs. To be fair, songwriting (or maybe writing in general) is where I go to one-sidedly express my own frustrations and gripes, before considering the other person’s perspective and taking a more well rounded/kind approach to communicating with them. That said, “I’m too unforgiving for us to live in tandem”, a lyric from one of those songs, is a pattern emerging in my awareness, and I’m wondering if I’m choosing to be harsh and alone instead of easy going and coupled.

Someone asked me recently if I want a baby and I answered “Yes, but I don’t want a partner so I need to get richer.” I definitely want to be a mom, and I definitely don’t want to be a wife, but I was surprised at how confidently I stated that I want to parent alone. I’m not actually sure that that’s true, I think it’s just way easier to picture myself being a great parent than being a great partner. Maybe I need to learn how to give my peers the same tenderness I am able to give children. Or maybe I am just doing a good job holding tight to my boundaries, and I’ll thank myself for not compromising for the sake of not being alone. Maybe I love being alone, in charge of my calendar, my personal space, and my hypothetical future baby.

I got a haircut this week and everyone keeps asking me if I got a perm, which surprises me because I didn’t realize people were still getting curly perms in 2025. It also surprises me because it implies that these people didn’t know my hair was curly before, and I had thought that was the main thing about me.

I got so happy when Zohran won the election this week that I had a full dopamine crash the next day and cried on the street. I figure modeled for a crowd of amateur artists that night and I was excited about showing off my new haircut, but everyone was too intimidated by me to make eye contact after I’d finished posing, and even though I think they were trying to be respectful it really hurt my feelings.

I was reading a book of women’s sexual fantasies this week curated by Gillian Anderson and it was really relatable and really horny, but then, during a wedding I was working yesterday, my library card expired and the book returned itself right in the middle of an essay about a woman getting fucked discreetly on a crowded subway car. I feel like I’ve spent so much of my life in the New Haven Union Station bathroom even though I’ve never lived in New Haven. Like why I am always putting on stage makeup in there when I’ve never performed at Yale?

Every time I hang out with a baby, I get obsessed with looking at pictures of that baby afterwards. One thing I love about instagram is watching acquaintances’ babies grow up all around the world. I’d be really sad to lose track of those kids if I stopped using instagram. I think I need to make a new instagram for my wedding coordination business, because I hate talking earnestly about weddings on my personal instagram. I don’t really like marriage that much, I just like high-stakes parties.

I already knew about myself that regardless of how I’m feeling I can honor my commitments; I can rally from a Q train nap to energetically teaching twenty 11 year olds dance within 15 minutes. I can be on my feet working a wedding until 1am and again at 9am. But what is surprising me, or what feels new in this no-caff state, is my absolute willingness to show up to things that are completely optional, and could be in lieu of my only chance to rest. I think being tired everywhere makes me feel like I might as well be tired anywhere. Why not go out at 11pm, or go take an early morning class, or get tickets to an event on my one night off, if I’m going to be walking around like a zombie regardless? If I don’t seem to get much sleep anyway? If I know I can still be fun and productive no matter what?

A friend the other day commented on how my energy is truly endless, and I would say this is a universally agreed upon statement by everyone who knows me, but maybe that’s not true. It’s just that my energy sources are pretty widely accessible. Movement, attention, crowds, laughter, crushes, compliments. (+meat, +sativa, +tequila shots but those aren’t really the point.) I guess extroverts like me are lucky in that we really can slurp up the energy of people looking our direction and use it to replace an 8 dollar cup of coffee.

There is also a comfort in accepting being tired as being low, and vice versa. These two weeks since quitting caffeine have certainly not been void of depressive dips, or ragey outbursts. I couldn’t find the downtown subway platform at Canal St the other day and had a full toddler meltdown on the street corner. I couldn’t do a move in a dance class the other day because of my bum ankle and I sulked in the back for the rest of class, fully allowing it to ruin my day. The cool thing though, about having these little tantrums in a decaffeinated state is that they feel so much less inexplicable. Like when a baby is kept up past their bedtime and starts to cry, nobody is concerned, everyone feels for the baby and considers it perfectly reasonable for the baby to fall apart a little.

So at least at this moment, I’m feeling very held by my decaffeinated sleepiness. We are sliding into colder months but the sun is still hot enough to blind my eyes and make me a little delirious. I’m sitting in the park writing this and every couple sentences I stop to stare dead eyed in no specific direction, frozen, before coming to and continuing, with a cozy little film over my eyes. Who needs to feel awake when you could just feel?