re meant for the outdoors. There was a time people took photos of their vacations on film cameras alone, waiting for days or weeks after coming home to get the photos back. A singular experience, recorded and kept a mystery until enough time had passed to relive it.

Now, of course, 5.78 billion people (70% of the world’s population) carry phones containing all the information in the history of our existence. Our pocket encyclopedias also happen to be endless capacity, high definition cameras. Every moment is recordable, evaluated, and re-shot as needed to suitable perfection. Instant feedback hijacks the present moment. It steals time from us. Byung Chul-Han talks about the shift from top-down surveillance: an authority watching over us, 1984 style, to the present digital panopticon model of surveillance that we voluntarily participate in. We take our photos, feed them into our digital avatars, wait for the short-lived dopamine to hit while our faceless advertising and AI gods feast on the bones of our experiences.

Content creators live this everyday, sometimes every minute of every day. All of your life is an opportunity to repackage into Content. Everything is recorded and narratively pieced together afterwards in a neat structure: horizontal long-form video, short-form social video, carousels, Instagram stories. I am as guilty as anyone. Content creation is economic liberation. It is a viable pathway for a lot of people to avoid the standard full-time job pathway. It gives you control over your time, decisions and income ceiling. I have been trying for a long time to figure out how to make this work for me. I have spent most of my sentient hours alive pulled between the desire to remain present, to resist chasing the validation dragon, while being keenly aware of what I am potentially missing out on. It is ironic that one of the most accessible paths to entrepreneurialism and liberation is the same matrix that exists to exploit our attention.

Film photography, and writing has been a small way I am trying to reclaim autonomy over the way I create and reflect. Being outside is another, and I was really lucky to do so at a Usal camping trip this last weekend in Tannersville, NY. I have spent most of my life seeing the world through the viewfinder of a film camera, and there is nothing that remotely approaches the sublime like bringing a film camera into the outdoors.

Everyone brought their own food, and most people brought enough to share. We had coolers full of sausages, fruit and coconut water, and home-made cookies. Uncle’s, a Thai frozen curry brand owned by Brendan Charreon, blessed us with a big communal pot of green curry. Everyone contributed an ingredient to the curry, our “stone soup”. I had never heard this fable before this weekend. It’s a story about hungry strangers convincing suspicious villagers to contribute to a communal soup that feeds the whole town. I brought potatoes to add to the curry. I ate that curry three times, one of those times mixed with my shin ramen instant noodle powder.

On Saturday, it rained heavily all day. We hiked for three hours through a thunderstorm. My rain jacket proved not to be fully waterproof, and I was hiking with my camera, so I ended up using it to wrap around my camera for most of the hike. We had no service, so I left my phone in my tent. There was a stone quarry overlook with thrones built from stone, a section of forest that became so misty it looked like the beginning of a horror movie. We walked through creeks and kept walking, as though powered by an unstoppable ancient force activated by the rain in the forest. At some point we turned back, and made it back to camp in time for a few hours of sunshine, sprawled in the grass. We dried our drenched clothes, built a fire and played card games until it was time for dinner. Most of the night rained this way, and at one point someone got a bar of service, which immediately triggered a shrill beeping tornado warning. “Seek higher ground. Do not be outside,” someone read aloud as we sat huddled by the fire, blasted in the face with smoke that haphazardly changed directions depending on the wind.

Colossal thunderstorms are disruptive. In the city, it can ruin my day. They drench my dog in dirty subway puddles, make my socks wet, make the Ubers expensive. New York itself is frequently overwhelmed by torrential rain. Overloaded plumbing spawning subway waterfalls and knee high flooding. Outside, the same thunderstorm becomes a secret ingredient in the stone soup of an experience. Rain makes moss greener. It makes being warm and dry a sublime experience, rather than a standard function of being alive.

Many campers are city folk, and for a few days we are cosplaying being something else. Connecting with nature in this way is a radical act when we are so insulated from the natural world. Our food is sold to us faceless and unidentifiable, shrink wrapped and sold for $8.99 at Trader Joe’s. We have happy lamps and central air/heat. To sit directly in a storm without the protection of a building or a car to shelter in demolishes every artifice we live our lives upon. It narrows the world into basic functions: keeping warm and dry. Camping doubly so: life is purely about keeping each other entertained, contributing an ingredient into a communal soup to be warmed by after being caught in the rain. Camping touches a primal nerve rarely activated in modern life. Jill and I camped in Death Valley during the Superbloom earlier this year, and these two camping trips were the most relaxed I have felt this entire year.

In the evening, as I lay in my tent and the storm raged outside, I wondered if the tent would collapse or get flooded. If I unzipped my tent window and slid my hand under the rain cover, I could feel the full force of the storm pelting into the earth. It seemed crazy that just a thin plastic membrane stood between me and this calamitous, biblical storm outside. I felt deeply rested, weirdly safe, more than I do when I am in the comfort of my temperature-controlled bedroom at home. The comforts of modern life provide so much, and I am of course grateful for the conveniences of my life, but it is foolish to mistake the trappings of modernity as true luxury. True luxury is sitting outside during a thunderstorm by choice. True luxury is eating from a big pot of communal soup. True luxury is waiting a few days to see the film photos come back, because you forgot to take any photos on your phone.

I used to have vivid, recurring nightmares that I was speeding down some highway in the driver’s seat of a really fast car, with no ability to actually drive. My foot was not on the gas pedal, and my hands were not on the steering wheel. The car was driving itself, but it was clear that at any point it would careen off the side of the road and/or into some other car, causing a fifteen car pileup, that I would either die from or go to prison for. These dreams started and ended the same way: hurtling down a highway in a car that was not mine, on the way to somewhere I did not know.

When I was a teenager, my dad attempted to teach me one time, which meant he never ever tried again. I remember thinking how difficult it was to keep the car between the two lines of a lane. I remember my mother trying, being in the passenger seat and screaming when I accelerated 5km. Nobody could afford to take me to driving school, and I spent all the money I earned at my various part time jobs on old clothes at The Salvation Army to post on Lookbook, and on $35 blow outs at Kim Sun Young to prepare for library study hangs with my crush. Learning to drive just never happened.

I was convinced for most of my life that I was not a driver, that it was somehow beyond my ability. Whenever I was in a car, I would watch thousands of motorists pass by. Some actually looked bored, as though driving was the most mundane thing in the world. One hand on the wheel, the other picking at a booger or scratching their head, looking at their phones. Other people could drive. Not only could they drive, they could groom themselves and reply to their crushes at the same time. Most other functional human beings could drive, and I couldn’t. It indicated that I was dumb in a very fundamental way, a way that seemed unfixable.

For a time, I had the recurring highway nightmare at least once a week. The fear of driving existed in the same breath as my deepest desire, which was only to be able to drive. I imagined a woman, who was not me, driving her dog somewhere remote to hike. What a woman! I fantasized about her, about being her, for most of my life. It was the ultimate embodiment of adulthood: a foreign land that I was not privy to (and at times still do not feel privy to, at the age of 32). Driving yourself somewhere meant liberation, freedom, the ability to go anywhere you want, to be in total control.

I learned to drive in a busted car loaned from a school I found on the internet in Bushwick when I was 25 years old. My instructor, a balding man in his 50’s with a thick Puerto Rican accent, picked me up from my then-apartment off the Montrose L stop and we would beep beep around the potholed bullshit roads of Bushwick for months, the car juddering to a stop every time he had to use his emergency brake. I learned where to line up the top left side of the wheel visually with the lines to be in the approximate right place. I still found it difficult to keep the car in between the lines. I barely passed the road test. When my license came, I held it and gawked, both thrilled and terrified. I felt like a toddler handed a knife.

In the last seven years of having my license, I have:

• Scraped someone’s car at the Lincoln Tunnel while we were inching forward at 10 miles an hour in peak traffic, on the way back from camping with five other Asian girls in a rented minivan from CC Rental. The woman who emerged from the car yelled racial epithets at me.

• Driven into the wrong side of highway traffic in Sydney, following a seismic break up of an eight year relationship. During that same trip, I scraped my friend’s car trying to pull into a very tight parking spot, and scream-sang-sobbed to Florence + The Machine while driving 20km over the speed limit down one of those new Sydney freeway tunnels.

• Had my rental car broken into at a beach parking lot in Rome on the way to Berlin, and had all my stuff stolen.

• Completely totaled my neighbor’s VW mini when I hit a deer leaping out the darkness somewhere upstate. I hit the deer and then proceeded to drive straight over it, the car lurching upwards and then back down. I was in a state of shock, so I continued driving for about 5 minutes, trying to ignore Ghost screaming in the passenger seat, that every display on the dashboard was flashing red, and the immense amounts of steam or smoke coming from the crumpled mess that was left of the hood. Eventually I spulled into some driveway and the police were called and insurance covered everything.

My point is, even when I did do all the lessons and got my license, it wasn’t like I suddenly became a capable driver. The first time I rented and picked up a car all by myself was in LA. I remember sitting in it after being handed the keys, taking a deep breath and thinking. How am I going to return this car in one piece in a week? Every time I got in that car I would dread the entire time I had to be in it, count down the minutes until I could walk away from it.

Over the last few years I have steadily, finally, become a real driver. I no longer drive past parking spots if there are any cars behind me for fear of embarrassing myself. I can keep the car between the lines without thinking. I haven’t been in any accidents for years. It took seven years of infrequent trips upstate and the occasional international rental to get here.

Last month, I was in LA for work, and rented a car so that I could drive to OC/Pasadena/Malibu to shoot my Viet Kieu project. I hadn’t rented a car in LA since the first time, trembling at a Burger King drivethrough because I had not yet learned that low blood sugar crash outs are incompatible with driving.

I took myself on long days of shooting, driving from Malibu to OC at 4PM on a Friday, going from the climbing gym to coffee shops to thrift stores and back. I reverse parked more times than I can count. I called my boyfriend during my long drives to OC, and he would interrupt, “are you calling me just to tell me about the road conditions and traffic in LA?”

I was rhapsodic about driving to anybody who would listen. I delighted at the ability to pack cameras, climbing shoes, shopping purchases, snacks, to go out all day and not return until the late evening. Even in traffic, it felt romantic, like I was in La La Land. In Houston, my next stop, I drove to Popeye’s at midnight to get three chicken tenders, and then to an ice cream shop, after my first dinner. I sat in my Airbnb eating my chicken tenders while watching the new documentary about Mormon pedophilia, thinking to myself: This is what it is to be an adult.

During my last therapy session, I talked about how I was proud of the driver I had become, that I no longer counted down the minutes until I could get out of the car. She told me it sounded like it made sense, that it was a reflection of how I felt about the rest of my life: that I was in the driver’s seat. It felt like a transmission from God. I am in the driver’s seat! I yelled at her. I am a driver!

It had taken my entire life, but I had finally arrived. I was no longer the dumbest person on planet earth, the only person unable to drive.

I haven’t had that recurring nightmare for a while now. I hope it’s because my subconscious isn’t capable anymore, that I have effectively starved the fear, the anxiety, the self-judgement from driving that would generate such a dream. Driving is joyful even when it sucks. To be a body moving yourself at such speed across vast landscapes and dense cities is a great joy and a great privilege.

I still feel like I am in a speeding towards a future I can’t see. The one defining part of my adulthood thus far has been the constant feeling that I am rushing rushing rushing towards a destination I don’t know. I am less afraid now. And now, at least, I can drive. I am in the driver’s seat, picking my nose, feeding myself chicken tenders with one hand, the other on the wheel, volume turned all the way up.

Dragon-Horse ~ Longma 龙马 (source)

I watched Hamnet a few months ago with my friend Ash at Williamsburg Cinema. On the way out, I found my bike lying on the ground next to the pole I had locked it to. The lock was completely open, about a foot away from the bike, which is bright yellow, a name brand, conspicuous. In a city where bike theft is so common that Kryptonite sells locks with names like the “New York Fahgettaboudit Ulock”, it is a miracle I have not had it stolen in the five years I’ve owned it. It was a miracle nobody took it that Friday night in the middle of a busy intersection in Brooklyn.

A few months earlier, all my belongings that were taken when I was in Rome were inside a locked rental car. I was in flip flops and a bikini top, lulled into a false sense of placidity. The salt from the ocean had not yet crystallized on my skin. For lunch, I had cacio e pepe. I was the only person in the restaurant, and I sat facing a perfectly circular window that framed beachgoers walking in that very specific way that one walks in the beach: languid, unhurried. I felt safe. My world had narrowed to that of VacationLand: a soft and squishy place marked only by sunburn and mosquito bites. I had forgotten an essential truth about life, as Anne’s mother says in Hamnet, “What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any time, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe.”

The jagged hole in the back window that they had smashed to gain entry was the only proof that something had happened. When something is stolen, grief exists only in absence, in the space left behind where something should have been. I lose things on a daily basis, to the point that my friend Aida has taught me how to “say bye bye” to the train cars and back seats of Ubers that I seem all too willing to gift my phone, my wallet, any random thing I happen to have on me. I shed single earrings, socks, scarves, gloves, lens caps, rings, sunglasses. I have repurchased the same lip gloss six times in one year, because I keep losing them.

It’s not just things I leave behind: I leave behind actual flesh, too. Severe psoriasis means waking up to a pillowcase covered in remnants of my scalp. I am constantly hoovering and sweeping tiny crystals of skin everywhere I go. Ghost sheds a lot too, and vacuuming and sweeping is a daily ritual in my home, collecting her fur and my skin, all of it mixed up into each other.

In a way, I’m microdosing the grief of loss on a daily basis, and still I was not ready for the magnitude of the combined effect of having everything you love taken. There was some naive and fundamental trust I had into the security of a locked car, of nothing bad ever happening on vacation.

In the Chinese Zodiac, the snake is considered a symbol of wisdom, strategy, and discernment. Snakes represent rebirth, shedding, transformation. There’s an ancestrally unsettling quality to snakes, something metallic in their feeling. I have a tattoo of a snake on my left forearm, it crawls up towards my hand, flicking at the boundary of my wrist. It is my most visible tattoo. Right now, as I type, I can see the tip of its head, and its tongue lapping at my fingers.

After a big break up in 2022, life became startlingly quiet and uneventful, like somebody had turned the volume down. My twenties were defined by the process of working through a lifetime of accumulated trauma (and lifetimes before mine), which built to a stunning crescendo during that 2022 breakup. The aftermath was silent, and the absence of drama in my life made me suspicious. I was overdue for a snake year, for a reminder of what awaits all of us around corners and behind doors. Maybe that’s all life is: struggle immediately followed by growth, followed by only enough rest to ready you for the next struggle. We must stay vigilant, we must not rely on our laurels.

I am always looking for signs, and the image of my bike lying on the sidewalk without being taken seemed like one. That time was when the cold of New York winter really began to set in. I was beginning to struggle with homesickness and a sense that I was trapped without being able to travel. Other small miracles things kept happening to me, little nudges that I was where I was meant to be. At Falansai, a new Vietnamese restaurant in Greenpoint, I was gifted a bottle of a hot sauce I had raved about all meal long, asking my friends I was eating with if they thought I would be able to buy it afterwards. In the same week, I went to a massage parlor suggested by my friend Michelle. The woman who massaged me, after seeing my psoriasis and finding out that I understand Cantonese, spent a long time writing down TCM practitioners and medicine I should look for. She recorded a voice message in Cantonese to my mother asleep across the world, and unceremoniously pulled my pant leg up to show my skin to her colleague, the kind of familiarity reserved for relatives. I loved being womanhandled by her. Afterwards, I walked to eat pho by myself, holding scraps of paper with Chinese words for psoriasis, for medicine. I barely understood what she said to me, but her care kept my homesickness at bay for a while longer.

Snake years remind us of the undeniable core of life: its instability. Nothing is promised, everything is open for the taking. There are signs everywhere for people who look for them, and I, like every other woman going through it, am looking forward to the symbolic year of the Fire Horse that has now begun. The Year of the Horse only comes around every 60 years. In 1966, anti Vietnam war protests exploded cross the United States. The optimism of the 60s had transformed into rage.

I have been thinking about the Fire Horse year for months, eager to escape a year that felt defined by loss and instability, both within my personal life and in the wider context of the world.

I thought that The Year of the Horse would be a break from the shedding of the snake, that there would be no obstacles in the path of a herd of galloping horses. I am now realizing that the Year of the Horse is not a break, but instead an escalation, a challenge. If life is inherently unstable, shedding is just woven into the fabric of it, and the Horse is an invitation to proceed and move forwards despite whatever is in the way. Life is a cycle of knowing when it is time to shed, and when it is time to move fully embodied into the unknown future.

It is a midterms year. There is an increase of state-sanctioned violence on the streets of American, of Iran, of Palestine still, of Congo. The first two months of 2026 have been a hot flaming mess, all of it deafening in its volume and intensity, and I have felt the energy of the horse lurking beneath. I feel it in Minneapolis and their historic general strike, their citizen-led front-line resistance, in the people of Iran who continue to fight for their country in the face of violence because they have no other choice. I feel it in a recent video I saw of middle-aged white women purchasing and returning salt from Target over and over in a creative act of protest. I feel the spirit of the Horse in New Yorkers checking on their homeless neighbors, in the joy on the streets found from a community-organized snowball fight and the hands of many pushing stuck cars on snowy roads. I am looking for signs of the Horse everywhere. She is here, straining at the reigns to burst forth even amidst all the destruction and chaos wrought by systems that seek to keep her down.

May we shed the systems and actors that seek to keep us separate from the fundamental truth of being human: that we are all connected. May we harness the collective energy needed to gallop towards a future that ensures dignity, safety and autonomy for everyone. Happy year of the horse.

I am an Australian far from home in the throes of homesickness. I salivate for the smell of eucalyptus, the sound of the ocean, the sizzle of the sidewalk while walking home in the middle of summer. I yearn for socialized health care, marvel at the free education I benefited from, our gun control laws, the way that we acknowledge the indigenous caretakers of the land before us in every public address. Australia is not a perfect place, of course it has a deeply racist history. The cost of living is rising as it is here, climate change stalks its beautiful forests and plains with recurring fires and droughts, and there are endless secret human rights violations in its offshore asylum facilities. And still, my ten years living in America has, in contrast, made Australia a symbolic fantasy Eden. A protected place to return to if shit really starts hitting the fan. Australia has its problems, but it doesn’t have these very specifically American problems. Like having 391 mass shootings this year alone (Gun Violence Archive), or like half of Americans losing health insurance next year because it now costs $1,000+ a month with the expiration of ACA subsidies.

I’ve had conversations with Australian friends living in the U.S. on the cusp of parenthood who move home. They don’t want their kids growing up with mass shooter drills at school as the norm. Australia’s deadliest shooting, the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, resulted in the banning of automatic weapons. There were no hard lines in the sand drawn by the “left” or the “right”. It was understood as an issue that rose above politics, something senseless and inhuman that didn’t deserve a place in our society.

Living in America is to waterboard yourself with images of violence. Political violence, mental health crisis violence, drug violence, genocidal violence, sexual violence, everyday acts of violence committed against each other on roads, in parks, at work. Violence is an inherent characteristic of life in America, in the same way that not having health insurance for the last three years for me feels unexceptional. Making healthcare inaccessible is in a way, another form of violence wielded by the state. It is woven into the tale of this country’s founding, the production of its resources, in its carceral system, in the continued destruction of its landscapes.

Maybe my fetishization of Australia as this ideal of safety is nothing more than misplaced nostalgia as someone living far from family. It is a metaphysical blanket, a coping mechanism. In my heart, Australia is a fever dream, an upside down world where the toilet water runs counter-clockwise and people get emergency healthcare without going bankrupt, and guns are banned. A place responsible for the idea of “fair dinkum” (genuine and true) and equal opportunity for every Aussie. A place where a weird hand puppet giraffe came to my school in a van and taught children how to eat vegetables.

I suspect this image I have built is one made up of fragments of memory from a long time ago, from a place that no longer exists. It has been over a decade since I moved, and much of my adult life has been spent here, in America, pulled between the whiplash of Obama-era blind hope and the seventh circle of hell of the last few years. In truth, I don’t know what healthcare is like today in Australia, or the education system, nor the feeling on the streets, the political divide. To actually really know, to see the truth, is to cross a bridge between the Australia of my past, of my childhood, and the Australia where somebody could shoot 15 people celebrating Hanukkah on one of its most famous beaches.

The Bondi Beach shooting immediately became the second deadliest mass shooting in Australia’s history. It was a father and son, from an area near where I grew up. Just the other day, I saw that a man in Taiwan threw smoke bombs and indiscriminately stabbed people in a busy shopping area, killing three and wounding more. He fell off a roof pursued by the police. They just found the Brown University shooter dead, and can’t assign any discernible motive to his actions.

Every day, another act of violence, much of the time with no coherent politics or rhetoric. Still, there are always too-eager politicians with their lips poised to lay the blame on some unlucky monolith of people of the same race as the perpetrators. Violence begets political retribution, which begets trauma, which begets only more violence. The Brown University shooter got his green card in the diversity lottery, now the entire thing is suspended. Threats in congress of a muslim ban, after the D.C. National Guard shooting. In Sydney, a sort of Cronulla Riots 2.0 was planned for Saturday the 27th, a screenshot sent to me by my sisters with the words “🇦🇺WE RIOT, WOG/MIDDLE EASTERN BASHING DAY 👊💪”. A single act of brutality bleeds outwards like water on a napkin, inevitably dripping onto the shoulders of people who have nothing to do any of it.

So much of the violence, that condition of life under America, feels tolerable when limited to the geographic boundaries of this country. Australia existed as a symbol of safety for me simply because uniquely American violence had not crossed the ocean. Last week, it finally did. It wasn’t just an attack on Jewish Americans. It was an attack on the idea of Australia I carry, that all of us carry like a talisman, this eternal symbol of safety.

Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Muslim father of two and fruit shop owner, tackled and disarmed one of the gunmen. The next day, Michelle Berkon, a Jewish woman wearing a keffiyeh, was police-escorted from the memorial service where she’d come to mourn. I keep returning to the details of these people, of a Muslim man’s courage, a Jewish woman removed for wearing a symbol of Palestinian solidarity while mourning Jewish victims. They don’t fit neatly into any narrative, they defy politicization. This is the Australia I recognize, not the one that politicians invoke when they are all too eager to weaponize acts of tragedy and grief for their own agendas.

My Australia has always been one where a family like mine, Vietnamese refugees, could settle within a five minute drive of little Vietnam, streets full of bright vegetables, fish shops and DVD rental stores. Authentic Lebanese food in Bankstown, the Korean cafe I hung out with my friends at in Strathfield, the beautiful mosque I drove past every day on the way to school, these were all landmarks of my childhood.

When I was looking through Twitter at the videos of the shooting, I came across a video a few months ago, of people wrapped in Israeli flags and general random white Australians, facing the beach and chanting “Go back to Lakemba. We don’t come to Lakemba, you don’t belong on Bondi Beach”. It was a clash between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protestors.

I grew up directly neighboring Lakemba, in a place called Yagoona. Both places are known for their large Lebanese and Arab populations. A few years ago, I was walking on the beach with a close friend of mine, and her girlfriends who were from Bondi. We walked on the promenade and looked out at the sea of people. It was the middle of summer, a scorching hot day, so there were lots of people out. One of the girls said in a flippant, off-hand way, “Look at all these Westies [a derogatory term for people from the area my family is from], what are they doing here?” I had just met these girls, and it surprised me that they were comfortable saying this aloud. I guess my proximity to my friend marked me as someone like them. I stayed undercover, feeling irate, embarrassed even. I wish at that moment I had told them that I was a Westie, and that I was someone exactly like them, or really, that they were just like me. The idea of Australia they had was one that lacked the joy of my Australia — a place where a hundred people from a hundred different places could enjoy the beach together. That is the point of a beach, it is a place of common leisure.

In a lot of ways, Bondi Beach is the peak of the Australian myth: a place of blue-eyed, blonde-haired people, of surfing and six packs and the surreal beauty of our coastlines. I imagine it as the front page of a travel brochure. Look at what the best of our country has to offer. I think this shooting was so painful because it was a direct attack on that postcard ideal. But beyond the cliches, it means much more to all the other types of Australians, people like me. I’ve seen Chinese women wearing normal cotton long sleeve shirts, soaked and laughing in the whitewash. I’ve seen women in burqas making sand castles with their children. I’ve sat on that beach after the worst break up of my life, listening to Adele in the rain. It is a beach for the people, despite what that girl said about Westies, despite the videos telling people to go back to Lakemba, despite the attempt of two men to violate a peaceful religious gathering.

The Australia of my dreams, the place of eternal comfort, is a place where a Syrian fruit seller could become an international hero. It’s where lifeguards sprinted from suburbs away carrying first aid supplies. Thousands tried to donate blood, so much so that the Red Cross website crashed. Interfaith ceremonies were held in a large city park with First Nation, Jewish, and Muslim communities united.

On Friday, thousands of people returned to Bondi and paddled out into the surf. The waves were quiet, as though the ocean knew. The people formed a giant circle, on surfboards and buoyed by their own bodies. They observed a minute of silence. In the aerial footage I saw, the circle looked so big, its own tiny island, a floating harbor of humanity and grief. The footage I watched cut to a very Australian man with a very Australian accent calmly telling the camera how he paddled out, didn’t expect to cry but began to weep, and that he suspected there are more tears yet to shed. I watched from the bright portal of my phone, on the other side of the world, tears pricking my eyes as the Northeastern winter wind rattled at my windows.

A picture I took in December 2021

Wearing a scarf, beanie, and tights all from Sezane.

I have to admit something about myself: I am really good at getting gifts. For myself and for other people. I relish in any opportunity: birthdays, new businesses, engagements. I relish other kinds of opportunities too: when I’m out in the world somewhere, and I see something that instantly reminds me of somebody specific. It’s like a call to arms. I must buy it. There is no need for any specific reason to give a gift, and the gifts that are given just because are the best gifts of all. I wanted to compile a gift guide that was kind of for this holiday, but also for any time of the year.

I didn’t grow up receiving or giving gifts to my family much, maybe a function of our economic situation, but also our cultural one. Once, when I was maybe ten years old, I took about 20 of my mother’s tiny glass animal figurines (they looked a lot like this) that lived on top shelf of a display cabinet in our living room, next to a framed picture of the twelve apostles and a weird doll holding a heart my mother had bought from Vietnam that had a skirt you could lift to reveal its tiny penis. I took these glass animal figurines, and gave one to each of my peers at school, as a lavish invitation to a birthday party at my house that I had conjured up without telling anyone else, including my mother. When she found out, I had to ask for every single one of these figurines back, and I had to tell everyone I made up my birthday party. I don’t remember much from my actual birthday that year.

If you deprive a diva of feeling special on her birthday, it has a ripple effect. The ripple effect was that I am enormously into gift giving and receiving. So, let my trauma be a gift of sorts to you. Here’s a non-occasion-specific gift guide for somebody special in your life.

<$100

• Fancy body wash adds so much luxury to a shower routine but I’m fairly sure nobody actually wants to spend $30+ on body wash, which makes it a perfect gift. My two favorites are Wonder Valley’s Hinoki Body Wash and OSEA’s Undaria Algae Body Wash.

• I recently found out about Stevengraph bookmarks, which were apparently hand embroidered by nuns or something according to the woman who refused to sell me hers at the local vintage market in Helena while I was there over fall. I went immediately on eBay and bought this exact same one and discovered an entire new eBay search term obsession: vintage bookmarks.

• Get a gorgeous vintage photo album (here’s one, here’s another) and fill it with pictures for somebody!

• I love Yamako Iona’s creepy ass paintings of possessed dogs. She had a “Creepmas” sale going (she releases prints every so often), but I didn’t finish this on time so you’ll have to just sign up to her newsletter for the next drop. I also love Robert Roest’s print of possessed dogs - this one ends TOMORROW! (December 16)

• A slight variation on the above is an oil-based unisex perfume roll-on. I use Wonder Valley’s as my sole vacation scent because it is so compact, and I also enjoy the one from Treadwell, which is a blend of eucalyptus and palo santo. These are great gifts for anyone, because they’re quite neutral scents. I have been to Burning Man one time, and one of the most special parts of it is the gift economy. It’s not bartering. You’re meant to just bring stuff to give freely without expecting anything in return. As it was my first time, I was barely alive the entire time let alone in a state to bring planned gifts but what I did have was a bottle of eucalyptus essential oils. I would go up to people, ask them cup their hands together facing up, and I would drop a little bit in and ask them to inhale. In the dusty wilderness of Burning Man, something as simple as the smell of eucalyptus was a gift, and that totally changed the way I think about gifting.

• On a similar note, novelty vintage sweatshirts, I think, are always welcome, because 1) it doesn’t have to fit well, it just can’t be too small and 2) they’re comfy and we all want more comfy clothes. eBay search “Somebody loves me in [insert place]” or “vintage [insert hobby or interest like volcanoes/rats/cheesecake/rainbows] sweatshirt size X”

• Last Christmas Cody bought me my current journal from this company called About Blanks. They take old book covers and make new beautiful journals that look inconspicuous on a book shelf.

• For the smoker in your life: why not a beautiful silver antique cigarette case? Roll them some to give inside.

• One of my favorite belongings, and for the weed smoker in your life: why not a joint holder in the shape of a woman’s body with 24K gold-tipped nipples? Elevate Jane is one of my favorite woman-owned weed brands and as well as being extra, joint holders are really useful to smoke roaches.

• Also for the weed lover or smoker in your life, I love having a beautiful lighter holder. This one by Chen and Kai is great, as well as this very extra one by Edie Parker.

• For the game lover in your life, there are sometimes actual records pressed for the soundtracks of games. I have both the Katamari and Stardew Valley soundtrack on vinyl.

• There are great Japanese photo books from Shashasha, and some locally made ones from Pom Press and Friend Editions. They’re both always releasing new titles. Jason also told me about Charcoal Press Book Club - a subscription service for photo books.

• One of my favorite belongings, and for the weed smoker in your life: why not a joint holder in the shape of a woman’s body with 24K gold-tipped nipples? Elevate Jane is one of my favorite woman-owned weed brands and as well as being extra, joint holders are really useful to smoke roaches.

• This beautiful circular hand cream from Superegg and it’s gorgeous egg sack it comes with. This hand cream smells insanely good and is also good to fiddle with when you’re anxious.

• I first discovered Bacha Coffee, a Moroccon coffee brand via a gifting suite run by the wonderful Oset called Prix Fixe a year or two ago. From there I ended up buying the Bacha Navigator Coffee Bag Taster for Cody. It’s really cute to choose the flavor you want to try that day and try it together over crosswords, and the packaging is soooo pretty.

• Sometimes the simplest gift is the fucking best: A gift card to McNally Jackson/Leaves/Word Bookstore/Books Are Magic for the bookworm in your life (this was recently gifted to me for the first time), or Nitehawk/Alamo/IFC/Anjelika/Metrograph gift card for your NYC-based movie lover

• Socks! Socks fall under the same category as luxury body wash: you want nice socks but you don’t want to pay for them. I like these Donni ones, and these Merino wool ones from Comme Si.

>$100

• Sezane scarf + beanie set. The scarf is big enough to wrap around my head three times, which is not nearly enough to protect me from a very chapped chin that always seems to happen every winter. It does help though. It comes with a matching beanie. They even have a matching gift set.

• I found a perfect hooded sweatshirt in a Second Street in Japan. I found out that it’s by a cult Japanese brand called McCoy that specializes in ripping off heritage golden-age Americana workwear and basics. I would get a hoodie-wear in my life this beautiful oatmeal hoodie. Price is a little crazy for a vintage sweatshirt but it is very well made and soft, the type of special impractical thing that is perfect to receive as a gift.

• Most of my everyday jewelry is from: Long May Love Rule, Em Jono, Natura Human and I just got very cute earrings from Kara Yoo. On the custom piece side, I have received a very sweet gift from Cody from Soft Good Studio, a jewelry studio based in the Bay area that specializes in pieces that integrate family heritage symbols. I’m also partial to a tiny necklace like this one from Chan Luu. I also stumbled across a woman in Chinatown called Lucky Zhang who is now my go-to girl for gold and silver jewelry. I got two silver charms - one of my Chinese Zodiac sign, and one of my boyfriend’s. I also bought my first Jade bangle from Margaret, she has great options for any budget.

• For the person in your life who washes their face with body wash (I’m not going to name names): a simple skincare set. I have used and liked Biossance, Youth To The People, and Beauty of Joseon.

• One of my favorite places in the world to go with Cody is a hotel called Tourists in Massachusetts. Every room has a radio on that is tuned into their own private radio station that plays the most on-point ambient music after 11PM, and we loved the robes so much we bought them for each other. They’re sold out right now but who knows, they might come back.

• Get them a gift card to a local framer so they can finally frame whatever random thing they never got around to framing. Again, something that is super useful and beneficial on a daily basis, and something nobody likes to spend money on.

Last Updated December 2025 - if you keep checking back I might just keep updating it when I think of or receive great gifts. :)

1. The first ever sighting of the white Iberian lynx. I wrote this a few weeks ago and in editing this wanted to clarify “from a few weeks ago” which was literally October 29. Why has this last month felt like a lifetime? Is your brain as cooked as mine in its sense of time and place?

   

2. I’ve been playing Once Upon A KATAMARI on Nintendo Switch non-stop since its recent release. It was first released in 2004 by a Japanese man who, according to his Wikipedia article, made “cheerfully bizarre” sculptures in university. I’ve played every single iteration of this game. The basic premise is the same throughout: you play a prince sent to the Earth by a flamboyant sky daddy king (although you can also swap into one of your dozens of “cousins” that you have to find and collect throughout the levels as an additional in-game goal), who instructs you to roll around a Katamari ball that collects things equivalent to your size or smaller, until you get big enough to collect bigger and bigger things. You begin by rolling up thumbtacks on a table, and become so big that you’re rolling up the Great Wall of China. The items you roll up are insane, they are stacked in crazy ways (like two pigs on top of a cake type shit), and the mechanic of moving the joysticks around to maneuver the Katamari Ball is frustrating and wacky. I have found it incredible as an outlet for emotional release, especially in today’s political climate. There is something incredibly powerful and life-affirming about being able to roll up every object around you, growing bigger and bigger until you rival the size of a country, destroying everything in your path. Special shoutout to the music, which I can only describe as hallucinatory, and of which I know every single Japanese word, with 0% understanding of what any of it actually means.

3. This short story machine that prints out a piece of light reading in Paris subways

4. The Gooner article on Harper’s - specifically this sentence that made me snort out loud about the writer trying to find a specific guy he heard a story about with a distinctive room where his walls covered in cum. “I searched for every permutation of what JustDamage remembered as the friend’s username—PornosexualGooner101—but this was like going door to door looking for a guy named Sal on Staten Island.”

5. Binge-eating gummy vitamins and supplements - I was sent some functional mushroom ones from Plant People and some very yummy chill out ones from Sakara Life. Even as an adult I can convince myself that a handful of gelatin gummies could meaningfully count towards my daily vegetable intake in lieu of actually having to eat vegetables. The Sakara Life ones remind me of all the jelly items from Neopets, somehow. I was very committed to building the breadth of my Jelly Museum when I used to play Neopets.

   

6. Paul de Vos’ Fable of the dog and the prey. I saw an artist’s copy of this painting on Instagram at some sort of design/art fair and was instantly enamored. Cody helped me figure out the original painting by Paul de Vos, which looks like it is based on Aesop’s fable The Dog & His Reflection. The Steak! The dog’s face! His sinewy body! The bridge! What an age to fall in love with a painting you first see as a copy of by someone else, in a screenshot of someone else’s Instagram story taken at a New Jersey design fair.

7. In China, if you suspect your husband is cheating, and you don’t want to confront him, you can hire someone to “organically inject” themselves into your family to subterfuge the affair on the low-low. Mistress Dispeller follows a mistress dispeller hired to get rid of a middle aged man’s 38 year old mistress who he plays tennis with and travels an hour by train to visit. The Mistress Dispeller is hired by his wife, a woman like a thick rubber band, who does exercise in her living room while she waits for her husband to come home from his affair.

   

8. Being in dark places I can’t have my phone. Specifically printing photos in the darkroom. I go to Photolab in New York, which has four color darkrooms you can rent by the hour. I’m normally there for four hours, running two enlargers at once. I really get in the zone here, and the sunsets are quite nice, plus you’re printing next to what is usually very friendly fellow photographers, so you feel still a part of the world even though half of that time I’m standing in the pitch black in a light sealed room. The other dark place I frequent is Akari, a membership Japanese-style sauna with two locations in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. It is a small, efficient neighborhood sauna and cold plunge spot, and I always bring reading material to squint at by the dim lights of the sauna, but I want to practice going without anything to do at all. Just to go and commit myself to doing nothing other than thinking and sweating might be the my pathway towards training myself against compulsively making every waking moment productive.

9. Ken Burn’s Vietnam War documentary. It’s an EIGHTEEN HOUR (!) ten-part documentary about America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. I have known about this for years, but for some reason completely forgot about its existence until recently when I was trying to research some more books to read to educate myself on the history of Vietnam. I am finding myself watching it while doing the Stairmaster, which is territory normally dedicated to Love Island. I’m about 12 hours in and legitimately binge watch this. It is very well made, and I’m learning so much about my own people’s history. On a related note, The Stringer, a new documentary about the true authorship of the AP’s Napalm Girl photo was an interesting, albeit very long watch that I was lucky to see at the DOC NYC Fest this year. It was my first time going to this festival, and I loveeeee a documentary. I can’t wait to go back again next year. This also ties generally into #12.

   

10. The Nikon F4 that I just bought as a replacement of the Olympus OM4TI, my normal go-to 35mm camera that was stolen as part of the great 2025 Italian Robbery of my life. It’s affordable, built like an absolute brick, and takes incredible, tack-shark images. I’ve started shooting in B&W consistently for the first time in my life, and it’s been really fun. The above is a picture of Luca and Ashley, a very sweet couple I did an engagement shoot with at Prospect Park.

11. I’ve done a lot of great reading this year. I’ve particularly enjoyed: While The Women Were Sleeping by Javiar Marias, Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, Intervals by Marianne Brooker, Audition by Katie Kitamura, Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, Autocracy Inc by Anne Applebaum, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. I’m currently reading my first Dostoyevsky: Crime & Punishment alongside my friend Shirley Cai.

12. This candle makes my house smell like an expensive spa. The Nippon Kodo Kayuragi Green Tea incense sticks make my house smell like an expensive Japanese spa.

    

13. Pretending like I just moved to New York! I have lived in NY for more than a decade and have lost the standard-issue rose tinted glasses you wear upon first moving here. The first few years in New York felt like the next best thing to ever happen to me was constantly around the corner. All of New York like the most plentiful buffets, the best choose your own adventure. I’m tired of forgetting the pure magic that lies outside. Sometimes you have to step over literal human shit to see it, but why live here if only to bitch about it? This next season I want to eat Greek food in Astoria, Chinese food in Sunset Park, I want to find my favorite new gyro spot. I want to go to the Met (where FYI NYC ID gives you pay what you wish entry) and drink red wine at the museum cafe before tipsily looking for the photography wing (there is none), like I did recently with my friend Jill. I want to take the Metro-North and join the hordes of fair-weather hikers to Cold Spring, where we’ll stumble over each other’s feet up the same hike. I want to be high in Washington Square on a balmy Summer’s night! I want to see parts of Central and Prospect Park that I never knew existed. I want to get rush tickets and go to free comedy shows. The rent is still fucking high so I might as well try to enjoy it, my beautiful and precious New York City, a bright dew drop on the leaf of America.

In Berlin at my friend’s house, wearing the pants I was in when I was robbed, and a new top, and jewelry I bought a few days prior.

I was robbed on my last day in Italy in a parking lot in Rome. Being robbed tears a fissure into the fabric of your life and identity. The size of that fissure varies, depends how badly you are robbed, I guess. I wasn’t robbed that badly. I struggle to even name it as a robbing. When I do, the blame always seems to drift back towards me. Since it happened, the tiny digital gods in my phone have shifted my algorithms: Reddit posts written by panicked fellow travelers with the same experience, Instagram Reels of people tracking down their stolen suitcases to the far edges of town. The comments under these posts are almost the same. It was OP’s fault for leaving luggage in the car in a foreign country. What a rookie mistake.

I should have backed up my hard drive when I said I would. I should have bought AirTags when they ran out of batteries last year. I should have brought my passports with me to the beach. I should have hidden the bag of film I shot at my friend’s wedding under the car seat. I should have known that somebody was going to punch a hole through the back left window of my rental car and take everything I own. $10,000 of cameras, a small fortune amassed over the course of a decade. My hard drive with the only copy of the book I’ve been working on for the last two years. The photos on that hard drive - another thing on my todo list that I never got around to, doing a second back up. My boyfriend’s mother’s jewelry, my laptop with god knows what on it, the favorite jeans I bought from Zara that Ghost ate the crotch out of, so it has this ugly patchwork on the ass. The necklace my friend Ash made for me years ago. The floral Betsey Johnson dress that was out of my budget that I saved for when I was 24. I had to tailor it to fit my body perfectly. All my favorite pieces of clothing, shoes. The library book I had 13 pages left to finish, which I will be charged for by the library once I failed to return it.

They’re only things, mere objects. The problem is the emotional attachment I have to my things is potentially higher than the average person (derogatory). Since I began purchasing things as a way to shape the person I aspired to be, I have always bought and treasured secondhand things. I love imagining an object’s prior life, the hands they were held by before mine. I feel like I’m inhabiting the role of sacred custodian. My cameras, my clothing, my books, my shoes, my furniture. Most things I love were once owned by somebody else, and why should I be surprised that my time is up, that it is time for those things to travel into a new pair of hands, even if by force.

Following the robbery, I was angry and depressed. I could not stop thinking about the way that my most cherished things that had no financial value were most likely strewn all over some Roman alleyway, hidden in trash cans and offered to tourists on a Sunday market. I imagined the thieves opening my film camera I had not yet manually rewound, ripping the film out the back and throwing it away. Photos I took of my friend’s wedding in Tuscany exposed to sunlight and destroyed. My underwear being handled by the rough hands that punched a hole in a stranger’s car. What did they imply about who I was by the things they took from me?

I have spent almost every day since returning home looking on Ebay for the things I lost, with zero luck. It’s like a terrible morning ritual that ruins my day before it even begins.

My sublet in Berlin

I’m reading The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. I found it on the free shelf in my apartment building. It seemed a good time as any to finally learn about Buddhism. He wrote:

“The conventional “self” or “person” is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories.”

My self was a structure towering in size, the strength of its base rooted in material objects as anchor points to memory. I’ve always found solace in physical objects. I like to have things because they feel like tangible representations of a change that happened in me, or an experience I had I want to remember.

My therapist has speculated that I collect things, that I imbue them with meaning as a way of creating personal heirlooms in the absence of actual heirlooms in my family. I have never lived in a house that me or my family actually owned, and I will receive nothing when my parents pass. She said that it was a class thing, to be so attached to objects. That it probably was some form of armor, a protection against being poor and miserable, which is how I saw my family. I still remember the running list I kept in my diary at age 12 of the things I wanted to buy myself, before I had access to money.

I have, my whole life, cobbled together the person I am through the things I wear and own.

“…According to convention, I am not simply what I am doing now. I am also what I have done, and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real “me” than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final.”

Finding who you are with the help of things/objects creates a sense of weightiness, of reality, of something rooted in stuff you can see, touch, smell. Many of these things served as guideposts to the person I wanted to be. They were significant because of who gave them to me. Gifts from my boyfriend, from his mother, from friends. Gifts can be loved embodied, materialized.

Maybe I thought that having so many things would keep my identity safe, that it would buffer me from the confusion and anguish of not knowing who you are without them. I started buying second hand clothes around the same time I started high school: 13-14. There was a Salvation Army next door to a KFC on the main highway that cut through the suburb I lived in Western Sydney. It was a 15 minute walk from my house, and as I started developing interest in style and clothes, it was a perfect outlet for a limited budget. Every week, a new selection. I went to a few in Sefton after school as well, including the St Vinnies in Chester Hill in that plaza, the memory of which feels like a far off dream. There was another one in between the library and the station that had tiny aisles packed to the brim with clothes and bric-a-brac.

In thrift stores I found an entire universe. I tried on clothing I had never seen before, clothing that was unflattering, clothing that was aspirational. I looked at the hodgepodge of human living on display like a shoppable museum. I bought tutus, little boys jackets, leather handbags with wooden handles. What was available and affordable to me in a thrift store did the same thing a good fiction book did—it expanded the boundaries of my life. It was an outlet of creativity and possibility with the limited resources I had available. In a regular mall, everything seemed impossibly expensive. A single shirt for $45. At thrift/charity stores, I could buy four of them, all completely different versions of a person I could try on for a moment. I could transform myself without needing much.

I am no longer the person who can only afford what’s available in a thrift store, but the habits remain firm even as I meander through my 30s and have very much shifted class. A Marxist I once dated called me a class traitor, and that has been a dissenting note in the goop of feelings that have come up after the robbery. A friend started a GoFundMe, one that I was forced by my friend Jade to reluctantly re-share on my story. I didn’t want to. It felt like asking for handouts, an inherited idea from my Asian parents that asking for money is the biggest sin that one could commit.

“Do you feel like you don’t deserve help?” Jade asked.

“Yes, because I have savings and this will drain my savings but there are people whose entire house is consumed by fire, whose lives are displaced by war. These are just belongings.”

“Do you think you don’t deserve help because you have savings?”

So I shared the GoFundMe, and told myself I would only share it once. It raised 50% of its goal - around $3500, enough to replace at least one camera. I am humbled and touched by everyone’s generosity, and I still feel incredibly uncomfortable thinking about this money, like I scammed people out of it somehow. I feel as though I do not deserve it. Fariha Roisin wrote in a recent Substack of hers:

“Asking for things has caused a lot of friction in my life in the last ten years. I don’t think I ever ask for much, but I witness that when I do ask people for things, so often they don’t want to give. Instead, friends get antsy and annoyed, they grow short and temperamental with me. Maybe it’s because they harbor these projections. I am read as having so much, why would I want more?”

I am read as having so much, why would I want more? I resonate with this so deeply. There is a cop in my head who is constantly monitoring how much I give to others and if it balances out with how much someone else gives to me (emotionally, spiritually). When the balance is off, more often than not it tips to my side. I compulsively support, share, give, and when I don’t receive that same energy back it touches some part of me that feels as though nobody wants to help me because I don’t deserve it. Getting older has only exacerbated that feeling, that I should be self sufficient because of the class that I am in now. Because I have friends, a modest savings account, a roof over my head, because I present as someone who can take care of themselves, that people don’t want to help me, or is it that I don’t deserve their help? I try not to ask for much from my friends because that cop is always watching. To ask for too much is to jeopardize the sacred balance. The problem is, I won’t ask, but I want people to offer their help without me asking. It’s like a secret trauma test that everyone is set up to fail at.

Losing everything I care about, years of work, a lifetime’s accumulation of special things has brought so much offered care. My friend Leah gave me her Mason Pearson hairbrush because she knew I would have lost mine. She remade a shell necklace, a baby version of one I lost in my luggage. My friend Moni gave me a Canon point and shoot she had thought I lost (it was actually in my beach bag on me at the time). My boyfriend bought me an expensive Leica M9 to lift my spirits because he couldn’t stand my loss of faith in my art. He wanted me to keep going when all I wanted to do was give up. It felt like an obvious sign from the universe - to stop writing and shooting. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to start again. Endless friends have offered words of support, their own tears, encouragement, space to help me process this.

My identity as an artist has been propelled by the material, by the cameras I saved up and bought for. It took a long time for me to feel brave enough to call myself an artist, and I think my cameras and my hard drive and my negatives and all this stuff was an easy way for my ego to believe that I was an artist when the spiritual base was still shaky. I know you can own an expensive camera and still not be an artist, but in the lack of self-belief, my tools were talismans, proof I could see and touch that I was an artist. Other people couldn’t take that away from me. Until they did. Some time has passed since the robbery, and I have almost emerged from the deep depression it threw me in. I know now that it was not a message, it was a test, a challenge. Are you an artist still, even without your things? Can you start again, can you keep going? Who are you without your things?

In Berlin, I went to my friend’s Mike and Yun’s apartment and spent twelve hours drinking chrysanthemum tea with them. Midway through our hang, Yun gave me a disposable camera. I have never actually used a disposable camera before. I thought its was below me, wasteful. I could not imagine any of the photos a disposable camera made could be usable. That camera was incredibly special to me. All the photos in this post were taken on it - a brief window of light I felt towards the end of my time in Berlin, before the depression set in again back home. I felt immensely protective of it, overjoyed to have something to document the last few days of my trip on. In the absence of all my fancy gear, all my preferred tools, the disposable was more than enough. It was a symbolic gesture, an invitation to begin again.

Self Portrait in Hanoi

New York is entering the boundary of Winter/Spring where it’s perfect at noon in the sun on a bench in the park, and then much too cold at 6pm. The days are stretching, a sudden proliferation of people on the street when I leave my house (too many). I have to admit: I’m a little mad about it. I’ve lived in New York for over a decade now, and finally I have found my appreciation for the frozen expanse of January-March, three months where staying home and planning my dates with Cody around the release schedules of TV shows feels totally acceptable.

I have to leave my house at minimum three times a day because dog, so I have to see what is going on outside when the weather is nice and the people are enjoying it even when I’m locked in and really shouldn’t be exposed to that kind of thing. I saw a tweet about how winter is for seasonal depression and summer is for seasonal anxiety that we’re not doing as much as everyone else is doing. I am very easily manipulated by my imagination: what is everyone else doing, how much fun are they having, and shouldn’t I be having that much fun too? Haven’t I also suffered from perpetually ashy knees and a Vitamin D3 deficiency for the last few months and deserve the liberty to let loose a little? The problem with New York is that there are simply too many people. I’m sure there are many people sitting at home, like me, trying to drag out the keeping to yourself that winter allows, but I don’t see them, because they’re not on the street in mini skirts filling every available bench in McCarren Park in my direct field of vision. It gets so horny on these streets and I worry I am missing out.

I feel as though I am finally hitting some sort of creative stride; I have long cast aside the anxiety that I am not an artist, or that I’m not allowed to call myself one. I no longer concern myself with semantics, I just feel as though I am. It kind of just happened one day. One day you feel like an imposter and then you work hard enough at it and no longer do. I have worked too hard, learned too much, failed too many times. A tarot card reader at a spa influencer event at the Hoxton a few months ago told me that my cards said 2025 is my year, but 2026 was really when all my flowers would bloom. I can feel them blooming already, but strangely I am finding myself increasingly desperate for the cold and wintery hours I feel allowed to shut myself in my house, to stay up late into the night editing photos and writing. It is the first time in my life I have felt called to do a lot alone, to not reach for my phone on a Friday morning desperate to make plans for the weekend. These days I long for a gap, a reprieve from the constant plans, the Google calendar filled with hundreds of relentless colored boxes demanding I be one place or another.

The simple answer is that I should just do whatever feels right, but the problem is I want it all. I want to be a serious writer, I need to finish my book, and the only person who can do that is me. I want to finish this Viet Kieu photo project and make a book out of that, too. I also want to drink three glasses of orange wine at 4PM until I have a headache, or pull on a joint at my kitchen table and stare obsessively into the patterns of my dog’s fur. I want to kiki and dance and go shopping. I want to “be in Europe this summer”and consider a last minute flight to a warm and sunny place, but I also know that achieving my goals requires a dedication that I have personally never mustered up for anything in my life before for this extended amount of time. I feel I have it in me, finally, but I am so, so distracted.

I’m grateful for my creative practice, because to discover it so urgently in my early 30’s has cleared the stage for total devotion. No matter how young I know I am, it still feels urgent to make up for the lost time in my 20’s where I wasn’t creating. It’s baffling to me how strong the feeling is now given it was so undirected and unharnessed for my entire twenties. I’m grateful for my creative practice because it is a stepping stone to the life lesson I am eternally trying to learn: how to slow down, how to do less, how to reclaim all the energy I leak everywhere else, to claim it back for myself, keep it closer to my belly.

It is difficult to show up everyday and work on a book I’m not sure is any good, to spend hours and hours in a darkroom (literally devoid of light) on days where the sun stains the sky a pretty pink that a nagging voice asks me: should you not be frolicking under a sky that pink? It’s so difficult and I am addicted to it. At this point, the goal of completion seems so abstract. I exist purely in a liminal space of ongoing creation and revision, editing and reflecting, spiraling upwards towards a hazy finish line that feels fake because I’m literally the only person who is responsible for its existence. But still, I persevere, and I read the motivational creative books (I’m reading a particularly good writing motivation book called 1000 Words by Jami Attenberg).

Right now, as I write this, I am tipsy off four glasses of wine after an impromptu group pizza dinner because my friend Leah is back in town. There were many things I was meant to do today. I was meant to climb, to move my body, but there was no time for that. I didn’t really work today, but as Eunice said at dinner, does it matter when you’re a freelancer when you do the work as long as it’s done? I am here, sitting in a dark corner of my apartment, drunkenly typing out my thousand words for the day diligently, each word a step closer to the dreams that I am chasing, at my own pace, at my own time, in my own way. That alone is a beautiful thing, a thing to be grateful for.

I returned from Vietnam a few weeks ago, spat back into my Western life under the rain cloud that is the Trump administration. It feels like actual trash in this country. I felt it viscerally when I landed, bursting into tears at 8AM in my kitchen, sick as a dog drinking oolong tea my uncle gifted me, listening to a compilation of Vietnamese 70s funk music called Saigon Supersound. The tea, the music, they are souvenirs, faint replicas of an indescribable emotional experience I had. I had gone and returned and put thousands of miles between me and there. Unpacking and drinking oolong tea that my uncle pressed into my hand during Tet, bringing my groceries home in my Paradise4Saigon tote bag, listening to the sounds of Vietnamese voices pour out the tinny speakers of my Google Home, these are all poor excuses of physical things that I am trying to filter the immensity of my emotion through, to relive it all as best as I can.

Typically, whenever I’ve gone through a Very Big experience, I rush to share how I feel with everyone around me. I have to yap it out, as though if I keep it inside the experience will disintegrate. If someone else does not bear witness to my experience, did it happen? Maybe that comes from growing up on the internet. I’ve trained myself since puberty to package my thoughts, feelings, preferences into a shape that others could recognize themselves in. I have seen myself as a reflection of other people for a very long time.

I felt this after Burning Man, after my ayahuasca ceremonies, after big travel trips; the urgency to share as much as I could. This time, I am almost afraid to distill the experience into words, as though speaking it aloud will break it up into pieces too small to reclaim.

I was sick for two weeks after I came home. The cold sores I developed during that time still haven’t healed. I wrote in my journal once that a vacation really ends when you’ve returned home and the mosquito bites have healed, when there is no longer any evidence on your body that your time away from home happened. My cold sores still haven’t healed.

There’s a dish from my childhood called Banh Uot that is from the South of Vietnam. It’s basically thick steamed rice noodle sheets rolled up and served in a semi warm salad of cucumbers, mint, bean sprouts and cha lua (Cody calls it Vietnamese baloney), drowned in nuoc mam (fish sauce). When I go home to Sydney, my mother will make me multiple servings to bring back to wherever I am staying. In Saigon, you can buy it casually off the street from vendors, you can get it delivered for <$5 straight to your doorstep within 15 minutes. I went to Kitchen Co Ut yesterday because it was the only place I could find in the city that sells it. It was just past lunch, around 3pm. I sat in front of a television playing clips of Vietnamese street vendors cooking, above a glass refrigerated case with clingwrapped servings of Vietnamese desserts: banh da lon, che. A sign on the fridge said, “We have banh Chung (new year cakes!)”

They only operate the machine that makes the rice noodles on weekends because there isn’t enough demand during the week. The restaurant owner greeted me in English, and switched to Vietnamese when I asked specifically for Banh Uot. My Vietnamese is not great, but it felt really nice to be recognized as one of our people. I ordered so much food I ate it in portions for the rest of the day, finishing with a late dinner consisting only of steamed pandan cake eaten straight from the takeout container at my kitchen island.

I felt deep comfort when that man was telling me about the intricacies of rice noodle machine operation in Vietnamese. The longing I feel for Vietnam is a longing for a sense of belonging I don’t think I’ve had in my country of birth, Australia, or here in the country I’ve lived in for the last decade of my life, the United States. I only lived in Saigon for a few years as a baby, and have carried it with me ever since, always falling short of understanding the extent it shaped me. I knew the rough contours of being Vietnamese before I went, the briefest of glimpses that I was chasing through shooting my project, building my relationship with my family over the years, untangling it all through doing The Work. All of that was intangible until this trip.

It is natural to have the post-travel blues, to return to a reality that shimmers far less than the memories made abroad. That’s why we travel right? To go as far away from the doldrum context of our life to see ourselves in a new place, a new culture, a new set of circumstances. The distance provides clarity of noticing ourselves anew. Returning to America during this particularly grim junction intensifies this noticing. It feels spiritually bankrupt here. The government is being dismantled piece by piece in favor of some sort of private utopia where personal favors to billionaires dictate the “correct way” to direct resources. The president is a car salesman, brandishing a piece of paper that lists the prices of different Tesla models as he stands in front of the White House labelling a Tesla boycott as an act of domestic terrorism.

The NY Times posted on Twitter a link to an article about how the Department of Education has been gutted so thoroughly that it is operating at half the size it was before the Trump presidency. Most of the responses were a variation of, “it needs a trim” and “that’s it? Why not more?”. This is the heart of America’s spiritual bankruptcy. So many people have been successfully indoctrinated in the church of hyper growth capitalism; the dehumanization of real people, real systems that benefit children, the elderly, the disabled, queer folk; all fair game at the sacrificial altar of efficiency and growth. It’s okay if other people suffer as long as I don’t, as long as my children don’t, as long as my groceries are more affordable and my taxes lower than yours.

Vietnam is not a perfect country, and nor am I a fan of its politics, but something I miss a lot is the sense of real community and ties to other people inherent in the way of life there. Every square inch of Vietnam has been fought over, has been colonized and reclaimed by its people. There is a gravity to Vietnam’s independence, a deep understanding of the heavy cost of war to a country and its people. For a place where so much blood has been spilled, I was shocked at the lightness in feeling on its streets, in its people. I am in no way discounting the challenges for people who live there, and the still wide gap in wealth that exists, but there is a tangible feeling of connectedness, whether it was a peak hour intersection in Saigon or in any of the dozens of small villages we passed on the side of windy mountain roads in the Northern Vietnamese countryside.

For one, many of the multi-story buildings in the cities are owned by a single family, where its common for their children and grandchildren to stay, live and work in the same place for generations. Most people will run businesses out of the street level entrance of their home, setting up plastic table restaurants in the alleyway. My family has run a wonton cart at the entrance of our home in District 10 since 1950. It’s still frequented by the same people who ate breakfast there decades ago. When the businesses close for the day, the people and homes are still there. Most front doors are wide open to the street, providing glimpses of domestic life to strangers walking by. Some will even hang hammocks between the treats on the street, bare feet dangling off the side. Cody and I would wander around little alleyways, each of them a neighborhood and world of its own, our heads on a swivel struggling to take in every rich and fleeting glimpse into a vast array of domestic living.

I felt it in the way that people move: by motorcycle/scooter. Grab, a ride share app, has an option to call a scooter/motorcycle, where you put on a communal helmet that has protected hundreds of people before you, hop on the back of a driver’s bike and weave in and out of the tangle of traffic together. I loved seeing the different permutations of people and animals on the back of scooters, tiny babies nestled between people, against their mother’s back. There is something truly intimate and vulnerable about all these bodies, pressed up against each other day in and day out, no car doors or windows separating you and the person in traffic next to you. You can reach out and touch them if you wanted to. I wore a top with very long tendrils of fabric that I had to gather in my hands so they wouldn’t flap in the breeze, and I was stopped so many times by well meaning people in traffic. “Chi oi, hãy cẩn thận” they would say. Sister, be careful. I loved moving around on a bike, disappearing into the mass of humanity that is Vietnamese traffic. No lanes and no real rules, but an implicit law of understanding that you are subsumed into.

Returning to America, where the national identity feels so fragmented, where the cruelty is the point and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it is deeply sad after spending a month in a place like Vietnam. America, a country where a stray foot on someone’s private property could mean getting shot, where you are watched by hundreds of personal and corporate surveillance cameras, where you go about your day shielded by headphones and by car windows, protected while you are en route from one private place to another. It is so easy to keep other people out in America.

In Vietnam, you would hear the sound of karaoke on the streets any time of the day. It was impossible to keep people out; it is impossible to be inured to the sensory overload of Vietnam. It requires you to participate; to side step the dog shit and rotting bones on the street, to cross the road through the tangle of traffic, to walk by families going about their daily lives in the open, to hear the sounds of someone absolutely belting their guts out at street karaoke 9AM on a Wednesday morning in the middle of the street. There’s a joke that there’s no crime because every neighborhood auntie is a human surveillance camera. Your business is everybody’s business when you live where you work and you all live on top of each other. I think that’s what I miss most of all: the responsibility to others, the inability to ignore that responsibility because you can see it, hear it, feel it, because it is embedded in the culture. That’s the truth of the matter: we are all deeply connected to one another, whether we like it or not, no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise.

I shared more creative work than I ever have in my entire life this year. I did it when it made me feel vulnerable, when it made me feel unworthy, when it made me feel insecure. I did it even when sometimes I would share photos and writing that were incredibly meaningful to me and it would get like 100 likes and 0 comments (which still regularly happens), and then I would share a picture of myself or an outfit video and thousands of people would engage with it.

I’ve posted on social media since I hit puberty, spraying my brain like a sloppy machine gun at every platform you can name — Tumblr, Livejournal, Bebo, Lookbook, Blogger, Instagram, TikTok, now Substack. I had dial up internet when I hit puberty; the way I process is inextricable from being online. There is no other way I know. Sometimes it’s been hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes it’s 100. I think I shared so much this year as a way to train myself out of expecting a response. I have learned that the value I hold of the work I create can never really be reflected in the response I receive from others. Yesterday I posted videos asking help to choose between three pairs of jeans I was considering; as soon as I posted them I realized that there was no possible way I could rely on the polls. Only I knew what they really looked like, felt like, fit like.

Cody said the other day that sometimes it seems like I’m writing my book because it’s a compulsion, something I absolutely must do. Other times he thinks I want to write a book because I want to wear a cute outfit to the book launch party.

I create for both reasons, I share for both reasons. I, like everyone else, want to feel acknowledged, to feel special. Growing up in a household where I was never explicitly told I was loved in words or otherwise underlines this gaping chasm in me. I spent my childhood having to affirm my worth and love to myself in the absence of my parents being able to do that for me, and I think as an adult I am still searching for confirmation from somebody else that I am good enough. Part of me is resentful that I am still left with the work of holding myself, but then again, we all are. Nobody else will think I am good enough if I do not think so first. I think I’m learning this, albeit slower than I’d like. I shared so much this year, and I am practicing the muscle of sharing over and over again because I am trying to teach myself to find value in who I am and the things I make without needing the reflection of others to confirm it.

I think that is the main thing I hope to continue leaving behind. The desire for other people’s approval. I know it will still happen, I will still post something and nobody will interact with it and I will feel like the shiny thing I made that I love so much means absolutely nothing. It won’t happen overnight, but I can feel it happening a little faster every time I share, the strengthening of the muscle of believing in myself in the absence of other’s opinions.

My personal lists of Ins/Outs for 2025:

In

• Reading the books I own before buying new ones

• Practicing letting go over and over and over again

• Wearing heels sometimes for the drama

• Meal prepping

• Being seen trying

• Texting people back

• Solitude

• Calling my mother more

• Taking more time in the darkroom instead of trying to run two enlargers at once

• Running amok

• Being thoughtful of what I say

• Writing letters

• Proper warm ups before I workout

• Playing games on my Nintendo Switch that’s not just Stardew Valley

• Not judging myself for yapping excessively

• Learning the violin

• Actually surfing instead of talking about wanting to surf

• Close friends and finsta posting

• Giving people the benefit of the doubt

• Writing everyday even if it’s one line

• Reviving my meditation practice

• Making smoothies

Out

• Reading books about writing instead of writing

• Letting my screenshots folder grow out of control until I no longer understand the context of what is saved

• Taking things personally

• Gossiping about people I barely know

• Picking at my scalp and psoriasis

• Arbitrary numeric goals for weightlifting

• Eating a late snack before sleeping

• Being overwhelmed from organizing social plans

• Doing more than 2 things a night

• Sleeping past 1am for no good reason

• Tightly held expectations

• Feeling left out

Some other photos from this year I love and haven’t shared:

I impulse purchased my first rangefinder, a Makina Plaubel 67 on eBay only for it to arrive broken from Japan. Martin Parr used this camera. I told people it was my equivalent of a man’s mid life crisis sport car purchase-- a camera that was gorgeous, inefficient, finicky. I ended up sending it back because it did not work. I filmed myself pretending to throw a pot on a wheel, pretending to ride a bike, pretending I was ordering from a bar, all for castings. I shot my friends in studio, spending hours in the darkroom printing for the first time. It was magic to see my photos printed for the first time ever, untouched by any digital process. It felt like I had unlocked something big.

February

I watched whales leap out of the Gulf of Mexico, and spent the next night feverish, throwing up every half hour from Norovirus. Jill was in a separate cabana, and the nearest pharmacy was a 25 minute walk into town. I texted Cody between barfing, wondered momentarily if I would die before I could reach Jill in the morning for help. I had pepto bismol for the first time in my life, I find the chalky pinkness of it pleasant. I Whatsapped dog walkers I found in Parque Mexico in Google Translate Spanish, paid one of them $50 to borrow his clientele’s dogs for an editorial shoot, relieved when he actually showed up. Back in New York, I got matching tattoos of Tom holding Jerry at arm’s length with my boyfriend from Jonah Weintraub. Cody is Tom, I’m Jerry.

March

I spent April in Lesa, a small town in Northern Italy off the shores of Lake Maggiore for my first artist’s residency at a little cottage at the top of a hill owned by Homestead Hospitality. I made espresso and ate caprese salad every morning, bought gorgonzola from the market, skinny dipped in a small creek on a hike, bought a velvet framed painting of Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt at a flea market. I visited a Magnolia tree every day and watched it bloom. I stayed in a hotel room in Milan and printed all day at a nearby darkroom under the supervision of Giorgio, an Italian man who barely spoke English. We didn’t understand much of each other, but I could rely on him to advise me to add more yellow to every print. I had my first exhibition in the town community center with the mayor in attendance. Sarvie and Jasper bought 50L of wine in a giant cask for the occasion. I lead climbed outside for the first time in my life in the company of an all-girl climbing group in Mallorca. At night, it rained so hard and was so windy that I had trouble falling asleep.

April

The light began to change, the tulips emerged across town. Jill and I drove upstate to hike multiple weekends in a row to prepare to hike Acatenango in May. I wandered around McCarren Park in the middle of a work day and took photos of people as they stared up at the eclipse with dark glasses, pleased that they were paying so much attention to the sky they didn’t see me. I took myself to the museum to try to reclaim a bit of the inspiration I felt I had left behind in Italy. It was warm enough to bike again. I wondered if life would ever be as good as it felt in April.

May

I bought my repurchased mid life crisis Makina Plaubel to Acatenango, a volcano in Guatemala that Jill and I hiked and slept at the top of in little huts with plastic windows. I heaved and nearly vomited on a particularly brutal stretch of stairs. I watched the volcano erupt from my bunk bed all night, waking at 4AM to hike uphill by the light of my headlamp. The camera has bellows, and is incredibly fragile, so each time I took a photo I had to shield it from volcano dust with my body, like a dog curled into itself. Jill and I sprinted the hill back down, our feet sliding in the dust. It took ten wet wipes to remove the dirt from my face afterwards. We drank beer and watched football in a bar we came across in a town on the shores of Lake Antigua. I flew straight to Portland to support Cody’s show at a design gallery. We stayed in the owner’s cottage at the back of her house, the toilet was not separated by a full wall, so we took turns sitting outside to give the other privacy. We walked nearby to the Redwood Observation Deck, and I nearly cried at the hush silence of the thousand year old trees.

Afterwards, we drove to Olympic National Park and spent hours walking in the rainforest, and on a cold and desolate beach piled high with driftwood. There was a wood fired hot tub at our last Airbnb campervan, and while we waited for it to warm up we drove to the beach and ate pizza while the sun set. I spent hours crying in a room at my annual birthday party with different close girlfriends, emerging out the room each time to a chorus of “where were you, we were looking for you”. The next day, we held hands and shrieked down a blue tarp slip ‘n’ slide, emerging grassy and soapy at the bottom of the hill in Jeremy’s backyard.

June

I spent my birthday crying in Japan in an Airbnb with my family, who had flown from Australia. Later that day I wrote a prayer on a piece of wood and left it amongst other people’s wishes in front of a giant gold Buddha. I ate eggs blackened from the sulphur of a volcano, ate kombini rice balls on hikes where I saw nobody, surfed tiny waves in Kamakura, cried when I saw Hermione’s Yule Ball dress at the Harry Potter museum. I walked forty minutes to a photo book cafe, arriving hungry and only to realize that they were no longer serving food. I walked around Tokyo crying for hours after I said goodbye to my family. I brought home two full suitcases and a duffle of new things: Montbell waterproof pants, a strange hat, expensive lip gloss in the wrong shade, ten photo books, some yuzu tea.

July

Cody and I took a bath outside and ordered room service as it rained in Miami at The Standard. We sat by the pool all day and watched a gay couple polish off multiple bottles of champagne, a middle aged woman with a swim cap do laps after barking into a phone. I read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and was surprised at how little there seemed to base a life-long fatwah on its author. I climbed with my friends a lot, biked everywhere. I dog sat Willie, my friend’s rottweiler upstat ewho was recovering from knee surgery. I walked her on leash around the secluded backyard in a bikini, letting her drag me around from stick to stick in the backyard. Cody bought me a macro camera meant for peering into body crevices, and we marveled at the amount of ear wax my tiny canals are able to produce. Willie barked at the projector when we tried to watch Shogun and a herd of horses galloped across the screen.

August

Cody and I watched a storm roll in as we sieved for shark’s teeth in Florida on a prehistoric beach. We fought over silly things, like buying sandwiches we both didn’t actually want. I hid from him in Goodwill when I knew he would become impatient and would want to leave, frantically sifting through the men’s blazer section before I was caught. We cried while watching Robot Dreams, and swept up a tiny mound of sand from the Airbnb floors once we left. Leah slept on an air mattress in my dressing room for a few weeks. Ghost and her cat Yupa circled each other, pretending not to see each other all the while getting a little closer each day. We watched the season finale of Love Island Season 6 with Bella and the cat and the dog in the little room upstairs. My friends made me a birthday compilation video two months after my actual birthday, which both embarrassed me, and made me sob with gratitude. My friends and I had a sidewalk sale, and we spent most of our earnings buying clothes from each other, exclaiming that we had to do it again soon.

September

I climbed at The Gunks for the first time, the skin on my hands becoming jagged and torn. Ash and I talked about love on the drive up. The crag was almost as busy as a gym, and Ghost barked at everybody who walked by her. I got upset I wasn’t invited to certain events at Fashion Week, standing on the street corner unsure if I should go home, getting angrier by the second. I was so busy with work this month, so busy that I left Ghost’s kibble container wide open one night on the way to an event. She ate half of the entire box, and simultaneously contracted giardia from somewhere else. For a week, her stools were liquid and bloody, and I cried when I had to sign a form saying I would not hold the vet responsible if she died under anesthetic. I flew to Chicago and shot Teya’s parent’s wedding, my Mamiya battery compartment breaking midway. It took an hour to get back to my hotel because of Mexican Independence Day. There were countless Mexican flags being waved in the street, huge SUVs blaring celebratory music. I met a new friend, Kat, who showed me around Argyle Street in Chicago, where I began to take the first photos for the photo project I would call Viet Kieu. Kat’s home has a cabinet full of Hello Kitty collectibles, and we sharde a joint as the afternoon light streamed through her living room windows.

October

I did nothing but work, in front of my laptop sending endless emails; in the darkroom printing endless photos. I sent my first purple climb at Vital on the roof, a climb I could not even begin on my first attempt weeks prior. Cody’s dad visited, and we took him to Lai Rai to have sorbet. I went hiking, I got massages, I went to the NY Short Film Festival alone. 1am became 4am in the blink of an eye at the after party of a friend’s wedding at a bar in Greenpoint. I went to Madison, Wisconsin and hurt my back doing warm up deadlifts in the hotel gym. I couldn’t walk properly for days, and it would be a month before it healed. I watched Trump ads in a basement bar with a group of political influencers while picking at my salad, drove to Detroit for a Rock the Vote concert I was working, getting McDonald’s on the way. I took photos of a Vietnamese sociology college student with a black cat, a mid-twenties socialist I met on Reddit, and a realtor I met off a local Asian American Association Facebook group.

November

Cody and I went to Newburgh and tried to figure out if we could see ourselves living there. We watched horror movies and made bolognese, walked around Dia Beacon and held hands in a blood red basement as a bass-heavy and eerie soundtrack reverberated on the walls. I ran across the blocked off marathon route in front of a disapproving policeman to join friends, the city alive and at its most charming. I screamed myself hoarse cheering strangers on, yelling as loud as I could when I spotted the Australian flag. I sat in the park after waking up to the news of the election with my work team, picking at snacks, a heaviness in my gut. I quit smoking weed cold turkey a few days before Thanksgiving, unhappy to be high all the time, unable to edit my book. I lay in bed for a week after with insomnia, wide awake at 4AM each night. I talked on a panel based on Sheila Heti’s book Women In Clothes, and worried I had talked too much because I was too excited.

December

I made Christmas ornaments with my friends while getting drunk off martinis. I went non verbal with Maryah after she cooked me dinner, a rice bowl with veggies and roast chicken. We lay on the couch and played Stardew Valley next to each other until it was time to go home. I did PT exercises and slept with a pillow under my legs as my back healed. I took photos at my friend’s exhibition opening, I took photos in Chinatown of a pregnant friend, I took photos in my home of another pregnant friend who had rekindled her romance with her baby daddy during an apartment swap we did. I went to countless social events and then to Salt Lake City, where I got sick and lay in bed watching Culinary Class Wars for an entire day. I went to an experimental dinner based on the Mekong Delta in Vietnam hosted by Thu Buser, I bought tickets go to and meet my parents there in January. On Christmas, Cody and I made lasagna and spent hours playing a Nintendo game called Flipon until we felt sick and glassy-eyed. I read a lot of fiction and finally began to sleep properly.

When I was 19 years old I landed my very first modeling gig. It was for a department store in Sydney, and it was based loosely on the personality types of different Australian bloggers. In my intro interview, I mentioned I loved to read, so they decided to base my shoot off being “one bad apple of a book worm” (not my words).

On set, I was surrounded by a whole bunch of white people, put in lingerie under studio lights and told to pout. I had never modeled before, and spent the entire shoot in high anxiety cosplaying as a caricature of a grown, sexy woman, a person far away form the person I was. I was shy, I was young and I could not recognize myself in the photos hung up in store a few months later. I hated these photos.

Now, at 31, most of those body hang ups no longer matter to me (I remember being obsessive about under eye circles lol), and turning on a commercial smile for the camera in front of strangers is now just one item in a long list of things I do for the bag. Looking at her, me at nineteen, in thigh-her stockings and platform satin heels doing my best impersonation of a sexy woman is like looking at the before picture of some sad lost dog in those videos that pop up only in your Facebook feed.

She is so far away now, from the person I have grown into, and still I vividly remember her. I remember shoplifting from this very department store for stay-up lace top stockings just like these to wear under my school uniform because it felt subversive in some way. My grasp at sexiness was a gesture imitating movies and magazines, a version of it accessible only through the most obvious of tools: my body.

This was the time I learned of Tinder, that I could meet random guys beyond the periphery of my limited interactions with boys at school. Knowing that men wanted to have sex with me was an affirmation, a new and thrilling freedom I wielded too liberally. It was the era of getting my hair blow dried for $40 at Kim Sun Young before I slept over at an older footy player’s house in Bondi, knowing he would never love me but that being with him was proof that I was in fact, a grown and desirable woman. Nineteen was a complicated time of clumsily wielding my sexuality like a magic wand. The choices I made that felt empowering to me then, now don’t even really register as true choices.

I wanted to recreate these photos in honor of her. I wish she could see how much clearer things became with some time and age. I bought the stay up stockings this time, with my own money.

Anyway, I thought it would be a good accompaniment to share the best books I read this year, because I am nothing if not consistent. I am still one bad apple of a book worm. I read 89 books this year. I started ACOTAR and The Empyrean Series without finishing them. I like being as horny as anybody but the writing prohibited me from truly getting off on all the eyes darkening present in this genre of dragon smut. I’ll try again in 2025. I read lots of books about the craft of writing, the entirety of Deborah Levy’s A Living Autobiography, and impulse borrowed too many books simultaneously from the local library. At one point I had ten books checked out at the same time, all due in the same two week window. I did little else those two weeks, and it was wonderful.

Here were my favorites from this year, in no particular order.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

This is a deeply impactful shiver of a novella. At 112 pages, it follows the brutal rape and murder of a young Palestinian woman by a group of Israeli soldiers in 1949, followed by the POV of a Palestinian woman decades later investigating this “minor detail” buried in history. It is devastating and haunting, and it followed me around for a long time afterwards. There is not a single word out of place, and it astonishes me how much can be done with so little.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton

I am currently writing a version of a break up novel, but it will never hold a candle to the humor and levity that Dolly Alderton brings to hers. This follows a struggling comedian in the aftermath of his break up, and does an exquisite job of examining the chasm that exists between two perspectives of the people involved in a break up, and the sad, funny and terrible things we do in its aftermath.

On Writing by Stephen King

I didn’t know that Stephen King was hit by a van in 1999 and spent a long time confined to a chair healing broken bones in his right leg and hip, broken ribs, a punctured lung and a head injury. I didn’t know either that he was broke and living in a single room with his pregnant wife before he sold Carrie for a fuck-off amount of money. Tis is one of the best books about writing I have ever read— more of a pep talk than a technical examination of writing.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

So, Sheila Heti is a total freak, because she collected 500K words from over a decade of her journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, alphabetized them and then edited it to result in this book. It feels like it could have been carved from the twenties of any of us who struggled through it; an incredible accounting of neuroses.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

I love love love this genre, when people take some long forgotten footnote from history and shift it into being the main thing. Hamnet is about Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who died from the bubonic plague in 1596. It is a beautiful and touching portrait of love and grief. I read it during my month in Northern Italy during my residency at Homestead Hospitality, who are now recruiting for their 2025 program and you should apply!

The Years by Annie Erneaux

“They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.”

This book is incredible - it’s part memoir, part history, like a written collage of a person’s life against the backdrop of the relentless pace of societal change and turmoil.

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe

It takes balls to write a semi-autobiographical novel about your own son being born severely mentally disabled, and your revulsion and rejection of him. There is a happy ending IRL, and this book is an incredible portrait of a very horrible character called Bird who struggles with his self importance, his fatherhood and his purpose.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Another banger whose events spilled into real life. This is the book that led to a fatwa being issued against Salman Rushdie for fictionalizing a fragment of a story that was removed from the Quran about three pagan Meccan goddesses. He wrote this in the 60s, and he was stabbed for it in 2022 (!). He wrote a book called Knife that was released in 2024 I have yet to read about this stabbing. This book is complex and surreal, and it is still so incredible to me that words can be so real that it can risk the authors their lives.

All Fours by Miranda July

I don’t know what else I have to say about this that has not been said already. It’s a book about being perimenopausal and a version of an incredibly chaotic mid life crisis/sexual awakening I can only aspire to live out one day when it comes my time.

The Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso

This was a fucking weird read and I really loved it. Loosely, it’s about the last son of an aristocratic line who is born deformed, and is then surrounded in a castle by other circus freaks and deformed people by his father so that he would never feel abnormal. It is a Chilean black magical realist novel written in the 60s and only translated unabridged into English or the first time this year. It’s depraved and confusing, and sometimes it switches from third to first person without any indication. Very fun to read, very difficult at times.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Idk what rock I have been under, but James Baldwin is a prophet and I may never read writing this powerful or assured ever again.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

James by Percival Everett

A reimagination of the classic American story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as told from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim who is only a minor character in the original story. Again, another banger in the genre of minor historical characters turned main character, and this should be required reading in schools. I read this in two sittings sick in bed in a basement in Salt Lake City, and it made me grateful that I was sick enough to dedicate the time to read this in such an uninterrupted spell.

During a recent work meeting, I came across a TikTok account of an Australian job listing app called Getahead. Their content strategy is the same as the U.S. based salary transparency website Salary Transparency Street—they approach people on the street, ask what they do, and how much they make. The only difference is the accent. I spent a solid hour watching the Australian public talk about their jobs; a 17 year old McDonald’s worker, Bob Katter, a long-standing Queensland politician, and a man who started a luxury property window washing company because he saw it on the internet.

It was 5PM, and the sun had already set. I was sitting on the floor in front of my heater watching video after video after video, a TikTok census of Australian employment. I love my family, and I love them increasingly more the longer I am in therapy, but I do not normally think of them that often. In that moment, on the floor, I missed them, acutely. I missed home. I missed Australia. I wanted to swim in the ocean and I wanted a meat pie, and I wanted those things right that moment.

When I say I am homesick, what do I mean? Growing up, my family did not celebrate Christmas in the presents-under-the-tree or even the Australian BBQ sense of the term. My dad would take me to Vietnamese Catholic mass in the park and I would stand in line to sit next to a priest I had never seen before, who would ask me in broken English how I had sinned. I would make things up; the usual suspects: I lied to my family, I was envious, I cussed. Afterwards, my dad and I would lean against the bonnet of our car and I would close my eyes and pretend to say the prescribed number of Hail Marys so that I could be absolved. I hated going to church, and I hated Christmas mass especially, because it was three times as long, which was three times as boring.

If you have been far away from a place long enough, you begin to make things up about it. I have spent a cumulative month and a half max in Australia over the last decade, and I keep in touch only sporadically with any remaining friends and family. Many of my Australian friends that I met here, in this iteration of life, have moved on from New York, and my exposure to my home country is limited to Love Island Australia S6 (I love Em!!) and random corporate TikTok accounts.

I am not enrolled to vote there, I do not pay taxes. I have a passport, and a family, and little else, and yet each year as the days become darker and shorter, I am hit with the same intense sense of longing for this mythical home of mine, a version that I’ve constructed from long-gone fragments. My memories, the yearning, is centered on the smell of eucalyptus in the air, getting paid a double hourly rate to work in my retail job (I sold suits) the day after Christmas, the hoards of people on the beach in Santa hats. My idea of ‘The Holidays’ in Australia is is a patchwork of random memories from being a teenager over a decade ago. The simple sound of an Australian accent on a corporate TikTok account stirred up an intensity of longing for a place that is realer in my imagination than in reality.

In his essay The Crisis of Narration, German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes “Remembrance is not a mechanical repetition of an earlier experience but a narrative that must be recounted again and again. Memories necessarily have gaps…when all experience is present and distantless, when it is available, remembrance is impossible. The gapless repetition of past experience is not narrative, but a report or record. To be able to remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal. The narrated or remembered life is necessarily incomplete.”

My homesickness is a sort of narrative that is possible because I don’t have any record of it. My digital photo archive goes back to 2013, the year before I moved to New York. I am able to create a utopic vision of a happy family and a sunny Christmas Day because there is actually no record of this. The illusion is more powerful than reality, its pull is so strong that I was about to book a $2000 flight home on a whim. If I had done that, I likely would have run into the same issue I experienced while spending my birthday with my family in Japan earlier this year. My expectation of a straightforward, Hallmark movie happy loving family would collide with the reality of a far more complex relationship that has changed and atrophied over the decade I have lived away.

Let me talk about reality, then. The holidays, for me, is a time when the city empties out because people are going to visit their family, when people like me (“orphans”) join Friendsgivings (how funny it is that there is even a different name for those of us who don’t spend the holiday with biological family). It’s when I spend hours carefully unsubscribing to Black Friday emails only for them to multiply like mosquitoes the next year. I get to take a break from work, and not feel guilty about it, but only because everyone else is taking a break, too. I will feel guilty anyway, because as a freelancer, when I am not working, I am not making money. It’s the time of year I lie in bed in the dark and watch people spend time with their actual families, counting the things I am grateful for in my head as I read a first hand account of homelessness in America that breaks my heart so fully I am unable to sleep until 5AM that night. It is a narrow, religious observance co-opted at large and sanitized into consumerist slosh. It is a time to be distracted, a time to add to cart, a time to share what you have and notice what you’re missing.

I am no less guilty of being part of the collective delusion of the holidays we all actively build in our frantic online universes. I dutifully post pictures of my Friendsgiving dinner, content filmed of my friends and I decorating my Christmas tree, and it makes me think about Byung Chul Han’s essay again. ‘The digitalization intensifies the atrophy of time. Reality disintegrates into information that is relevant only briefly…Information does not permit any lingering.”

Reality is fragmented into fleeting pieces of information we share and consume, which demand our immediate attention but lack lasting significance. We post a picture of our plate of food, a Christmas tree, or our friends, and all of it disappears after 24 hours, none of it really registers. It just kind of disappears into the soup of online consciousness that we keep one eye trained on in perpetuity. The emails are relentless, they tell me that today is your last chance to get 50% off, this deal will never happen again, and if I am dumb enough to fall for it, those things I acquire from these master manipulative marketing materials will most likely be just a memory this time next year, a piece on its way out to Beacon’s Closet.

The imagined ideal of a warm Christmas around my family in Australia is a powerful spell that continues to take hold of me, year after year. I imagine that as information continues to travel faster, as the algorithms gain more ground over our lives, over my life, that this spell will only become stronger. The imagined and the real of the holidays will continue to blur, and my annual yearning for my home will persist, the yearning for a time and place that no longer exists.

Originally posted September 10, 2024

I have a recurring dream that I am late to maths class. The bell has rung, and there are swarms of students moving with purpose around me. I don’t know where I am, or where I am supposed to be. As I search for the classroom, a panic builds about homework I didn’t do that I vaguely suspect is due. I stumble around hallways lined with identical grey silver lockers and start to cry. I’m late and painfully underprepared, lagging so far behind that I will never be able to catch up.

The thing about maths is that your ability to understand certain concepts is predicated on understanding the ones that came before it. The complexity increases as you progress, and if you fail to understand one thing, it rolls into the next, becoming a roadblock.

At some point in maths class, I didn’t understand a concept being taught, and the class moved on before I could figure it out. Everything from that moment forwards was incomprehensible. I was held up by this one thing and I was too embarrassed to ask for help. Instead, I played phone games underneath the desk in the back left corner as Mr. Dimopolous filled the chalkboard with numbers and symbols, total gibberish to me. I would avoid his gaze when he handed back the tests that I failed, shoving them in my backpack before anybody could see.

Once I was left behind, there was no way for me to catch up. Being shit at maths led to the belief that I maybe I was just a dummy, something that persisted well into my adulthood until the last couple of years after having freedom to actually wholeheartedly choose what I want to learn. Learning to drive was a similar feeling: here was something that a majority of adults seemed to be able to do, something I couldn’t, and maybe would never be able to.

Adulthood sometimes feels much like learning maths in high school. There is an urgency to keep up. To pause for a moment is to be left behind. Everyone else has already moved forward, is continuing to move forward, their retreating backs only barely visible in the dust that has been kicked up behind them. We are always somehow behind.

I, and my many of my friends, are entering our thirties, the hallowed grounds of adulthood. We have less money that we expected, we’re single when we thought we’d have children by now. Our careers are less fulfilling, years of effort fizzling into an itchy feeling, or we’re standing at the precipice of big changes; going back to school, starting new and more senior jobs, starting and finishing large bodies of work. The rents are higher, the government trending the wrong direction, the prospect of home ownership more remote. Often, I lie in bed at night and count the things I did that day as evidence to myself that I am fulfilling my role as a person engaged with life to the highest degree. Nothing is too insignificant for this list of achievements: I watered the plants, I had three calls, I meditated, I read, I wrote, I worked out, I washed my hair, I cooked two meals for myself. I mutter these things under my breath, offering them to some higher being as a bargaining chip for rest that I feel as though I have earned.

My ex of eight years recently got engaged, a piece of news I found out about when I was walking my dog around the same park we’ve walked around thousands of times before. His engagement was just one in a long chorus that seems to be growing in volume the older I get. It is among other accomplishments that you can point to, make Instagram posts about: promotions, new homes, moving countries, reproducing. All Summer, I have been restless, uneasy, unable to identify what exactly is wrong, only that I am not progressing in the way that I feel as though I am supposed to.

I have been somewhat unhappily distracted by any opportunity to indulge: hours in the park in the middle of the day reading on a bench, last-minute glasses of wine that go on for longer than they should. Each night collapsing in bed exhausted, guilty that I didn’t write, didn’t meditate, didn’t read as much as I wanted to. When I am unable to list all these offerings that I use to reassure myself I have done enough, it’s evidence that I am falling behind in all the big ways, and now, all the small ways, too.

I litigated this with my therapist. I worried that I was wasting my potential, that I am too good at having fun. She looked at me and said, “Maybe you’re just enjoying Summer.”

She kind of ate. Now that Summer is officially Over, I feel suddenly fine again. After that therapy session, the one where I paid my therapist $150 to tell me I was simply Enjoying Summer, Cody and I went to Sarasota (Florida) for his birthday.

I worked for an hour or two in the morning and didn’t bother to meditate, or write, or work that much. I forgot to count my accomplishment offerings at night, I simply just fell asleep. We went to thrift stores, ate simple meals, floated in the warm ocean and watched movies in the air conditioned Airbnb. Life was narrowed to the hot sand burning the soles of my feet, getting comfortable on the squeaky leather couch, trying to agree with Cody on what time we should get to the beach to play frisbee. I finally stopped feeling like there was something I was supposed to be doing, if only I could just figure out what it was.

One of my favorite things when we go to Florida is sieving for shark’s teeth at this prehistoric looking beach called Caspersen’s. It’s fully exposed. The wind and the sun feels especially harsh here. The water is choppy, often cold. This time, it was lukewarm. The road to the parking lot had eroded into pieces of cookie into the sand dunes, and we had to walk through it. It was about a fifteen minute walk in the midday sun, the type of additional walk you need to account for in your mental expectations for the day.

Usually, there are dozens of other people up to their knees in the ocean, carrying shovels of sand and beach debris from the ocean onto the shore, sifting through them to look for the dark, triangular teeth that washes up to this specific beach. The whole thing looks like a mining operation. This time, maybe because of the cookie dust road, there were much fewer people on the beach. We lowered our butts into the warm ocean, lowering and raising our sieves from the bottom of the seabed. I was trying to practice my ability to spot the sharks teeth among the 1000 other colorful and dark little pieces of ocean that I had scooped up. Cody always seems to find them, even the smallest ones, the sliver of a tooth broken off from some probably dead shark.

I could not get my hair to stay in my ponytail. It kept whipping around my face and into my mouth. I was sweaty and dirty, coated in a fine layer of dark sand, vaguely thirsty. I would get into short bouts of intense focus looking for teeth and then lie back on my towel and reading my book. Heavy rain clouds rolled in after a few hours, the sound of thunder in the far off distance. We set off back to the car, not wanting to get caught in the rain. I washed sand off my body underneath the public shower, my foot pressed down on a metal pedal to keep the water on. On our drive back to the Airbnb, we sang along to whatever we could find on the radio, too lazy to connect the bluetooth. I can drive well now, but I’m a passenger princess in Sarasota.

Originally posted on August 1, 2024

I went to Japan as a grown woman with all four members of my family from Australia. It was our first vacation together since I was 12, when the only vacation we took was driving 10 hours up to the Gold Coast. My dad would blast Boney M and 90’s eurodance music up front as I swayed with motion sickness in the back. I don’t remember much of those trips outside of the film images of myself, gangly and skinny at 11 years old, wearing lace trimmed Capri tights underneath a bubble skirt and a graphic tank top. We would go to all the major theme parks: Sea World, Movieworld, Dream World. As an awkwardly shy teenager living in a working class family, (I always looked at my feet while I was walking), vacations felt like impossible luxuries completely controlled by the Gods that were my parents.

I’ll spare you the gritty details of the emotional rollercoaster that is taking a two week vacation with your entire family who you have not lived in the same country with for a decade. In short: it was strange, joyful, exhausting and I can’t wait to go back. It was partially planned by my younger sister (via an exhaustive spreadsheet with activities scheduled down to the hour and rest time), and partially by me on the fly (and cultivated through the sporadic saving of Japan-related travel videos I came across on TikTok).

I think a great vacation is one that both meets and challenges your expectations of what you expect to be fun. Being on a family vacation is the ultimate way of having both these things magnified at a crazy scale, and in Japan, even more so. My family and I functionally have very little in common: They do not want to go see the weird vending machines in Akhibara (some have pedophilic stories printed on them that I’m hoping are not true), or art museums, or vintage stores. I don’t want to go to TeamLabs, or line up for two hours to eat at Tsujihara, a popular sushi rice restaurant that blew up on TikTok that my sister was intent on making our mid-60s parents line up in the sun for. There is a middle ground, a fine dance between spending enough quality time on things you all find enjoyable, and having enough space to avoid losing your mind. I think my trip managed to hit both, not without a fair amount of tears (mostly just on my birthday when I was triggered HARDDDD and spent most of the night before and morning of crying on the phone to my boyfriend about how nobody loves me -lol) and laughter.

I also want to make a strong argument for going to Japan alone, to be able to navigate and adapt to the environment without the filter of company. My friend Chris, who lives in Tokyo, told me about the idea that Japanese people have three faces: the one you show the world, the one you show your friends and family, and the third, secret one, that only you know (mine is using the new macro probe camera my boyfriend bought me to look inside my ears). If you’ve watched Shogun (and if you haven’t you should), they describe it as the ‘eight-fold fence’. It’s a meticulously maintained face you serve to others, but which is stripped away when traveling alone. I found this concept to be an interesting through line throughout the trip, and without further exposition, here’s a non-linear collection of thoughts on traveling to Japan kind of with your family and kind of alone. Some I wrote while I was there, and some while wishing I was still there while back here, home in Brooklyn.

Firstly, the practical:

- I loved being able to see both dense, hectic cities and the quieter towns that satellite them. I went from Osaka (to Kyoto and Nara as day trips) and took the Shinkansen to Tokyo (and then to Hakone and Kamakura as day trips). It was like Japan for Dummies, the tourist circuit. It seems that almost everyone does this same circuit to begin with, and it just works really well as a basic primer to plan your future trips on. If I were to re-do this trip, I may have shortened my time in Tokyo and added another random satellite city.

- Load up your phone with a Suica pass in your Apple wallet to use on the 3-5 train lines that intersect but owned by different companies (confusing), the vending machines (delicious), or even as payment for stores (convenient).

- Bring at least two portable batteries cause your shit will be kaput so quick walking these streets. Bring only comfortable shoes.

- Having cash on hand is important for all the little snacks you may need throughout your day. Having a coin purse is important. I recommend buying a cute coin purse once you get there.

- Luggage forwarding (takuhaibin) is your best friend if you plan to shop. You can essentially send your luggage ahead of you to meet you wherever you’re going, whether it’s in another hotel, the next city or at the airport. Most hotels will do this for you if you inquire at the front desk.

- Understanding basic customs and etiquette beforehand is key in feeling less like a bumbling white tourist, which I personally have never felt more like in my life. Giving and receiving things with two hands, using any tray provided by cashiers for your card or payment, not eating on the train, or while walking, learning how to say arigato gozaimasu and sumimasen (excuse me).

- I went in June, which was very hot later in the month when I was in Tokyo but tolerable everywhere else. I would return for March/April for cherry blossom season, or for fall for the leaves.

- Bring your passport when you leave the house because it entitles you to a 10% off tax refund discount that they either apply before you pay or refund you at a special counter nearby (which is a delightful experience of being refunded physical cash which according to girl math is just free money)

- The internet’s advice about traveling with a near empty suitcase to Japan is absolutely correct. In the event of buying even more than possible to fit in your empty suitcase, the department store Hands is a great place to find foldable travel 45-150L travel duffels, some with built in locks. I checked one full of clothes on the way home and it was totally fine. Hands also has an entire floor for stationary and a great cosmetics section.

- A way I like to travel to hit hot spots while keeping it flexible to be surprised: pick a neighborhood, zoom in on Google Maps and star random things that look interesting (be liberal!) and just walk around from spot to spot, seeing everything in between. Japan is best explored on foot.

- Some of my most enjoyable meals were from the convenience stores/konbini. You’re not really supposed to eat and walk, so you end up standing on the side of random streets and solely focusing on the act of eating. This was frustrating at first and then turned into one of my favorite things about Japan - the social etiquette that shames you into being more present. What’s the rush? Where am I going anyway that requires me to eat while walking?

- I have always loved crustless white bread sandwiches (my palate is that of a five year olds). The egg tamago sandwiches at the convenience stories is NOT TO BE MISSED. I had one for breakfast every day, accompanied by a randomly chosen refrigerated coffee beverage.

- All the malls seem to have a food court floor that serves hot food, a food court floor with a lot of deli-esque bite sized/lunch things behind glass display cases, and a floor that has packaged food novelties like perfectly wrapped individual pieces of fruit. I had an incredibly satisfying chicken tonkatsu curry and an ice cold Asahi standing up in a mall food court in Osaka. Many of the meals I had were chosen based on proximity to my immediate need to be hungry, its Google reviews and accessibility, and most of the meals I had were incredible. I loved that most places you can eat at are dependably good, many far surpass your expectations. I booked exactly zero restaurants in advance, but I know that’s not everyone’s preference - I don’t care as much about food as I do everything else.

Now, the rest:

STOP 1: OSAKA

- Osaka is where I encountered my first web of interconnected underground and above ground system of malls that also connect to various train stations, many of which are owned and operated by completely different companies. Do not go into these situations without sustenance because it feels like a panic attack waiting to happen. While I tried to find an antique store on the 12th floor of a department store, I found a 10th anniversary bird crafts market instead. The scale of commerce in these places is absolutely insane. Wandering around these places is a cultural experience in itself. I especially liked HEP FIVE if you’re trying to shop for clothes. The BEAMS store in the HEP FIVE was the best one I came across my entire time in Japan.

- I loved visiting Book of Days, a kind of hard to find photo book store in a quiet neighborhood. This is also where I saw my first smoking box, where they corral smokers into clear glass boxes located in the parks, which I thought was hilarious and would never ever be possible in America.

- I did a LOT of shopping in Osaka. On our first day, we went to Shinsaibashi-Suji shopping street, an indoor street of stores that seemed to stretch into infinity. I loved the 2nd Street locations (I believe there are 2 or 3 on the same street), and there’s a bunch of big brands like Asics, Uniqlo, Gu, etc. on this same street.

- Osaka is also the first place I encountered Kindal, basically an upscale 2nd street. Good for tighter curation, higher prices. I went to the Umeda Chayamachi and the other Umeda location.

- I didn’t get to go, but nearby Umeda, there’s a neighborhood called Nakazakicho that I’ve heard is pretty to walk around and packed with vintage stores. Some shops I would have visited if I had time: AURA, Sorciere, POPEYE.

- Dotonbori is an overwhelming district for dining - filled with huge neon signs and restaurants. I walked around the river and back streets as the sun set and took photos and had a great time. I had some of the best Italian food in my entire fucking life here at Italian Kitchen Legare, a place I looked up on Google Maps because I was tired of eating Japanese food and getting hangrier by the minute. It was a 12 seat counter wrapped around a small kitchen with one man, and a menu entirely in Japanese. From the mouths of two people walked out whose seat I took; “this was the best pasta I’ve ever had. We ordered seconds to take back to our hotel.” I also ordered seconds for my ravenous family waiting back at the AirBnB. Trust me. Go here.

- We were meant to go to this restaurant opened by the first urban winery in Japan (here) but quickly learned that you’re basically shit out of luck trying to book for parties about 5 people. I also would have loved to try Ikareta Noodle Fishtons and Mochisho Shizuku Shinmachi.

- Bouldering gym roca is an incredible tiny bouldering gym that you find at the very top of a narrow staircase. Owned and operated by seriously good climbers, the place is generally run down and with no AC but makes up in charm what it lacks in amenities. E-cigarettes are not sold in Japan, but they allow “heated tobacco products” and this gym is where I first encountered IQOS, this weird device you put what looks like a half cigarette in, and it heats it without combustion, fire, ash or smoke. There was a general confusion with the owner when I asked to bum a cigarette and had to learn how to use this entire system, and he wanted me to try both the flavors he had on hand, which I did out of politeness and which promptly made me feel like I was about to pass out. Cash only.

- I loved seeing Osaka Castle, even if it was insanely touristy. It’s a crazy looking place, and I’d recommend buying tickets to go to the museum inside so you’re not just standing outside looking at your family members in the rain and collectively deciding nobody is willing to try hard enough. We also went to the Osaka Museum of History nearby.

STOP 2: NARA

- I woke up bawling on my 31st birthday. I felt lonely and terrible; the differences between me and my family magnified in the context of the day and all that the expectations that I had built around It. I was 31 going on 13, and it took a serious self-face slap to get myself out of the tragic corner I had backed myself into. We had already planned to go to Nara that day, and it turns out that it’s not possible to be sad while also feeding and bowing to deers in a beautiful Japanese park. Nara is known for their population of sacred semi-wild deer that were protected as the helpers of the gods for hundreds of years, making them unusually docile and unafraid of humans.

They’re also incredibly aggressive, and you have to be careful where you wave a special deer cracker around, because it will attract a hoard of them ready to tear through your bags and your clothes to get to them. The further you walk away from the main train station, the less aggressive they become, and the real magic is walking deep into the park away from the hoards of tourists. Dotted across the landscape are little groups of deers napping together under trees, or roaming across hills.

- There is randomly a Montbell in the middle of the park. They’re a Japanese outdoors brand that makes super high quality clothes and camping/hiking products. My dad got a shirt with a fish on it (he fishes back in Sydney) and I got tiny carabiner keychains and Gore-tex pants as a birthday gift to myself.

- The Nara National Museum seemed like a really interesting spot known for a huge collection of Buddhist art, but you need tickets ahead of time, which we had not done.

- At the center of the park is a huge temple complex called Todai-Ji, which has one of the largest wooden structures in the entire world and one of the largest Buddha statues in Japan. The grounds include multiple koi ponds, smaller temples and gardens, and my family and I stumbled across a Buddhist ceremony that moved me to tears at one of the smaller temples on the periphery.

- After I said bye to my family, I crossed paths with my friends Allie and Erin for the briefest moment at the giant statues of guardian demons that marked the entry point of the Todai-Ji temple complex. Then, I walked 45 minutes south through the park, passing people napping on benches, cautious lines of deer stalking alongside car park fencec, towards the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum, a small photo museum. I stopped at Tenkuii, a beautiful restaurant on the very outskirts of Nara after being rejected from Uma-no-me without explanation. They were done with lunch, but sat me down in a private upstairs dining room facing a manicured garden. I ordered a carafe of sake, a jar of custard, and got tipsy. This made the walk through the backstreets of the residential Nara area incredibly chaotic and fun. There were barely any people on the streets, and the small details of people’s lives had enough to keep me fully locked in after already having walked 20,000 steps.

The museum was tiny, and perfect. It has an insanely comprehensive photo book library you can just sit and read books in, and I found out that Irie Taikichi is a local photographer known for landscape and nature work. I walked back to the station to take the train back to Osaka, stopping first at 7/11 and getting a Mochi pizza bun, chicken nuggets and sitting on the rim of a water fountain and chowing tf down before getting on the train back.

STOP 3: KYOTO

- My family went to Warner Brothers Movie World or something of that equivalent, which meant I had a free day and decided at 10AM to book an overnight hotel in Kyoto (like 2 hours on the train - everything is insanely close and efficient with their train system), where my family had already visited. In another stroke of serendipity, my friend Teya happened to already be there, and I proceeded to have the most manic 24 hours of travelmaxxing. I booked Agora Kyoto Karasuma, a bare bones but very pleasant hotel near the center, dropped off my bag and then took a bus over to Yasaka-jinja Shrine, hit up a few antique stores, ate a grilled rice ball stick from the street, and ended up at Kiyomizu-dera, which was a tourist shitfight but still an incredibly beautiful quick and easy loop around green temple grounds. I ate lunch just as it started pouring inside a random tiny udon noodle store, got myself tipsy again on a single beer and took a Uber over to Fushimi Inari, where I found a “back” way on AllTrails that thinned out the tourists by 99% almost immediately. It was like slipping into an alternate universe. The hike up was pretty steep, about 2 hours, and the route takes you along tiny shrines dotted on the mountain with overgrown mossy statues. At the top, I paid one of the wooden home/kiosk businesses $3 for a candle to light at the shrine, and started to cry because I am nothing if not a sentimental bitch.

- At this point it was maybe 4pm and Teya was arriving from Tokyo, so I met up with her and we walked along the Kamo river and watched kids skate and people be on dates (I highly recommend doing this). I regretted not bringing my camera on this walk. We went to a vegan ramen restaurant that was surprisingly good (offers very little in ambiance) and reminded me of the chaotic oversharing and purity of Dr. Bronner’s. Then, we met up with our friends Danny and Peyton, internet friends, where they were finishing a dinner at a stand-up bar serving giant bottles of sake.

- The next morning, we took a very long morning bus after pounding 7/11 tamago sandwiches to head to Arashiyama station, where we got off and ordered a 5 minute Uber up the hill to Otagi Nenbutsu-ji Temple, a beautiful 8th century temple featuring 1,200+ mossy stone heads with different personalities and expressions. They represent Buddhist worshippers. We walked down the hill past Adashino Mayumura, an adorable store that sells tiny sculptures made from discarded butterfly cocoons. We passed a few temples, stopping at Gio-ji temple, the one with an insane moss garden that had something like 200+ spices of moss sharing a forest floor. We walked through the famous Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, which was pleasant but absolutely forgettable, and then to the Arashiyama Monkey Park. You have to walk up a 20 minute hill to get to this insane viewpoint over the city, and there are just crazy amounts of monkeys around. You cannot interact with them, but you can feed them exactly one packet of tiny cut up applies from inside a jail that the monkeys crowd around the windows of. They stick their grubby little funny hands through the bars and grab at your slices of apples, or peanuts, and I won’t lie, I loved doing this.

- Afterwards, we walked along the Katsura River (turn left after you exit the monkey park and just keep walking) which was so idyllic. I imagine it’s insane in Autumn.

- That afternoon, I went to a 300 year old restaurant specializing in noodles, where I tried a Kyoto specialty — soba with pickled herring. Kyoto is so landlocked, and back in the day they would ship their fish from the coast and pickle them to make them last longer. It was an incredible solo meal. I walked outside and came across Kyukudo, a stationary store that feels like the Bloomingdales of stationary. I’m obsessed with the way that they sell designed and patterned letter writing sets everywhere. I used to have a pen pal at 14, shoutout to you if you are still out there somewhere, I actually have very little idea how we even found each other, but I was doing some random shit on the internet in the mid 2000’s. I think the idea of writing someone a physical note is incredibly romantic, and I want to bring this energy into my life.

- I caught the tail end of the Nijo Castle, which is the last place there was a shogunate that ruled the country, which was very cool (thank you Simran for the rec), and then packed my shit up and took the 3PM train back to Osaka to return to my family after deciding that yes, I had done enough for 24 hours and was exhausted.

STOP 4: TOKYO

- My friend Teya is vegan, and we had an insane dinner situation unfold where we came across the perfect vegan izakaya tucked away on the fourth floor called KlboKo Organic gallery & wine, which we walked 30 minutes to only to be again, mysteriously rejected despite there being empty seats. We ended up trying to go to a gyoza restaurant that had a Google Maps review referencing the “plentiful vegetarian options”, which resulted in us ordering 6 dishes, 5 of them being inedible because of the surprise meat they’d turn up with. Even the scallion pancake had meat.

- Besides this disastrous dinner experience, we had an incredible day otherwise. We walked our feet off: Firstly from her hostel in Asakusa (which was actually pretty adorable and had an Australian wine bar next door), where I bought matching expensive hand-made Japanese kitchen knives for my boyfriend and I at Musashi (which I am still terrified of using because they’re so sharp), to lunch at a very cute open air vegan cafe that we spent way too long lost in conversation in, before getting ready back at her hostel and then to mine in Akasaka, and onwards on foot to Shinjuku for dinner. That night we went to Golden-Gai, a small area of alleyways crowded with tiny bars - we’re talking 4-10 seats, some of them themed. I saw one that was soup themed, as in you got a free bowl of miso soup. Cash is king here, and most places have a cover charge. We chose a small jazz bar owned by an older woman, who placed down little bowls of snacks in front of us as we ordered sake. We were joined by two Australian recent university tech grads, an Aussie engineer, and a 81 year old Arabic teacher. I found out that the trains stop at 12, which felt impossible in a city that felt much more expansive and futuristic than New York, where the trains take you home around the clock.

- One of the absolute highlights of my trip was standing on the street trying to pump myself up to go into a jazz bar by myself. I think having a drink alone in a public place is straight up aspirational, and I summoned all my courage only to arrive and realize my intended destination was closed. As I patted myself on the back and walked back to the hotel, I passed a sign for another jazz bar called G’s Bar and after staring at the entrance like a weirdo for a while, I walked in and took a seat in a tiny 15 seat jazz bar. The music swelled to fill the entire room. I found myself involuntarily grinning almost immediately. There were three different performers and an incredible live band that included a man on the piano who I watched the entire time. They found out I was from New York and told me some guy that was sitting at the bar once lived in New York, and they all cheered for us.

- I went to Jinbocho, the used book district overstimulated and grumpy and it absolutely cured me. There one used/rare/antique book store after another, and you can burn hours just sitting in one place and attempting to Google Translate the titles and descriptions of books, mostly judging by cover. I loved this store - there is a second floor section dedicated to them, and you get a drink token for the vending machines next to the chairs facing the street upstairs with each purchase. I found some of the coolest and niche photo books that have barely any information available online about them, all very affordable. The only problem is that books are probably some of the heaviest things you can buy to bring home, but most of these stores will offer international shipping for a fee.

One of the best photo books I picked up one was called Yokohama Mary, based on a post-world war II sex worker who roamed the streets of Yokohama for decades. She was known for wearing thick white face makeup, and nobody ever knew her real name. One day in 1995, she just disappeared and they never figured out where she went or what happened to her. The book was full of photographs of her, hunched over from afar, as though being watched from a car. Afterwards, I went to McDonalds and tried all their different sauces.

- They ask you to wear communal Crocs to go to the bathroom at climbing gyms in Japan. Reading that sentence back makes it sound disgusting, yet, I would still trust the Japanese with bacterial risk any day. Most gyms asked me if I smoked, to show me the special smoking area (replete with communal smoking Crocs). At B Pump in Tokyo, a multi-story internationally known chain, I saw so many groups of older people bouldering, something I don’t really see here in the States. I also went to the other one near Shibuya

- The Mori Museum is an excellent small museum with a great gift shop and an expansive view of the city if you want to skip a dedicated observatory visit and roll it into seeing some culture as well.

- Daikanyama T-Site was like book wonderland. It’s a multiple building book store with one of the most extensive art and photo book sections I’ve seen. There are cafes nearby, and plenty of expensive boutique shopping and record bars if that’s what you’re into (I am).

- My friend Chris who lives in Koenji took me to a used book pop-up around the corner to his house that only opens on the weekends. Your bag is checked at the door, and you join a gentle throng of mostly older Japanese men flipping through hundreds of used books—nestled on shelves, spine up in bins on the floor. Everything was extremely well priced - I’m talking things from $1USD upwards. I bought a hard cover Japanese version of 1984 that I liked the cover of, and a photo book for my friend called Night Rainbow. We had very good pizza.

Tokyo Photographic Museum and Gallery Bauhaus are two photo museums I really liked. The TOP is the largest, sleekest one, with an extensive photo book store and some great local exhibitions. Gallery Bauhaus focuses on high quality photo prints, super teeny tiny but worth visiting.

- Around the corner to Bauhaus is a cluster of strange vending machines that I found about on Reddit. They’re filled with strange and varied objects— a can of chips, a toy scorpion in a jar, and rows upon rows of square items wrapped in Japanese newspaper, with individually printed stories taped to each one facing outwards. They ranged from the tender (watching a mother take care of her disabled son in public and marveling at human love) to profane (vaguely pedophilic). It’s pretty fun to Google translate the stories. I bought one for $6 and unwrapped it to find expired Japanese animal crackers.

- I stumbled into Akomeya, a local grocery and home goods store while on a verge of a panic attack the first time I tried to navigate through Shibuya. I ended up coming back to buy a bunch of souvenirs - think high-end grocery staples, sauces and local specialties. They also have beautiful sake cups, and kitchenware.

- I didn’t get a chance to go, but would have wanted to see the ramen museum and the Tobacco & Salt museum, which was heavily recommended. I also would have booked tickets to the Ghibli Museum in advance if I knew a month before.

- My family and I hit up Afuri ramen multiple times - a very no-frills counter seating restaurant specializing in yuzu shio ramen. You order via vending machine, take a seat, and it comes out piping hot very quickly. I loved the spicy version, and always chose the thicker noodles. There’s a very delightful yuzu beer if you want to full send the citrus. Writing this months later, I just found out on a dog walk that Afuri has opened up on N11th(!!!).

- It took me 1.5 hours to go to Oi Racecourse Flea Market, which happens on Sundays, because I took the express instead of the local train all the way to the airport and had to double back. If you actually make it here, half the market is without shade in a car park, so come prepared with water and snacks. There are food trucks nearby, and most vendors take only cash. Most of the clothing stalls seem best first thing in the morning before they’re picked over, and like most of Japanese vintage, there was an over-representation of chintzy Americana vintage - denim and band t-shirts. I still found it interesting and would probably have found more if I had the energy to dig through piles of clothing on the ground in direct sun. I also bought my favorite purchase of the entire trip here - a tiny hand knitted strawberry handbag for $15 from a woman with a single table next to her car.

- I bought my drugstore beauty from Hands, a huge department store, and Don Quixote, this is where I got the Hadalabo and Shiseido things. I got the Canmake stay-on balm, which is the perfect tinted glossy balm, alongside specific eyeshadow palates from Excel recommended by Reddit, and the Naturie skin conditioner which I have to admit I still don’t really know how or where I’m supposed to use it given that it’s the consistency of milk and the only application I’ve figured out is slopping it all over myself haphazardly like I’m baptizing myself.

- We went to The Making of Harry Potter, something I only begrudgingly agreed to do as though I was above it. It made me fucking weep. The exhibition focuses on the craft/production - set design, original costumes, animatronics, music, construction, all of it. I genuinely found seeing Hermione’s pink dress from the ball deeply moving. The cafe food was themed and delicious (albeit expensive) and my parents loved all the photo moments and interactive elements. There’s a gift shop at the end that took me 15 minutes to fully explore and they still were not able to make a single piece of merchandise not too corny for me to buy.

- Today, after a really fitful night’s sleep, I walked to my family’s hotel in Akasaka to say goodbye. I took a photo of them in the alleyway behind the hotel, and when it was time to hug, I burst into tears. It was involuntary, an urgent leaking of the eyes that betrayed what I knew in my body before I knew how to describe it with words! The tragedy that it would be many months before I could hug my mum again, our planes departing in different directions to carry all of us back to our individual lives.

STOP 5: HAKONE

- I bought a full six course convenience store meal for myself for the train car and did some work. What is it about being in motion that makes a bitch feel productive? My convenience store meal was a plastic bento box of rice with some sort of grilled fish, misc vegetables, pickles and little savory tiny accoutrements. This was in my rush to get to the station as I dragged my carry-on through the hot streets of Akasaka, unclear if the time to find the platform for the Romancecar mountain train would exceed the time I actually had. In a rush, I grabbed this funny tiny bottle of mandarin juice—I never drink flavored beverages during the day back home, but there’s something so appealing about half sizes and tiny cute packaging that begs to be tried! I then rushed to the station and got a mochi donut covered in icing sugar, a packet of Mandarin (the most elite citrus flavor) flavored gummies, and a little squeeze pouch of flavored pomegranate jelly. I had enough food for a week’s long journey. I ate all of it on the 1 hour 20 minute train ride to Hakone.

- I checked into my onsen, Hakone Sumeisou, which I have yet to be able to deliver my full opinion on as I’ve only just arrived and settled in for the night, but so far it has been quaint and adorable - many unexplained customs and details I’m left to figure out through abstraction and context clues. I have never felt so much like a lumbering white man. They provided a Kaiseki dinner, which was an elaborate spread of 16 tiny courses in different cups and plates, all of which were heavy in seafood and meat that I’m not normally super into - I’m not going to lie my gag reflex was activated by some of the dishes but I managed to try them all. At one point I stared at the wall in front of me and thought how funny it was that they lock you in a room by yourself for a very long and elaborate meal that you feel the need to pay full attention to, leaving you alone with your thoughts and anxieties. Someone comes into your room while you have dinner to assemble a futon they keep in the closet and bring tea to your room upon request. There’s even a really soft, worn in robe with a waist tie that I danced around in, and the private bath that is bookable for 45 minutes was so hot I could barely stay in it, and was one of the only moments I wished that I had someone else to enjoy it with - it was so romantic.

- The most divine bite of sour plum Ume sorbet that was tart and a taste that just seemed to swirl into all corners of the mouth with its presence immediately. An insanely strong finish to a very strange meal for me. Redeeming.

- I arrived in Hakone today, checked in to my ryokan and walked thirty minutes uphill in the sun to Tenzan, a local hot springs bathhouse. When I walked into the main washing room that precedes the insane outdoor hot springs area, there was a single shaft of light illuminating a Rubenesque Japanese woman sitting on a stool washing herself. I had to tear my eyes away for fear of looking pervy because the light and the image was literally breathtaking and I wish I was in a position to take a photo. It always takes me a moment to re-adjust to nudity as something no big deal, those first few seconds you hesitate before taking your underwear off in a room of strangers. Within moments I was totally accustomed to being around the nude bodies of others, scornful at the Westernized idea of nudity as inherently sexual.

In Japanese bathhouses, you wash yourself down before you enter the bathing area, and the communal experience of washing your body amongst others should be a mandatory human experience. The baths outside are fed directly from natural hot spring sources, and seem as though carved into the side of a mountain.There’s a sign outside of Tenzan that assures people with tattoos they’re welcome as long as they’re alone; they must enter with an intention of using the hot springs to heal, to take it seriously. There’s a hush to the place before the post-work rush that happened right about the time I decided to leave. Most were silent, sitting nude on benches with their eyes closed or cast above at the canopy of trees. There was a mother who brought in two of her young children, and held the baby on her lap in the hot natural pools, while the older kid splashed around next to them.

- One of the main things to do in this area is the Hakone loop, a tourist loop that hits a volcanic vented area, a lake and something else via a cable car. I took the train Gora, the end of the line, got tickets for one cable car and then got off to get secondary tickets to a second cable car, all of which was incredibly confusing and stressful because I was trying to get to a nature walk through Owakudani, the active volcano at a specific time. One of the cable cars actually takes you directly about a bunch of active volcanic vents, and there is an insane view of Mt Fuji. At the top, I sprinted and only just made it through the gate and part of the tour before it closed. I was given a helmet, and they walked us slowly up the barren landscape, pausing at bomb shelters to explain things only in Japanese. These tours only happen a few times a day, and you get to see the actual pools they dip dozens of eggs into. The shells react to whatever volcanic shit is going on and turn black. There are entire restaurants and shops on top of this random volcano where you can buy black eggs (I shared mine with some Spanish tourists). Each egg eaten adds year to your life. I ate two, I’m going to outlive everyone. The walk was unnerving and cool, you can book it here and I believe its 500 yen.

- On the way back, instead of braving the packed trains, I decided to get off at Chokokunamori and do a hike I found that would take me all the way back to my ryokan. I found a quiet Lawson at this regional train station and loaded up on spicy chicken nuggets, soy sauce rice crackers, a pair of soft socks from Muji (they have a pop-up presence within Lawson) and an emergency onigiri to stash in my bag as an insurance policy. I never want to hike without a fanny pack full of konbini snacks ever again. The trail takes you immediately into Chisuji falls (“waterfall of a thousand strands”), which is one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been to. It was like Japanese Fern Gully. There was only one other person present when I went there, and I was literally mouth open speechless at the ambiance - gently bubbling streams and branches bent over, leaves trailing on the surface of the water. The rest of the hike was longer and steeper than I expected, and SOOOOO many root stairs. Big time recommend.

STOP 6: KAMAKURA

- I took two trains from Hakone to Kamakura, a beach-side area with an iconic tram system which was featured in an anime that now attracts hoards of tourists to recreate this photo. I was meeting up with my friends Chris and Nele to explore Enoshima Island for the day. I used the coin lockers at the train station, and had an incredible matcha ice cream sundae at a casual 100 year old cafe I stumbled across on the main strip. It was hot, and the island is completely covered in staircases. You can pay money to use escalators, but I never figured out where they were. The stairs weren’t that bad.

- Enoshima was so beautiful, a tiny island surrounded by rocks and soaring hawks. We meandered from restaurant to restaurant, sampling an elaborate lunch at a place that turned us away until we came back and was let in by other waitress while the guy who rejected us was downstairs, stopping by a cliff-side family-owned cafe where we had shaved ice and stared at the glittering sea outside. There’s a system of caves at the center of Enoshima’s story that is worth walking through (beware of the animatronic dragon that guards the third cave, which growls when you clap). We finished the day with my second incredible Italian meal of the trip at Il Birraio.

- On my one full day in Kamakura, I walked from my hotel, WeBase (I’d recommend - they give you the most elaborate breakfast that I couldn’t even finish) and through the main tourist street. It was both incredibly overwhelming in vibe and underwhelming in vibe at the same time. I’d recommend exploring the streets just off to the side of this one, there are so many adorable specialty boutiques that I found - from a place called Chahat which sold Thai and local handmade accessories, and Pajaro, which was an adorable hat shop owned by a photographer. I spent $100 on a hat here, and it made me feel like a character in a cartoon.

- I grossly underestimated the amount of time I would spend staring at trinkets, and was running out of time to make it to the famous temple with the hydrangea bloom (Meigetsu In), but walked to Jochi-ji, another idyllic temple, and started a hike I found on AllTrails that cut through the center of the city along a peaceful and quiet path at times overrun by bees, all the way to Kotoku-in, which is known for its giant bronze Buddha statue. I watched people here for a while, some who looked like it was a real important moment for them, bowing in reverence and whispering murmured prayers. I had worked up an appetite at this point, and found a tiny confectionary shop run by an elderly man. I spent my last 150 yen scavenged from the bottom of my bag to enjoy a stick of mitarashi dango (rice flour dumplings covered in sweet soy sauce glaze). I walked back to my hotel, along the way stopping at a vintage store called off course, where everything is 2000 yen, and then finally to Matsubara-an, a soba noodle restaurant recommended to me that just happened to be next door to my hotel.


STOP 7: YOKOHAMA

- Quick stop on the way back to the airport, stopped in Yokohama at my connecting station and dropped my suitcases off at a coin locker. I walked to get one last climb in at B Pump, and had a very fruitful 2nd street visit. I found a Stussy t-shirt, some pants, a handbag and left behind a North Face rain jacket and Ralph Lauren handbag. I went to Cosme underneath the station to stock up on beauty products, mainly a Decortes lip plumping serum that I mistakenly bought the wrong color of, and which I’ve also lost twice since I’ve come back. I got back on the train to the airport and an hour later I was elbowing a guy out of the way at the 7/11 in the airport so that I could get all my snack souvenirs. I bought one last egg tamago sandwich for the road.

Originally posted July 9, 2024

I write these big ass essays and then feel pressure to wait until I have something that feels urgent to write about, but really I just need to write more things that do not relate to the manuscript/book that I’m working on, which is currently giving me anxiety and is sitting at 70,000 words, all of which were squeezed out of like the last few drops of toothpaste stubbornly wedged at the very tip of the tube (update since I wrote this: I suddenly finished one day this week because I had previously held myself to the arbitrary number of 100,000 words, something I had read somewhere and decided was where I needed to be, based on maybe nothing. I realized via a recent Google Search that 100k is too many for a novel. The first Harry Potter was 75,000 words; I am already there).

Behind the reluctance to write about random things, about my life, I think, is the feeling that writing about anything other than war or collective liberation feels trivial. Any writing I have to offer has to meet a high bar of “This is Important”, but this self-imposed impossible expectation stifles my ability to see that sometimes, the important things can be hidden in the daily and inconsequential - like the interactions I have with people on the street, the way that things are metabolized in me even if there’s no clear output.

Those things feel especially important now that so much feels too big to fathom, too far gone to fix. I used to date this guy who was 23 and who said to me completely sincerely, “I believe in the people’s revolution”. These days I bounce between his brand of starry eyed hope (this morning I cried at footage of the French Left celebrating their unexpected win against Le Pen and far right fascism), and then days where all I want to do is retreat into a hole in the woods somewhere with two dogs and my boyfriend and put the whole business of hope and investment in the future to bed, to scurry back into a personal bubble of protection and ignorance.
The anxiety has permeated into my day to day - since I returned to Japan I have been feeling distinctly hermetic. I’ve been pacing my kitchen eating corn flakes by the bowl (left by my two Aussie subletters while I was gone, alongside a can of Australian Foster’s beer and a pair of Bonds underwear), my mind racing over a million different things at once:

- Paying attention to pop music for the first time in years and finding myself deeply invested; Sabrina Carpenter, Chapell Roan, Charli XCX and the girl, so confusing lorde remix. I was stunned by Lorde’s verse, how intimate and real it felt, how much of a mirror it held up to girlhood and friendship. I love the liberated, queer, openly sexual brand of these pop queens who are expressive and emotive in ways that has felt sanitized into commercial oblivion the las few times I’ve tried to check in with pop music. It feels like a revelation; an indication that maybe culture is evolving in the right direction. But then I’m also like where are all the cool pop girls of color? There’s also a nagging sense that it is a distraction somehow, from seeing things as they really are. Does it really matter that two major female pop stars worked it out on a remix when there’s so much else that is not able to be worked out on a remix? Will I ever be able to take pleasure in basic things like pop culture without having an existential crisis? I push the thoughts down and scroll past another image of a child with their jaw blasted off, or a limb missing, and read another tweet or Instagram story take on pop culture feminism.

- The Presidential debate and how humiliating it is to live in the United States right now. o live in the United States right now.

(source)

- How much I love my Marni Fussbett sandals, which were my first big girl luxury purchase a few years ago, and which still remain my go-to sandals that make me feel like an elevated version of myself I can never quite seem to nail consistently in my style. AND how quickly I’m pulled into the trap that I need another pair of them because they’re such a good investment. And what a trap! To convince yourself that you should spend $400 on sandals because they’re an investment, only to be drawn in two years later to buy the same sandals in another color because they were such a good investment.

(They’re here but I wouldn’t recommend buying them full price - they go on sale a bunch)

- The general feeling that my body is decaying, from the flakes of skin I pick off it constantly, to the blood that spurts forth after I scratch off a scab, and the toe fungus infection I’m currently addressing through a three month course of anti fungal medication. Sometimes I look at other people and wonder how everyone else seems so pristine and full of vitality.

- The sense that I need to start thinking about having a baby, but being unclear as to where I’m supposed to start. Do I want to have a family? When do I want that? Is 40 too old to have a child? Will I suddenly wake up at 34 and demand that I want a kid? Will it be too late? Will I even care? Is it enough to be the fun auntie?

- My ongoing lack of health insurance (now going on more than a year). I climb three times a week, ride my bike in New York City and generally do risky shit. I have had health insurance in the past as a freelancer, but the short of it is that there is no real good options for people who do not have full time jobs if you do not qualify for subsidized state insurance. I can pay $800 for mediocre health insurance, and there’s no real other option that is more cost effective. I could probably afford that cost, but there’s a simmering indignation of having to participate in the system where you must simply pay your way into safety. I read this recent article called Everyone Into the Grinder that essentially says if we don’t force the rich to participate in the same public-owned systems that we are all forced to contend with, they will remain unpleasant because privatization means some of us can just pay our way into comfort and basic human rights, reinforcing the status quo.

“The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”

I have felt compelled to simply sit in my house just as Summer has begun to rear its sweaty, matted head. Social obligations have felt especially trying. My skin has been flaring up really badly, a field of psoriasis all over my legs and across my chest, so I have been hiding away and leaving the house only in long pants, which has at times felt like walking around with my legs encased in two furnaces given my normal proclivity of wearing mini skirts that show my butthole to the entire world every other summer of my life. My body has craved stillness, and I can only seem to exist in two extremes: completely alone, hiding out and doing nothing, or having so many plans that my body protests and breaks out in hives and psoriasis. It’s a constant cycle I’m always wrapped up in.

It’s the same old tired script every time a season arrives: it’s too hot, it’s too cold to do anything. I have felt like a little sewer rat hiding in my cave, banging away at my keyboard to reach the finish line on this manuscript, trying to calm my nervous system to heal my crazy skin. At one point I went too deep on a 15 tweet thread someone posted in response to a headline that said scientists are predicting the first Billion people will die because of climate change, and that those people are going to be you and I: those of us completely divorced from the source of their food, who rely on the convenience of globalization to have things magically appear in front of us with zero effort. It’s the collapse of those systems that will get us, and I found myself at 1AM in the evening staring into a bowl of cereal I didn’t even buy or know where it came from, texting my boyfriend to see if we should start looking into buying land somewhere so I can learn to grow my own vegetables before it is too late. “You subsist entirely on imported sake, Japanese snacks and instant noodles. You’ll be fine,” he said.

This past 4th of July weekend, I had an overwhelming urge to work - to get ahead while everyone else was off and enjoying whatever they were doing. The city was eerily quiet, hot and soupy, oppressive in the direct sun. Thursday rolled into Friday which rolled into the weekend and I barely did any writing or real work, the vague sense that I needed to sitting on my thoughts like the silhouette of an apex predator staring me down. Each day, I would go to bed and remind myself that it was okay I didn’t do any work, there was always tomorrow and I deserve a break. I’m realizing that I feel deep down as though I don’t deserve a break, that I am so far behind (in what? And who decides where I should be but me?) that to pause for a brief moment is to sink into the background until I am no longer visible or important.

What did I do? I went climbing with friends multiple days, hours spent at the gym reaching for plastic holds, I ate five hot dogs and felt sick at my friends Tessa and Marshall’s BBQ, all of us attempting to blow vape bubbles (when you hit a vape and blow out the vapor into a bubble wand, which creates milky bubbles). I hung out with my friend’s baby, I saw my boyfriend and watched TV, I went to Beacon’s Closet and tried ten things on and bought nothing. I walked my dog endlessly and drank sparkling effervescent sake (Dassai 50 Blue) by myself in the cool dark cave of my apartment.

All these things feel excessive and frivolous; and even now as I write this I write it with guilt, that it betrays how privileged and boring I am. I have effectively employed a cop of my own making in my head who is on duty 24/7 - the cop tells me that I should be thinking about how to make the world better, how my work will impact other people, that if I don’t write and read and shoot every day, if I don’t produce, then I am not worthy of considering myself an artist. I have no answers on how to get rid of this constant nagging guilt, the pervasive sense that it’s never enough, that any moment spent -god forbid- having fun, is a complete waste of time. The moment feels so urgent, and at the same time I can’t tell you or I am meant to do about it except stare at it until our brains hurt.

Still, I go to bed and close my eyes and list three things I’m grateful for, three things that made today a good day, and hear my voice ringing out into the night reassuring myself that it’s okay to relax, that I deserve rest, too.

Originally posted June 19, 2024

Every morning I walk 30 minutes from my little apartment on the hill in Lesa to visit a Magnolia tree. Down the mossy stairs, I turn left from the house and stop by a dog named Sansone (“sun” in Italian), a big Malamute who sits in his concrete front patio, barking at everyone who walks past. My hosts Jasper and Sarvie told me that he’s more bark than bite, and easily bribed. I’ll give him one or two treats, an exchange for his increased affection and intimacy. Today, he let me scratch him behind his ears. I’ve been here for a week. Like I said, easily bribed.

I’ll take a left at the fork and walk through a few narrow alleyways flanked by homes. On sunny days I will hear the sound of Italian flitting out of windows above. Gates might be open, to reveal two baby scooters parked inside next to each other, or a woman hanging her laundry out to dry, shower cap still on. Laundry will be gently lifted in the breeze off the side of balconies, something I can’t help but take photos of despite the cliche. On rainy days, everything is still, all the doors and windows are shut to the world. I can do this entire walk and see nobody else.

I’ll walk past Jasper and Sarvie’s house, down a cobblestone alleyway with the names of Italian families written on the letterboxes in fancy script. Past the multiple gardens owned by Angelo, who sometimes I see walking with his cane between his tomatoes and flowers, up and down the hill despite his bad knee. At this point, I can see the lake. On clear days I can see the Swiss alps in the distance.

The path will pass a small creek running across it and down into town. Further along, there are two dogs who work themselves into a frenzy barking at me, running back and forth. I’ve started to throw them treats too, picking them up and trying again if my aim is off and it bounces off the chain link fence, sometimes back onto my face.

The path ahead becomes narrow and bushy, overgrown and shaded, the buzz of mosquitoes in the air. After particularly heavy rainfall, I caught the frozen eyes of two deers staring at me from some distance as I rounded the corner. We stared at each other for a moment before they leapt out of sight.

It goes for about five minutes more, passing a lone deck chair facing the lake past a single chain that says “private property” (begging for me to trespass, which I did once— it took me about ten minutes before I got too nervous and had to leave).

Finally, it opens up to the view of the mountains, the lake, and a giant magnolia tree in someone’s yard that hangs over the public path. On a sunny Thursday morning in mid-March, she was fully in bloom. The grass is overgrown underneath her, and enclosed by an uneven stone wall that is high in places and low in others. I was told it was built by the Romans. I leave my bag on the wall and load my camera, walking on the stones to take photos of her from every angle.

When I first saw the tree on my first day in Lesa, it was about to burst, its branches covered in tiny green buds. It had rained non-stop for the entire first week I was there, the promise of a month stretching beyond me like an eternity. By the time I saw her bloom, I had shot 10 series of portraits, printed them all in a frenzy in Milan and was about to exhibit them in the town community center, marking the end of my residency.

As I finish this essay now, it’s the end of June and two more trips between Lesa and now have come and gone. To age is to experience time out of order, to jump between then and now and later. Going on a trip that felt like it would last forever and then cutting to months later, writing the summary of it in a few paragraphs at my dining room table.

My twenties felt like a flurry of activity, pointed towards the false idol of security and success, a frantic race to a place I had run for so long to reach, only to bail at the last minute. I was in a very long relationship, one that felt final and forever. Now I couldn’t describe to you what it felt like to kiss him. I was flying at the speed of trauma, all of life an endless race against myself and everyone else. Everything was urgent, everything was important. Maybe that’s just what being alive feels like, or being young.

I was looking at all the wrong things: the urgency of getting promoted, of making more money, of impressing people, of getting more abs and lifting heavier. Now, I’m almost blindsided by what feels urgent: the passing of time that indicates the aging of my parents, the people around me pairing up, getting married, moving away, having children, my own body changing and ageing.
I’m still adjusting to experiencing time in the marrow of it, the actual fact of it. Not dictated by the artificial rhythm of the churn of capitalism, but by the growing and dying of all things. Sometimes I catch myself mixed up in the stream of two times: capitalism time and real time, confusing one for the other.

When I’m in capitalism time, I feel shame at starting a creative career so late, worry that I am not doing or achieving or being recognized enough. I forget that I chose to be self employed, to follow a path that has no guidelines or markers of advancement other than a ~vibe~. I get caught up in playing the same games I used to play as a full time member of the corporate dream, in the dogged pursuit of a promotion, a fatter pay check, a bigger title. In capitalism time, I forget that I’ve made choices about what I want and how I want to get there, I slip back into the same robotic fear and desire for more. Decolonizing my time may be a life long practice.

Sometimes, fleetingly, I manage to wriggle out of the iron grip of capitalism time, and I experience real time, time time. The time of growing and dying. It’s when I’m with my family and noticing how they’ve shrunk, how they’ve softened with age. It’s sitting in front of a magnolia tree every day in the sun and the rain and crying at the bottomless gratitude I feel at the sight of it. I feel it when my dog jumps into bed at 6am and wakes me by gently licking my toe, when I watch my psoriasis come and go, come and go, healing and appearing like an endless video playing out on my skin. I feel it when I think about the ten long months of genocide that has unfolded on our screens, the months of inaction and death.

There’s an Italian expression: Piano, Piano. It means little by little, or step by step. It’s taking things slowly, letting them unfold in time. A man at my exhibition said that to me in response to me sharing that I was going through at least one block of Gorgonzola cheese every two days. I needed to hear it at 20 years old, about to attempt to shove the rest of my life into the next ten years in a desperate attempt to get ahead, to be safe.

Magnolias only bloom one week of the year. Jasper told me that March in Lesa is the time of change, and I had his words in my head during the last few precious day that the tree was in full bloom. I was in Milan to print photos at a darkroom, staying overnight at a hotel. I was worried I’d miss it, willing the train home to go faster, like I was missing my favorite band headlining at a festival. I had waited all month to see her bloom. The flowers were still there when I got there.

I came home to New York at the beginning of April, having skipped the uncertain time where Spring has not yet broken and all of us are losing our minds. The magnolia trees and cherry trees were just starting to sprout in Brooklyn, the process beginning all over again. It felt like a tape rewind, a gentle reminder that things move at different speeds depending on where you are.

I took long walks around the neighborhood the first few weeks I was back, missing the green hills of Lesa. I worked on these photos in the darkroom, photos that were evidence of the same thing having happened on the other side of the world a month before. The Magnolia tree in Lesa has long shed her flowers, but the ones here in Brooklyn, at home, had just started to show.

Originally posted in December 2023

Coming home is looking at a familiar object through a glass prism. It’s knowing what the Eiffel Tower looks like after a lifetime of looking at it through Google Images, the cartoon Madeline and in the background of Emily in Paris, only to get there and realize it’s both kind of the same but also just a mere facsimile to the version that exists in your head. In my childhood home in Sydney, the glass jugs of boiled tap water still sit next to the sink. There’s still a bowl of cut fruit (this time, honeydew) in the fridge nestled in a bowl, a thin layer of plastic cling wrap waiting to be removed. My name is still scrawled in childish handwriting across each of the nine drawers of the in-built closet, labelled to make sure everyone knew they were mine. To return to a place like your childhood home as an adult is to stitch a memory suspended from the most fragile silk with the reality that so much has changed.

What has changed: the fifteen tanks full of fish my dad used to illegally breed and sell in the abandoned granny flat out back has been reduced to just two (overrun by snails?) in the living room. The 4 for $4 champagne flutes my mother purchased from Kmart specifically for Christmas, the first we have ever owned as a family, bragging about how cheap they were the same way other people might brag about having Riedel glasses. What else has changed: the relationship between my parents and I, one whose sharp edges have eroded through years of talk therapy. It’s been softened by the simple effect of what we commonly know cures all but don’t really believe until we ourselves can be old enough to witness it: time passing. A laundry list of complaints and questions from growing up in a low income immigrant household with its requisite physical and emotional abuse has fallen through the filters of being examined a thousand times and coming out frayed and faded, a receipt in the back pocket of a pair of jeans gone through the wash.

I have lived on the other side of the planet for almost a decade now. The previous trips I took home were defined by either indifference, active chaos, or quietly felt like chores, my penance for deciding to put 10,000 miles between myself and the place I was born. Last trip, my ex-boyfriend of eight years broke up with me sixteen hours into quarantine, leading to a month of full fledged, unhinged chaos: almost breaking my knee, constantly driving into the wrong side of traffic, scream crying to Florence and the Machine in the car, and a rebound romance with a 23 year old I met at the climbing gym. I was feral with main character break-up syndrome, and I experienced that trip as though everything was muffled through four layers of glass. Sydney was the backdrop for a huge, unexpected heartbreak that I was struggling to stay on the surface of. My family were secondary characters in the background of that drama, people who existed on the fringes of my panic. I wasn’t present, I was incapable of it.

Going home this last December was the first time in my life that I returned feeling somewhat normal, the grievances that I checked alongside my bags poofed into thin air, able to see my home and my family clearly for the first time. Instead, I brought a golem that I created here in Brooklyn. It was a fantasy of what family and home was meant to be, moulded in the vacuum of Brooklyn therapy culture and through the anecdotes of my friends and boyfriends’ families, far far away our rented home in Yagoona, Sydney. I wrote and spoke and thought and dissected all of this stuff as a 30 year old woman living in an apartment that costs triple what my entire family pays, until I was blue in the face and convinced I had looked at it at every possible direction. I did the ayahuasca ceremonies, started writing the book about immigrant trauma. I participated in TikTok conversations about what it all meant to be a second-generation child of immigrants, and I brought all of this home eager to bask in fruits of that labor. To simply return home for the holidays without complication or the sticky residue of childhood trauma. I wanted to come home as someone healed.

My first time home on this trip, my American boyfriend and I drove from our custom designed beach-side Airbnb to the suburban sprawl of where I grew up. Over dinner, my parents asked him what he does, and were polite but confused at his answer of “Artist”, deflating the pride I felt about him, and what it must mean about me. Although everyone spoke English, I had to translate between the fast clip of Cody’s American accent and my parent’s Vietnamese/Chinese accented English. There was so much I had projected onto this meeting - of this man representing so much of who I am now, walking and breathing inside the house I grew up, interacting with the ghosts of the person I used to be, in the place I became her. I watched them try to connect with each other over plates of oysters and noodles. I watched my parents lean over the table to arrange the food on Cody’s plate as though he were a boy and not a 40-something year old man.

I had brought so much expectation back about what it meant to return home, of what a clean and tidy version of family and the holidays meant. That idea dissipated almost immediately, replaced instead with surface-level dinner table conversation, the jokes my boyfriend didn’t understand, my mother telling me that she has checked my GPS every single day for the last five years, including when I went to The Dolomites and the month I spent in Mexico City. I imagined her zooming into foreign places at my blue little dot, not understanding any of the context of where I was, just comforted by the simple fact that I was alive. It became my dad forgetting the ingredients for my favorite Vietnamese dish, banh uot, and walking 30 minutes back to the grocery just to get them, even though he hates the dish himself. It was repeating everything I said three times to make sure they understood, slowing my speech down, removing parts of stories that seemed too complicated. None of it was part of the starry-eyed, one-note fantasy I had built, constructed from cliche and self-absorption.

Both of my parents would allude to me moving home one day, and then backtrack by smiling and saying they’re joking, when we both know they’re not. They say they’re happy as long as I am, and they don’t need me to be home. I know that’s a concession that they make for a daughter who decided that she needed to leave, and has built an entire life away from them. I smile and say maybe, knowing I won’t, that the person I have become doesn’t fit into the sunny rocky shores of Sydney anymore, and the cultural, language, and geographical divide between myself and the love that exists in my parent’s shrinking bodies is one created by and perpetuated by me. I’m a visitor now.

On the morning of our flight home, I cast a shadow over our hotel room, irritable and snapping at Cody. I said I was annoyed I didn’t get to go to the beach on my last day, but that gave way to tears by mid-afternoon that I was actually just devastated that I had to leave. My next visit would be after another year or two of changes in myself, in my family, ones that would have to be reconciled over and over again with each return. A sudden grief descended, knowing that it took this long to enjoy my family, to see them clearly. That they are happy for me but barely understand what it is that I do, that they have never seen my life here in New York, that it is so different in so many ways. Grief for the calls I didn’t make, the interest I never took in their inner landscapes, instead writing them off as one dimensional characters in my life. That I can invest so much time in the process of healing but it will not measure up to simply sitting next to my mother to watch TV with her. That I now ache for a place that I couldn’t wait to leave a decade ago. The reality of what it looks like when I return home, and I don’t live there.

The world that I’ve created in my head does not compare to the one that exists within those fading, marked walls with my name written on them in Yagoona, Sydney. This world may not include the animated dinner table conversation on political views or shared memories I get to have with my boyfriend’s family. There is little to no curiosity about my creative practice, or the life I live on the other side of the world. The movie hallmarks of what it is to return home to family are completely absent. Instead, in this world, the wine glasses are cheap, there is always a place to return to, and there are people who check my GPS every single day to make sure that I am safe, even when I do not call. One fantasy has been laid to rest in place of another that I watch recede on the flight map as my plane climbs its way into the sky to take me all the way back to my life in Brooklyn.

Originally posted December 23, 2023

I’m a sucker for a new year. The idea of waking up to the slate wiped clean, to peer tentatively through the opening of a calendar beginning again. When I was a teenager, I’d write down New Years resolutions religiously - this is the year that I’ll save money, I’ll drink at least eight glasses of water a day. Most of my ‘goals’ were in pursuit of perfection in my physical or financial self, of chasing an idealized version of responsibility that never seemed to materialize. Setting resolutions has always felt like an act of hope, that I can change, that I can start again. It doesn’t matter if the resolution remains the same on December 31st a year after I set them. New Years feels like a glistening mirage of second chances, of trying again (maybe harder this time), of reflection and change.

Looking back, I’m glad to leave this year behind. It’s the year I downshifted Scallion Pancake to focus on writing and photography, a leap that has been hiding behind a corner my whole life. It felt a lot like pushing a heavy cart up a hill. I tried really hard this year. I cared a lot this year. I continued grappling with boundary setting and putting myself first, and learning to manage my energy levels. I teetered between running myself into the ground and feeling like I had everything under control. I felt tired a lot, part of it was that the world felt very heavy, part of it was from the exertion of pushing myself as someone chasing a dream at age 30, an age that feels both young and like I’m running out of time. My psoriasis was probably the worst it has ever been. I felt the most proud of myself this year, for sharing my photography and my writing even when it felt really really scary. I started writing a book! I saved a significant amount of money for the first time in my life, and I was very hydrated. It only took about 15 years for me to achieve those resolutions I set for myself decades ago in my bedroom in the dark.

It’s the time of In/Out lists, and so many seem to be personal declarations on the wider cultural zeitgeist. I don’t feel like I have any ability to predict what other people like, but for me:

This New Year, I want to Venmo my friends money for coffee when I’m thinking about them. I want to be the type of person who bakes things and bikes them to the people I love just because. I want to use my library card more, I want to read every book in the world. I want to clean my camera roll out every week so the screenshots of things I forgot the significance of don’t rot in my phone. I want to touch grass, I want to climb outside, I want to swim in the ocean, I want to bury my face in the my dog’s fur more. I want to stick my head out the window of a moving car. I want to play frisbee on the beach. I want to rediscover my sense of joy in style, of feeling expressed in what I wear, even when it feels too cold to do so. I want to finally cook recipes from the cookbooks I collect that sit and collect dust. I want to play more records.

I want to go on impromptu walks with my friends more. I want to be free of the prison of expectations. I want blind confidence. Big statements. I want to follow through. I want to believe that I am capable of anything I want. I want to save money. I want to buy myself things when it feels right, without guilt. I want loud house music in a dark club, eyes closed, occasionally bumping limbs with someone I love. I want to submerge myself in an open body of water, surfacing and feeling my feet kick against nothing. I want to say hi to people on the street I know even if it feels uncomfortable. I want to listen to my body. I want to hear people make a lot of noise because they recognize that the wellbeing of others is tied to their own. I want peace for the people who are suffering. I want safety, joy and community. I want everyone else to have that.

Happy new year. <3