As I look around at a set of visibly exhausted parents trying to soothe their irritable child, the man on a business call who clearly wants everyone to know he’s closing a “very lucrative” deal, to the woman giving it to the front desk agent about how she won’t make her connecting flight to Greece now, I’m astonished at how calm I am in the midst of this chaos.

This level of calmness is new for me. Admittedly, I can be a fairly anxious person when things don’t go as planned or expected. I tend to worry, overanalyze, and catastrophize. Never have I been quick to embrace iteration or deviation from what I envisioned, not until recently. But hey, at least I’m self-aware.

“Life will eventually humble everyone,” my father said very definitively during one of our usual hour-long phone calls. I could comprehend the words he was saying, but life had yet to show me what he meant.

Before we got off the phone, he gently ended with, “In time you’ll understand what I’m saying, Ify.”

As much as I’d like to believe that I’m in control of my future my emotions, my career, or even my environment, I’ve had to accept there are an infinite amount of things outside the realm of my control.

For example, I have never been able to make the men who I’ve adored see me as a person worth investing in or valuing long-term. I haven’t been able to stop people who I thought were my dear friends from suddenly and heartlessly divesting from the friendship. More recently, I have failed miserably (despite my greatest efforts as a self-proclaimed health enthusiast) to prevent my mother from getting sick.

I am absolutely and utterly incapable of saving anyone from the current housing crisis, humanitarian crisis, climate crisis, literacy crisis, loneliness epidemic, or financial collapse which looms over all of us.

So what’s the fucking point of any of this?

It can be depressing sitting with this question, because at my lowest, the most honest answer is that none of the things we worry about actually matter in the grand scheme of life. And perhaps, with that answer, our road to true self-actualization can begin.

The anger or grudge I’ve been keeping towards my sibling no longer holds the same weight when the mortality of a parent is called into question. The sadness I feel from not being chosen by a man who was never going to choose me suddenly isn’t sad at all, because I am chosen and loved by so many other people. The friendship that ended abruptly and without reasoning is far less earth-shattering because it creates space for new and meaningful relationships to develop. The trivial frustration with not growing a following as quickly as others on social media becomes absolutely and unequivocally inconsequential because I live a blessed and fulfilled life offline.

Does any of that make sense?

We are all on this earth so briefly, a blip in time. Our existence, like millions before us, will only live in the hearts and minds of family and friends, who will eventually too be distant memories of their loved ones. It’s just the nature of things. The masses will not return to your IG page or post you yearly like Martin Luther King or quote you like Bell Hooks.

However, maybe when none of it matters, it is then that the most consequential things crystallize. A life well lived isn’t dependent on external validation, material possessions, or being labeled an “IT girl.” It’s not defined by your relationship status or how many weddings or birthdays you get invited to. Fame nor wealth nor how many stamps you’ve acquired in your passport act as signifiers, either. It does not require you to be seen as tasteful or aesthetic (aesthetics mean fucking nothing).

What it requires is intentionality.

How do you show up for yourself and others? Have you accepted the uglier, lesser parts of yourself? Have you taken advantageous risks? Do you care about the well-being of your neighbor? Do you treat people with respect? Do you pour into your community? Are you honest? Are you kind? Do you practice forgiveness? Are you generous with your time and with your money? Are you curious? Are you able to sympathize with someone’s lived experience without having gone through it? Are you someone people feel safe with?

All of these questions have answers, and if the answers you come to find aren’t ones you’re proud of, then life gives you a choice. What a blessing that is.

A decision at any point in time to change how you act, think, feel, and relate to the world around you.

And isn’t that everything?

I think about the woman at the front desk right now, absorbing the full weight of a stranger’s frustration about a flight she didn’t cancel, a connection she didn’t book, a trip to Greece she couldn’t have predicted would fall apart today. She’s still there. Still showing up. I wonder what she’s carrying beneath that uniform, what she’s going home to, whether anyone will ask her how her day was.

I think that’s the thing nobody told me about humility, it’s not some grand revelation. It exists through a delayed flight, through a phone call with my father, through watching my mother’s body do something I can’t negotiate with or heal myself or research my way out of.

My father was right.

Life humbled me.

Not cruelly, but thoroughly.

And somewhere between the 12:55pm flight that never happened and now, I stopped thinking about my expectations and instead, started noticing what was happening all around me. The child who finally stopped crying and fell asleep across two airport chairs. The businessman who laughed, genuinely laughed, at something the person on the other end of the call said.

It’s in the small, mundane moments.

Maybe that’s what a life well lived actually looks like in practice, just being present. Just paying attention, just being someone who, even in the middle of a chaotic LaGuardia terminal on a Tuesday that didn’t go as planned, can look around and find something worth seeing.

Delta just announced another delay.

I’m okay. None of this matters anyways.

I did.

However, unbeknownst to me, Cannes was built as an act of defiance.

In 1938, the Venice Film Festival had become a vehicle for fascist and Nazi propaganda, with Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany dictating which films won and which didn’t. The jury had already made their decision — an American film had their vote — but under pressure from Hitler, the Nazi propaganda film Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl and an Italian film reigned supreme instead. The French, British, and American jury members walked out. From that walkout, a French diplomat named Philippe Erlanger began asking a serious question: what would a festival look like if politics had no seat at the table?

The concept was approved in 1939, but the inaugural edition was disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. The first planned festival was scheduled for September 1st, 1939. On the morning it was set to open, Hitler invaded Poland. The festival was called off after the screening of just one film. It took seven more years, a world war, and a devastated Europe before Cannes finally happened. In September 1946, in a festive atmosphere despite a series of technical problems, this first festival kicked off a long golden era.

That origin matters because most people don’t know it. Cannes wasn’t built to celebrate the already-famous. It was built to protect cinema from the people who would use it as a weapon. That’s the foundation underneath all the glamour — a stubborn, radical insistence that art should answer to no government, no ideology, no single commercial interest powerful enough to corrupt the result.

Today it functions as one of the few platforms where auteur-driven cinema can reach international audiences without immediate commercial filtering. Industrially, it remains one of the world’s key film markets, where deals are negotiated during the festival week, and its Marché du Film has become central to financing and distribution strategies across continents. That tension — between the artistic and the commercial — is still the live wire running through everything here.

After all, money begets money and art needs money. Cannes has always understood both, and never quite resolved the tension between them.

Which brings me to what they really don’t show you.

The journalist from Lyon who’s been cold-emailing a distributor for two years, rehearsing her pitch in a hotel bathroom mirror at 7am before the crowds arrive. The costume designer who dressed a €40,000 film, standing in the same room as one that cost $40 million, waiting — just waiting — for someone to ask her the right question. The film student with a press badge and a camera that cost more than his rent, who flew here on savings and a feeling, because he understood something instinctively that most people spend years learning: that proximity to the right room can change the entire shape of your life.

Cannes is a marketplace dressed as a celebration. The glamour is real, but it’s also a language — a way of signaling that what happens here matters, that the films screened on this particular stretch of the French Riviera deserve the world’s attention. That signal, over decades, became the event itself, or at least what people associate it with.

People stopped asking why Cannes mattered and started accepting that it did.

The fashion world, understood this early, and not in the superficial way people assume. The relationship between Cannes and fashion is old and serious. Since the 1950s, designers have treated Cannes as seriously as any runway. In 2015, Lupita Nyong'o opened the festival in emerald green Gucci and didn't just walk the carpet — she chaired the jury. The dress was the statement. The seat at the table was the point.

I came to Cannes expecting to feel like an outsider looking at a machine built for insiders, and in some ways, that’s exactly what it is — there are levels of access that money can’t entirely buy and connections alone won’t manufacture.

However, what shifted something in me is how porous it also is. There are many people precisely because they refused to accept that it wasn't for them, and came anyway, by whatever means necessary. Cannes rewards a specific kind of stubbornness. The kind that doesn’t photograph well but quietly accounts for a significant portion of what actually happens here.

That’s the story I’m interested in. Not the gowns (although, we’ll absolutely be talking about the gowns) but the real reason Cannes persists today. A festival born from resistance, a belief that people and art were bigger than political or monetary powers. The festival continues the much needed and encouraged conversation about what art owes the world.

I'm going to take you through it, and I promise you, it's more human, more alive than anything you will see on your Instagram timeline.

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Anyways, there’s nothing like a raging coffee addiction to force me out of my hotel room despite wanting to be a recluse. I didn’t get much sleep last night and had my body not desperately needed caffeine, I wouldn’t have left my bed. I did a quick search on Tiktok to find the best coffee shop in Cannes called Saddle and surprise, it was not the best, just the busiest.

I am constantly disappointed by recommendations on the internet, I’m surprised I still willing trust them because to be honest? I don’t really respect a lot of people’s opinion on the world wide web. Too many people quick to call something good but don’t know how to articulate why they even think it’s deserving of praise – instead they opt for a simple “9/10” description. The amount of times I can recall the viral place or thing being worth the hype? Slim. I clearly forgot I was born in the generation where people simply wandered till they found the true “hidden gem”.

Then somehow was guided by the universe to the main shopping strip of Cannes and stumbled into Mango.

If you haven’t looked at their inventory lately, you should. The quality has gotten better and with that, the prices have skyrocketed. It feels both comical and disrespectful but the pieces I walked away with are undeniably fabulous (yes, I bought this dress).

I still have one more night before the group I’m here with arrive and I’m debating whether I run the three course meal back? Who am I kidding? I already know I will.

1. What I’m listening to

   Revisited a classic album and have had Best of Me by the Queen, Jazmine Sullivan on repeat.

   

2. What products I’m loving

   Too Faced pressed powder (I get it in Tan). I swear by this powder to help complete any make up look + touchups.

   

3. A drink that needs praise

   Coke Zero in Europe. I’m usually a DC girl (I’m trying to reduce consumption!!) but there’s something about a Coke Zero in Europe that just hitsss.

   

Quotes that matter

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” - Toni Morrison

Does anyone else feel like they come alive differently overseas? I've never fit neatly into the American beauty standard and traveling abroad is always a reminder that beauty is wider than one mold, that mine tends to be appreciated by those with a certain je ne sais quoi about their concept of beauty.

While walking along La Croisette, I’ve noticed Americans have begun to flood the city as my ear catches bits of English and French intertwining. There's something special about arriving somewhere new thats reminiscent of a child tasting sugar for the very first time — colors are a little brighter, sounds are crisp and clearer, every sense turned all the way up.

And just like that child, I’m on a high.

Cannes film festival officially kicks off tomorrow and it feels like I’m at the top of a rollercoaster that is beginning to descend. I’m hoping I packed the right outfits, my hair doesn’t revert from the humidity, and that I can find an eyelash curler by tonight (no luck after visiting two french pharmacies)!

Last night I was on facetime with my best friend, discussing the distinct differences I’ve noticed in my short 24 hours in France compared to the United States, and the one thing I can’t shake is a sense of calm amongst the people. The global economy is in turmoil everywhere, but it feels like there’s more to be excited about, more to look forward to abroad. Perhaps this is me romanticizing a bit (I’m not ignorant to the fact that every country has their struggles), but they aren’t bombarded with daily lies and antics from their government in the same way. They speak to their neighbors and strangers alike, their lives don’t seem to be quantified by their output or adoption of AI, which I haven’t seen anywhere now that I think about it.

Yesterday, I had a wonderful dinner by myself. I’m not usually a fan of French cuisine (I can debate about this any day, all day) but yesterday I had a meal that left me questioning everything. I can’t remember the last time I ate past the point of being full, but I didn’t hold back.

Me, Ms. Morrison, a three course meal, and two glasses of Chablis. Maybe I’ll run it back again tonight…

What I’m Watching

Drive My Car

In honor of Cannes, I wanted to watch some films of the past winners. I am in awe of this film. Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a genius.

What product I’m obsessing over

2. Bose Ultra open headphones

   Not only are these super chic headphones (I’ve gotten so many compliments) but I love how they allow me to still hear my surroundings. I got mine in the color sand & driftwood.

What food deserves praise

3. A (good) french baguette

   What I constitute as a great baguette is as intricate as how I judge good sourdough, not all are created equal. The french obviously make the best and after inhaling a whole loaf yesterday, I’m convinced this is top 5 breads.

   

Quotes that matter:

“If not you then who? If not now, when?” - Hillel the Elder

I just got off an eight-hour flight from New York to Nice, and since my room isn’t ready, I’m sitting here in the lobby next to a French couple who are so wrapped up in each other they’ve forgotten the rest of the world exists. The sky outside is this heavy, dramatic grey. The wind is doing something to the birds, making them feel louder, closer, more there somehow. I’m completely exhausted and completely alive, and the only thing I wanted to do was open my laptop and talk to you.

Two weeks ago, I was invited by a friend to come to Cannes film festival, and I answered the call. To be honest, I’m at a point where the idea of not doing more with my time, my life, and my God given talents causes me more anxiety than anything else.

We’re living in strange and heavy times. The light at the end of the tunnel feels more questionable than ever before, but I’ve come to believe that staying still doesn’t protect us from that, it simply guarantees we never find it.

How else do we find the light if we don’t search for it?

Comfort, for me, has an expiration date. My brain enjoys it the way my body enjoys a week of eating badly — fine at first, then suddenly everything in me is screaming for a vegetable. I reach my fill and then I need to go work out aggressively.

Don’t get me wrong, I love routine, my ADHD basically requires it. But there’s a difference between structure and a cage, and being too comfortable has always felt like the latter. It’s as if I’m living inside someone else’s idea of what my life should look like, all fear and untapped potential, with the days blending into each other.

I don't think timing is ever really an accident, it is divine. Something opens up, and you either walk through the door or you don't. I walked through it, and even if this isn't towards the right destination, at least it moved me forward.

In order to keep you all connected, I’ll be sharing my big 3 of the day, every day.

1. Cinema/literature capturing my attention

2. Products I’m obsessed with lately

3. Food/drink that deserves praise

1. The Audacity (on AMC+)

   Maybe I’m biased because I work in tech but I haven’t seen a show this accurate at depicting an industry and the people within it’s sphere.

2. Tom Ford - Tabacco Vanille (travel)

   Smelling good is more for me than others and this is the most chic travel perfume that packs an incredibly long lasting punch. I think I will always have one in my pursue from now on.

   

3. Dirty Gin (Hendricks) Martini’s w/ cheese stuffed olives

   I don’t think I need to explain, if you know you know. I hope to have plenty while I’m here.

   

Till tomorrow!

P.S. Happy Mother’s day to all the wonderful mommies out there, xo.

He meant it technically. The push between elitism and desire, between challenging a house and honoring it, but I think he stumbled onto something that lives far outside the couture.

Change does not arrive as opportunity, it arrives as conflict, and what we decide that conflict means determines almost everything that follows.

“Change is conflict and that might be the point.”

When Matthieu Blazy debuted at Chanel last October, the Grand Palais became a planetarium. Glowing orbs suspended overhead, a cosmos suggesting something had been launched into a new orbit…the room held its breath.

What followed was a debut collection that earned a standing ovation and simultaneously divided the internet (his recent collection in Paris doing the same). The quilted 2.55 bags came down the runway crushed and unclasped. The camellias were crumpled or missing entirely. The tweed suits, perhaps the most sacred of all Chanel signifiers, arrived deconstructed and unrecognizable to people who had spent decades loving them in their original form. Blazy had set himself precisely that challenge: strip away everything used to identify Chanel and see if the soul of it remains. It was an act of both reverence and disruption, and the crowd felt both.

Some called it a renaissance.

Others, quietly or not, asked whether it was still Chanel at all.

Much like Blazy, Anderson is navigating the same tension at Dior. His early collections have polarized the industry. Red carpet looks collected praise and criticism in equal measure. His sophomore menswear show split rooms. And yet, underneath the noise, something coherent is forming. He has described his whole approach as an ongoing rhythm: “challenging and embracing, challenging, embracing.” Not resolution. Perpetual tension, held with intention.

This is what serious change looks like. It does not arrive with consensus. It arrives with argument.

The reason conflict reads as threat is that we are attached to our ideas of what things are meant to be.

Chanel is supposed to feel like Chanel.

Your friendships are supposed to hold their shape.

The life you imagined is supposed to follow the map you drew for it.

When something disrupts those shapes, the first feeling is rarely curiosity. It is grief, or anger, or the particular disorientation of looking at something you once loved and no longer recognizing it.

I know this feeling personally. In friendships that ended without warning. In people I thought were permanent who simply were not and refused to be. In the way certain chapters of my life closed so abruptly I had no time to say goodbye to the girl I was inside them. For a long time, I read all of it as punishment. I catalogued what had been lost and called it suffering, because that is what it felt like.

The conflict was not the ending, it was the start of another blueprint.

There is a concept in fashion called an “edit”.

A collection arrives on the runway at one hundred looks. What a store carries, what a customer encounters, is a fraction of that. The edit is not a failure of the original vision. It is a decision about what belongs where, and when.

I have started thinking about the disruptions in my own life the same way. The relationships that dissolved, the environments that shifted without my consent, the doors that closed with a finality I could not negotiate, the delusion and anger that has ensued. I used to stand at those doors and search for what I had done wrong. Now I think to myself about what was being made possible on the other side.

When I look back at the losses that felt most catastrophic, I can trace a line from each of them to something I could not have had otherwise had the tragedy not taken place.

New people who arrived only because there was space. A version of myself that could not have existed inside the container that was broken. What felt, at the time, like being discarded was actually something closer to being repositioned. I was being edited, not punished.

There is a word for this kind of working: providence. Not the tidy version, but the real one, which rarely announces itself as grace. The version that looks, in the moment, indistinguishable from loss.

What strikes me most about the reaction to Blazy’s Chanel F/W 26 collection is that the people who loved it and the people who resisted it were experiencing the same emotion. Both felt the distance between what they expected and what they received. The difference was only in what they decided that gap meant.

For some, the gap was a provocation. For others, it was an invitation.

This is the hinge point of every significant change. The emotion is almost identical on both sides of it. The unsteadiness, the sense that the ground has shifted. Whether we name that feeling loss or possibility depends entirely on what we believe about change itself.

Anderson put it plainly, “we love the aristocrat and hate the aristocrat. We love elitism and resent it in the same breath.”

He’s describing fashion’s paradox of desire but he was also describing how we relate to anything we have assigned deep meaning to. We want it to stay and when it changes, it feels like an abandonment and betrayal, even when it is actually an evolution.

Fashion houses, much like people, who refuse this evolution do not survive.

Maturity, I think, does not happen in the absence of conflict. It is the growing capacity to sit inside it without immediately declaring it a catastrophe.

It is being able to watch Blazy send a crushed bag down the runway and hold open the possibility that this is not an ending but a beginning you do not yet have language for. It is being able to lose a friendship or sibling and resist the narrative where you are only a victim of someone else’s choices. It is standing in an altered environment and allowing yourself to say: “I do not know what this is yet. Something is being built.”

The most devastating changes in my life have also been the most deliberate ones. The ones I could not have engineered and would not have chosen. Those were, almost without exception, the ones that opened the largest doors. Not because pain is secretly good, but because removal is sometimes the first act of construction.

Space had to be made. I had to be made ready for it.

When Blazy turned the Grand Palais into a cosmos, it was not an accident. A solar system implies things in motion, objects finding new orbits, patterns emerging at a scale larger than any single piece. Displacement that is, from far enough away, order.

Change is conflict.

It has always been conflict, from the first season a new designer takes over a beloved house to the Monday when an ordinary friendship quietly ends. The conflict is not a sign something is going wrong. It is the sound of something becoming.

I think about my own life that way now. The people who left. The versions of myself I had to retire. The environments that stopped being home before I was ready to leave them.

None of it was abandonment, it was the map getting larger.

In March of this year, it will be six years since Covid-19 changed our lives.

Almost everything we have grown accustomed to has radically been altered.

The way we gather and meet people. How we use social media. Dating. Hundreds of thousands of restaurants and beloved businesses, gone. DEI no longer a priority. Economic security doesn’t exist. America is no longer the world superpower it’s been for the last 126 years.

Rome is in free fall.

And yet, those are only the obvious changes but what about the ones which pervade our every day lives? The price of food has skyrocketed, while the rate of rectal colon cancer is on the rise for young adults due to the chemicals put in food and beverages (that includes water). AI is demolishing the planet and the job market, while simultaneously propping the economy up. There are multiple pedophiles running the country. Sports gambling is rampant. Journalist are being arrested. People of color and immigrants are being stalked, kidnapped, and killed daily without repercussion.

It feels harder than ever to find moments of joy in a world so chaotic. It feels easier than ever to fall into a state of despair. However, what if all of this is the start of something rather than end times?

What if this is the finale of one reality and the painful birth of another?

I can be as much a pessimist as the next person, but something in me resists the seduction of hopelessness.

Instead of asking why this is happening? it requires different questions:

What is this difficult moment asking of us?

In what ways does this moment require us to evolve, change, and adapt?

Where does this moment require our undivided attention?

While there are many things we cannot control, we have full autonomy over how we impact my loved ones and the ways we engage with our community. We have power over where, how, and with whom we spend my time. Over the ideas we nurture. Over the energy we amplify. Over whether we choose cynicism or courage.

Darkness will always exist, it always has, but darkness has never built a world on its own. In every historical era where an empire has collapsed, the people were caught at a crossroads, one that demanded active participation about what comes next.

Post system failure, the people are left to decide how to rebuild and it is those who refuse to surrender their imagination of peaceful possibilities, who do not succumb to the belief that cruelty is necessary, that hold true governance over self and future generations to come.

It is cowardly to believe that people and realities are incapable of transformation. It is even more spineless to cling to that belief in perpetuity when new evidence contradicts it, when growth stands right in front of us and we turn away because the current story we tell ourselves is more comforting to digest.

Darkness isn’t dispelled by the loudest cynics. It moves because of the steady hands of those who choose to do the right thing, the hard thing, in spite of the outcome or circumstance. It cracks little by little when people remain humble, vulnerable, and open. Then the light rushes in just as we refuse the narrative that decline is our destiny.

This moment may not be asking us to decode its meaning or to linger too long on 2016 nostalgia, it is asking us to be present and create in real-time. To make meaning through action, neighborliness, discipline, and generosity. By choosing to be someone who leaves rooms, streets, group chats, companies, and cities better than they found them.

Maybe this is the great test of our time: not whether darkness exists, but whether we will organize ourselves around light. We are not powerless observers of our reality, we are participants. And if Rome is falling, then let us be the ones learning how to rebuild it differently when the dust finally settles.

For others, the reset follows the Chinese zodiac. Their year begins on February 17, with the Lunar New Year, as we shed the Wood Snake and prepare to welcome the Fire Horse.

Then there are the overachievers. These are the people who have been consistent for the last sixteen days, fully locked in and crystal clear about what they want from this year. They are not snoozing the 5 a.m. alarm. They are in the gym by 6 a.m., and after clocking out of their nine-to-five, they turn toward their passions and hobbies with the same discipline.

These groups occupy entirely different states of mind, yet they are united by a shared undercurrent. 2026 feels different. It feels more optimistic. No matter how the year begins, the race ahead is longer than our current surge of motivation and willpower. In time, those who felt no cosmic shift on January 1 will find their stride, and those who began in a sprint will settle into their baseline.

So let’s say we honor the Lunar New Year, and February 17 marks the official start of 2026. Even then, preparation is required. Moving from the Wood Snake to the Fire Horse is a transition that calls for intention.

This week we’ve seen people go with archival photos from 2016, nostalgia has made something clear. We are startled by how quickly time has slipped through our fingers. A decade has passed, marked by staggering technological, scientific, economic, global, and political change. It is almost too much to fully grasp.

Still, as we move deeper into this new year, which I can almost guarantee will look nothing like 2016, I’ve chosen a word to guide me through whatever twists and turns lie ahead.

That word is purpose.

I chose it because looking back at 2016 made one thing painfully clear: time waits for no one. It moves forward with or without our consent, and without something to anchor us, it’s easy to be swept up in the noise of the day to day.

The days are long, emotions shape our reality, and everyone, in one way or another, is searching for an escape. Purpose pulls me back. It realigns me with something larger than myself and forces an honest reckoning with how I spend my energy, my time, and my attention.

Purpose asks difficult questions:

What is purpose to me?

What is my purpose?

Am I walking in my purpose today?

Have I ever felt like I was walking in my purpose?

If not, what do I need to do to get on that path?

What I anticipate will happen is some days purpose will feel clear. While other days, it will feel distant but even then, it serves as a compass rather than a destination. A reminder that fulfillment is not found in speed, applause, or comparison, but in alignment.

So as this year continues to unfold, however and whenever it truly begins for you, I’ll leave you with a question worth sitting with:

What word will guide you through this year, and what kind of life would honoring it ask you to live?

Don’t get me wrong, the dream is still ringing in a new year on a remote island with my closest friends and family. That version of celebration lives close to my heart. But this birthday asks me to begin from a more somber place.

In 2021, my beloved uncle, someone so deeply dear to me, passed away on the morning of my 26th birthday. From that day forward, this date has carried a different weight. It is forever intertwined with grief, but also with a profound appreciation for life itself. In a way, that feels fitting for another revolution around the sun—an ending, a beginning, and the quiet reckoning that lives in between.

So with that in mind, I thought this would be a meaningful moment to share 31 things I’ve learned in 31 years. I hope some feel familiar, others serve as gentle reminders, and that at least one sparks thoughtful reflection.

1. Karma is real. Your life is a reflection of how you treat others and the quicker you can realize that everything eventually comes back around (and I mean it when I say everything, no matter how long it takes, the universe will always even the scoreboard) the faster you will decide to move with love, kindness, forgiveness, and intentionality.

2. You are the company you keep. Be extremely thoughtful regarding who you surround yourself with. As Jim Rohn said, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with", therefore choose very very wisely who you spend your time with and ruthlessly audit your circle often. P

3. If you’re the most successful person in your circle, find another circle. It’s easy to feel like you’re at the top when you’re doing better than those around you but that feeling is actually stagnation, not growth. Growth requires proximity to people who stretch you, humble you, and inspire you to evolve.

4. You have purpose, even if you can’t see it now. Purpose isn’t always loud or linear. It unfolds quietly through curiosity, discipline, and showing up. Every single day is an invitation to get closer to it.

5. Health is actually wealth. Take care of your body, invest your skin, hair, nails, indulge in self-care, and exercise your mind. How you treat yourself, your mind, your body is the catalyst for how you do everything else in life.

6. Build genuine relationships. Not transactional ones masked as “networking”. Not performative ones. Real ones. The kind that hold you accountable and hold you up when the worst moments in life inevitably arrive.

7. You are only as old as your mentality around aging. How tiring is it to dread another year? Aging is a privilege. I believe you start to look older the moment you believe you’re old.

8. Do things that terrify you. Fear is often just excitement that hasn’t been properly introduced yet.

9. Everyone should do therapy. Being intellectual and self-aware with a high EQ does not mean you don’t need additional help. Therapy is like a deep clean to an already tidy (and/or messy) mind.

10. Envy and jealousy are external projections for internal emotions. Another person’s feelings of envy, jealousy, and anger are often unresolved insecurities that have nothing to do with you. It’s best to not take it personally and remember, you could also exude these behaviors if you’re not careful.

11. More people should be single. Not being coupled is actually the best gift the universe can give. It’s a time in life which allows for self-introspection and action untethered to the thoughts and feelings of another person. It teaches you how you move through the world without negotiation. Who you become when no one else’s needs are louder than your own. Romantic relationships are a serious responsibility and too often people jump into that responsibility before they’re ready.

12. Craving partnership and community is normal. It’s possible to be whole and still want to be witnessed. Community is not a weakness—it’s a biological truth.

13. Family + Friends who feel like family are everything. Sometimes it’s blood. Sometimes it’s chosen. What matters is who you can be unguarded with, the people who know your history without holding it against you. People who are willing to accept you as you are. These are the people who shape your sense of home.

14. Money can’t buy taste but it can buy happiness. It buys options, time, rest, safety and peace of mind. There is nothing noble about wanting less for yourself. Wanting a lavish, wealthy life is not shallow. Pro tip: stay away from people who make you feel like it is.

15. Actions are more important than words. We tell people who we are and how to treat us through our actions. People are listening more intensely than you think, so move carefully and intentionally.

16. Privacy > oversharing When everything is shared, nothing is sacred. Some moments deserve to exist without commentary or validation. Not everything needs to be processed in public to be real and external applause will never satisfy what you’re really seeking.

17. Read. Write. Watch great films. We live in a world of endless brain-rotting media consumption. Similar to when we eat junk food for days on end, our bodies and minds will start to reflect what we ingest. Swap out the bad for the good stuff.

18. Culture must be intentionally preserved. Traditions, language, style, and stories fade when they aren’t protected. Document everything. Learn your parents’ language. Save things. Passing things down is an act of love.

19. Social media will never replace IRL. Digital connection is not a substitute for presence. Social media cannot supplement real life interactions. Real connection requires showing up for people physically, emotionally, consistently.

20. Travel to places out of curiosity, not trendiness. Go places that make you curious, not places that perform well online. The best trips leave you quieter, more observant, and slightly rearranged.

21. Financial literacy is essential. Money gives you agency. It allows you to make decisions from clarity instead of fear. The longer you take to learn it, the harder life will be.

22. Give more than you receive. Giving time, attention, resources is meant to ground you in what’s actually important. It reminds you that abundance grows when it’s shared, not hoarded.

23. Fall in love, get your heart broken, and then do it all over again. Heartbreak is not a failure—it’s evidence that you showed up honestly. The alternative is far worse: living untouched.

24. Eat everything once. Try everything at least once. Taste is a form of curiosity, and curiosity keeps life interesting. It’ll also make you more interesting.

25. Set goals and watch the universe conspire to help you achieve them. When you’re clear about what you want, the world responds differently, opportunities appear, people align, movement begins.

26. Journal, Journal, Journal. Writing things down reveals patterns you can’t ignore. Journaling isn’t about perfection—it’s about honesty. Your thoughts become clearer once they stop living only in your head and you typically have more foresight than you can see in the present moment.

27. “I don’t know” is better than acting like you do. Pretending to have certainty where you don’t only delays understanding. It closes the door to curiosity, learning, and growth. Admitting what you don’t know requires humility, but it also creates space for better questions, better decisions, and better outcomes. There is strength in pausing, listening, and allowing yourself to be a student again.

28. Do not let other people’s projections interfere with your journey. Their assumptions often reflect their own fears or limitations. Never ever inherit what isn’t yours.

29. Forgiveness will free you, resentment will cage you. Holding resentment keeps you tied to the past, while letting go creates space for something new.

30. Consistently ask yourself difficult questions and answer honestly, then watch how your life changes. Lie to everyone besides yourself. Holding a mirror up to yourself is uncomfortable but essential for your own growth. To avoid these ugly questions and avoid all accountability is to do the greatest disservice to yourself, your destiny, and the relationships you hold dear.

31. Tomorrow is a new day. Whenever you wake up is your own morning. No matter what yesterday held—grief, mistakes, joy, clarity—tomorrow arrives with possibility. Use it gently and wisely.

That’s all I got for now. Talk soon.

With love,

Ifeoma.

Long time, no talk.

I feel like I say that more often than I should, but here we are.

I won’t apologize for how long it’s taken me to climb back on this metaphorical Substack horse. I’ve been busy savoring the last stretch of summer, unplugged and unbothered.

Most recently, I traveled back to Michigan to conclude summer and celebrate the start of fall with family and friends from high school. If Michigan in the fall were a person, it would be a splash paint artist, flinging color with no restraint with leaves ablaze in reds, yellows, oranges, and greens. The mornings at home were crisp, airy and the afternoons softened into a warm embrace. And the quiet—God, the quiet—was so thick it forced me to hear myself again.

I needed that.

Because lately, I’ve been feeling lost in the noise of New York. I came here to shake myself awake, to stop hiding in my apartment like I did in Chicago and I’ve succeeded: dinners, rooftops, late nights, new friends, the frantic pulse of a city that never lets you sit still. But stillness has a way of finding you eventually, especially as the year bends toward its close and the planets insist on reminding you they are up there, pulling tides and moods alike.

If you read my last post, Let’s Not Be Delusional, you know I unexpectedly stumbled into feelings for a man this summer, which has become something of a rarity in my thirties. We had one magical date and then I did the thing women are not supposed to do: I cared too quickly, too openly. People love to say dating isn’t a game, but let’s not lie to ourselves—the game is real and the woman who shows her hand first usually ends up playing alone.

The feelings were not mutual and instead of shrugging it off, I spiraled.

I conducted my heartbreak like a panel discussion. Friends, coworkers, my parents, even the woman tasked with lasering my bikini line (bless her) were forced to listen and engage. I wasn’t necessarily looking for advice, I was looking for confirmation of the cruel chorus already in my head: he didn’t want me because of how I look.

By September, I’d sentenced myself with that verdict. Fat. Undisciplined. Undesirable. And to be fair, I hadn’t been treating myself kindly. I skipped the gym, procrastinated on work, smoked, scrolled, and ordered UberEats like it was a second income stream. My body became the scapegoat for every unkept promise to myself.

It was only during my stay at my friend’s cottage in northern Michigan, where I could hear the sound of the birds chirping and the waves crashing against the dock that I realized it was never about him, not entirely. What I truly wanted were the things he carried so naturally—discipline, ambition, gentleness, confidence. I mistook admiration for desire. I projected my hunger for growth onto him and called it feelings.

Projection is insidious. It sneaks in like a whisper and becomes a truth. It convinces you that someone else holds what you’ve been too afraid to cultivate in yourself. I let insecurity and fear take over. I cracked jokes at my own expense to my friends, thinking if I said the mean thing first, I could vocalize what we were all mutually thinking.

However, the real truth, when it finally arrived, was simple but sharp: his rejection hurt because I was already been rejecting myself.

Every skipped workout, every night I numbed instead of created, every dream I pushed to tomorrow—I was telling myself I wasn’t worth choosing.

So I made a choice.

I’ve decided to quit smoking weed (at least for now). I started moving my body with intention again, eating in a way that feels like care instead of punishment. Small shifts, yes, but sacred ones. Most importantly, I decided to speak to myself with the same tenderness I admired in him. To chase my ambitions with the same urgency I wanted him to chase me with. To stop projecting and finally start progressing.

They say you must be the love you seek, or maybe Rihanna said it best to Oprah: ““I want a man that loves me, cherishes me, values me. But they have to know my value in order to value me. They have to know my worth. They can only know my worth if I know my worth.”

I’ve stopped outsourcing my value.

Real talk, we are standing on the edge of another new year and I won’t let a man who can’t see my value distract me from the presence of my own becoming. If love comes, let it find me in the daylight…whole, laughing, fully confident and awake to myself.

And although people are quick to make comments about how excited they are for fall (aren’t we all?), it feels to me like we’re already excavating chunks of time from the calendar, carving out entire weeks just to make room for sweaters and cinnamon-spiced everything.

It’s as if we cannot sit still in the season we’re in, always fast-forwarding toward the promise of comfort in colder weather.

But truthfully, I am holding on. Clinging, really. To the last few days and weeks of summer in a way I don’t think I ever have before. I’m savoring it all, the way you savor the last few bites of a meal you know you’ll remember for years—chewing slower, pausing between sips, trying to trick time into lingering just a little longer.

I still call girlfriends on Friday evenings with half-baked plans that turn into full nights. I still find myself perched on patios, martini glass in hand, talking under strings of café lights. Too often, I leave my apartment without a jacket, ill-prepared for the sharp bite of a 60-degree breeze. And still, I refuse to give in—walking briskly, bracing for goosebumps that never quite fade, choosing stubbornly to believe summer hasn’t left me yet. Inevitably, I return home in the blur of early morning, makeup smudged, heart warm, another memory tucked into the season’s growing collection.

This summer, I let myself do everything I wanted.

I traveled to places that expanded me. I ate whatever my heart desired, without apology or hesitation. I abandoned strict routines, and in doing so, I discovered that spontaneity is its own discipline. I gave my time generously to friends and family, and I kept time selfishly for myself. I entertained flings that fizzled and flared. I broke a few hearts, only to find karma circling back with heartbreak of my own. I allowed myself to love and to be loved, even when it was messy, even when it was fleeting. I journaled until the ink stained my fingers. I laughed until my stomach cramped. I cried until my sheets absorbed the salt.

There are no regrets here—just stories.

And if you’ve been following me since the beginning, you’ll remember my Summer 2025 Predictions post. I wrote then about living fully, about saying yes to things that scare us, about stretching past the borders of our comfort zones. Because comfort, while cozy, is often just a polite form of confinement.

Routine gives us safety, but it also clips our wings.

This summer, I decided to be delusional about what was possible. And as it turns out, delusion was the best travel companion I could have chosen. My grand illusions didn’t just meet reality, they exceeded it.

But here’s the thing about delusion: like summer, it has an expiration date.

Eventually, playtime wanes, the seriousness of life comes knocking. We’re already approaching those months—the colder, darker, demanding Q4 and Q1 stretch—where everything shrinks: the daylight, our schedules, our softness. The world asks us to cocoon in coats and commitments, to exchange play for productivity.

And that’s the problem with rushing ahead. One minute you’re flirting with life, and the next, you’re scribbling goals for the following year, wondering where the warmth went.

However, the story of this summer doesn’t end here.

But my delusions are shifting. As I’ve learned this summer, delusion is a slippery kind of medicine. It can soothe the sting of loneliness and dress the wounds of heartbreak in silk, but it can also seduce you into believing the silk is skin—yours, his, anyone’s but the truth.

This summer I met a man who turned the air around me electric. He wasn’t a stranger, no. I’d known him for years, trusted him, shared jokes and quiet confidences. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t just a friend. He was a possibility. A rush of possibility. I allowed myself to believe that the way my body leaned toward him when he spoke, the way I memorized the geometry of his smile, the sensation of his lips against mine, must mean something larger. Surely the universe was conspiring, surely he felt it too.

But what I mistook for mutual gravitation was, perhaps, only my own orbit, spinning wild with the heat of August. His rejection came like an early frost—sharp, undeniable, and impossible to dress for. In one moment, the delusion I had carefully nurtured cracked apart, and with it came the cold-heartedness, the self-deprecation, the aching reminder that even the most careful summer skin can blister.

And still, I can’t bring myself to hate the delusion. Because in those suspended weeks, I felt more alive than I have in years. I felt possibility beating at the walls of my chest. Delusion let me fall—hard, fast, unrepentant. Reality only reminded me how bruised knees sting when they hit the ground.

As seasons shift, so do our expectations. Summer asks us to be expansive—bare-legged, sun-drunk, unmoored. Fall and winter demand discipline, insulation, and rigor.

But who says the elasticity of summer must vanish with the leaves? Who says our capacity for softness, for playful delusion, should fold away like linen sundresses in the back of a closet?

The truth is, I wanted to skip ahead. To fast-forward through the heartbreak I’ve been feeling, past the sting and into the steadiness of colder months, where I have an excuse to cocoon. But life, unlike our feeds, cannot be scrolled through. The ache must be lived. The calendar cannot be cheated.

Summer’s not over, yet.

Delusion comforts; reality anchors. One is a fever dream, the other a grounding stone. Neither is superior, neither inherently cruel or kind. It is the skipping—the refusal to stand in the hard middle, the ache of the in-between—that betrays us most.

So I sit here, still sunburnt from July and August, already sensing the chill of September, wondering if the balance is not about choosing between fantasy and fact, but about holding them both at once. About letting myself be whimsical enough to believe in miracles and true love, while also being rooted enough to accept when they don’t arrive.

And maybe that’s the true gift of summer, it teaches us how to love the delusion and then to let it go, until next year.

Whether it’s overconsumption, procrastination, the lure of a passionate but unraveling entanglement, or the harmless-seeming white lie told without cause— there’s an undeniable allure to self-sabotage. These impulses, indulgences, and small betrayals hold a strange gravity. We know better, often, but knowing isn't always enough.

There’s something irresistibly human in indulging in what’s clearly not good for us.

When thinking about guilty pleasures, I can’t help but to reflect on the generation that came before us— their pleasures were and are fairly modest: a quiet backyard, a stable paycheck, the comfort and familiarity of routine. They moved through a kind of quiet gold rush era in the United States, not of riches unearthed from the ground but of opportunity seamlessly embedded in the everyday. They do not apologize for their contentment because it was hard-earned within a system that seemed to keep its promises.

They were sold a dream — homeownership, a nuclear family, retirement by sixty — and remarkably, though not without effort, they moved through life with the quiet assurance that their labor would be rewarded. They lived by a blueprint we’re still expected to follow, even as its foundations have long since cracked.

We inherited the illusion, but not the conditions that made it possible. And in the absence of that promise, many have drifted, jaded, overstimulated, seeking comfort in small excesses and fleeting indulgences.

Nevertheless, this isn’t a story about the collapse of the American Dream. It’s about the human desire to wants things that aren’t in our best interests.

When I think about this “guilty pleasure” pain/pleasure paradox, I’m primarily fixed on relationships—platonic, romantic, familial.

If you’ve dated into your 30s, I can almost guarantee you’ve found yourself on both sides of the spectrum.

On one side: you’ll chase someone who only ever runs. They don’t want a future with you, just a warm body on a Friday night and the ego boost of your devotion on a Monday morning. So you perform, pirouetting through their imagined fantasies, hoping your perfect act will finally make them see you as more than just an intermission between lovers.

On the other side: you are the one being chased. You say no—politely, then firmly, then with a tinge of exasperation. But still, they linger like a song stuck on repeat, refusing to hear the silence between your words. And you find yourself wondering: Is unrequited love still romantic when you’re the one being cornered by it?

Yet, it all boils down to the same thing, we are conditioned to desire things which are intrinsically more difficult and/or painful to obtain.

For example, when coveting friendship, you’ll buy similar outfits or go to the same establishments, even curate your socials just to get the cool girls to notice you. All without thinking about if the friendship would actually be worthwhile.

With family, (especially if you’re the youngest) you will silence your opinions in order to be allowed to stay in the room. You’ll apologize for everything on behalf of everyone just to find peace with the people you love. And still, an older sibling or parent will inevitably find a way to make you feel insignificant, as if you’re desire for relationship is rooted in something other than pure love.

What if Lauryn Hill wasn’t being poetic, but prophetic? “When it hurts so bad, why does it feel so good?” — not just a lament, but a warning.

A whisper to pay attention.

Why are we so tethered to what diminishes us?

We remain entangled in friendships defined more by performance than reciprocity.

We shape-shift to preserve peace in families while the person causing the chaos continues to break everyone’s heart with little remorse.

We label our habits “guilty pleasures,” though many are neither pleasurable nor harmless, just practiced forms of avoidance dressed as indulgence.

There is a difference between comfort and sedation, between connection and compliance and between desire and compulsion.

But when pain becomes familiar, it’s easy to mistake it for a deeper meaning. We’re more liable to return to the same dynamics, habits, distractions and not because they serve us but because they’re known. We know that if we pursue the thing head on, we feel like we’ve done our best, we can blame the other, but that is a fallacy that must end in order to grow.

The rituals we repeat—emotional, relational, behavioral—are rarely random. We reenact what we believe we’re worthy of. We chase the approval, closeness, and relief in places that have never truly offered them.

I talk about this not as some self-help jargon, but as a self-aware adult.

The work, if there is any, is not to seek more of what feels good or crucify oneself for the sake of peace but to interrogate why so much of what we call “pleasure” depends on our own self-sabotage.

Perhaps, that’s the only way we can finally understand how the things not meant for us will not become through sheer effort alone.

I gave myself a little summer break. An intentional pause from writing weekly, a gentle nudge to redirect my energy toward the other corners of my life. The ones that don’t live Google Doc’s at work or between the lines of a Substack draft.

My 9-5 has been busy. My social life, bustling. My dating life, dare I say, blooming. All of this unfolding while the United States seems to teeter on the edge of collapse.

But that’s not what this week is about. Not the chaos. Not the fires. Not the fear.

This week is about the act of living.

Lately, I’ve found myself wrapped in the same conversation with friends over wine, with strangers in passing, with my family on walks, and it’s always some variation of this: now, more than ever, is the time to live.

Fully.

Brazenly.

Softly.

Loudly.

Whatever flavor your soul craves, the moment is asking you to taste it.

Yes, routines ground us. Yes, the world feels uncertain. Yes, it’s easier to say “maybe next time.” But we forget — we are alive. That’s not a small thing. It’s the only thing.

Living looks different for everyone, but it often starts with a simple yes.

Say yes to plans that feel inconvenient.
Say yes to the last-minute invites.
Say yes to the late-night drives, the awkward first dates, the impromptu dinners, the long-haul flights.
Say yes to putting your phone down and looking someone in the eye.
Say yes to the group trip you keep “thinking about.”
Say yes to your own joy because no one else can choose it for you.

Too many of us are living like we’ve already aged out of adventure. Too disciplined. Too calculated. Too…tired.

We act like we’ve got tomorrow, forgetting that tomorrow is not promised.

Maybe it was the pandemic that made us small, careful, safe. But maybe it’s also been the slow forgetting that time is always moving. That we are not promised anything but this moment.

There will come a time when you look back and realize there’s more time behind you than ahead, and what a tragedy it would be if all you saw were empty weekends, unopened invitations, and too many nights you convinced yourself staying in was “self-care” when really, you were just scared of showing up.

Let your life not be a regretful tale.

Let it be a loud, sprawling, beautiful one — full of dance floors and beach sunrises, of passed plates and shared laughter, of passports stamped and rooms lit up by your presence. Let it be made of stories that start with, “I wasn’t going to go, but…” and end with “…and I’m so glad I did.”

It’s in the kind smile to a stranger.
In the deep talks on balconies.
In the sweaty joy of a concert.
In the wine-soaked summer nights with your girls.
In the trip you said yes to, even when the timing wasn’t perfect.

The truth is, life is never going to slow down and wait for you to feel ready. You have to meet it where it is. In motion. Unscripted. Messy. Beautiful.

So here’s my advice:

Go outside.
Touch grass.
Book the flight.
Make the call.
Wear the dress.
Kiss the person.
Fall in and out of love.

Show up — not just for the party, but for your own damn life.

Because the world is heavy. But you? You’re still light. You still glow. Don’t dim it. Don’t wait. Don’t waste it.

I encourage you to choose to live.

Back then, campaigns didn’t just launch, they landed.

Nike became the brand it is today because the humanity and inspiration within their stories compelled people to point of purchase.

Steve Jobs once said, “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller” and built an empire by telling stories about his products.

Thoughtful stories elicit powerful emotions.

They spark thought and shift culture.

They raise the next generation of artists.

In the 90’s —fashion, music, culture, activism, and sex were going through a revolution. In major cities like New York and Los Angeles, there was an intoxicating vibration and all-encompassing energy. It was visible in the way people communicated, danced, and dressed. It was heard in the music bleeding from car stereos and corner stores.

There was no content to capture or internet to judge. It was just undeniable taste oozing from young and hungry individuals who sought to leave their mark on this earth. Their influence permeated throughout the world despite not having the level of connectivity we see today.

To be more specific, taste as I am defining it, is a sharp, discerning instinct —not handed to someone by a following but cultivated in silence, in solitude, albums listened to, in the pages of magazines, the places visited and the types of food indulged in. Taste isn’t just what’s “cool” or “aesthetic” or “pretty”. It’s a keen sense of self: knowing what you love, what you reject, how you show up and then watching it resonate effortlessly with others.

We’ve misplaced that type of taste or maybe we just exchanged it for 30 second bite size videos with the most likes. Either way, I’ve desperately missed that feeling —the impact of the landing, the depth of the art, and the stickiness of it in culture.

This week, I felt the hum again.

Something shifted. Subtly, yes, but undeniably. A campaign moved me, not just visually, but viscerally. It lingered. An album announcement got me so excited, I revisited the discography of the artist’s and remembered why I love them. I currently can’t stop devouring the books I’m reading, as they expand my understanding of love and female desire.

These feelings remind me that what we consume isn’t just content, it’s consciousness, and if you’re not careful, you’ll let your feed dictate your values before you even realize you’re being programmed.

1. Pusha T and Clipse Are Releasing an Album TODAY, 5/30

I’m a stan, unapologetically. Clipse and Pusha T don’t just drop music, they disrupt memory. In a culture oversaturated with gimmicks and empty calories, they emerge like shadows at high noon —sharp, deliberate, undeniable. With Pharrell at the helm of production, this isn’t a rollout, it’s a summoning. A moment that feels less like marketing and more like disruption to the algorithm.

Pusha’s pen remains surgical, as always: “If the devil’s in the details, then I’m Satanic.” A lyric that slices clean through the noise. He doesn't just rap, he composes lyrical magic. The duo returns as necessary correction to the bullshit we’ve been ingesting, call it a long overdue colonic.

Because we’re in a moment. The industry is cracked open, the sheen worn thin, the rot exposed. Misogyny, abuse, exploitation — no longer whispered, now written in headlines and reported on TikTok. And while the scaffolding shakes, the culture’s craving something heavier. Real men. Real rappers. Artists with spine and pen. What Kendrick did to Drake wasn’t just lyrical warfare, it was recalibration. Just in time for summer.

2. Bottega Venetta Turns 50 and Honors a Legend

After the Met Gala, after the flashbulbs fade and the chaos of couture settles, what remains is always the same: craftsmanship. The real kind, the quiet kind, the kind that doesn’t beg for attention but earns it seam by seam, stitch by stitch.

For me, Bottega Veneta continues to stand in a league of its own. While other brands chase relevance on the back of their creative directors social clout, Bottega refines it and dives further into the feeling, the storytelling — sculpting leather and fabric into heirlooms of modern design. It’s only right they honor designer Edward Buchanan, design director from 1995-2000, who introduced it’s first ready to wear collection.

This year, as they celebrate 50 years of artistry, I find myself reflecting on my own evolution. Turning 30 was a milestone that feels like its own kind of tailoring. A trimming of what no longer fits, a reworking of the silhouette, a reevaluation of the woman I am becoming and a relentless pursuit towards her.

And that woman has always aligned with Bottega.

The house has years of values rooted in intentional resistance to trends and fast fashion’s weightless promises. An aversion to inauthenticity, every piece is a unique love letter to longevity and taste.

As I step further into my 30s, I’m excited to deepen my relationship with the house. The next chapter is ready-to-wear — a piece already waiting, already speaking in its own language of structure and subtlety. I’m not just wearing a brand, I’m stepping into a story that honors both legacy and hopeful futures.

Bottega doesn’t just dress the body. It understands it. And in a world overrun with spectacle, that kind of intimacy feels revolutionary.

3. Chimamanda & Ester Perel Shift My Understanding of Love

It’s been a while since I’ve felt this way.

Cracked open by language, undone by thought. Books stacked on my nightstand have sat unread for months, gathering dust like untouched memories but recently, two voices — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Esther Perel — called me back to myself. Not just to the inquisitive parts but again, the part that feels. The part that aches, dreams, hungers, and questions. The part that reminds me I’m still wildly, complicatedly, beautifully alive.

Adichie’s Dream Count is (so far) lush, intimate, aching with emotional nuance. Her short stories carry that signature sting of hers: delicate then devastating. She doesn’t write for performance, she writes from the gut, perfectly fuzing the nuanced complexities of Igbo and western cultures. Each character is a mirror, fractured but honest, revealing how love, longing, and betrayal can all live in the same body. I’ve caught myself rereading lines just to taste them again, to sit with the discomfort and the truth.

Then there’s The State of Affairs by Esther Perel — a book that doesn’t simply explore infidelity, but reframes it. She isn’t asking us to justify or condemn; she’s asking us to understand. To see desire not as a moral failure but as a sign of something deeper: imagination, disconnection, rebellion, hunger, reinvention. It’s not a book about cheating, it’s a book about being human.

In its pages, I found grace. Permission. The room to breathe between societal expectations and personal truth. To understand that infidelity in any form is typically more grey than black and white.

Together, these two works have jolted me awake. They’ve reminded me that sexuality isn’t as surface level as sex itself. That love isn’t linear. That affairs — emotional, physical, intellectual — often arrive when we’re searching for something we can’t yet name. These authors have made me reflect, reimagine, and re-enter the world of women who are not afraid to feel deeply or ask difficult questions to their partners or themselves.

I haven’t been able to stop reading and that hasn’t happened in a while. These books have sparked the familiar, forgotten pulse: the thrill of discovery. The seduction of story. The freedom of perspective. They’ve stirred the water. And for the first time in a long time, I’m not trying to calm the waves I’m letting them carry me.

This week reminded me that aliveness doesn’t come from staying informed, it comes from being moved.

The feeling is present in music that cuts through the noise, clothes that carry weight, and words that challenge the way I see love, desire, and myself. The kind of work that doesn’t just pass through me, it forces pause.

We deserve more moments like that.
More art that confronts.
More beauty that holds.
More language intended to stretch us beyond our carefully designed echo-chambers.

So if something stirs you, stop and stay there. Let it shake you. Let it rearrange something. Let it remind you that you’re paying attention, you’re engaged, you’re excited, you have an opinion, and that you are always seeking to feel.

The system is designed to keep you complacent. As long as it tastes good, you’ll keep consuming it. We’ve traded nourishment for convenience, and now we justify it with shrugs and jokes: “Everything’s bad for you anyway.”

But even if that were true, even if we’re all doomed — it still matters what you choose. If the poison and the cure are sitting side by side on the grocery shelf, when you reach for the poison out of habit, ignorance, and branding, it says more than you think.

I know you’re rolling your eyes. You’ve already tuned me out.

When you’re grocery shopping for oat milk and eggs, you’re not looking for a reckoning but once you start noticing what they’ve hidden in plain sight, choosing ignorance starts to feel like the greatest form of self-betrayal.

However, if you do choose to examine a little further, something happens. You begin to see all the other ways we’ve been lied to, numbed, and distracted. It starts with oat milk…

Oatly, Califia, Silk, Almond Breeze

These milk brands are the epitome of engineered.

You’re not just getting oats or almonds or macadamias—you’re getting an emulsified, oil-laden, gum-thickened Frankenstein formula made to mimic the texture of a creamy delicious milk, and you’re wondering why you’re hair is thinning so young or you have digestive issues.

Let’s take Oatly Barista. Beloved by cafés, influencers, and wellness girlies alike. But what’s actually in it?

Water

Oats

Rapeseed oil (aka canola)

Dipotassium phosphate

Calcium carbonate

Tricalcium phosphate

Salt

Vitamins D2, Riboflavin (B2), and B12

Gellan gum

Enzymes

Cute font. Great froth. Trash for your body. The addition of rapeseed oil alone should make you pause…an industrial oil linked to inflammation, processed with heat and solvents, and entirely unnecessary in real food.

“So what are my alternatives?”

Malk, Elmhurst, Whole Milk

The less ingredients, the better.

Purified Water

Oats/Nut

Sea Salt

Vanilla

These are the good ones, for now.

See, it starts with you reading the back of the box instead of just the front. Seeing past the packaging, straight to the ingredients. Not falling for words like “organic” or “non-gmo”. You realize that most of the “healthy” things we’re being sold are just junk food in yoga pants but the real question is, do you care?

Do you care enough about your skin, your hair density, aging, fertility, your DNA or potentially having chronic illness later down the road?

Because once you say you do, it’s hard to look away.

You can’t unsee the ingredients. You can’t un-feel how your body responds to real food versus processed slop. You can’t un-know that there are systems profiting off your distraction, your cravings, your disinterest in the fine print.

So what does your milk say about you?

IF you’re still reaching for Oatly & Friends…

There’s a good chance your digestion is off, your energy is inconsistent, and your skin or hormones are quietly bearing the burden of ingredients you’ve never questioned. It’s not about shame—it’s about awareness. Because what we consume regularly becomes the foundation of how we feel, think, and function.

Are you choosing what your body actually knows how to digest or for what tastes the best? Are you trusting the front of the label or are you willing to flip it over and read between the lines?

Because maybe alt milk isn’t just a dietary preference, it’s a mirror. A small but telling reflection of how disconnected we’ve become from real food and how easily wellness and the buzzwords within this ecosystem has been commodified.

And what if that choice (what you pour into your coffee each morning) isn’t just about milk but about reclaiming agency? About returning to foods that nourish, not perform. About choosing alignment over illusion.

Because if the food industry can mislead you on something as basic as milk, imagine what else it’s gotten away with.

However, if you reach for the cleanest ingredients?

Clean Alternatives & Whole Milk (Especially Raw, Grass-Fed, Local)

You’ve stepped off the conveyor belt. You’ve started asking the uncomfortable questions. You’ve probably read Michael Pollan, or at the very least, know how to pronounce “ghee.”

You value what’s real, even if it’s harder to find. You’re less concerned with what looks good and more invested in what actually nourishes your body. You understand not all fat is bad, that food is information, and that tradition often holds wisdom modern convenience has forgotten.

You’re skeptical of fads and cautious with labels.

You trust your body, and you’re learning to listen. Not to follow trends on TikTok. You’re invested in how your skin clears up, your digestion evens out, and your energy stabilizes when you return to whole foods made with intention.

So maybe this whole thing wasn’t about milk after all.

Choosing to care is infectious. It starts with self and extends outward into everyone and everything.

So, if the milk in your fridge has 13 ingredients and one of them ends in "-phosphate," consider this your sign to pivot. You don’t need to become a food monk or grow your own almonds, but you can start giving a shit.

Because when you start with milk, you might find yourself unlearning everything.
And in a world that benefits from your numbness? That might just be the most nourishing thing of all.

Now, go forth. Read the back of the label. Google or Yuka app “rapeseed oil.” Side-eye the barista milk. Question the protein bar. And if someone asks why you’re suddenly so extra about your groceries, just smile and say:

“I woke up.”

And if that’s not the beginning of a revolution, I don’t know what is.

Those words still haunt me, echoing in the quiet hours of the night or just as the sun starts to stretch across my sheets. They swirl in my head like spearmint mouthwash in between the sides of ones mouth or whiskey in a cut-crystal glass—sharp, stinging, and impossible to ignore.

You have to understand, being belittled, hurt, manipulated, and discarded was my baseline for love. That was the water I learned to swim in. So I never imagined that one day, I could be the one to cause the pain, that I could be the one who left scars on someone’s heart.

I was always the hopeless romantic. The loyal girlfriend. The ride-or-die. The one who would overextend, overcompensate, overstay. I learned to mistake losing myself for loving someone deeply because I was taught that love was earned through endurance. That to keep a relationship, you had to bend. That the best women were the ones who didn’t ask for too much.

But the truth is, no one ever teaches you how to come back to yourself when you've given too much away. There’s no roadmap for that. Just a quiet reckoning, a slow realization that love shouldn’t cost me my sense of self. And once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it.

However, what happened next was a byproduct of my own trauma.

I became the villain.

After years of swallowing betrayal, reckless cheating, emotional whiplash, manipulation that left me questioning my own reality, I snapped. I stepped out of the relationship in the same way he had done to me so many times before. But this time, I didn’t just cheat. I fell in love with someone else. And instead of confronting the damage head-on, I kept it quiet. I nurtured both lives in secret, until one day I just… disappeared. I ended it without ceremony. No closure. No confession. Just silence.

And I didn’t care what he thought of me. Not then. I didn’t feel like I owed him decency after everything I had survived. In fact, there was a part of me that relished the chaos. That savored the taste of reversal, the power in not explaining myself. I wore the role of the villain like red lipstick: loud, unapologetic, and a little seductive.

But here’s the thing no one tells you: being the antagonist in someone’s story rarely brings the satisfaction you imagine it will. When the adrenaline fades and the silence stretches, all you’re left with is the echo of your own choices.

And it made me realize something bigger, something a little uncomfortable.

We are all the villain in someone’s story.

You can be careful, thoughtful, even kind and still be cast as the heartbreaker, the bad friend, the one who "changed." You can end a relationship face-to-face with the best intentions, and they’ll still say you handled it wrong. You can outgrow someone quietly and still be painted as cruel. Because the truth is, perception is reality and we don’t get to edit someone else’s version of the story.

So I’ll ask you something I’ve had to ask myself:

In whose story are you the villain and why? Do you think it’s worth trying to change the character they’ve built in their mind?

Maybe the point of this isn’t to defend ourselves, or to seek redemption in every chapter. Maybe the point is to live with more awareness. To stop contorting ourselves into saviors or martyrs and instead accept the complexity of being human.

We break hearts. We get ours broken. We make mistakes that we can’t take back. And still—we grow. We learn. We try again.

Because the goal isn’t perfection. It’s honesty. And sometimes, healing begins the moment you stop trying to be the hero.

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Just silence.
Sharp, deliberate silence that cut deeper than I expected it to.

I found out recently through a mutual friend, the kind of reveal that makes your stomach turn in both clarity and shame, that a group of girls I was growing close to stopped being friends with me because of a…boy.

A boy.
Not a betrayal. Not a valid reason to fall-out. Not even a misunderstanding. Just the idea that I may have gotten too close, been too seen, or taken up a little too much space, and so they quietly voted me out of the friendship circle. No ballots. No closing arguments. No explanation.

And honestly, I was devastated. Not because I thought we were soul sisters but because I thought we were adults who had a level of mutual respect for one another.

This is the thing about jealousy, it rarely arrives in a grand entrance. It slips in through comparison. Through the moments when someone else’s light feels like it’s dimming yours. It festers quietly in the corners of community, until it starts to rot the relationships you once valued.

But here’s the truth: there is no place for jealousy in true friendship.

Friendship, the real kind, is built on the belief that we’re better because of one another. That your glow doesn’t threaten mine. That when I see you being chosen, celebrated, loved, I don’t shrink. Instead, I choose to cheer loudly, emphatically, and genuinely.

We don’t talk about how hard it is to acknowledge feelings of jealousy within female friendships, a dynamic where comparison is intrinsically built in. Not to mention, the world has taught us there can only be one —only one seat at the table, one man to choose you, one job to validate you, one version of what success truly looks like.

So what happens when the person you’re becoming friends gets what you secretly wanted? What happens when your friend is the one the room keeps looking at? Or the name men and women in your life keep asking about?

Do you still clap?
Or do you quietly look away?

I’ve had to ask myself those questions, too. None of us are above jealousy. But the difference is whether we let it erode our relationships or reveal where we still need to grow.

The girls I used to be friends with weren’t mean. They weren’t cruel. But they were scared — scared that my shine meant theirs was fading. And instead of saying that out loud, they just disappeared.

And that’s what hurts the most, not the envy but the exit.

Friendship is not perfect. It’s not always pretty but to me? It’s sacred.

And sacred things deserve honesty, not silent treatments. They deserve hard conversations, not group separate chats excluding you.

The more I grow, the more I realize I don't want friends who only clap when I'm quiet. I want friends who cheer when I’m loud and loved and lit up. I want friends who know how to hold space and have healthy boundaries. Who can say, “Hey, I didn’t like when you did this,” instead of ghosting me when their ego gets bruised. I’m not afraid of a little tension, I’m afraid of women who pretend everything’s fine while slowly backing away.

To be jealous of your friends is to misunderstand friendship entirely.

You can admire a woman and still be her friend.
You can want what she has without resenting her for having it.
And if you can’t? Then you we’re never a real friend.

So if you ever find yourself in my position — iced out, left confused and unchosen — don’t internalize it. Don’t twist yourself trying to solve a puzzle that never made sense to begin with.

Jealousy makes people act strange but the women who are meant to walk beside you, won’t flinch when it’s your turn to shine.

Therefore, I’ll leave you with this question:
Do the women around you really love you or do they just like having you when you’re a little less shiny than them?

To the girls who left without a word:
I hope you find peace.
I already have.

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What I’m offering is a working theory. One that has slowly taken shape over the past decade through observation, pattern recognition, and continued reflection. It began as a loose hypothesis and has since matured into a framework I can no longer dismiss as anecdotal or incidental.

Specifically, I’ve noticed a recurring set of traits among a certain demographic: heterosexual men over the age of 35 who have never engaged in a long-term, committed relationship or whose last meaningful romantic bond dates back to adolescence.

In contrast to their female counterparts, whose later-in-life single-hood often stems from a conscious decision to prioritize personal growth, professional development, geographic mobility, or in the most extreme of cases the refusal to marry on the basis of abuse and forced child marriage, these men appear to exhibit patterns far more concerning. While exceptions exist, the prevailing trend suggests that these older single men have a heightened susceptibility to behaviors that are emotionally avoidant, socially regressive, and in some cases, overtly misogynistic.

To be clear, this is not about moral judgment but about sociological inquiry:

1. What cultural, psychological, or interpersonal forces allow men to remain disconnected from intimate partnership while aging into roles of increased societal power and visibility?

2. And what are the downstream effects—on themselves, on women, and on the ecosystem of modern relationships?

Take, for example, men like Sean “Diddy” Combs. A mogul by every measure—wealth, influence, cultural legacy, yet his personal life reads like a case study in arrested emotional development. He’s dated beautiful women but abused every single one of them (aside from Jlo). His inability to fully commit despite fathering multiple children, and most recently, the disturbing reveal of abuse, rape, and coercion suggest something deeper than mere bachelorhood. This isn't about lifestyle preference, it's about an absence of relational accountability that, unchecked, becomes corrosive.

Then there’s the recent news of Shannon Sharpe, whose charisma and confidence have gotten him a coveted position in sports media. He often boasts about his independence and dating younger women, but beneath the surface lies a paradox: a man so publicly self-assured but privately evasive, predatory, and clearly self-hating when it comes to his choice in companions. On his podcast, he has admitted to choosing his career over love, a sentiment echoed by many men who equate emotional commitment with limitation rather than expansion.

Take Bill Belichick, a coach revered for his football IQ and super bowl wins. While he's not publicly embroiled in scandal, his story adds to the chorus of powerful men aging into a type of solitude that does more harm than good, with a woman old enough to be granddaughter.

Men who are surrounded by professional networks, groupies, and lack the deeper community bonds that offer sustainable emotional grounding in later life, are bound to end up weird.

While women are often scrutinized for aging without a ring, the stakes for men may actually be more perilous.

According to a 2023 study published in Psychology Today, single men over 40 are statistically more likely to suffer from loneliness, depression, and alcohol abuse than their married counterparts. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies on happiness, found that strong relationships are the single most important predictor of life satisfaction and health in older age, far more than income or professional success.

The issue isn't singleness in and of itself. It's that men, especially in the United States, often lack the community infrastructures required to sustain emotional well-being outside of romantic relationships. Women, on the other hand, typically build and maintain complex networks of friendship and kinship with deep emotional depth. When men are single, especially without children or close social ties, they are far more vulnerable to chronic isolation.

And let’s talk about the so-called “standards” that some of these men cite: she must be a 10, no kids, no emotional baggage, cook, travel, be submissive, be a freak, love sports, have a degree, and never, God forbid, disagree with them. These aren’t standards. They’re codes. Codes for control, fear of being seen, fear of compromise, fear of failure, fear of depth.

In truth, many men are not seeking love, they’re seeking adoration and adoration asks nothing of you. Love, by contrast, requires growth and growth is uncomfortable.

As Warren Buffett once said, “Marrying the right person is the most important decision you’ll ever make. It will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.” Even Jeff Bezos, now re-engaged, credits his ex-wife MacKenzie with being an essential force in the early days of Amazon’s success, anchoring him emotionally while he built something world-changing.

Of course, not all older single men are miserable. Some have poured themselves into mentorship, service, community leadership—men who have evolved into elders, not just aging bachelors. But these men are few and far between nowadays. America does not make it easy to live beyond the pursuit of one’s own success and self-fulfillment. We reward self-interest more than stewardship, conquest more than communion.

So no, this isn’t about bashing men. It’s about asking harder questions about masculinity, emotional labor, and the societal structures we’ve built around male identity. It's about recognizing that prolonged singleness in men is not inherently a red flag, but left unexamined, it can become a symptom of something far more dangerous: a life untested by intimacy.

And so I’ll leave you with this:

What becomes of a man who never lets himself be truly known—by a partner, a community, or even himself?

Because while independence is praised, and solitude romanticized, we forget that some of the most important revolutions begin in relationships.

And when a man refuses to stand in the mirror of another's love, he may find that the life he built alone, is far more hollow than the one he feared he might lose and when the world truly sees him, scars & all, it’s always more monster than man.

It was more than just a season; it was a vibration. A collective mood. The kind of summer that makes you believe in main character energy, rooftop magic, and the healing power of a perfectly timed Drake lyric.

Views had just dropped, Afrobeats was finally getting its long-overdue spotlight, and for a brief, beautiful moment, it felt like the world was dancing in sync.

The kids might roll their eyes, urging us to let it go — “It’s been nearly a decade!” they say, as if time has ever been a fair judge of relevance. But here's the thing, some summers aren't just memories, they're milestones.

They say nostalgia is a seductive liar but if that’s true, then summer 2016 was the best lie we ever told ourselves.

Back then, we lived like the sun would never set on our youth.

Artists had everyone popping bottles in velvet booths, slow-whining in dimly lit sections like we were the stars of our own music video. Afrobeats crept onto every playlist, at every establishment, wrapping itself around the western world like a warm breeze from Lagos to Kingston. Social media didn’t have the role it plays today and people actually had money to spend. Oh, and chivalry wasn’t entirely dead.

Then came CTRL and Lemonade — SZA & Beyonce’s rebellion — and with it, an exodus from stability. Long-term relationships were ending with one final, tearful FaceTime. Monogamy was out. Summer flings with emotionally unavailable men? In. The girlies weren’t looking for forever — we were looking for fire.

In was cleavage, bold lipstick, and bottles with sparklers.

Out was staying home with a face mask and herbal tea.

It really felt like we could have it all. Romance without the ownership. Attention without the risk. Culture without the dilution.

But oh, how the tables have turned.

These days, the club culture is on life support. Sections are replaced by velvet ropes to members-only rooftops, where you pay $1500 every quarter just to sip overpriced cocktails and act like you’re networking. Everyone is always recording. Third spaces designed for POC’s are disappearing at an astronomically rate. Every event requires purchasing a ticket. And the men? Somehow both quieter and more confused. Less likely to approach, more likely to DM you after seeing you in person, because apparently, courage is also in recession.

And speaking of recession, the one we’re already in has done more than shrink our wallets — it’s shrunk our spontaneity. Our capacity for joy now comes with a budget spreadsheet. You used to ask, “Where are we going tonight?” Now it’s, “How much is the cover and do they validate parking?” Nights out require planning, precision, and a post-event Venmo requests. But recessions last longer than a few months, and in today’s market, the cost isn’t just financial, it’s relational.

So the real question is: how do we continue to build community, joy, and intimacy when the price of entry feels just out of reach?

If summer 2016 was the age of curated chaos, I have a feeling summer 2025 will be the beginning of something slower, deeper, and far more intentional. I think we’re on the edge of a collective craving — a desperate desire to get back to the basics.

Real friendships. Real fun. Real flirting. Real feeling.

So I decided to break down what I believe will be in vs. out this summer — not because trends matter, but because how we choose to live does.

And maybe, just maybe, we will look back and be as nostalgic for this summer as we are for summer 2016.

Romance & Dating

IN: In-person flirting and first moves
OUT: Dating Apps
Real seduction doesn’t happen on Hinge. It happens in real life. This summer, the sexiest thing you can do is put down your phone and look someone in the eye! Don’t break eye contact when you lock eyes with intended person. Slip someone your number, ask someone to coffee. And lastly, calling/voice note instead of only texting, idc what anyone says.

IN: Clarity and commitment
OUT: Situationships
Situationships start like a flirtation, unfold like a fantasy, and end with us staring at the ceiling, wondering why the hell we didn’t stop at the first stop sign. At some point, the thrill of ambiguity wears off and what we’re left with is unnecessary emotional whiplash. Maybe the real high comes not from the chase, but from the clarity. The boundaries. The bold decision to actually show up. Somewhere along the way, commitment got a bad rap. But maybe being all in is the thing that teaches us how to love better, communicate deeper, and obtain the kind of fulfilling connection we’re actually craving.

Fashion & Style

IN: Discovering your personal style and building a timeless wardrobe
OUT: Internet fashion trends
If your wardrobe changes every time TikTok does, you’re not evolving—you’re shape-shifting to look like everyone else. And while trends may win the algorithm, they rarely hold the test of time or speak to having real taste. The real flex? Knowing what works for you and wearing it like a signature, I promise it never fails.

IN: Great tailors and shopping your closet
OUT: Extensive clothing hauls
A great tailor is a clothing surgeon, a fairy godmother of fashion, turning “meh” into magnifique. And shopping your closet? That’s just builds your personal style muscle. It forces you to look at fabric labels before you buy and stops you from buy fast fashion. A perfectly tailored outfit is a conversation piece and will invite people to compliment how much you care about your presentation. If you don’t like anything in your closet, it might critical to visit the above. Hauls are fun until you realize half of it still has the tags a year later and it’s all made of polyester. Fast fashion moves quick, but real style has noticeable power.

Travel & Leisure

IN: Solo trips and ‘just because’ vacations
OUT: Waiting for friends to plan something
Sometimes the best plus-one is a passport and a playlist. There’s something wildly romantic about booking a flight with no one to consult but your intuition. Who says you need a reason or a group chat to explore the world? If we waited for everyone to be available, aligned, and interested, we’d never leave the house—let alone the country. Group trips are great in theory, but in practice? You’re better off booking now and sending a postcard later. If a solo trip is too crazy, text your girlfriend who travels all the time and propose a trip but remember, you’re inviting him/her on this trip so do the heavy lifting and look up hotels/plan a tentative itinerary as to incentivize them.

IN: Going to countries you’ve always dreamed of going to
OUT: Going to countries for content
There’s something sacred about finally standing in the places your younger self only saw in books, movies, or daydreams. Travel should be a love letter to your own curiosity—not a checklist for content. Just because it’s trending doesn’t mean it’s calling you. Traveling to a country for a beautiful photo to post on Instagram doesn’t mean the trip was worth your while, it just means you’re easily influenced.

Community & Culture

IN: New friendship dates and expanding your network
OUT: “No new friends”
”No new friends” had it’s moment until we all realize how lonely that mindset actually is. There’s something electric about getting coffee with someone who you met in passing at a party. Grown-up friendships are about expansion, not exclusivity, and the best connections often start with you putting yourself out there first.

IN: Kickbacks & Rooftop/Backyard parties
OUT: Membership clubs
These days, I’m starting to feel like intimacy > exclusivity. There’s a certain kind of magic in mismatched chairs, a homemade playlist, and wine poured from whatever bottle someone brought. The vibe is warm, unfiltered, and effortless, a come-as-you-are celebration of real connection. Curated spaces don’t always equal community and their often costly.

Summer 2016 was a rush—high-gloss, high-volume, and drenched in fantasy. But somewhere between then and Covid, the lights turned on and the party ended. That’s why we talk incessantly about this time when conversations during the week stretched past midnight, where the DJ would transition a song and everyone kept dancing, when you could meet a person waiting in line eat the bathroom and it felt like someone you’ve known in another life.

So this summer, we’re not performing. We’re arriving. Fully. Honestly. Imperfectly.

We’re flirting in person again, saying yes to last-minute plans, wearing the dress that makes us feel like her even if no one’s around to compliment it. We’re dating with intention, not obligation. Building community not in exclusive clubs, but across mismatched lawn chairs and backyard playlists.

Because we’re done asking for permission to take up space and finally ready to make space for what matters.

Maybe it’ll be the summer we come home to ourselves.

Or maybe when we look back, we won’t long for a decade past. Instead, we’ll be proud we didn’t wait to feel this alive again.