I’ve always been spiritually gullible to the point of fault. As a child it was God, and as an adult it’s Saturn Return. I find comfort in the belief of a higher power. I enjoy the idea that there’s something out there I don’t understand and can’t control. I imagine the invisible hand that pulls the strings to be, hopefully, benevolent. But is it?

In October of 2022, I made the pilgrimage from Orlando to Tampa to see David Sedaris live. At the time, I was devouring his books. I started with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, moving to Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and then, obviously, Naked, finishing all of three within a month. Within the year, I’d read Holidays on Ice, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and Me Talk Pretty One Day. I had never experienced writing like his. I was entirely enchanted.

He spoke of his childhood, growing up in North Carolina, his time in Paris, his time at a nudist colony, and then of his life in Chicago. There was something sticky about Chicago. It lodged itself in the back of my mind and began to grow. It started with David Sedaris. And then The Bear came out. And then I started listening to Djo’s album DECIDE, which contains the song “End of Beginning.” You know the one. All signs were pointing towards Chicago shortly after my big breakup. And as I’ve already said, I’m incredibly spiritually gullible.

The final sign I was searching for came to me at the live reading David Sedaris gave in Tampa. The reading was amazing, obviously. Everyone always says, “If you like his work, you have to hear him read live,” and now I can join the legions of people who spout this wisdom whenever his name is mentioned. It also gave me the opportunity to collect more information on the man I’d be standing in front of very shortly at the book signing table. As he spoke, I realized for as much as I knew about him, there was still so much unknown to me. How strange to make a living off of telling stories about your own life and yet have so much left to say.

After the reading, I held two books in my hand, Happy-Go-Lucky and my ex-boyfriend’s copy of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, the very copy he had lent me earlier that year, the one that first got me hooked. I’d been preparing for this moment.

An excerpt from my journal, days before the reading:

“When I meet David Sedaris, I need to be prepared with the perfect line…

I’m hoping it will go something like this:

I’ll approach his book signing table and say “Hi, how are you?” because it’s funny to say ordinary thing sin specialexchanges. And thought he might be a little surprised he wouldn’t let me know, saying back, “I’m good, how are you?”

At this point he’d look up at me and remark on my age. “I don’t usually get a lot of young people at my readings,” or something or other.

Maybe he’ll ask what I do or what I want to do and I can tell him I’m moving to Chicago to become him. Maybe I won’t word it like that, which sounds like I will eventually stalk him down and wear his skin.

Maybe I’ll say ‘to be like you.’ But keeping it so vague—does it imply I don’t fully understand what he does? He’s an author, yes, but there should be a word that’s more all encompassing. He’s a person, but an important one, not like everyone else in the room who pays $70 just to share a breath with someone important.

Or maybe I’ll look him right in the eye and ask him to tell me what to do with my life.

‘God’s dead, art’s dead, and the president might as well be dead. As far as I’m concerned, you’re all I have left.’

I waited in line with sweaty palms, running through questions in my head: “At what age did you finally feel secure? What’s your best advice to young people? What kind of music do you listen to?”

It reminded me of being 12 at the Christian water ski camp, aptly named “Walking on Water,” where I was asked, “If you got to ask God one question, what would it be?” To which my answer was, “Are there any colors we don’t know about?” Clearly, the light spectrum wasn’t taught until 7th grade.

As I looked around, I realized that something was wrong. Although the room was filled with salt and peppery heads, there wasn’t an alarming lack of young people either. Couples, a group of ladies, even a child. Maybe I’d be the prettiest, or I’d have a look in my eye that caught him by surprise. Or maybe I’d have to reckon with the realization that I’m really not very special at all.

As I approached the table, all I could think of was to tell him about my recent breakup. Not in a way that made it seem like I was approaching an oracle (though clearly I felt I was approaching an oracle), but in a funny, “ain’t that just the way” kind of way.

“Hi, how are you?” I said.

He didn’t reply.

“Who’s Jack?” he asked as he went to sign the first book, which I’d indicated should be made out to Jack.

“My ex-boyfriend,” I replied. I thought to myself, I got you now.

He asked a few more rapid-fire questions, our conversation more so resembling an airport security exchange rather than a life-changing book signing.

Then he opened my book.

“Who’s Grace?”

“My ex-girlfriend.”

Proud that I thought of a joke on the spot, albeit not a very funny one, I stuttered through the following explanation: “I’m kidding, that’s me. I said ex-girlfriend cause like, you know, I have two books, one for each ex, but yeah, no, that’s me.”

He told me how he thought throuples always look like the people who stock shelves at Walmart and that he was surprised at first because I didn’t look like the kind of person who’d be in a throuple. I was utterly flattered.

He finished signing mine too quickly and I panicked.

“Can I ask you a question? Would you recommend Chicago to a young person who recently got out of a relationship?”

He gushed about the city, how it was a great stepping stone, how it was more affordable than New York City, and then he said, “The next time I see you, it better be in Chicago.”

Fuck, it was such a good line. I felt like I had seen the face of God for a split second. I left the theatre shaking, tears welling in my eyes. It was the sign I was looking for, begging for.

So I picked up my trail of breadcrumbs and started planning my move to the city. It all seemed divine. I googled “are there lesbians in Chicago?” (just to make sure) and scoured Reddit threads for neighborhood guides.

My first adult visit to the city was to apartment hunt. That last night, before flying back to Florida for the final time, I admitted to my friend that the magic I had been searching for wasn’t there anymore. The trail had gone cold. But I had nowhere else to be, and I had just signed a lease, so what else could I do but continue down my preordained path?

And the first couple of years were good. David Sedaris was right, Chicago is a great place to be. I fell into friendships and jobs and clubs every time I took a step forward. All the while, doing it without the magic.

But, where are you now David Sedaris? And why have you forsaken me? I did what you said—I moved to Chicago. Three years later, between rent hikes and cockroach infestations, I’m homeless.

This city was supposed to be a “wonderful stepping stone” into a part of my life I’d be content with. Now I’m sitting in Milton, Wisconsin, of all places, neither content nor wildly successful. My life has been one big writer’s block.

While there have been days of chasing down buses and nights of binge drinking Miller High Life, there has not been a particular amount of writing in moody solitude. I haven’t stolen myself away into a high, high tower and returned only to deliver my perfect manuscript to a publishing house. No, I haven’t come down from a mountain after 40 days with two stone tablets containing my manifesto, only to drop them and have to go back up the mountain to etch new ones (the Bible says he threw them down purposefully, but I can spot a clumsy person from a mile away).

How dare you, David Sedaris? How dare you lead me here on the false and vague pretense of something good happening to me? You led me astray. I could still be in…Orlando, Florida if it weren’t for you. I could be swatting away lovebugs and sweating through my underwear in the holy land.

You’d think that after everything, he would provide some sort of guidance and not just go back to his life of being a successful author and famous person, leaving me here to rot. Yes, it’s his fault. A life is a terribly large thing to take care of by myself.

At some point, I assume, I must get back up and dust myself off. I must pick up the trail of bread crumbs and make my way towards the magic, if it ever shows itself again. I must abandon my place on the ground and stand on my own two feet, under the benevolent eye of David Sedaris or not.

I’m just waiting for a sign to begin…

On the eve of the apocalypse
smoke from the canadian wildfires
choked out the sun
And still we drank beer
and played bags
In front of me
sat my mother
in a lawn chair
One of the nice ones
Beyond her
a wall of haze
We lost
twice

I grew up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. This is a fact that people laugh at when I tell them. Whether it’s because the name sounds funny or because they somehow know how small the town is just by how I say it, I can’t tell. It’s probably one of the first words I learned so, 25 years in, it just sounds like home to me.

My neighborhood was nestled into woods that ran into the nearby state park. Once I had taught myself to ride a bike, I explored every inch that I could. The creek that ran under the bridge was where the neighbor kids and I looked for crawfish and where I first learned the f-word from some very informative graffiti. There was a small trail that ran through a ragtag sculpture garden, but if you veered off to the right at the fork, you’d be led deeper into the forest, until the sound of passing cars could just barely be mistaken for the wind.

It was there that I spent hours looking through the tree branches, following along the bank of the creek, looking for clues to some ancient mystery, trying to identify scratches on the trees as secret messages from giant brown bears, and climbing over trees that had fallen long before I ever entered the forest.

I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing was a grounding practice. I was aware of my surroundings, listening intently, looking at everything around me, taking in deep breaths of pine and dirt, and gripping the rough tree bark as I climbed on and off the path.

I knew my neighborhood and I knew it well. As I continue to go through life, I’ve lost touch with this practice. Louder, brighter, and faster-moving things distract from the ordinary. I find myself so wrapped up in digital simulacra that I forget the very real existence I’m surrounded by constantly.

On top of those distractions is also the fact that Western society as a whole is much more mobile than it used to be. We are only a couple of generations separated from people who viewed being born, living, and dying in the same town as the status quo. When we are so desensitized to picking up and starting new lives, sometimes as often as every five or so years, we tend to forget that moving can be hugely disruptive to the mind.

From ages 16 to 23, I moved every 2-3 years. Family took a new shape and home became just a word. Starting over so often was destabilizing for me, and as much as I tried to ignore that fact, it always chipped away at my feeling of safety in the background. It’s only now that I’ve chosen to stay put that I feel that difference. Meaning starts to move back in.

As I write this, Amundsen High School sits across the street from me. It doesn’t mean anything to me, but I know which of my neighbors have signs in their yard announcing that their child attends school there. I also know that if I’m describing where I am, I could mention Amundsen to a friend who’s lived here much longer than I and they would know what I’m talking about. They might know someone who went to school there or they themselves might’ve went to a rival high school in the city and instantly it becomes something more meaningful than a brick and stone building that I sit and look at in between paragraphs. I am reminded that it means something to somebody. The world fills back up with meaning during an age where meaning erodes on every front.

The greatest realization I’ve ever had was that a home is something you can create. And so, I’ve created a list of commandments for feeling at home for the ever-searching wayward soul, as someone who’s needed it the most.

1. Listen To Who’s Speaking

When I lived in Orlando, I got really into identifying birds. My partner at the time introduced me to an app called “Merlin,” which is like Shazam for birds. You can take pictures or record audio, and the app will tell you who you’re seeing or hearing.

I adopted the habit of sitting outside and observing. Over time, I’d start to recognize certain calls. The song of a red-winged blackbird stood out from the song of a Florida scrub jay. I knew the bird perched precariously atop a cattail was a Boat-tailed Grackle rather than a Common Grackle. I’d be on walks and, without even trying, my brain would single out a voice and recall its name effortlessly. It was akin to learning a new language, feeling excitement every time my subconscious effortlessly picked up on something.

The place I lived, my neighborhood, my home, became a little less strange as the sky started to fill with familiar voices.

My habit of listening for birds turned into a habit of listening to everything. The recording you’re listening to was taken near Lake Underhill in Orlando, my old neighborhood. For just over 13 minutes, I sat silently, perhaps with a book or with my dog or with nothing at all. At times, the sound of an airplane becomes deafening in comparison to the soft chirping of birds and, although it’s annoying, it reminds me that I lived near an airport, a fact I might have since forgotten.

My old phone is full of recordings like this; moments I wanted to savor and return back to one day. There are recordings taken while lying next to a beloved friend on a sunny day, or during a dinner with loved ones, where you can hear soft chatter and the sound of metal against ceramic while someone finishes up their meal. Each one is a reminder that at some point, I was so happy and absorbed in the noises that surrounded me, I wanted to save them for later.

Although I love my headphones and I love listening to music while I walk and take the train, I’ve had the most tender experiences when I allow myself to listen and be a part of my surroundings. How will you feel at home if you can’t describe what home sounds like?

2. Observe The Comings and Goings of Critters

This one is my favorite. There are few greater simple pleasures than watching your neighborhood from the front stoop. People watching is phenomenal, yes. But critter watching is unmatched.

Your image of the neighborhood will begin to fill out. Who lives here? The monolithic term “critters” breaks down into repeat guests that grace your street, or yard if you’re lucky enough to have one. “Birds” turns into robins and black-capped chickadees while “rodents” turns into squirrels, chipmunks, and, of course, rats for the city-dwellers.

The practice requires you to sit quietly for some time. As you settle into your spot, reading or drinking a cup of tea, they’ll slowly reveal themselves to you. Observation, here, is a thing to be earned.

At first, their movements seem irregular. But the longer you watch, the more patterns you recognize. Just last week I was startled when a grey cat crossed in front of my steps with a small mouse hanging from it’s mouth, unaware of my gaze. I thought about the odds of witnessing something so interesting, like a momentary glimpse of a life that was so in the middle of itself. But only a few minutes passed until the cat strutted in front of me again, returning from where it came. It’s hunting, I thought.

This is not so much a novel insight, but an attempt at wrapping my mind around the reality that life is happening all around me, for everyone, all of the time. Even little grey cats.

I was better about keeping up this habit when summer was cooling into fall. I’d toss a handful of birdseed onto the grass and the steps, trying to coax the birds into coming closer. After a few consistent days of this practice, I noticed them braving the top step, but still too shy to land on the ledge next to where my chair sat. It makes me wonder what length of trust I could establish with them if I kept at it consistently over months rather than days.

When you’re not used to staying in one place for very long, that long-term daydreaming starts to slip. When I realized I could develop an actual relationship with the birds outside my apartment, it also occurred to me that I’d been craving that kind of stability, of envisioning myself in the context of the future and not just the past and present.

The critters are real. You are real. And I recommend this practice purely on the basis of the joy it can bring to your life.

Pro tip: keep a jar of birdseed on your stoop.

3. Become a Regular

Usually, when this advice is doled out, it’s with the insinuation that this is a good and effective way to make friends. I wholeheartedly reject that notion. Having been on both sides of that interaction, as a lonely customer and as a propositioned server, I can tell you now it never works. Becoming a regular isn’t about trying to make friends with your local less-than-friendly barista, it’s about entering the ecosystem itself.

In that first year after moving to Chicago, I had made it a priority to visit every cafe within walking distance. I tack on tags in my head as a means to categorize them. I know which have the best food, which have the best coffee, and which have the most accessible power outlets. So when a friend comes to the neighborhood, I know exactly which direction to point them in depending on what they’re looking for.

I love that the comfort food I eat as I write this section is the same comfort food I had during those first few months of moving to Chicago, when everything was big and scary and unknown. I’ve changed in countless ways since those first days, but the Pad Thai from that restaurant hasn’t. It’s a part of my story because I once chose it and I continue to choose it. This is a huge reason why I am so anti-Doordash et al; frictionless food delivery is so impersonal and nihilistic at its core. There is every reason for me to eat at a place in my own neighborhood, most of all because it’s just what’s there when I walk out my front door. I am simply not interested in algorithmically chosen dinner spots.

To know the restaurants and cafes in the area begets a sense of soft control. Your surroundings become less unknown. You “unlock new areas on the map,” as it were. You pick up on street names and hole-in-the-wall places that fill out your understanding of the neighborhood. Ordering dinner ceases to be a perfunctory act of survival, it’s a moment of human connection, of discovery, an opportunity to make someone smile or to let someone make you smile. It’s not always that, but you’re opening yourself up to the possibility of that, a possibility which doesn’t exist if you don’t leave your house.

I know that if I leave my house right after ordering my Pad Thai for pick-up, I will arrive at the restaurant almost exactly when it comes out of the kitchen because the restaurant is a perfect 15-minute walk from where I live. There are few simpler pleasures than that.

4. Become a Steward

My grandma always had this funny habit of spying on her neighbors. When we’d stop in to say hi, she’d often recount all the notable occurrences. The neighbors across the street put a new garden in (“they only eat organic vegetables,” she’d explain with a wrinkled nose) or the neighbors down the road had a beat-up pickup truck parked outside for the past few days (“I just don’t know whose it is!”). I used to think this was just a quirk of hers, but I’ve come to realize it’s the mark of a person who feels at home in their neighborhood.

To become a steward of the neighborhood, to watch over and notice things about it, means you care. You have decided to insert yourself into the comings and goings around you because you believe that it matters.

In a big city, this one is hard to keep up with. Things are always shifting, different people are always walking past your window, and you most likely live on a street with multi-family housing, making it impossible to spy on your neighbors to the extent that my grandma did.

But there are still small changes that you can keep up with. When the flower beds in my neighborhood were refilled with fresh, pungent mulch, it was hard not to notice. You could smell it from a block away! When the new bakery opened up, the smell of freshly baked bread wafted down the street early in the morning. When construction began on the house on the corner, I could’ve found it with my eyes closed. Not only because of the sound, but because of the strong scent of fresh plywood.

These simple recognitions made me feel at home. It was, as silly as it sounds, empowering to feel like I had a good eye on what was happening around me. I wasn’t a guest in the neighborhood, I was a part of it. And as a part of it, I felt right keeping my eye on what little I could.

5. Be Inconvenienced

I once successfully convinced four friends to move to Chicago in the same year. My simple pitch? It’s a walkable city with public transportation.

There’s surely something to be said about the freedom of navigating Chicago on foot (I would rather convert to being a Bears fan than try to find parking in the city), however I think the real pleasure is that walking and taking public transit gives you exposure to your neighbors. I love sitting on the bus when someone gets on and addresses the bus driver by name. I love sitting on the train and looking up and recognizing the person across from me. I love walking somewhere and getting honked at by a friend driving past.

With working from home, food delivery, and grocery delivery, I could easily stay hidden inside my apartment. It’s become way too accessible to have everything you need brought directly to your door. And I definitely lived that way for a minute. But the absolute joy of recognizing your neighbors is worth tenfold what the joy of staying on your couch all day is worth.

Go run your errands! Kurt Vonnegut put this very elegantly in A Man Without A Country. In the chapter “I have been called a luddite,” he describes his experience buying an envelope, finding pleasure in the people he meets in line at the convenience store, the woman at the post office he’s in love with, and even the mailbox he puts his envelope in. He ends this story with:

“And I go home. And I have had one hell of a good time. Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

6. Learn the Context

When I first moved to Chicago, I soaked up every piece of city history I could. The word “Chicago” comes from the Algonquian word šikaakwa, which describes the wild garlic field that populated the location that the city now sits on.

In 1871, The Chicago Fire burnt down 4 miles of the city, forcing the city to rebuild, which led to its first skyscrapers. The city is a mosaic of ethnicities due to its abundance of industrial jobs and easy access via trains in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century. And between 1910 and 1970, The Great Migration saw Black southern culture make its way up to Chicago, ushering in the Chicago Black Renaissance and introducing jazz and blues to an already culturally diverse city. Behind every beautiful thing about the city, there is a long and interesting history that explains why it must be.

Take Pilsen, for example. Pilsen is a southwest Chicago neighborhood, mostly known for its concentration of Mexican residents. This neighborhood was first established by German and Irish immigrants and later inhabited by Eastern European immigrants. You can see this echoed in its Bohemian-Baroque architecture, which features “ornate, heavy, or unusual parapets, reflecting the aesthetic of the original Czech, Polish, and Lithuanian settlers.”1 These same buildings are now inhabited and adorned by it’s Mexican residents. A walk through the neighborhood and you’ll see this collision of cultures through an environment that reflects both local and global history.

I urge everyone to know the history of the place they live. You might not retain everything you read or hear, but what really matters will stick with you.

When I walk in the city now, there are small architectural flourishes that catch my eye and streets with names of people I know about. It is a comfort to know that the history of the place I live is not just a story to be told, it is the ground I walk on and the air I breath. By living here, I am an extension of that history. And there is something really interesting and meaningful about imagining myself in the context of something grander.

7. Get Into Something

One of the hardest parts of moving is making friends. It is a nearly impossible task that only gets more difficult with age. I’m blessed to say that I now have a bustling and sometimes overwhelming social life, achieved through hard work and incredibly lucky timing. A quick audit of my social life reveals that my closest friends come from one of three places: a team sport, a previous job, or through mutual friends. Let me break this down a little further.

When I say “get into something,” I really mean it. Little communities exist everywhere, and they are slightly inaccessible by design. My second summer in the city, I signed up for a beach volleyball league. I wouldn’t have done this if I hadn’t met a friend earlier that spring that signed up with me. Stroke of luck #1. We joined an independent team, and it was there that I met Bill, who happened to run an already sizable pick-up volleyball group. Stroke of luck #2. I started going religiously, learning new names and faces, desperately trying to rid myself of the unbearable feeling of being an outsider. People I met through the beach league invited me to indoor open gyms and leagues. Up until very recently, I would be saddled with anxiety and self-doubt every time I stepped onto a court. There were times when just showing up to a game was painful. But had I not stuck it through, I wouldn’t have made it to this point, where the games are fun and I’m able to call many of those people my genuine friends.

My best piece of advice if you’re going to join something to meet people? Find an activity that is social in nature. Workout classes are fun, but you can get through a whole class without ever talking to another person. I’m clearly biased towards volleyball, but think about team sports in general: basketball, softball, or even kickball. And don’t stop at physical activity either. What are your local poets up to? Where do the jazz musicians hang out and jam? Find your niche and dig in, any way you can.

The next way in is through a job. Last summer, I worked at a neighborhood restaurant. The job was ridiculous at times and never great money, but the environment was lighthearted and fun. Stroke of luck #1. Days were spent, sweaty, serving margaritas on the rooftop in the middle of a heat wave, while nights were spent, also sweaty, dancing with coworkers at bars I had never been to before.

I still visit the restaurant once every other week or so, for a glass of wine and a catch up. The friends I made at that job have bled over into other areas of my life. A book club and life-changing nights out with Olivia, weekly salsa classes and an Ireland trip with Riley. I feel very lucky to have worked somewhere that doesn’t run on negativity and micromanaging. I know a lot of people have remote jobs nowadays, but if you’re ever considering moonlighting as a server, I would always recommend it.

The last piece of this equation is connecting with mutuals. The friend of your friend is also your friend. I got into the habit of throwing parties years ago, and although it gave me awful anxiety to invite acquaintances into my living space, I grew to love hosting. The internet loves to complain about the lack of free third spaces in the modern age. You just have to be the third space you want to see in the world! Hosting is an act of bringing people together, strengthening community, and holding space for more connections to bloom in your network.

When I hosted, it gave me a chance to see my friends. They would sometimes bring their friends. I would connect with them multiple times in group settings, our defenses slowly falling, without us ever having to do those awkward one-on-one friend dates. Your circle builds and builds this way.

And once you’ve grown your circles, through hobbies, through jobs, through friends, you start to realize you’re a part of something. You get invited to birthday parties and going away parties, you get closer to certain people and further from others, you hear gossip and you’re a part of gossip. At some point, you will feel so viscerally part of the organism. You become inextricably linked to the community you worked so hard to join. And it’s amazing!

Moving is a really difficult task, more than just a logistical nightmare. Ripping up roots and resettling is more emotionally taxing than we give it credit for. To anyone starting over this year—you got this! However you’re reshaping your life, take faith in your ability to bounce back even better than before. If I can do it, I promise you can too. :)

I began working for a tea and botanicals company late this year, causing a large shift in my life. Following a summer of bartending, late nights, and nonstop movement that left me exhausted and socially burnt out, the abrupt change to sitting at a desk for 40 hours a week was actually much needed. I struggle with that kind of stillness and this change of course has taught me a lot about the importance of finding pauses.

At work, we talk a lot about the idea of rituals. Rituals, specifically around tea, have always had a place in human history. In Japan, they have chadō (茶道), a matcha preparation ceremony heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism. In China, there’s gōngfū chá (工夫茶), indicating that the tea-making technique is “meticulous, subtle, graceful and exquisite as well as requiring patience and experience to perfect.” Although, in our language, ritual is solely defined by performing a series of actions in a prescribed order, there is historical precedent that clues us into the heart of ritual: the aspect of mindfulness. Ritual asks that you bring your full attention to your prescribed actions, and begs you not to rush them.

And so, as 2025 closes out, rather than wax inspirational about all the goals I plan to accomplish and the habits I hope to track, I’d like to share with you some of the small rituals from the past year that have allowed me to bring my awareness to the present and recognize joy in its small apparitions.

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1. Cassettes in the kitchen

My cassette player is housed on my kitchen windowsill, nestled between jars of spices and recipe books. It’s a simple pleasure. First bought to play my grandmother’s handed down big band cassettes, this unassuming piece of tech bought from a little boutique called “Amazon” has brought more joy than I thought possible.

The ritual is simple. I pop the tape in, press play, and make breakfast or do dishes or whatever it is I’m called to do in the kitchen. This ritual transforms my daily actions into something more significant. Intentional music, not an algorithmically chosen playlist, sets the scene and creates a moment out of endlessly passing time. Something about the ease of pressing the play button feels like wrapping my brain in silk. There are no screens, no hamburger menus, nothing to press and hold or swipe. The options are finite. They extend as far as the real estate on the window sill goes. This is especially calming first thing in the morning when my brain is sensitive and still waking up, not ready to stand at an infinite intersection and decide on a direction.

I have three albums in rotation currently. My first on-repeat cassette was Simon and Garfunkel The Concert in Central Park. Besides the back to back bangers, what’s special about this album is that it’s a live recording. The audience cheers when they hear the opening chords to their favorite S&G song, the legends themselves comment throughout the set. It has a level of personality that live recordings always carry. 10/10.

The second was a gift from a dear friend, Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut album. Now, I’ve listened to this album from my phone before, and it’s just not the same. There’s a certain kind of grit with cassettes that can’t be recreated, sometimes making you feel like you’re in the same room with the musician. And for an album so personal and raw the way Tracy Chapman is, it’s worth listening like that. “Fast Car” is a timeless, beautiful song, but hearing it in the context of the full album it becomes a small piece of a larger story about the complexity of poverty and the tenderness of love. Also 10/10.

My third is a recent acquisition, Cat Stevens’ Footsteps In The Dark/Greatest Hits Volume Two. Steven’s breathy, folksy voice drapes over twangy guitar picking and hopeful synths like a warm blanket. It’s a gentle and sentimental start to the morning. Guess what, also 10/10.

2. Tea before going out

Gabri Abrão, also known by alias sighswoon, once posted on Instagram that she drinks white tea before socializing for it’s heart-opening properties. I adopted the habit after her endorsement and, although it may just be placebo, I’ve found it to work.

The ritual that used to be a coconut RedBull split between friends as Megan Thee Stallion blasts over someone’s JBL speaker at the pregame has transformed into brewing a pot of magnolia scented white tea to share over the hum of the fridge as I think about my intentions for the night. Although there is merit in both of these schools of thought, the latter has served me well over the past few months. No more is a “night out” about the frantic pawing for attention and seeing how much alcohol I can drink in one setting, so a different fuel is needed.

It’s a small gift to myself; a caffeine bump and a quiet moment to ground before a high-energy night.

3. Calling family

I used to be really afraid of calling my family. I can’t say why I felt such aversion to picking up the phone, but it’s been a blessing to overcome that fear over the past couple years. And the silly thing about calling family is that once you start, it becomes a compulsion. If I have 30 minutes of downtime in between meetings, you can bet I’m going to call my mom. Even as I write this, it’s dawned on me that I haven’t called my mom today yet.

In a world that feels like it consists of crumbling structures, staying connected with family gives me a sense of stability that hasn’t always felt so accessible to me. A quick catch-up call with my mom or my sister reminds me that I have support, even when it’s not right in front of me, it reminds me of the person I’ve been my whole life up until now, and it reminds me that love is present.

Looking towards this new year, I already have a couple rituals I’m exciting to start incorporating more consistently.

The first one I lovingly refer to as “taking a lap.” Like many soft, sensitive souls in this world I struggle immensely with social anxiety. It’s an absurd, illogical affliction that I have no choice but to cope with. And taking a lap is one of my favorite coping mechanisms! If you feel impending doom as you approach the entrance to whatever function you’re attending, just take a lap around the block. No one will notice that you’re five minutes late, I promise. Not only is it a great excuse to get a little walk in, but it’ll help you breathe and chill out so you can enter just a little easier.

Another beautiful ritual that I don’t practice often enough is putting on a record as I wind down for the night. It’s no secret that screen time directly before bed isn’t exactly great for the human brain, but it’s so difficult to put down the damn phone. Going a bit analog and filling my home with incredible art has been a favorite activity of mine that often gets replaced by scrolling and binging TV. The times I’ve successfully completed a “wind-down” routine, I’ve had the best sleep of my life, so it’s truly absurd to me that I keep avoiding it and opting for hours of Instagram Reels instead.

In the final stretch of 2025, I started cold plunging in Lake Michigan. As a fellow plunger put it, “I was just looking for a little hit of dopamine.” Although there are many practical health affects of cold plunges (ones that I won’t look up in fear of fixating on them), I really just do it for the love of the game. Pain and discomfort are under-explored sensations in our cushy, modern world. A 2-minute dip in the near-freezing, good ol’ Lake Michigan is a reminder to myself that I am capable of withstanding discomfort if I choose. Our bodies are more resilient than we think. And what a silly way to bring attention out of the mind and back to the body than to do something that most people avoid like the plague.

Thank you for closing out 2025 with me. May your new year be filled with everything life has to offer.

XX grace

That’s why I designate November 7th as my one big day of release. As the anniversary of my father’s death, it’s a naturally emotionally charged day. November 7th comes every year. It’s right there on the calendar, and yet I somehow manage to miss its approach until it’s in front of me. Schedules fill up, life gets busy. That’s why this day is so important for me to honor. It is quite literally the only day of the year I get that suitcase down from the closet and let it breathe.

Nine years seems like a long time. Nine years certainly feels like a long time. But when you say “nine anniversaries,” the number suddenly feels much smaller. I’ve had nine opportunities to grieve my father, to come to terms with the emotions, to process and lay to rest the feelings of guilt and regret that accompany the grief, and somehow that is barely enough time to even scratch the surface.

Nine years in, the pain still sits in my body like rusted shrapnel. It takes little more than recalling a memory of him for my chest to tighten and my eyes to fill.

I lay awake last night, coaxing the feelings back out of their hiding space. I start to think about early memories: the bright, flickering reflection of the sun on Lake Michigan as he drove me to school, playing video games together in the basement, and how he’d try to make me laugh when he thought I was faking being asleep. Not all my memories of him are this happy, so I pull up more: memories of him yelling at me for making mistakes, hitting the dog when he lost his patience, and demeaning my mother in front of my sister and me. He was a deeply flawed man who took his frustration with the world out on the people he loved the most.

As the clock approached midnight, the pain in my chest intensified. I’m brought closer and closer to that hospital room, to the moment when the world spun out of control around me, a stranger’s hand resting on my shoulder as if that could’ve possibly helped. If time is a spiral, nine years later, it feels like I am finally reapproaching that space again. The memory appears vivid in my mind, and I see him for the first time in years, back in the hospital bed, intubated and pale, and I am trying to understand that he will never open his eyes again. It is not the smell of his aftershave or his laundry detergent that reminds me of these last moments, but the stench of medical-grade disinfectants.

Nothing in my life has ever hurt like this. Lying in bed, choking on the pain, I am surprised by how intense it all still feels. I breathe the same chopped and ragged breaths I used to breathe in the months following his death. I am the same 16-year-old who watched her father die in an ugly hospital room without the chance to say goodbye. I am the same 17-year-old who didn’t know how to handle the pain other than to muffle her cries with a pillow.

This is how these grief-fests usually go. It begins as a tentative stroll down memory lane and eventually explodes into complex structures of fragmented memories and thoughts that remain just as intense year after year. I walk through the worst of it, over and over, until my head pounds and I’m too dehydrated to put myself through another round. I call it quits at this point.

As the years pass, new feelings arise, too, which surprise me. As I grow and change and rejoice in my own ability to weather the things life throws at me, I have to take a moment to acknowledge that each step I take forward is a step I take further from him. The anniversary reminds me that life moves on, makes you forget, keeps piling on more and more of itself until you’re so far from that point you’re trying to get back to that it seems impossible you ever will. Life moves on, but there is still a huge part of myself that is stuck back there, with him. And I know that if I keep stepping away, keep growing up, then I will become less and less of the person I was when he was still alive. There is a massive wound that I won’t let close.

When I look back and take stock of my short life, most of the things and people that make me who I am entered my life after he passed, and this makes me cry all over again. Because he will never know me as I am today, I like to play a game of “he would’ve loved this” with myself. It’s really easy, I look at the new parts of my life and ask if he would’ve loved it or not.

When I bought my record player, I pulled his old records out of storage. Spinning Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I think, “he would’ve loved this.” I can picture him driving down to visit and bringing one of his favorite records to play for me. I can picture myself playing one of my new favorites for him. I can see us walking into record stores together on sunny autumn days like today.

This game acts as a check-in for myself. I get to think about how I’ve changed since he passed away nine years ago. My newfound interest in tea? I think he would’ve loved that. I can imagine visiting him on Thanksgiving break, my suitcase packed with a pu-er teacake and maybe a bag of gyokuro to show him. It may be gratuitously self-serving to imagine he’d love everything about my life, but he had a secret love for alternative medicine that I think would translate easily to an interest in tea.

I don’t think he’d like that I live in a big city. I think he’d be concerned about safety, and pollution, and noise. He’d be right, but in a way that a parent is supposed to be.

In a lot of ways, puppeting this cryofrozen image of him around my current life is a lot happier than our relationship might’ve been if he were still alive. I romanticize small aspects of his personality and fit them into mine. This hurts sometimes even more than real memories, but the trade-off is that I get to pretend for half a second that he is still here. Even mental illness is an avenue for connection.

When I was at my lowest earlier this year, suffering from weed-induced psychosis and trying to get myself home on the train, I kept having the recurring thought that “maybe he felt this way too.” In my fantasies, where he’s still alive, I share my mental health struggles with him, and it helps him realize that he has issues too. It’s a Hallmark movie in the making.

It’s frustrating to sit with the fact that my dad can’t get to know me as an adult. That I can’t get to know him as an old man. That we never got to release our anger toward each other and trade forgiveness. That my mother never got her apology. That my sister couldn’t be walked down the aisle by him. How sweet would it be to share one last dinner? Watch one last movie together?

I still remember when he showed me The Lord of the Rings. I was in the habit of coming home from school and going straight to my room to rewatch Les Misérables. After a couple of nights in a row of this, he said, “Let me show you something less depressing,” putting The Fellowship of the Ring on. We watched all three extended versions back to back, night after night. Hardly less depressing, these movies were the vehicle with which he was able to connect to the moody, teenage girl I was.

It’s moments like that, where he feels real, where I could feel him trying to connect, that are the hardest to think about.

In his older age, that quick-to-anger demeanor softened significantly. With his world falling apart, amidst a divorce and splitting custody of his one daughter left living at home, I think he had little choice but to return to the gentleness he must have known as a child.

He kept my favorite snacks stocked at his apartment, did my laundry while I was at my mom’s, and always wanted to watch a movie together. He gave me advice and held my shoulders when I cried to him about school.

This is where the story usually ends, in that small two-bedroom apartment. I fly across the world to live with my mom in a country he never ends up seeing. I don’t remember our last week together. I don’t remember the last words he said to me. I leave him alone, and three months later, he is in the hospital. It must have been hard being in that apartment, knowing he was dying.

I had my tarot cards read today. I don’t know if I believe in it, but it was the first thing that I grabbed onto when I reached out my hand for help. I told her today was a significant day for me. When asked what the best part of my grief was, I said the fact that it made me introspective and really face my emotions. When asked what the worst part of my grief was, I told her it was the pain. She told me to let go of the guilt and the regret. She told me that those who pass don’t care about those kinds of things anymore. She told me that grief is just love that has nowhere to go. And so I sit here, with nine years of love weighing heavy in my arms, nowhere else to go, and let it come out through words.

My friends have often joked with me about going through “the longest breakup ever” and although that certainly can’t be true, I will admit the process has been unusually long and unorthodox. We lived together for a full year after breaking up, he helped me move to Chicago, and it was only earlier this year that we went no-contact.

In my defense, I never anticipated that day coming. Right before I moved to Chicago, he complained to me that he thought I’d miss the dog more than I’d miss him, to which I replied “Well, obviously. I can talk to you on the phone, I can’t talk to Cowboy on the phone.”

I had read “Just Kids” by Patti Smith, I thought exes could stay in each other’s lives until one of them inevitably and tragically dies of AIDS. Even in my most outlandish visions of the future, I always saw him there, like a straight, Floridian Robert Mapplethorpe.

But for some reason, it struck me today that that can no longer true. Whether that discovery is due to the turning weather or some invisible clock, I now face the realization that none of my futures will ever include him.

Ironically, it took the aftermath of being no-contact for the weight of that loss to sink in, three years too late. If I had understood the gravity of it all earlier, would it have salvaged some of the friendship? Or was this always destined to happen? Perhaps our two and a half years of post-breakup closeness was just us running on fumes until the whole thing fell apart.

My brain has always operated with this kind of dramatic delay. This is good in some ways and bad in others. It is good when someone I love dearly passes, and I need to continue functioning until I have more time to slow down and grieve. It is bad when I leave a partner and they think I remain unaffected because I can’t yet feel the depth of the loss.

To lose anyone in life, is a massive paradigm-shifting event. It can be hard to fully understand that in the moment, especially when it comes to the dissolution of your first big relationship. And no one has quite summed this phenomenon up quite as perfectly as Stevie Nicks when she wrote “Landslide.”

(If you want to cry, read the comments under this video)

“Landslide” is undeniably one of the best breakup songs of all time. It’s not just about leaving someone or something you love; it’s about the immensity of how it changes everything. To leave a relationship, whether by choice or not, is to change the nature of your very life. It’s about the landslide of that change and the emotional weight of choosing to come down with it. It’s a quiet, humble surrender to growing up and past something that you had been holding onto for so long.

Rather than finding bravery in summiting a mountain, Nicks finds bravery in turning around and going back down the mountain. How much harder is it to give up on all you were working for than to be allowed to see it to completion? The frustration, unfairness, anger, shame, and guilt all build into this song. Listening to “Landslide” is an expression of all those pressure-cooked emotions, a great release.

The chorus has the qualities of a spell, an alchemical poem that contains much more meaning than it should for how simple a configuration of words it is. Nicks, the witch herself, hones in on the cutting truth we all discover through periods of immense change, brushing away the dirt and leaving us with the fruit. The heart of the song is concentrated here, unprotected by metaphor or convoluted prose, in all its vulnerability:

Well, I've been afraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too
Oh, I'm getting older too

It is the nature of humans to want to build their life around something or someone that they hope will remain steady forever. We want to find stability in family and lovers and jobs, really anything that will let us cling onto it and rest for a moment. But it is the nature of life for those very things to change, often rapidly and without notice. Having written “Landslide” at 27, Stevie Nicks has a profound understanding of this cycle.

That relationship was my entire world. On the heels of losing my father and a big international move, I was desperate for a sense of stability, for a mountain to climb. We were together for three years, which I now understand to be enough time to build a small life together; a small life that included a couple of apartments to inhabit and decorate with each other, a dog we loved like a child, a handful of camping trips, a network of mutual friends, and weekend routines that felt like heaven. He knew every thought in my head, the ins and outs of every argument I had with my family, my fears, and my plans for the future. I formed opinions based on his opinions, I learned to like what he liked, I structured my entire worldview around the unit of us. To put it concisely, “I’ve built my life around you.”

That fear of changing while in the midst of transition that Nicks talks about is powerful. It’ll warp your intuition until you can’t make sense of what’s in front of you. Throughout the breakup, despite knowing we were moving in opposite directions, I never thought we would stop talking. I thought our love was great, that it could resist dissolution through transformation, that we’d be great friends until we reached our separate deathbeds and be invited to each other’s weddings with our very own plus-ones. My own fear of change and guilt for hurting someone I loved prevented me from seeing the truth of the situation: change is inevitable.

I still struggle to recognize that change, and it arises as a sharp pain from time to time. I know the reason the breakup hits me so hard three years too late is that it never occurred to me that we’d stop knowing each other. The questions continue to bounce around in my head: if I could have expressed this complex sadness three years ago, would we still be friends? Would there be a small thread that tied us together? A monthly phone call to catch up with each other? Would I even still want that?

Three years later, I finally feel like I’m creating my own life, and with that comes a feeling of mourning for the old life. I don’t do the same things I did when I was 20, which means that period of my life that felt like it would last forever is finally over. It is over enough that I feel nostalgic for it, which is just as scary as it is exciting and sad as it is comforting.

I listen to different podcasts than the ones we listened to together, read different books than the ones he saw me with, have different dreams than the ones I shared with him, work at places I never knew existed until after we separated, have opinions that are shaped by experiences that came after the relationship, speak and think in ways that would certainly be foreign for him to see in me now.

There are days that feel especially lonely. There are days I miss being seen with such frustrating clarity. It’s like a phantom pain, an ache from a different time. It’s like being a tree with a knot. You keep growing, but the knot will always remain a part of you, a bittersweet reminder of who you once were and what you once had.

You think you will always feel this lonely, but you don’t. Eventually, you throw out the old New Yorker crossword puzzles you finished together. You kept them at first because they had both your and his handwriting on them, a grown-up equivalent to initials scrawled on a park bench, but you suddenly realize you don’t have the space for the pile anymore. You stop wondering what he’s working on and tell yourself to stop checking his website to see if he updated it again. You enjoy days off work alone, moving from coffee shop to bookstore to the living room couch and it only occurs to you once that this is what you used to do together. You rewrite the fabric of your own daily existence, and it starts getting easier to be your own person for maybe the first time in your entire life. This is what you promised yourself you could have when you first ended the relationship. As if you’d been directed by a voice from the future, you knew that this was the journey you needed to take yourself on, as messy and painful as it was.

And, of course, it was not all sad.

It has almost become a cliché to say that the love of romantic relationships can be found through friendships, but it remains true all the same. On days I struggle to get up, there’s KJ to keep me company via FaceTime. We prop our phones up and chat until we discover that we’ve both made it out of bed and even miraculously made breakfast and coffee for ourselves. When Sara comes to visit, she reminds me what it feels like to have someone you love cook for you and have someone you love to cook for. When my mom’s in town, we clean and organize and fix things around the apartment that are long overdue. There are friends for coffee and breakfast sandwich runs (Michaela), friends to wax poetic with (Thomas), and friends who will let you talk in circles until they lovingly point you in the right direction (Imara and Mariana). All the things I did with him, I now do with friends. And the nice thing about friends is that they want to stay a part of your life, even if you move and change and make mistakes and grow.

It is not lost on me the vast wealth of friendships in my life. I stand somewhere in the middle of a beautiful, enormous mountain, one that I am grateful to be climbing. One day, it will inevitably shift, maybe not into a complete landslide, but the mountainside will change in ways I can’t predict or prevent. All I can hope for is that I can handle the seasons of my life and be ready to pick back up when I encounter the next mountain.

When I was a child, I loved combing the woods near my house for secret clues, hoping I’d find a key or a totem or some magical item that would lead me to a mystery that needed solving. Blame it on the fantasy books I was devouring at the time.

I love to envision a smaller version of myself scanning the forest floor for a piece of magic, but in reality, I never actually stopped this practice; it’s just changed shape. I came to Chicago following a trail of breadcrumbs left by my favorite authors and a universal hunch. This mystical nudge that I’ve always followed like a devoted dog, the quiet itching in the back of my mind, is exactly what led me to wake up on my 25th birthday in none other than Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Something about being halfway done with my twenties made me nostalgic in a dangerous way, and I had a feeling there was something to still be found in the cracked sidewalks and abandoned strip malls of my hometown.

For most people, I imagine that visiting home is more routine, a yearly tradition, a trip that acts as a responsibility rather than a pilgrimage. I’ve always stood outside this tradition, my hands pressed against the glass, projecting some kind of fantasy on the place I grew up. I’ve placed every answer to every question inside the city, without it knowing, like a Pandora’s Box for all the things I wonder about myself.

I left Sheboygan when I was 16. I had suffered a slew of friendship breakups, I was just becoming acquainted with my own mental health issues, and I didn’t know it yet, but my dad was only a few months from dying. And then, all of a sudden, I was in the Middle East, a place that was far from the familiar rolling hills and grey-brown trees of Wisconsin.

I always speak of the transition with appreciation. There’s a small part of me that doesn’t think I would’ve finished out my high school years alive if I hadn’t been taken as far away as possible. But with seven years between now and then and the clarity of hindsight, I wonder if the move fractured me in a way I’m still trying to understand.

Had I parents who still lived in the city or friends to return back to, maybe I’d visit more often. But it’s just hard to justify paying for a hotel room in the only place you’ve ever really called home. And so I often go long stretches without going back.

When I’ve been away for too long, I start to forget it exists completely. I wonder if I imagined the yellow brick buildings scattered around the city, or the cobalt blue railing that lines the riverfront, or even the towering, red lighthouse that marks North pier. If I did imagine the whole place, it’s a phenomenal story to have made up.

In a lot of ways, Sheboygan is what I would call a perfect city. Lining Lake Michigan, the beach stretches all the way up its eastern side. There’s no shortage of lookouts and parks, beaches, and piers that reach out into the lake. The Sheboygan River snakes west. Family-owned businesses are dotted around the city. If you go far enough south, you’ll run into the wooded and sandy Kohler-Andrae State Park. You could drive the length of it in almost 20 minutes, and bike it in probably an hour. The farmer’s market runs the length of the summer and has the best egg rolls I’ve ever tasted. On Sunday, you’ll hear the gentle serenade of church bells. It’s home to a phenomenal art museum that takes my breath away every time I visit. And the people are chatty.

Sheboygan also holds a lot of charged memories for me. It’s where I had my first heartbreak, where I learned how to ride a bike and drive a car, where I had bonfires on the beach in the late summer, where my parents got divorced, where I learned how to swear, where I sang Wicked songs at the top of my lungs in my bedroom, and where I learned how to love my best friend.

That best friend accompanied me on the pilgrimage. They have their own bucketful of emotionally charged memories, star-crossed lovers, and people that helped shape the person they are today.

Driving up I-43, past mile marker 111, the giant rental Jeep shuttled us back in time. Familiar location markers started cropping up to the left and right of us. KJ points out the McDonald’s parking lot their parents would meet to trade custody of them. The Acuity flagpole, the tallest flagpole in the United States and the 16th tallest in the world, starts to come into view. How many times had I driven past that ridiculously huge flag with my parents in the front seat?

We had arrived in our mystical, mysterious, magically-charged Sheboygan.

We spent the first day of the trip, my birthday, in the only way I could’ve: breakfast at our favorite coffee shop, driving around our old neighborhoods and pointing out all the important places (“that’s the park where my first boyfriend and I would hang out”, “that’s where the kid who drank bleach lived”), telling old stories, and ending with a beautiful, dry white wine at a restaurant our parents used to go to. It was the day I had dreamed of for years and years, and it was exactly how I hoped it would be.

As the street lights flicked on, I stared out at the downtown facade. It was a sequence of buildings I knew more intimately than my own self, but something about them started to feel off. The goosebumps that had been coming and going the whole day were suddenly still. I felt tired, exhausted. It occurred to me that the buildings in front of me might not be buildings at all, but elaborate recreations. The stories we’d told each other all day wove together a beautiful and tragic play, but it was beginning to feel like we’d stayed a little too long on the stage.

I had spent the day reminiscing, yes, but in some part, cosplaying too. We drove the roads I drove with my dad, and for half a second, if I focused hard enough on the lake as we sped up Lakeshore Drive, I could feel what it was like to be in the car with him. I’d remember the feeling of safety as he drove me to school and the kind of thoughts I would have while watching the sun bounce off the waves.

Earlier that day, I had turned a corner in the grocery store and felt with 100% certainty that I would run into my grandma, who had passed away a few years ago, in the next aisle picking out cereal. It occurs to me now that maybe part of my trip home, however subconscious it was, was to Truman-show myself into discovering that these people I loved so, so much had never actually passed away, just pretended to as a part of the plot. Deep down, I felt there was a nonzero chance that I would get to see them one last time, however fleeting, and that small hope felt so good to hold onto despite the sad, unremarkable realization of its futility.

This false hope that everything might stay exactly the same, my loved ones and forgotten friends, like actors, ready to pick up where they left off, was proven even more incorrect by just how much everything changed while I was away. The city is verifiably different.

My bank is now a health food store. The kid I knew on the playground is using gym pics on his Tinder. There’s a queer book store and a vintage store owner that wants to open a lesbian bar. My grandma’s house got repainted. The Kwip Trip is now an Alfaa. The bars that served as nothing more than street decoration to me when I was a child are now filled with people that I went to school with.

The changes shouldn’t have surprised me in the way they did. After all, I was hardly the same person I was the last time I visited.

Sheboygan wasn’t a concept behind a glass wall anymore; it was real, and I was right in the middle of it. At dinner, my eyes scanned the room for familiar faces, looking for former high school classmates and families I knew from church. Would I be happy to see them? Nervous? Too scared to make eye contact? Realistically, it would be a messy concoction of all three.

I never really kept in touch with anyone besides KJ. I felt different when I was around my friends back then, like I always had to struggle to fit in and keep up. Whether or not it was actually true is a moot point now. The point is that it left me with a behemoth of a superiority complex, always feeling the need to praise myself for leaving my hometown and experiencing more of the world, to make up for what I lacked in my social connections.

KJ and I fantasized about what our lives would look like if we had never left our hometown. Would we be married with kids? Working at a local boutique for minimum wage? Sending our children to the same schools we went to? And was that really so bad? Surely it was not the scary reality that I had convinced myself it would be. Here were people who lived happy lives; here were people I loved who were proud to be exactly who they were. Maybe I was too preoccupied with my ego-fueled sprint away from my hometown that I couldn’t understand that having a connection to where you come from is a divine gift.

And then something started happening. I started hearing my own call to return home. Something was tugging at me, asking me to return to the well-worn streets that I could still navigate without a map. This tug reminded me that I will always have a connection to Sheboygan, whether or not I like it. So much of myself was formed there, 16 whole years of who I am. How could I ever forget?

The trip ended with my best friend and I sitting on the hood of a Jeep, sharing a cigarette and watching the waves of the lake roll in as Twenty One Pilots played from their phone speaker. Somehow, it’s exactly what I thought 25 would be, Jeep and all.

The other cars lined up to face the lakefront at North Point Park were dark. I couldn’t see who was in them, but I felt some kind of solidarity between us, like we were all experiencing our own significant moments. Sheboygan has a type of magic to it in that way. It’s a wonderful place to come of age, at any age.

When I’m 35, I’m sure I’ll romanticize every moment of this era in my life, rebranding the endless existential confusion and uncertainty about life as something endearing, the same way I do with my 15-year-old suffering. And I know the city will still be there for me to retreat to when I need a place to hold me.

On our last morning, KJ and I tidied the hotel room and packed our things back into carry-ons. We started on our way home, with me in my grandma’s sweater and my best friend’s pants, and my best friend in my ex-boyfriend’s tee and my pants. I thought about how every part of us is forged in the other people we know, how it’s impossible to divorce yourself from the impact that other people have on us, and how that’s the whole point. That’s the whole point.

We made two stops on our way out of town, the first to the diner we always go to on our last mornings before we say goodbye, and the church where we met each other. We were met with smiles and hugs and a reminder that those places are still there for us to come back to. I can feel that nearly decade-old fracture starting to heal itself, all these different parts of my past connecting with each other.

I’m writing this now from a coffee shop in Milwaukee as I wait for my bus back home, the trip behind me and the city safely tucked back behind glass again. I’m wearing my best friend’s pants, and they’re wearing mine. I’m not sure if I found all the answers I thought I tucked away there, but I think I found the next clue that’ll help me unravel the mystery of it all, as long as I keep looking.

Spring finds me taking a Google Maps Streetview hike around the neighborhood where I grew up. I take the road from my house to the river and then the park and then the house of the boy I used to have a crush on. I would ride my bike past his house obsessively, some false hope fantasy running through my mind of him coming outside and professing his love for me. With my thumb and forefinger, I zoom into the windows and wonder if he ever saw me making my rounds and thought it was odd. I think about how many hopeless crushes I’d had in childhood and wonder why they all felt like I was trying to convince another person I was worth paying attention to.

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Spring finds me checking my ex-boyfriend’s Spotify playlists to see if he still listens to any songs he found from me. I scroll until I find the small green circles that indicate songs I have saved to my own library, although I don’t think any of the songs are ones that would make him think of me. It’s funny to recall that this is how our relationship began, with me checking his Spotify almost daily to see when he’d delete the playlist he made for his girlfriend before me. It’s an odd, full circle moment. Such a strangely intimate, strangely lonely activity to perform, almost like I’ve entered a place I’m no longer welcome in through the back door that leads to a storage room. I hang out in the storage room for a minute, then head out. Nostalgia is a powerful force.

Spring finds me cleaning my room. Finally, folding clothes and opening mail (not all of it, of course, but definitely some of it). I tell myself that this year I’ll be better, cleaner. I probably won’t but this season is about optimism, so I won’t give up on the dream just yet. I am better if just for a moment.

Spring finds me taking long, deep breaths so I can remember how it all smells. Being alive feels different lately, and I wonder if it’s the way the air smells that makes me feel that way. The warmer, thicker weather makes me want to open up as much of myself as possible, starting with my nasal passageways. I want to take those soft, sunny spring days and devour them whole, consume them until I become them. It’s hard to want to grab and hold onto something as intangible as a day.

Spring finds me listening to music I usually describe as “tender.” I find a home in songs where you can hear the sound of fingers picking and moving up and down the neck of the guitar. I usually favor electronic, dance-y, feel-good-all-the-time music, but spring really does find me slowing down from time to time and enjoying the melancholy crooning of bisexual indie musicians.

Spring finds me crying at a protest, yes, because it’s sad, but also because I’m on my period, and the thought of people coming together for a single, common belief is enough to make me want to cry again while writing this. Young people, old people, even children can walk together and chant together and although it doesn’t fix anything immediately, it does mean something. And sometimes you just really need something that means something.

It’s a fool’s spring.

On this trip, we shared our life updates via Powerpoint. We talked about our career trajectories, our new friends, and what was making us laugh lately. And, of course, we each had dedicated slides to recap our “love lives.” These slides contained pictures, timeline summaries, and even screenshots of text conversations.

As I gave my own “love life update” I felt a sense of deep boredom wash over me. Did these men really symbolize a significant aspect of my year? Was there actually anything inherently interesting about my love life other than the fact that I could point to a small handful of people who fulfilled my need for flattery? Why did I feel the need to boast about this in the first place?

As I mulled this over, it occurred to me that what I was really doing was searching for approval. I was using my semi-romantic exploits as social currency. I wanted to have experiences to trade with other women. I wanted to sit cross-legged on a couch and contribute to conversations about who I was seeing during the day and who I was seeing during the night. The intention was not to build a connection with lovers, but, in fact, to build a reputation with friends.

Standing firmly in the Fall, I look back on my Summer with confusion. I had entered the season intending to indulge in my senses, in life’s beauty, and in rich experiences, but somehow I’d missed this mark entirely. Like, completely, entirely. I left the Summer feeling burnt out, disillusioned by social interaction, and somehow further away from the feeling of visceral love that I was chasing so rabidly.

I’ve thought a lot about love. Where to find it and how to hold onto it. And yet, the past few months, I had ignored everything I learned about connection and love and traded it for a cheap imitation: the concept of connection.

(This shallow version of connection, rooted in inauthentic intentions, really should have a name, by the way.)

I want to be angry with myself for wasting even a day of my life on a pursuit so narcissistic in nature, but it would be unfair to pin all the onus on myself. In our modern culture, love has become a commodity, the must-have item of the season. And I’m only trying to keep up with the trends.

These days, having a man in your back pocket is in vogue. Pull him out when group conversation turns to love lives, pull him out when you need a date to a function, and most definitely pull him out if you’re feeling even an iota of inadequacy or loneliness during the dreadfully slow hours of the evening. And remember that it’s extra chic if he embodies the physical attributes of the internet’s (often white and skinny) man-du-jour, which, right now is the Rodent Man, if you were wondering.

And the more men you have at your disposal, the more secure you’re inclined to feel. Besides, you never know if the man in your back pocket will be busy when you need him most (sometimes they do actually have their own lives), so it’s best to have backups just in case. Have one for every occasion, one for each social circle. Maybe one that is kind and one that is less than kind. Have one that likes to go out and one that likes to stay in. One that lives near and one that lives far. Even a couple scattered across the globe, if you’re particularly adventurous.

Count your lovers. Measure them, even. Isn’t this how we estimate our worth now?

“Lovers” is a loose term, a romanticization of impressions of relationships. Count your reply guys, the men sitting idly in your Instagram DM requests as if in a sort of romantic purgatory, a waiting room for your attention. You can see them sitting there, the blue “unread” bubble tickling a spot deep in your brain that you’re hardly aware of. Count the likes on your Instagram stories (subtract the likes that come from your platonic relationships) and call that your value. Scoop up your collection of digital admirers and look in the mirror and try to reconcile the sinking feeling you have about yourself with the feeling of worthiness you felt a passing shadow of when you checked your phone notifications.

This can’t be all I’m searching for. Does there exist anything greater than this cycle of instant gratification? Has the commodification of romantic pursuits entirely stunted our ability to connect with each other? Even if I divorce from this cycle, will there be someone on the other side looking for the same kind of intentional and mindful connection I’m looking for? Or are we left with only shells of potential partners with incredibly well-curated Instagram profiles and Hinge profiles that have been workshopped to death?

I want to know how we got to this point as a society, but also to understand how I got to this point as an individual, in hopes that I can backtrack and escape this dead-end tangle of weeds I’ve found myself in.

There are decades of social politics that have led up to this point, and trying to pinpoint a single movement that caused us to behave in such inauthentic ways would be futile. But I do believe I can point to four main trends that have contributed to this shift:

1. Fourth-wave feminism placed importance on women finding empowerment through casual sexual encounters and viewing relationships through a misandrist framework.

2. Media, particularly television shows, upheld the notion that having a rotating cast of love interests was not only desirable but proper for the upwardly mobile.

3. The invention of dating apps and the pervasiveness of social media caused us to view people as objects rather than complex individuals.

4. The erosion of community and quality friendships has led us to seek approval from anywhere possible to assuage our connection insecurity.

Let’s get into it.

1. The Squeak of the Rodent Man

The objectification of men sounds like a silly concept when I type it out. I have lamented over the objectification of women ever since I discovered feminism on Mark Zuckerberg’s internet back in the early 2010’s. I would stew over misogynistic Facebook posts, wondering why it was so hard for men to see women as real and complex people. I never considered that one day the reverse would begin to manifest.

And, to be incredibly clear, this is not a complete reversal of roles. Women do not magically hold the same kind of social capital that men have held for centuries just because man-hating is mainstream now.

The 2000’s was rife with players, fuckboys, and womanizers. Watching old TLC shows is a slightly exaggerated capsule of this phenomenon. Men only wanted one thing, and it’s exactly what you think it is. In response to this, women developed skills to screen and rebuff these kinds of men. Don’t seem too interested, wait a few days before calling him back, and definitely don’t put out until the third date. Guides to dating filled the shelves of bookstores, like Why Men Love Bitches, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and The Rules Handbook.

Echoes of these arbitrary rules are still found in our dating culture today. Don’t double text, wait twice as long as he waited to text back, and if you want him to text, post a tasteful thirst trap on your Instagram Story. We think this makes us evolved, smarter than our mothers and grandmothers, but at the end of the day, we’re still playing the same game. And what is the game if not wrestling for an ounce of affection by a conventionally attractive man?

Those of us who partake in this charade need to recognize that we are still tying our sense of worth to men. We are still centering men. We are still putting them on a pedestal, albeit a much lower pedestal. We think that if we collect lovers in abundance it will hurt much less when we lose one. We are the ones in power, as long as we have at least one man to tell us how beautiful and smart we are. By creating objects out of lovers, the modern woman seemingly reclaims her power. No longer is she the only commodity in the relationship dynamic. Now they both are!

When I first saw the New York Times article about The Rodent Man, I gasped. Not only because I would be embarrassed if I saw my picture under a headline about rats, but also because I would be incredibly hurt to read an article about the type of woman that is most in style. Can you imagine the opposite existing? The Rodent Woman? Can you imagine reading an article from a major news outlet about Rodent Women? It sounds so stupid, I feel ridiculous repeating it, but I truly can’t wrap my mind around the team of people who pushed out this story. It is one thing for social media users, probably most of whom do not possess a fully formed frontal lobe, to talk about this trend, but to know that this story was published by “reputable journalists” is baffling to me.

The Rodent Man is only the latest addition to the list of desirable men. Before the rat was the “emaciated skinny man who looks like he eats cigarettes and doesn’t sleep.” For months, the internet was buzzing with the identification of this archetype. I’m not sure when we decided that glorifying one certain body type over another was not only acceptable but a part of internet in-group speech, but I vehemently reject this trend. Maybe I’m just tired of slotting people into archetypes. And this includes the “all men are trash” oversimplification as well.

It’s not that I’ve never hopped on the misandry train. In fact, I believe it’s because I’m such a frequent rider that I feel so strongly about correcting my old habits. It’s an easy train to board, to be fair. But, as Roxane Gay says in one of her many essays on gender, “this is how we all lose.”1

From hookups to long-term relationships, we’ve become so accustomed to barely liking the people we dedicate our time to. It’s become a bit of a pastime, I’m realizing, for friends to complain about their men. In fact, it’s replaced love stories almost entirely. It’s simply more satisfying to regale friends about the latest misstep of a lover rather than the latest tender moments. We want to sit, dissect, analyze, and assure ourselves that we still maintain a moral high ground. There’s something about the drama of conflict that makes us feel stimulated. But when we zoom out, it begins to appear as if we don’t even enjoy the person we’re seeing when all we have to discuss is our list of complaints. I’ve had to ask myself: Does it make me a better feminist to hate the person I love?

I see this trend as an overcorrection. Previously, men felt comfortable acting in ways that are no longer acceptable within our generation. And this shift came from women talking to each other, supporting each other, and ensuring each other that it is possible to be treated better.

Growing up and seeing the women around me accept love that is stilted, stunted, and oftentimes harmful to their wellbeing, it became a necessity to reassure them that a greater love is possible. And taking into consideration the power imbalance, this reassurance typically took the form of “men ain’t shit.” How else to convince a friend that the man she thinks hung the moon in the sky is not only fallible but also pretty bad at being a partner and a lover? See it as rebalancing the scales.

And so, at one point in the recent past, this rhetoric was a requisite to liberate women from a position of accepting detriment. It is out of caution that we continue this trend, but I fear it often creates more issues if we are always living on the defense, expecting the ones we love to eventually slip up and hurt us. When you enter a situation expecting betrayal, you become a sentinel rather than a lover, and your watchful eye will surely be noticed by the other party. You create the environment you exist in, so why dream up one of law and order?

I fear our parents and grandparents have forgotten to teach us conflict resolution, to remind us that the goal is not to win the battle, but to find the holy middle ground and truthful dialogue between two people with honest intentions.

It is hard to live any other way than within the context in which we exist. But if we allow ourselves to be victims of this cycle, we will miss out on genuine love and connection—we will miss it entirely. Be wary, but believe in the best of people. Trust that the people in your life are there because you surround yourself with quality connections. Divorce yourself from expecting misery!

2. And Just Like That

I’m a bit of a sitcom junkie. I like to collect them like infinity stones. The formulaic plot, the familiar living rooms and coffee shops, the promise that everything will be okay by the end of the episode. It’s all so comforting.

Seinfeld was my first sitcom, and I’ve since watched it three times through. It seemed to be a perfect example of how a person was supposed to live in the 90’s. Episodes often revolve obsessively around small, petty social missteps, assigning morality to activities like “coming to see the new baby” and showing up to a house party with the right loaf of bread.

This expectation of a social standard extends heavily to the dating culture of the rime period as well, and is a major focus of the show. Jerry breaks up with a girl for wearing the same dress multiple times, Elaine breaks up with a man who doesn’t use exclamation points, and George breaks up with a woman for beating him at chess. In-show these breakups are acknowledged as cartoonish and irrational, but it sets a precedent that dating, at least in this fictional depiction of the 90’s, is much less about love and much more about fitting a certain mold.

Sex and the City is a more recent addition to my watch history and is perhaps the paragon of sitcoms that deal with dating culture. It’s curious that this show is experiencing a resurgence among my generation, which features a revolving door of sexual and romantic exploits. The show centers sex and emotional intimacy much better than Seinfeld (to be expected), but still tends to glorify the act of accumulating lovers. The women love to meet for brunch or cocktails and ruminate over their recent relationships and whether or not they’re good or bad.

The show has been the subject of heavy debate on whether it is anti-feminist, feminist, or post-feminist, and I find myself having this internal debate while I watch. But no one said it better than Miranda when, frustrated with the state of their conversations, she says to her friends, “How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?”

This conversation about dating culture now extends to everything we consume. Social media is steeped in dating discourse and new reality dating gameshows seem to crop up every week. The Bachelor and The Bachelorette have paved the way for Love Island, Love Is Blind, The Ultimatum, Too Hot to Handle, FBoy Island, Perfect Match, Love on the Spectrum, and many, many more.

We want to convince ourselves that we can remain objective observers, we can watch reality TV without it warping our own sense of reality, but that’s simply impossible. There are mountains of research on how media slowly affects the way we think, naturally, since our perception is influenced by the information we obtain about our surroundings. Consciously, we understand that television may not always accurately reflect the average experience of our immediate environment, but our subconscious is not afforded this luxury.

If my brain is told repeatedly that romantic endeavors are a part of the culture of being a 20-something, and even 30-something, upwardly mobile woman in a big city, then my inclinations will tend towards this behavior, however unconsciously those inclinations may be. It takes active and continuous acknowledgment to break this association.

Perhaps this is why I feel so pulled to write on this subject. Perhaps I am finally ready to commit to the active restructuring of how I approach relationships. I am a 20-something upwardly mobile woman in a big city and I am tired of yearning for a revolving door of romantic interests.

Which brings us to the gamification of love.

3. The Crapshoot

I used to think the term “crapshoot” was a reference to using the bathroom. To me, proclaiming “this is a crapshoot” meant “this is kind of shitty.” I learned later on that it means that the odds of an outcome are uncertain, or risky, as the stakes are in a game of craps. But in my brain, the two definitions are inextricably linked. I see a crapshoot as a situation where the outcome is uncertain, but most likely shitty. And this is coincidentally exactly how I feel about dating apps.

My arrival at college coincided with the heyday of Tinder. I remember the crafted opening lines I would receive, often repeated over many matches, and how I could never decide on the right balance of genuine expression and cheesy pickup lines that I was hoping to receive. I was just as bored by the “what’s up” opener as I was by the “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” opener. It wasn’t until I bought into the inherent insincerity that I felt I could use the app at all.

All of a sudden, I experienced an explosion of eligible matches in my immediate vicinity. I relished showing my matches to my friends. “Look what this guy messaged me!” I’d say as I tossed my phone across my shoebox dorm room to a friend. Whether the message was good or bad or just straight-up insane, it was exhilarating to have someone say something to me that was worth showing other people. Even back then, it acted as a form of social currency.

Two relationships later, I graduated from Tinder to Hinge. Hinge touted a more well-rounded experience. There were questions and prompts interspersed between photos, which is meant to encourage the user to think about a person’s brain and body, rather than just their body.

Still, I found myself enjoying the act of collecting matches like Pokemon cards, swiping until I found the perfect addition to my collection, only to match and never even have a conversation. Or maybe we’d have a conversation that quickly fizzled. Or we’d plan to meet up and then mutually ghost each other. There are a plethora of ways that two people can avoid meeting each other in person when neither of them are actually interested in doing so.

And this isn’t entirely unique to me, of course. So why are we all on dating apps if no one actually wants to date? For a while now, social media has been spreading the idea that dating apps are akin to gambling. And there’s quite a bit of research to support this notion.2 Our brains process a match like a small win, not enough to make us feel satisfied but surely enough to make us keep swiping. Your future partner could be right behind the next swipe…or the next one…or maybe the one after that. “Don’t quit now!” our brains tell us, “If you quit now, you’ll never hit the jackpot!”

I have to admit—pulling out my subconscious beliefs and writing them down like this feels awful. On a conscious level, I am disgusted by the way my brain has been operating, viewing complex human beings as nothing more than a few pictures and prompts on a screen. I don’t know whether to be angry at myself, dating app companies, or the kind of society that normalizes this way of thinking. And then I have to ask myself, is it just me? Has everyone else found a way to operate in this way without allowing their minds to degrade to such a simplistic and self-centered framework?

Let’s examine my habits in real life, as well. Do I not size up strangers on the street, measuring them against my expectations for a match? When I meet someone new, do I not make a split second decision on whether or not I could fall in love with them? Am I not constantly mining my own preexisting relationships for opportunities of romance? When I zoom way out, has my entire life just become a game of craps as I yearn for someone to experience love with?

I hate thinking this way. Whether it’s a result of my phone’s influence on my reality or a deeply-rooted way of thinking instilled by family members whose first question upon seeing me is still always “Are you seeing anybody?”, I hate thinking this way.

I’m putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps, subconsciously, I want a romantic partner. But consciously, I know I’m not ready for one if this is how I approach life. If I don’t have the capacity to see a potential partner as a real person, how will I see an actual partner as a real person and not just a reflection of my own self worth, as a prize that I’ve won? The answer is: I won’t.

I don’t believe that we deserve physical intimacy if we can’t engage in emotional intimacy. By emotional intimacy, I don’t mean playing therapist or meeting the parents. I mean the responsibility we have to each other to learn about and try to understand each other’s emotional selves. And I think that’s a fair thing to ask of the people we give our time and our bodies to.

I’ve been dating-app-clean for about four months, and I’ve never felt more resolute about any decision I’ve ever made. Having ditched the crutch, I am much more inclined to engage with people in real life, talk to those around me, smile at strangers, and flirt with someone I just met at a party. These actions are not means to an end, I remind myself, they’re just small ways in which I can interact with the world I exist in.

With dating apps, there’s this looming sense of responsibility. If we match, we have to talk. If we talk, we have to meet up. If we meet up, they’ll be expecting a second date. It’s like I’m being shuffled through a hellish dating pipeline that is devoid of any intentional actions. It is much easier to forget values and intentions when we are trying to fulfill expectations.

I still miss Hinge, sometimes. Once in a while, when I’m lying awake in my bed, I’ll get an itch in the back of my brain that tells me my soulmate, the person of my dreams, is waiting for me just a few swipes away. I have to resist the bright lights and flashing colors of the dating app casino, instead choosing the quiet, dusk solitude of my room. I know better now, I have to remind myself. Oftentimes, choosing what’s best for ourselves is the least glamorous thing in the whole world.

4. Please, God, I Want to Feel It

I have a playlist by the same name as this section header where I slot the most fervent romantic songs I come across. They’re songs that remind me of the sacredness of true love, and the importance of letting it wash over you inhibited. I save their rhyme schemes and stanzas for the day that I can finally see myself in their message.

And there is no shortage of love songs to sift through.

I find that our American culture tends to place an astonishingly huge emphasis on romantic love. TV shows, even the ones for children, always integrate a romantic storyline. Children as young as kindergarteners will be asked by their parents and grandparents if they have a boyfriend or girlfriend yet. My generation and the one before grew up on magazines filled to the brim with celebrity dating gossip and dating tips that reinforce a very slim archetype of acceptability. If we are always focused on how to optimize ourselves for the right lover, we are not thinking about the love that already surrounds us.

I’ve caught myself many times thinking about my absence of love while sitting amongst friends. How vain and neglectful of me to accept in passing the community I have worked hard to be a part of. We often don’t count platonic love as real love, but as I scan through my memories, I find that I have experienced the most profound and life-changing connections in my life through family and friends.

So why, then, must I place so much significance on romantic love?

I think, for a while, it made me feel empowered against my own insecurities. If someone could love me, it meant I was a person capable, even worthy, of being loved. It meant that even if I didn’t fit the mold I had tried and failed all my life to fit into, it didn’t matter anymore.

But instead of accepting this truth and moving on, I got stuck somewhere, trying to prove it to myself over and over again. It takes up so much of my thought space. Crush psychosis. Friends to lovers. Enemies to lovers. Slow burn, fling, one night stand. What is love, what is love, what is love? I’ve found myself stuck in a thought loop. I’ve been here so long, I forgot I could leave.

Why is it that I feel the need to find reassurance in the first place? At what point did I begin to search for permission to exist through other people?

In my research into this, I came across the article “Sense of community: A definition and theory,” in which the authors, McMillan and Chavis, define sense of community as “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together”3

Inherent to the definition of sense of community is the feeling of belonging and commitment. My fear is that many of us are not receiving the proper care from the communities we are a part of, or are not even a part of a community to begin with. And if we don’t have spaces we feel we belong in, we will inevitably search for that wherever we go.

We are attempting to give ourselves the reassurance that we think we need to exist in the world. When you’re a part of a community, there doesn’t exist the need to constantly question your worth and your connections. Without community, connection becomes a scarce resource and we in turn are stray dogs fighting for scraps in the alleyway, lunging at the first piece of meat that lands in front of our teeth.

Without community, our worlds become swollen with uncertainties. In fact, our worlds become almost entirely made up of uncertainties, as we desperately search for a ounce of control. We must then create new worlds and narratives to convince ourselves we are not at the whim of the universe, and that a single person (if it’s the right person) can assuage all the uncertainty we hold.

But by creating a false sense of knowledge, we distract ourselves from the fact that we aren’t actually in control at all. We are still at the beck and call of our ever-shifting desires. We are out of control at our own hands. And we are alone.

Where to Now…?

I am reminded, as I write this piece, of something I journaled about recently. Loving and dating are completely different actions. You don’t have to love someone to date them and you don’t have to date someone to love them. And as I reevaluate my relationship to relationships, I am surprised that as my interest in dating decreases, my interest in love increases. Surely this will not always be the case, but perhaps it’s necessary as I rewire the way I approach these topics.

For so long, I told myself that a degree of emotional separation is required in 21st-century dating. I desperately wanted a situationship. I wanted to be the person who could engage in an affair and remain unscathed by emotional turmoil. Rather than dating to marry, I was dating to see how easily I could be hurt. And it turns out, if you never really open up to someone emotionally, it’s easy to stay unscathed.

I feel unsure of how to proceed. Am I a lover? Am I looking for something casual? Am I looking for a person or a feeling? What am I looking for? How do I parse the difference between holding back from love and being sensible in the face of flattery?

Every time I take an intentional step, I end up looking back and finding that I moved with incredible ignorance. In a world where dating has started to feel like a trap, I think I must move away from dating altogether. But as soon as I make this decision, fears bubble to the surface. What if I’m closing myself off from love? What if I’m ignoring signs from the universe? There is never an end to these doubts.

So maybe abstination isn’t the answer. But I believe there are guardrails that can be put in place, at least for myself, to make sure I’m being intentional and honest in my endeavors.

The first guardrail: Romantic situations are not to be discussed with anyone, as much as I can help it. If I can’t use a situation as a topic of conversation, will it still interest me as much? If yes, then I may proceed with caution.

The second guardrail: Do nothing out of obligation, wait for desire to arise. One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in this journey is feeling as if I have to fulfill an obligation when I’m dating. I feel that if someone wants to see me, I have to go see them, before asking myself if I really even have the desire to see them. I forget sometimes that I have the agency to say no, to occasionally disappoint. I find that when I quiet my mind, I can finally listen to my body, which has been trying to communicate this whole time.

The third guardrail: Engaging through social media and texting must be kept to a minimum. I find that when I am waiting for a text, what I’m really looking for is attention. I don’t want my romantic relationships to be built on my incessant need for attention, so I must separate them from each other as best as I can.

The fourth guardrail: Invest love primarily in my community. If I’m not cultivating the kind of connections I’m looking for in those who are closest and most important to me, I am nothing but an exhibitionist.

The fact remains that I’m deeply confused by romance. I still sometimes harbor doubt that I’m capable of feeling true love. But I know this anxiety can’t be drowned out by a breadth of shallow connections.

I trust that I am working through the conflicting emotions that are constantly battling for my attention. I hope this drive for genuine connection leads me to a version of myself that is more attune to others and their divine humanity, regardless of whether our relationship to each other is romantic in nature.

Maybe I’m aging out of the game, or maybe it’s because of the wealth of strong platonic connections I’ve built that I’m realizing there’s so much more to get out of the world than a romantic partner. It’s time for me to fold my cards. And although I may lose some social currency, I predict the sacrifice will be well worth it all in the end.

I stand in the Dane County Culver’s looking out of the cookie-cutter windows and I have a feeling that if I turn around, my grandma will be sitting in the booth, waiting for me to come back with our ketchup. But, of course, she isn’t.

The inauguration day coincided with a weekend road trip up through my home state of Wisconsin to visit friends and family in Minneapolis. It’s hard to drive through the Midwest in the winter without melancholy seeping into you as if it rode on the back of the coldness that somehow reaches the core of your bones.

Traveling through the picturesque Wisconsin pastoral, the landscape stretches out as alternating patches of golden hay and white snow. The blue/grey sky looms over it all, and the sun rains down in streaks. And the naked trees, old and leaning toward each other as if their own gravity was pulling them together, connect the heavens and the earth. It is hard not to believe in God in a place like this, in the only place that has ever felt like my home.

Just like in Culver’s, the feeling I could be anywhere and any age returns as I stare out at the road in front of us. I’m 24 and I’m on my way to Chicago, a dear friend navigating us safely home. I’m 13 and I’m on my way to a volleyball tournament, my mom driving us and forcing me to listen to a Michelle Tumes CD. I’m 6 and on the way to family Thanksgiving in an itchy wool dress and tights. Not much, if anything, has changed about Wisconsin highways and it gives me a distinct feeling that all of my past selves are colliding into one.

I love it here, but I hate it here.

I find it hard to hold so many contradictions at once when I think of the country I come from. I love the rolling hills and the purple mountain majesties, but I hate that they were stolen from those who were here before us. I hate the U.S. military’s agenda and what it stands for, yet I love many people who have acted as hands for that agenda. I love how different everyone can be, but I hate that those differences have been politicized to turn us against each other.

Andrew Callaghan1, host of Channel 5 News on YouTube, put a documentary out on HBO Max that’s been returning to my mind a lot in the wake of the presidential election. In his documentary, This Place Rules, Callaghan travels across the country to interview attendees at Trump rallies leading up to the January 6th insurrection. He captures this explosive moment in history with care, allowing space for his interviewees to speak for themselves. He visits the home of one family in particular, joins them at the dinner table, and plays with their kids. For the first time for many, we are let into the intimate experience of sharing space with people who are deep into the QAnon conspiracy and have even taken their children out of public school to further protect them from “liberal propaganda.”

We do not see them through the lens of social media critique or biased news outlets. Instead, we see them presented without commentary, without asterisks or footnotes. We commune with them and hear their words clearly because no one interrupts.

It scares me that my neighbors share such different values than I do, and I know it scares them too. We have been poked and prodded into a place of hatred. We have been pushed to the point where we are afraid even to hear each other.

We want Joe Rogan kicked off of streaming platforms and we want to control what teachers are allowed to even mention in the classroom. We, as the American People, want everyone to think and act like we, as the individual, do.

I’m a result of this thinking as well. I have opinions and values and ways that I think this country should work. I believe in the moral superiority of my beliefs, the way that my conservative counterpart does about their own beliefs. And instead of cultivating a culture of productive conversation and problem-solving that tends to the needs of both ends of the spectrum, our interests and attention have been hijacked by a ruling class that uses its money and power to commit atrocities across the world.

There is no moral superiority simply by virtue of existence. We are all products of our environment, victims of a steady diet of propaganda from one side or the other. I am sorry to have been a part of the problem.

At some point, the left may need to recognize that branding Trump voters as “uneducated and delusional” only serves to stroke their own egos. Perhaps they should take a closer look at their own leadership, the one that abandoned the working class ages ago. And perhaps the delusional ones are those who thought they could win a presidential election through marketing tactics and celebrity endorsements.

God bless America because we really need it right now.

We are a broken people, filled with vitriol for ourselves. And I don’t know how to begin on repairs, but we have no choice but to stop ignoring it. Media outlets have found great success in making monsters out of the people we don’t understand, but I no longer find interest in villainizing those who disagree with me.

I know many who wish for a life outside of the United States, their home country. Let’s not forget that the website for seeking Canadian residency broke after the 2016 election. I can’t say I haven’t considered it and I can’t say I’m not considering it in the future, but currently, I am not afforded this kind of levity for the situation. Almost every person I have ever loved calls America their home; friends and family who will be negatively affected by President Trump’s promised policies and friends and family who voted for the man himself.

I want to leave, but I can’t yet. I can’t leave the home I love so much and hate so much. For whatever reason, I feel at least partly responsible for cleaning up the mess we’ve found ourselves in.

God bless America and her people. God protect those affected by poverty, corporate greed, wildfires and hurricanes, and by the people who seek to acquire wealth and power at the expense of others. God bless America because for some people, there is no option of escaping through emigration. For some people, this is the only home they’ve ever known and will ever know, and those are the people who always feel the brunt of political malfeasance, on both sides of the spectrum.

There is almost too much to say about the state of things, these are just the thoughts that had to come out first. I’m curious what everyone else is thinking. How are you processing the new administration? What’s going on in your minds? I’m tired of scrolling X and Instagram, so give me something to think about in the comments.

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I used to think writing would save me. Like a Swiss Army knife, writing could fulfill all my needs. It would give my life purpose, provide me with notoriety, pay the bills, and help me cultivate a deeper connection with myself and others. So far, I don’t know if any of that has been accomplished.

When I started writing for Soft Spots over a year ago, I didn’t have a concrete vision for it, I just wanted a place to set down the words that kept bouncing around my head. I must’ve gone through a lot of thinking to set it all up and decide to post for the first time, but looking back now, it almost feels like something that’s always existed. If I were to decide to start posting my writing today, I don’t know that I could bring myself to do it.

Writing has always felt that way, as if the words themselves have always existed in this exact sequence and it’s my challenge to remember the order in which they come. In that way, writing feels more like a duty than a craft, which is wonderful until writer’s block sets in.

My goal for this year was to write one piece a month, a goal that I thought would be highly attainable. I promised myself I would find the balance between discipline and the freedom to create without forcing it. I made it all of three months before I cracked under the pressure of needing to write a feasible amount of words in 30 days about my own thoughts and opinions.

My failure to excel at the one thing that felt “right” has accumulated into an avalanche of feeling inadequate. The allegory of the fig tree casts a long shadow over my days, as I juggle work and projects that never fully capture my attention nor my excitement.

Scrolling through Reels late at night, a sediment of jealousy and self-disgust is stirred up by videos of child prodigies and young entrepreneurs who seem to know exactly what they want out of life and how to get it. I hate those kids.

How were we born on the same earth and yet they possess more skills than I do when I have eight to ten years on them? How is it that I’m 24 and have no discernible skills to my name? Is this gifted kid burnout or just regular burnout? Am I a burnout? How can I be a burnout if I feel like I’m always working? How can I feel like I’m always working when I have nothing to show for it?

The constant worrying and self-doubt cloud my intuition and transform what was once comforting into pure confusion. And now even the act of writing, which used to feel innate, feels foreign to me.

I watched Maze Runner the other week. I couldn’t help but feel a sad sort of empathy for Thomas when he awakes in a loud, fast-moving elevator with no memory of where he came from and no idea of what lies ahead.

I have to wonder—is this a “being in your early twenties” thing? Am I doomed to question every move I make until my frontal lobe develops? Or is peace of mind a thing to be earned?

Even as I write this piece, I keep deleting, retyping, and rearranging. There used to be a voice in my head telling me I was going in either the right direction or the wrong direction, now there’s only static and Apple by Charli XCX.

We used to think whales were solitary creatures until we learned that they can hear each other’s calls from across the ocean. A whale off the coast of Ireland can communicate with a whale off the coast of New York.

But the waters have become noisier due to industrialization and the sound of shipping containers and barges. Already in 2011, it was estimated that the acoustic habitat of whales decreased by 90%.

I think about lonely whales a lot more than I should, sending their voices out across nearly half the globe only to be met with the sound of scraping metal. Selfishly, I want to take it as a metaphor for myself; a reminder that I need to keep my environment quiet so I can listen.

When I can’t hear myself, when the sound of everything else in the world busies up my head, that’s when I feel the most lost. When I can’t hear myself, life feels like a series of illogical decisions made based on arbitrary “signs from the universe” and an affinity for the path of least resistance.

I often ask myself, “Why am I here when I could be anywhere else?” And for that matter, why be anywhere else when I could be right here? My thoughts circle around each other like this until I look up and realize the sun has long since set and I forgot to make dinner again.

A while ago, I saw people online talking about whether their souls had been reincarnated many times before now or if this was their first time on earth. I think, probably, this is my first time here. It feels that way very intensely, lately.

I started this morning like most mornings, scrolling on social media. I hate saying it and I hate typing it, but it’s true. It’s an addiction I can’t seem to kick no matter how hard I try. I can’t even fathom going a day without it.

I’ve built most of my life around social media. It’s how I interact with friends, promote my work, look for jobs, and keep up with current events. And if I really dig deep and psychoanalyze, it’s really how I visualize my personhood, how I project to others my value, and how I signal my status. I feel like I talk about this in every single piece I write, but it’s because that’s all I’m ever thinking about.

That’s where I’ve been. As for where I’m going, in the words of Father John Misty, “I’m going where my body leads me.”

I’ll be writing more, I’ll be breathing more, I’ll be cooking more, I’ll be cleaning more. I think I need to get back to the basics that make life beautiful.

If you read this far, thanks for coming on the journey. I find a lot of value in writing in a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness style, but not always in reading it. Oh, and I guess this piece’s soft spot is dreadful existentialism if you’re going to hold me to always writing within the theme I created for myself.

Things to check out:

Deep Water Whale Communication

“If you need to be mean / be mean to me,” sings Mitsuki Miyawaki, or Mitski, as she’s known onstage. Mitski has long been hailed the queen of depressing music in the indie music scene. Her discography weaves a tapestry of self-discovery through suffering that, although emotionally complex, taps into fundamental 21st-century experiences. More recently, she’s been adopted into the “girlhood” culture by TikTok teens, due to her recurring themes of womanhood, growing up, and being unlucky in love.

I first discovered Mistki from a close friend in college, who convinced me to attend her show. As I moved from album to album, preparing for the concert, I found that her lyrics revealed parts of myself that I didn’t even know were there.

From “Washing Machine Heart” to “Goodbye, My Danish Sweetheart,” Mitski’s lyricism echoed my own experience trying to navigate the waters of first love, with my raging hormones doing nothing but encouraging the swells. It was as if she knew the same pain I was struggling to carry, knew the exact weight and every corner of it, and had transformed it into something greater.

The first time I saw her perform, in 2019, my concert experience was limited. The only concert I’d ever been to was Newsboys, the Christian rock band sensation. And although it was flashy (at one point the entire drumset lifted off the ground, tilted forward 90°, and spun around during the drum solo), it lacked a lot in the way of artistic acumen. At this point in life, I didn’t know that a concert could be more than a lead singer making love to a microphone and impressive drum solos.

Whatever I expected, Mitski transcended. She wore a uniform of bike shorts, knee pads, and a white crop top. That outfit, beside the bedazzled bodysuits and flowing gowns of her contemporaries, felt utilitarian. After the opening song, she turned to the crowd and told us that this was the last time she’d address the audience until the end of the show. This unexpected announcement shifted my perspective, my brain immediately shuffling what I was about to witness into the category of “real art.”

The stage held but two items: a table and a chair, which Mitski interacted with, moving around the stage and occasionally dancing on. There was no wasted action, every single movement was significant and planned. It was intentional, it was more than just serenading an audience of adoring fans, it was a performance piece. Performing her music live meant just as much for herself as it did for her fans. Upon leaving the venue, I knew I had to see Mitski perform again one day.

In between that night and the one I set out to write about, Mitski released her sixth studio album, Laurel Hell, to mixed reviews and an audience of disappointed fans. The indie-synth-pop-electronic style left fans feeling like they didn’t recognize their miserable, wailing queen anymore (I, of course, mean both of those descriptors as a deeply sincere compliment).

Laurel Hell was followed by The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We. It was described by critics as “her loneliest” album, “a meditation on self-witnessing,” “evocative, mesmerising,” and “her most emotionally raw.” She had once again struck a nerve with the collective, and this time, rather than unrequited love and the feeling of inadequacy, she muses on isolation.

As I entered the Auditorium Theatre alone on a rainy evening in late March, I was dazzled by the murals and golden lights surrounding the stage. I clutched my coat and an overpriced gin and tonic as I found my seat. No longer was Mitski performing in dimly lit indie venues with sticky, concrete floors. We were in a venue with chairs. And although the audience was sprinkled with preteens, the venue itself lent the concert an air of maturity.

The Auditorium Theatre was established in 1889, and was said by Frank Lloyd Wright to be “the greatest room for music and opera in the world, bar none.” It’s ornamented by esteemed artists and has seen performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Romeo and Juliet, speeches by Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, and concerts from Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. This stage had been graced by those whose work and legacy extended well past their own lifetime and it felt like a hopeful premonition to witness my favorite musical artist stand in the same place.

When the time came for Mitski to enter the stage, she appeared at first as an apparition. A spotlight cast from behind created a larger-than-life shadow version of the musician. It was the moment the audience had been waiting for, and we erupted with applause to prove it. The next 90 minutes were spellbinding, as Mitski sang and danced in a sea of hued light.

To see Mitski live is to witness a true performer. She moves around the stage with the ease and honesty of a girl dancing in her room and the emotion and precision of an internationally acclaimed artist.

It was an immense privilege to see both new and old songs interpreted through movement, light, and the sound of a live band.

The performance embodied the title of her album Be the Cowboy, featuring many of her most notoriously sad songs metamorphosed into upbeat country songs. Her choreography shifts surprisingly into line dancing, and as she grapevines to the left, she sings:

If your hands need to break
More than trinkets in your room
You can lean on my arm
As you break my heart

This rendition is so thick with irony that maybe there’s nothing ironic about it at all. The self-destructive lyrics, the singer begging her lover to let her absorb their pain, are originally accompanied by loud, gritty bass chords and grainy background noise that reminds me of how the inside of my head sounds on an especially bad day.

But when paired with fiddle riffs and a shaking tambourine, “I Don’t Smoke” becomes reminiscent of old country songs, where (usually white) men lament about drinking too much and missing the women who left them. It turns something heartbreaking into something more fun. More enjoyable.

Although not the album this single is from and not the album she’s touring for, Be the Cowboy has been on my mind ever since leaving the concert. Be the Cowboy, Mitski’s fifth studio album, was named after one of the artist’s mantras. She explains to Time Magazine that the mantra translates to: “What would a white guy say? What would a swaggering cowboy riding into town do in this situation?”

Mitski, Japanese American by blood and raised in multiple countries across the world, has discussed at length her complicated relationship with identity, especially as it relates to her career as a musician. Claiming the cowboy identity not only serves to embolden the artist to be fresh and confident in her work but also to challenge our preconceived notion of the type of people we think of when we think of American culture.

To add yet another layer of meaning to the cover, it also confronts the way we expect our favorite female indie artists to behave and perform. Many a publication have written think pieces and opinion columns about the “sad girl” label tagged onto any woman with a guitar who sings about their feelings, and Mitski herself is well aware of the reputation she’s been given on the internet.

As I sat in my seat, mouth gaping at the subversion of one of my favorite songs to mope to, an old interview came to mind.

“The sad girl thing was reductive and tired, like, five, ten years ago and it still is today,” she says to the camera.

I, myself, have been guilty of putting my favorite artists into tightly defined boxes, especially when it comes to “sad girl music.” When Lorde put out her Solar Power album, I was expecting a gut-wrenching, heart-breaking collection of songs that I could wallow and moan to while I contemplated my fleeting adolescence. So you can imagine my disappointment when I realized the album was actually about her being happy. Can you imagine?

There’s a certain expectation we have as fans of our favorite artists. It’s almost like a nasty, codependent relationship. Rather than feeling happiness or pride for their growth as an artist and as a person, we feel left behind, robbed of something we perceive to be owed. If Mitski (or Lorde, or Lana, or Billie) puts out music that we don’t relate to anymore, it means we’ve lost that point of connection, and that can be scary.

For a lot of people, music is how they tap into the human collective. If I go through a breakup and listen to the new Taylor Swift album to cope with the change, I’m not only tapping into Swift’s experience of heartbreak but also into the mass of people on earth who are using the album to process their break up as well.

And in a society that is moving rapidly towards disconnection and individualism, it’s incredibly powerful to feel connected to swaths of people through something as simple as a pop song.

However, the well-intentioned demand that our favorite artists continue to be our connection point to the rest of the world takes a nefarious shape when the position we ask them to stay in is one of misery and self-sabotage. This expectation that our favorite artists stay stagnant and miserable forever reflects our own secret desire to stay stagnant and miserable forever. And expecting despair means we don’t ever invite happiness. Instead, we find holiness in rotting and treat suffering like mass.

It’s easy to play the victim, to assume that the world is out to get us, to take every inconvenience and imperfection and collect them like stones in our pockets. It is much more radical, albeit more difficult, to release ourselves from that narrative cycle.

When I find myself in a funk again, I’ve gotten in the habit of asking, “Have we tried not being miserable?” and this has fundamentally changed how I view the world.

This revelation wouldn’t have happened had I never heard the well-loved quote from Ram Dass, where he said “You can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like a dance.” This line sticks with me because, most of the time, I forget to dance. In fact, I forget that dancing is even an option.

I think this is what Mitski hinted at when she called the sad girl phenomenon “reductive and tired.” She knew, well before I ever figured out, that breaking out of the cycle of misery is freedom. You can take something, like old feelings or old music, and transform it into something else, something that honors the person you are now and not the person you used to be.

The first Mitski concert I attended reshaped the way I think of musical performances. The second Mitski concert I attended reshaped the way I think of music itself. It reminded me that art is alchemy, that you can put both your emotions and your expertise into it and create something that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

“I Don’t Smoke” was a song that reminded me of crying in my bathroom as I bleached my hair in the middle of a pandemic, of panic attacks at 3am when I thought my lover was leaving me, and long days where I couldn’t gather the energy to leave my bed.

Now I can’t hear “I Don’t Smoke” without thinking of fiddles and linedancing, of going to my first concert by myself in a city I was just getting to know, and the fact that there is always an opportunity to not be miserable.

And I have Mitski to thank for that.

Putting work out, and especially marketing it on social media, gives me the sharpest whiplash I’ve ever experienced. After pressing “publish,” I’m imbued with euphoric energy as the synapses in my brain exchange dopamine, my little treat for completing a task.

As this feeling fades, it’s sharply replaced by fear. Fear that I’ve shown too much, that I’ve overestimated my skill, that, in a Truman Show-esque way, everyone knows what I’ve done is deeply embarrassing. Everyone, that is, except for me (if this is true, don’t tell me just yet).

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I’m no stranger to this kind of whiplash. It’s the same experience as getting too excited at a social function and realizing that I’ve been too loud or too expressive. I’ve shown too much and therefore opened myself up to criticism.

As I’ve grown older, I learned how to control this part of myself, but I was different when I was younger. I was louder, a natural-born performer and leader, never shying away from the spotlight. It wasn’t until I came face to face with the “bossy” allegations that I realized that the more I talked, the more I opened myself up to being disliked.

“Bossy.” It’s a word that haunts me, hiding in the shadows cast in corners of rooms, waiting for me to slip up, anticipating my tendency to talk too much or make too many decisions. It’s a word steeped in misogyny and rife with assumptions about the morality of decision-makers.

I first received the insult at a birthday party in elementary school. Maybe I deserved it, after declaring that we all abandon the planned events for the evening and play Dance Dance Revolution instead, much to the birthday girl’s dismay. But I stand by the fact that it wasn’t a bad suggestion and probably would’ve been a lot of fun. Have you seriously ever played DDR and not had a good time??

Despite knowing that my idea was good, and my intentions weren’t malicious, I recognized that what I had done was hurtful. And not only that, but it went against the social code of conduct, a thing I was just starting to be aware of.

As an adult, I have a much deeper understanding of this code, and I know what a social faux pas it is to commandeer a person’s birthday party, but at the time it solidified in me a fear of speaking up in social situations. The more I spoke, the more chances I had to mess up.

This is something that’s stuck to the inside of my brain like a sticky note, a constant reminder of something I’m afraid to forget. And like I’ve written about previously, this fear of social critique has suffocated my ability to connect to others.

It only occurred to me recently, as I’ve been trying to forge stronger connections with the people around me, that when I show more of myself, yes, I am opening myself up to criticism, but I’m also opening myself up to more love. Sharing vulnerability is how we build intimate relationships with the people around us.

You might feel judgmental of the coworker who shares her messy relationship problems with you unprompted, but chances are it’ll make you feel comfortable enough to share some of your own if you ever need to.

This act of self-censorship is a defense mechanism. But like a lot of defense mechanisms, it quickly becomes outdated once we grow up and move on from the situation that forced us to develop a defense mechanism in the first place. To put it in a medieval metaphor (the term “defense mechanism” elicits images of trebuchets and archers in my mind), if no one’s attacking the castle anymore, there’s no reason to point your crossbow at the merchant who just wants to trade with your kingdom.

Similar to self-censorship is its cousin “preemptive embarrassment” and it’s what I feel for my creative work. It sounds like “Yeah, you can read it, but it’s really bad” or “It’s just a first draft, it’s not my best.” It’s the phrases we insert before showing another person our work, just in case they don’t like it.

The thought process goes like this: what I’ve made could be bad, and if I am the first person to denounce it, all criticism that follows is redundant. If I own that what I make is bad, no one gets to have the “gotcha” moment of tearing me down. I’ve already torn myself down.

Is this humility universal, I wonder, or is it more heavily tied to the experience of being raised as a girl? This seems to be the same phenomenon that contributes to the gender pay gap and is a common thread among my female friends.

Just as I was terrified of the insult “bossy” being leveled at me as a girl, I’m now terrified of the label “overly confident” being thrust upon me as a woman.

And so, my new defense mechanism is being the cringing critic.

I’m currently reading Word by Word by Kory Stamper, a book about the history of dictionaries (thanks to Annie Rauwerda for posting about it), so I find it appropriate here to break down the etymology of the word “cringe.”

Its Old English counterpart cringan means “to yield” or, in some cases “to fall (in battle).” And in the way American life slowly adapted to be cushier and safer, it seems this word did as well.

By the 13th century, cringe meant “to draw in or contract one's muscles involuntarily (as from cold or pain)” and morphed into a noun in 1597, meaning “a servile bow.” We then see its popularization as slang (used as an adjective) in 1983, meaning “so embarrassing, awkward, etc. as to cause one to cringe.”

Today, cringe is defined as “to recoil in distaste,” most likely influenced by its life on the Internet. From “Try Not to Cringe” challenges to Cody Ko and Noel Miller’s “THAT’S CRINGE” YouTube series, it has become a common word in our 21st-century vocabulary.

In fact, exemplified by Ko and Miller, the act of cringing has become almost a profession. The “THAT’S CRINGE” series is a collection of 16 videos, published within the span of two years, that has amassed over 316 million views in total and a cult following with the Zillenial crowd. The videos, for those who aren’t familiar, consist of the two men watching a video, often something lo-fi or counter-culture in nature, and providing comedic commentary.

I was a huge fan of these videos as a college student, and still love to rewatch them when I’m in a YouTube rut. Their popularity was far-reaching in a time of burgeoning audience fragmentation and the fact that my roommate and I were just discussing “Matty fucking Smokes” (a figure from one of these videos) just the other day, speaks to the impact it had on my generation.

The series struck YouTube gold, but after two years of raking in advertising money, the pair finally recognized the inherent negativity in creating content that exists purely to criticize and humiliate people who didn’t ask for it.

I never reflected much on this content, but as I sit here today and muse on my own relationship with cringe, it’s hitting me that it must have been much further reaching than I ever realized. Yes, Cody Ko and Noel Miller may have had an impact on this movement, but it’s the Internet at large that is to blame for our cultural fascination with cringe.

From “Karen Compilations” to “Feminists Getting Owned” videos, it seems that online culture has been obsessed with consuming content in which the viewer assumes a position of higher social standing than that of the person they’re watching.

I am not immune to this thought process. I similarly cling to cringe because I falsely believe it gives me a better social standing. I think that no one can critique me if I’m the critic. Creatives open themselves to feedback, to be told if they’re good or bad. Critics do not open themselves to such criticisms, but they also cannot create freely. If they do manage to create, it is a torturous process filled with doubt and self-hatred.

And when everyone around you is a critic, rating things on a 5-star scale, you fear the retribution of your peers. Nothing is safe from this criticism and everything you make is open to feedback from a comments section.

The 5-star rating system, originally used to categorize restaurants and hotels, was popularized back in 1926. Now everything from films to wax salons to recipes can be rated thanks to platforms like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, letterboxd, Goodreads, Yelp, Google Reviews, Tripadvisor, and many, many more. We are all critics, we all critique.

However, when I start to believe the critique of others holds more weight than the value of learning from failure, my fear of failure becomes stronger than my love for creating. And this need for control over my narrative only slows down my creative process.

Even writing this piece, I had difficulty figuring out where to start. I wanted to open with a reflection on being in my twenties, but before I could even type out the first sentence, I knew I would have to add a note to mock the fact that I am yet another girl in her twenties talking about the experience of it on her Substack.

This is something the musician, essayist, and cultural icon Eliza McLamb discusses in her essay “Everyone's Writing Sounds the Same Now” and was part of the catalyst that got me thinking about all of this in the first place.

Although the essay centers more on the topic of young writers being labeled as derivative and unoriginal, she taps into this idea of viewing creative work as a small part of someone’s history. One commenter remarks, “Within the canon of the 'girl essay' on SubStack are future novelists, poets, journalists and essayists, and that’s something I’m excited to see come into fruition over the coming years!”

It’s vital to shift our perspective to be less narrow and understand that the work we create now will only improve with practice. In a time of instant gratification and social media personas, it is a radical act to view our work in the context of a lifetime. Or at least in the context of the next five years.

What you practice, you will improve. And I’m afraid we’re starting to forget that.

This epidemic affects us all but is incredibly palpable for those of us who have started to view Instagram as a business to promote ourselves or our work, rather than a place to simply post photos we want our friends and family to see (if you want that, head back over to the wasteland of Facebook).

And with the influencer-ification of almost all our popular social media apps, the feeling of performance has only gotten more intense. Young women especially are encouraged to flatten themselves into consumable little pieces, handed to an audience on a platter of Instagram posts. If I had a brand sponsorship for every time I was told to build my “personal brand,” I would be swimming in cash and codes for 15% off a Hello Fresh subscription.

There’s a reason that “personal branding” feels so unnatural. First of all, you’re a person, not a brand. But in addition to the glaringly obvious, it’s antithetical to the idea of growth. To brand something requires a focusing of the lens, to remove things that don’t align with a small definition of what the thing you’re branding is. To brand yourself while you’re actively practicing and improving your craft is to continually “cut the fat” of something that hasn’t finished forming.

Which brings me to my central idea: expression cannot exist in tandem with criticism. If we try to hold both at the same time, we constantly make edits midprocess and produce a dead-on-arrival piece of work. Not only does this affect the end product, it soils the process of creating itself, and process is holy. Yes, part of any process is editing, but it simply cannot be simultaneous with creating.

As I’ve now discussed ad nauseum, I have a warped relationship with social media and I’d like to explore how to engage with these platforms in a sustainable, creativity-honoring way.

I often describe the landscape of Instagram and TikTok as a concert or a festival. There are performers, there is an audience, and there is a clear delineation of which is which: the presence of a stage. If you’re a performer, you get money, fame, and adoration, but are subject to vehement criticism and ostracization if you make a single wrong move (even if the “wrong move” is a completely normal thing for a person to do), and a complicated relationship with your sense of self.

If you’re a part of the audience, I’m sorry, you don’t get anything other than a screen addiction and a constant feeling of not being good enough. And if you try to get up on the stage, you’re subjecting yourself to immediate criticism and labeled “cringeworthy.” How many times have I been a part of the problem, seeing a post from an old high school friend and thinking “Oh, you’re trying to be an influencer now?” in a self-righteous, holier-than-thou tone?

This is why it’s important to redefine what posting signals. Rather than a performance or an advertisement of the self, I want to view posting on social media as a documentation of my life (this idea originally came to me through a conversation with a friend, although I can’t remember who. My deepest apologies for forgetting and sincerest thanks for this piece of wisdom you’ve given me).

I want to see social media as a communion between my creative inspirations, my friends, my peers, and myself, rather than a stage of performers and watchers.

I want to post what’s happening in my life now, instead of waiting until I feel polished enough to be absolved of all criticism. And—spoiler alert—I don’t think I’ll ever feel “polished enough.”

So, I won’t delete these posts just yet. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever delete them. Because I know, in the way that I look back on things I wrote in high school with fondness, I will one day look back on this writing and smile.

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The fourth song on the tracklist, “Something to Believe,” opens with a piano chord and an angelic, crooning voice singing “Drank a lot of coffee today…” She’s just like me.

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Weyes Blood goes on to paint a picture of a woman plagued by existential questioning, confused by the bottomless dread that arises from seemingly nowhere and consumes her. She ends the chorus with a plea to the unknown:

“Give me something I can see / Something bigger and louder than the voices in me / Something to believe”

There are some lines from songs or quotes from movies that stick with us, phrases that we keep in our cupped hands and return to because we recognize a universal truth hidden in the syntax and semantics. Lines that make us think “someone else sees me.” This is one of mine.

For a long time, I begged the unknown to send me something bigger and louder to believe in. I left a relationship, I moved to a new city, I quit my job, and I left the country, desperately trying to follow a path of crumbs that I thought someone from the ether had tossed out for me.

For a long time, all I got back was silence.

I stopped writing and I stopped looking for soft spots and glimmers of emotional truths. I felt betrayed that I had followed my intuition unquestionably and hadn’t been rewarded for it immediately.

I went on a trip, which I thought might consist of the kind of soul-searching that’s supposed to “fix” a person. I spent the first two weeks in close contact with the voices in my head that gnawed at my brain and told me that nothing would ever change.

But slowly, as I broke my screen addiction and pushed past my habit of constant consumption, the chaos in my head started to calm down.

It was then that I started to stumble upon small realizations. When I engaged in conversation, I found myself worried about how I was being perceived, rather than listening to the person talking to me. I started making small adjustments. I started listening, tried to stop worrying about myself, and focused on asking more questions. I felt engaged. I felt present.

The deep-rooted insecurity I was white-knuckling began to slip between my fingers as I realized that it was no longer protecting me. The disdain I thought others felt for me was unmasked as my own perception, and as soon as I could see it clearly, it began to dissipate.

I could feel the ball rolling. I started to crave social interaction, rather than cower from it like I’d previously been doing. I felt myself start to open up.

And it was when I was surrounded by people I loved, who loved me back, laughing hysterically under the light of the full moon that I finally found something to believe.

I’ve always believed that a dynamic between a group of people, however small or large, is a living thing. I like to imagine a small beast, sitting in the middle of a circle of friends. Every kind word or look of recognition feeds the animal, and as the people around the circle become more comfortable, it grows happier.

I think we had, between the people I was with, a very well-fed and plump beast. As the understanding between us grew, the inside jokes piled up, and the conversation devolved into uncontrollable giggles, it was the breath of the beast, pleased and purring, that was finally bigger and louder than the voices in me. I couldn’t hear the sound of doubt or insecurity or anxiety anymore, it was all being drowned out by the love we’d created.

The full moon hung low in the sky that night. I had stopped believing that a full moon meant anything, but this one felt important.

“If this was the 1800s, we’d be taken away for hysteria,” my best friend, Sara, informed us as we gasped for breath, having forgotten why we started laughing in the first place. The thought still makes me smile.

It dawned on me that this wasn’t the first time I’d experienced this feeling. When I first found my group of friends in Orlando and we spent almost every night with each other for weeks, I remember feeling this way. I felt it in my college dorm when all of my friends were within arms reach. I felt it at summer camp and youth group trips.

Under a blanket of stars, walking home with a group of people we’d met only that week, Sara looked at me and said, “It feels like we’ve been left unattended on a class field trip,” effortlessly identifying the feeling that I’d been struggling to put into words.

And the more I thought about it, the truer it became. I had been blindly craving this feeling for years without ever knowing what it was.

For a long time, I valued work and my career over everything else, falsely believing that financial stability would bring me the joy of life I’d been searching for. Financial stability is incredible, and vital to surviving in a world that makes you pay for basic amenities like food and housing, but it’s not something that nourishes the soul.

As I dove deeper into the self-imposed isolation that complements a work-from-home lifestyle, I strayed further from this universal truth. Zoom meetings took the place of coffee with friends and I forgot what it meant to live outside the 13 inches of laptop I had become accustomed to.

It seems so rudimentary when it’s said so plainly. It’s almost silly that it’s taken me this long to figure out that human connection is what sustains us. But in a very Alchemist-esque way, I traveled to Egypt and discovered that my treasure waited for me back at home. I suppose life does imitate art sometimes.

Paradoxically, like finding love or a dream job, the more you agonize over finding something to believe in, the more the universe seems to dangle it over your head. It was only when I stopped looking that it revealed itself, consuming me fully.

I think about that Alan Watts quote a lot: “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions.”

So what does one think about, if not the persistent voices of self-doubt and existentialism? Well, community, for one.

As I move through life, I’m working on shifting my focus from my own existential questioning to the well-being of the people around me. I want to be the kind of person who remembers birthdays and big events and follows up with people when they say they will. Gandhi said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others,” and more simply put by my friend Jack, “Community is as human as we can be! Community is spiritual!”

I’m growing tired of the hyper-individualist way of thinking that fueled my isolation in the first place. I have no interest in developing my “online persona.” The microtrends that only exist to fuel more exclusive elitism, like “clean girl” and “coquette-core,” are making my head dizzy and clouding my vision of reality. I don’t want to be the “main character” any more or less than I want to be a character at all, which is to say that I don’t.

I yearn to be defined by my actions and the way I make people feel when they’re with me rather than by a collection of flat words that provide nothing more than signaling what kind of content I consume. In short, maybe I’m finally tired of thinking about how I fit into the virtual landscape, and I’m ready to reenter the real world.

I’ve finally found my something to believe, and I’m so grateful to have had a sliver of a glimpse of that beauty. Prioritize people, prioritize connections, and prioritize love. Sometimes the corniest and tritest of truths are the most important, we just have to find them for ourselves.

The front half of this classroom was an arrangement of tables and chairs, a projector, a whiteboard, and his own desk; a run-of-the-mill classroom. The back half, however, was set up as an editing bay. Huge, 27-inch Apple monitors towered on top of high-top desks and created almost a full circle, sheltering whoever was working there from outside distractions. This setup, paired with giant over-the-ear headphones, offered me an oasis of solitude in an otherwise unruly and chaotic high school environment.

I remember the sadness of that day, feeling as if all the energy had been sucked out of my body. And then, sitting alone behind a wall of computer screens, I felt an unexpected feeling of peace following closely behind the sadness.

At the time, I felt self-critical of my own drama, as if I had manufactured the entire experience to get attention when in reality I just wanted to be alone. I thought grieving was something that happened to a person. Almost like it was a state of uncontrollable despair thrust upon you when you least expect it. I didn’t yet understand that grieving is an action one takes, a choice to engage with the intense emotions and inspect them.

On the second anniversary, I made plans to hide away in my college’s piano lab where I could once again be alone. These plans were derailed by an ailing boyfriend, whom I dutifully nursed back to health after he became afflicted with the common house cold.

On the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth anniversaries, I did nothing that I can remember.

Today is the seventh. And although I had grandeur plans to rent a car and drive up to my hometown, I will be at my desk working a job to pay rent.

This is not out of the ordinary. In fact, millions of people around the world are forgoing the act of grieving in favor of making ends meet. It’s a reality of the 21st century.

Even as I type this sentence, I should be working. In less than 30 minutes, I am going to hop onto a virtual meeting and if I’m asked how I spent my time this morning, it won’t be an acceptable answer to say “grieving.”

What is the appropriate way to go about giving ourselves time to process loss? Do I need to block off time on my Google Calendar? Request PTO? If I’m not allowed time to grieve during the daylight, then when should I fit it in after work? And which responsibilities get bumped to next week so I can give myself a quiet moment to cry?

Unprocessed grief therefore becomes a burden; a feeling in the back of our minds reminding us that there’s pain we need to reckon with if only there was time. And once we start to put rules up around grief, there is no stopping. We start to ask ourselves who we are allowed to take time to grieve for.

A partner, a parent, a sibling, and a child are all automatic passes. A grandparent is a pass, but the allotted time is cut down. You’re allowed no more than two weeks away from work or school when a parent passes, while a grandparent might only justify a couple of days, or a long weekend if you’re savvy enough to arrange your time off accordingly. And a pet, no more than one. Of course, you can request more, but the longer you ask for time to grieve, the higher eyebrows raise.

When you start to get outside of the nuclear family unit and grandparental annexation, the yellow tape becomes more apparent. If an uncle dies, it’s best to mention that you need time off for the funeral, not just for grieving. In situations like these, it’s important to show that you can multitask and that you’ll actually have things to do while you cry, instead of just sitting around. You’re not supposed to just sit around.

However, once you exit the familial circle, any time you set aside to grieve for a lost loved one, think friends, neighbors, and coworkers, is accompanied by a feeling of guilt. We tell ourselves to “hurry up and get over it faster” so we can get back to being productive at work.

And now that we have access to the whole world through social media, now that we all have a front-row seat to natural disasters, genocides, and every atrocity of the week from around the world, we are faced with the question: How are we allowed to grieve?

Is it in between stand-up meetings and quick touch-bases that we can open Instagram to the faces of dying civilians? Do we cry then, or wait for the lunch hour to let it all soak in?

Sitting in my Chicago apartment scrolling on my phone between meetings, I have immediate access to the constant influx of footage from Gaza. I wake up and every morning the first person on my feed is Bisan (@wizard_bisan1), a Palestinian filmmaker from Gaza, who is documenting the genocide. She’s my age, by the way, 23.

Following Instagram accounts like Eye On Palestine (@eye.on.palestine) and Let’s Talk Palestine (@letstalkpalestine) means I don’t have to scroll far before seeing videos of limp children being pulled from rubble or journalists crying over the shrouds of their deceased families. These accounts do a tremendous service by documenting the tragedy.

But scrolling through Instagram is not the same as grieving, and I think it’s important to understand that. It’s hard to imagine the scale of death. The Palestinian death toll reached 10,000 people this week. Only a few weeks ago, it was 1,000, which is already an unfathomable amount. It’s hard to process the loss of one life. How does a single person begin to think in thousands?

It would be impossible to stop and mourn every wrongful and violent death in the entire world. The world is big and oftentimes bad. But I’m afraid that our desensitization to the loss of life is distancing us from our own humanity.

I can sit at my desk and write about how sad it is that humans are dying, and truly believe it, but do I even feel that sadness anymore? Can I imagine it?

I know the feeling of losing one parent, but what would it feel like to lose both at the same time? What would it feel like to lose a parent, knowing they would’ve survived if there were enough resources, or if the ambulance they were in was not bombed?

Where in the body would you feel that kind of loss? I imagine in your chest and behind your eyes, but I wonder if your whole body wouldn’t be on fire with despair.

If I wanted to, I could go visit the road I grew up on and look at the house I was raised in. I can peer through the chain link fence and see the treehouse I used to play in as a child. I can envision my life there, replay memories in my head, and feel close to my father.

I could drive past his old office, sit down at the Culvers by his apartment, or visit the church we went to as a family. I can always find him that way.

I’m allowed to move freely, between where I am now and where my fondest memories were formed. It still exists. How would it feel to watch the road I grew up on reduced to ash? To watch as my neighborhood was removed from existence? To have my memories severed from the location they happened at?

And how would it feel to know that there are people, around the world, that celebrate my loss? To know that some of the worst things that can happen to a person have happened to me and to be told that I deserve it?

This is what is so profoundly and deeply sad about Palestine. It’s not just a mass loss of life, which is horrible beyond comprehension, it’s a loss of everything. Entire families and communities have disappeared in a matter of weeks. This event will ripple through generations. Children will grow up without grandparents, without parents, without a neighborhood block, without a place to call home.

I saw a video yesterday of a child, no older than two years old, who survived the bombing, looking around wild-eyed for a family that is nowhere to be found. That child will grow up knowing nothing about their lineage, not even the name that was given to them by their parents.

It has now become a privilege to know my own name, to know my father’s name and his father’s name, to know that their lineage originates in Germany, and to know what genetic predispositions I inherited. I am lucky to know what my father’s voice sounded like, to know that he always dressed in a plaid shirt and dress pants, to know which snacks were his favorite (pretzel Combos), that he never missed church on Sundays, visited his mother almost every day, and that he was really, really funny.

I don’t feel wrong to mourn my loss. Instead, I feel more connected. What I feel today is what connects me to every other person on earth, what connects me to friends, and enemies, and even to you, dear reader. The pain of loss is a universal human experience and in the face of despair, between work meetings, of course, I am fortunate enough to recognize a sliver of my own humanity.

Today, I will sit at my laptop and work on tasks that don’t really matter. Tomorrow, the same. But for a few brief hours on November 7th, I gave myself time to reflect and write and remember. This is how I am allowing myself to grieve.

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I’m trying something new. As much as I love to dissect and analyze my own experience on Earth, I have to admit that it can be exhausting. I spend so much time writing and polishing these pieces and trying to hone in on certain emotions that I rarely post anything. I want to honor these complex feelings, but I also think there’s some unseriousness to be explored.

Although “small wonders” is a term that seems to have been passed around, I first heard it when I found a podcast called Wonderful! The podcast is self-described as “a podcast for joyful and enthusiastic people that like hearing about the passions, big and small, of other people.” The hosts, a married couple, take turns sharing information about the things they love (the wonders in question) big and small.

I’ve always liked this idea of celebrating things that feel ordinary. I think it brings just enough awareness to your surroundings that it can shake you out of the fog and remind you that good things are indeed happening.

“Small wonders” can be swapped for other terminology like “delights”, as used in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, or even “little joys.” You get the idea. It’s simple things that make you happy.

I like the word “wonder” specifically because it hints at the idea of having respect and appreciation for something, and I like the notion that I’m observing these good things, rather than having any sort of control over them.

So let’s get into it…

August is always a month of turbulence. School is starting, the weather is changing, and it’s statistically one of the busiest months for moving. August was built for mess and change, and those are two things I struggle with the most. Or maybe it’s two things we all struggle with the most. The point is, that I am extra grateful for my small wonders this month.

My first small wonder is the stoop.

The stoop is a contradictory space that’s meant for both moving and not moving. It is simultaneously an area for gathering and a pathway. This is the first time I’ve had a stoop, and I love it.

It’s perfect for the after-work reading session to regain my sanity, and because it’s facing west, I’m bathed in the orange, late afternoon sunlight while I recharge. And if I stay still for long enough, I might be graced by the hesitant presence of a rabbit or a cardinal.

The stoop is also the perfect smoke spot. It’s outside (which is a very important factor) but far enough from the road that it still feels semi-private. My roommate and I have already shared many beautiful summer nights listening to the cicadas from this spot.

It’s perfect for people-watching and catching fragments of gossip from the neighborhood. The steps and ledges transform into built-in seating.

But like I said, it’s also a pathway. Sitting on the stoop is the only way I interact with my upstairs and downstairs neighbors, who seem to come and go only during the evening. We’ve shared many awkward exchanges this way, and if we keep this up, we might actually be able to share a friendly conversation by the time one of us moves out.

My second small wonder is Thai food.

On our first night in the new apartment, we ordered Thai food from a place down the street and it was incredible. Since then, we have tried many different Thai restaurants in varying degrees of distance from our apartment, and they have all been just as good. I don’t know if bad Thai food exists, but if it does, I haven’t found it in Chicago.

My third small wonder is books.

This one is a little lofty, I can admit, but after hunched over a laptop all day the only thing that’ll undo my blue light headache and help me unwind is to pick up a book.

Reading is an activity that’s engaging but doesn’t suck me into a black hole the way other media does. It’s an escape from screens.

Lately, as I’m making desperate and futile attempts at meeting people and making friends, talking about and recommending books is an avenue for connection. I was just sent Pamela Anderson’s biography from a friend and I’m looking forward to cracking it open (after I finish the male toxicity fest of American Psycho) and getting the chance to discuss the book with him further.

My fourth small wonder is boba tea.

My fellow WFH-ers know what a solitary experience working from home can be. The only time I leave my house is if I really force myself to. And sometimes, I just need an easy excuse to make it out the front door.

Our boba shop happens to be the perfect distance: an 8-minute walk. It’s close enough to go even when I’m tired but far enough to get my blood pumping through my body again. It’s a little treat, fruity and refreshing, and it’s my failsafe for remedying a sour mood.

It’s also one of the few drinks with no means to an end. It’s not supposed to improve my health or my skin or my gut or make me tipsy or make me relaxed or make me energized, it’s literally just supposed to taste good. Sometimes I just need something to taste good.

These are my small wonders for August! I’ll be working tirelessly to gather you more wonderful experiences to report on for the month of September.

In the meantime, I would love to know how everyone else found joy this month.

With love,

Grace

Years of practicing how to control and bury my emotions have landed me in this space where I need to coax out my feelings in order to know they’re there. That’s why I have this need to press on my emotional soft spots from time to time. And with all the busywork of the 21st century and the endless list of tasks that need accomplishing, it can be really easy to forget to feel things as they happen.

I’m not going to pretend to be a huge romantic as I write about my move to Chicago. Sometimes, things are exactly as they appear. A new job is just a different building to clock into every day. A big move is just having to find a new Target. But something about this move feels significant.

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Somewhere along the way, I couldn’t tell you at what point, I made the decision that I would move to Chicago. The details of this dream’s inception are fuzzy, but a lot of it came down to the process of elimination. New York is too expensive, Los Angeles is too car-dependent, but Chicago rests in this sweet spot of “affordable” and “has good public transportation” that really spoke to me as someone with not a lot of money and no car.

As one thing led to the next, I eventually found myself a week away from moving with a whole lot of belongings to box up. That final week was full of frantic packing and lots of nights where I thought my chest might explode. Because of this, I never really got to sit in my emotions about leaving. As soon as I realized I would have those “lasts”, most of them had already passed.

In a way, it’s easier to not know you’re doing something for the last time while you do it. If I knew I was paddleboarding on the lake by my apartment for the last time, would I have enjoyed it as much,? Or would I have been filled with dread as I faced the end of it?

The morning we left, I sat in my favorite coffee shop with friends and it felt like every other day. It was nice, but no part of me felt like I was saying goodbye. Walking out felt just as easy as walking in, and as I sit in Chicago finalizing this piece, I find that there’s a part of me that feels like the coffee shop is still just a drive away.

I do think a huge part of this has a lot to do with our virtual connectivity. Saying goodbye just means there’ll be a lot more texting in between the times we get together. Maybe the longing and the craving come later on.

The deep and dull pain I feel when I think about moving is more about the inanimate: the view from my bedroom window, the drive to the pho restaurant, and the Tuesday night tradition of seeing a movie with friends.

As much as the Grace who moved there in 2018 would hate to admit it, the Grace of 2023 has finally warmed up to living in Florida.

Florida is a funny place. It serves as a good butt to any joke, thanks to its eclectic residents and infamous retirement communities like The Villages. Courtesy of Twitter, the term “Florida Man” was popularized, referring to newspaper headlines describing the outlandish acts of Floridians such as “Thousands of Gun Owners in Florida planning to ‘shoot down’ Hurricane Irma.” It’s also home to the kind of politicians that have built their careers on terrorizing marginalized communities. Florida is a complicated place.

And yet, there is so much that has impacted me since landing there five years ago.

The first thing I remember about moving to Florida was the heat. I moved in August when the heat sits in the air like an invisible weight, hitting you in the face as soon as you exit the air-conditioned airport. The second thing I noticed was the Spanish moss.

Spanish moss, which is neither moss nor originates from Spain, hangs from the trees in Florida like giant curtains of grayish green. Different cultures around the world have given it nicknames and lore that liken it to an old man’s beard or overgrown hair, but when I first laid eyes on it, it was just a pervasive reminder that I moved from the comfort of rolling hills of soft grass to a flat swamp.

The third memory that sticks out is encountering lovebugs. They’re little black and red bugs known for flying around in mated pairs, like a two-headed insect. There’s an urban legend that the bugs were engineered by the University of Florida to control the mosquito population but got out of control in the wild, though there is nothing to prove this. The wretched little bugs come in swarms, sometimes making it impossible to walk outside without getting hit by one. As someone who’s been terrified of bugs for as long as I could remember, it felt like I was entering my own personal nightmare.

To me, these signs weren’t much different than Moses’ ten plagues. I was just waiting for the tap water in my dorm bathroom to turn into blood.

I spent a lot of time lamenting my existence in Florida. I felt like I was above living in a place I used to make fun of so frequently, like I should’ve landed somewhere I could brag about in 20 years.

But in between my first day and my last, I’ve come to love Florida very much. I’m not sure if it was the friends I’ve grown close to, the diverse communities of people, the vibrant ecology, the strange culture, or just the fact that so much good in my life has come from living there, but I’ve found myself very grateful for the life I’ve built in Florida.

I’m grateful for the birds that frequent my backyard and for the fact that I can now recognize red-winged blackbirds and boat-tailed grackles just by their calls. I embrace the heat, turn my face toward the sun, and try not to think about the sweat rolling down my back. I cry when I hear the chorus of frogs croaking at night and see their beady eyes shine back at me from the tall grass. When I look at the ancient trees and the Spanish moss draped over their hulking limbs, I’m reminded of all the history they’ve seen, the indigenous tribes and conquistadors and landscapes unfettered by 8-lane highways and McDonald’s. My only regret I have of my time in Florida is that I did not see more of it before leaving.

It’s hard to voice these sentiments to people who have only ever visited for Disney or the beach and view the state as a safe haven for pandemic deniers. But I feel that this narrative of disgust and “holier than thou” attitude discredits all the incredible people who call Florida their home. It discredits the unique history and vibrant culture that’s been influenced by so many groups of people from all over the Caribbean, the beautiful communities of queer people that have had to fight twice as hard for rights and recognition, and those who choose to stay because they recognize the importance of staying connected to their generational roots.

I was only a visitor for a mere five years, so I won’t pretend to understand it all, but what I did learn I fell in love with.

I feel immense sorrow for my impending move away from Florida, not because I think it’s a place I want to stay for the rest of my life, but because it’s been so sweet to me. I’m the kind of person who has a hard time quitting something before I’ve wrung every last drop of satisfaction out of it. Leaving Florida is the first time in my life I’ve known there’s more good to be experienced, but I’ve still left anyways.

Executing a big move is like closing your eyes and entrusting your entire life to the person you were when you first decided you wanted to move. It’s feeling all the pain of ripping out your roots and not letting yourself stop halfway through because it hurts too much. It is one of the worst feelings in the world.

So, why, I have to ask myself in order to stay sane, am I leaving? And the answer changes every day.

Some days it’s as simple as I said earlier, by process of elimination. Other days the answer is a cynical “because my lease was up and I had nowhere else to go.” To adults, the answer is “for more job opportunities and to be closer to my family,” while to other 20-somethings I usually launch into an explanation of how “the city is so interesting and full of history and did you know house music originated in Chicago? Also Kanye’s from Chicago, but I guess he’s kind of controversial now, but it’s still cool history…”

My embarrassing reason, the reason that I most like to tell myself when I feel like I’m making the biggest mistake of my life, is that I followed a trail of breadcrumbs and called them signs, that I was reading David Sedaris and saw that he lived in Chicago and thought if I moved there too I would meet my own version of Ira Glass, who would read the things I write and put me on whatever my generation’s version of This American Life is, and that I would not only be set down a path of success but I would finally find something to do that makes sense to me. That I would finally find a calling, as it were.

And the worst reason, a secret that I am only now divulging because I think that if I shine the light of day on it, it’ll dissipate, is that making a big move will be enough to shake the dust out of my lungs and sand out of my head. The move is like a failsafe, an emergency eject button. It is my last-ditch effort at trying to find my way back to myself when I’ve felt so far away for so long.

But none of this quells the anxiety that intensifies as the day inches closer.

As I write, I am thinking about the feeling of standing in my apartment parking lot. The sky is turning pink, the cicadas have just come out, and it’s too hot to bear. I am trying to decipher if I will miss this feeling out of love or out of comfort.

In my life, comfort has become synonymous with love. As I force myself through this experience of intense discomfort, I wonder how my definition of love will change. I can finally say I am excited to move. There is excitement and there is dread, and somewhere between those two emotions is something really powerful that I am only just beginning to navigate.

As I sign off from a new city, I’d like to express my gratitude to everyone in my life that has supported me. If it weren’t for a perfect storm of circumstances, I don’t think I would have made it here. Thank you to Ally for saying yes when I asked you to move across the country with me after only knowing each other for a couple of years, to Jack and Julian for helping with the move, and to Jack again for everything.

I hope the next time I post I can regale you all with tales of Chicago and I finally have a word for that feeling between excitement and dread.

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I would arrive at school, absolutely positive that everyone would be able to see a golden aura surrounding me, and would know that it was my birthday. I basked in the birthday wishes, accepted any presents that might’ve floated my way, and sat in each class eagerly awaiting my teachers’ realization that it was, famously, my birthday.

I’m not sure what I expected to happen on my birthday, but somehow I always ended up waiting for something that never came. In this way, every birthday has been a little bit of a disappointment and served as a reminder that as soon as the clock strikes midnight on May 3rd, I’m no longer special.

As I get older, birthdays become less of a nebulous, once-a-year event that I expect perfection from, and more of an excuse just to see the people I love and celebrate the alarmingly quick passage of time.

I turned 23 this month and celebrated with a party and a dinner with close friends. I was no more or less special than on any other day and it was all I could’ve asked for. It felt a lot better this way.

The only hitch about turning 23 is that I am, in fact, becoming a 23-year-old.

What they don’t tell you about your 20s (or maybe what they do tell you but I just haven’t been listening) is that each year a feeling of dread sneaks up and tries to pull you down into a dark hole where you do nothing but think about how old you’re getting. I’ve worked very hard to avoid being caught by this feeling, but as I type the number 23 over and over again, I’ve started to sense it growing closer.

21 is widely accepted as a good birthday in America, but now that I’m past that, they’ll have me thinking I have nothing left to look forward to, that my 20s are a death march, and every new birthday marks a year closer to irrelevance (being 30).

I try not to believe in this idea (I’ve actually heard great things about being 30), but even in rejecting the notion, I can’t find much to like about being 23. It’s a signifier that I’m in this weird in-between stage of “no longer a child” and “not yet an adult” where everything is expensive, I don’t know what’s going on, and suddenly I have all these responsibilities that I’ve never had before. Be nice to your local 23-year-olds, you never know what they’re going through, and most likely neither do they.

23 also happens to mark ten years since I turned 13.

My 13-year-old self holds a special place in my heart. My strongest memories of childhood live within that year. I was about to enter 8th grade, I read all day and scrolled Tumblr all night. It was when I first discovered music that wasn’t on the radio’s Top 40 Hits mix. If I wasn’t at volleyball camp or band camp, I was making fan edits of Sherlock on my mom’s work laptop. The only thing I had to worry about was whether my friends would have the same lunch period as me.

Just like being 23, being 13 is also an awkward transitionary time. It’s the transition from child to teenager. It’s when I started shaving my legs and sneaking my mom’s eyeliner from her bathroom, but before I’d had my first kiss or even knew how to use said eyeliner.

Sometimes I think about kids today and wonder if they’re doing the same things I used to do, going through the same dramas, or if being in middle school has become a completely different experience.

In 2013, we were all making this transition together because it was all we knew, but it’s not like that anymore. A six-year-old could pick up an iPhone today and see how 21-year-olds are acting, and that scares me.

I lament a lot about the “adultification of children” and how kids are expected to look incredibly old as a result of social media influence. When I went to my first prom, my older sister did my makeup because I didn’t know how to. This predated contour and was at least 4 years before I would attempt to put on false eyelashes by myself. When I see friends post their little sisters’ prom photos today, they look more made up than I do at my big age of 23.

I can’t imagine having TikTok while in high school, let alone middle school. The constant pressure to look prettier, dress better, and optimize every aspect of your being for online consumption is tiring for me to handle. For them, it must be exhausting.

There’s something really special about existing without an inner voyeur as a child, and I would give up a lot to go back to a time before I knew that I was supposed to look, act, and speak in certain ways to avoid embarrassment. Being 13 was just supposed to be embarrassing.

I’m a part of an incredibly fascinating generation (as are probably most of the people reading this) that experienced smartphones and social media entering the mainstream during our formative years, but still experienced life without them.

I acutely remember the first summer I had an iPod Touch. I barely left my room. It was a quick 180 from playing outside every single day to being holed up in my room on Instagram all summer long. Even then, I had a sadness in the back of my mind about my sharp descent into social media binging, but it was impossible to peel my attention away from the unlimited stimulus and instant gratification that I craved so intensely as a child.

As I write, I can’t help but mourn for all the things I missed out on that summer and every summer that followed. How many more bike rides could I have taken for a gas station slushie in the peak of a summer heat wave? How many more grand stories could I have made up in my mind as I stomped around a shallow creek bed? How many more frogs could I have caught between my dirt-covered hands?

Back then, as I was burning my retinas on a 5th-generation iPod touch, I could have never fathomed that would be the majority of what I would do for the next decade of my life.

Today, things aren’t much different. I sit at a laptop and stare wistfully at the palms that frame the lake outside my window and wish I had some kind of drive to break the cycle of constant consumption that’s had me in its grip for the past 10 years.

Maybe this is a sign I’ve finally served my time. 23 could be the year I finally pull myself out of the social media haze.

I’ve tried quitting cold turkey before, but it always lands me back in a 3-hour doom-scrolling session, as if my brain is trying to catch up for all the time I spent enjoying the real world.

There’s got to be a way to cohabitate with social media, I just haven’t met anyone that’s figured it out yet. There are small remedies, however. When I start to get nauseous from the amount of screen time I’ve had, I find that going back to the basics helps the most, finding joy in any activity I used to do before I got a smartphone: going for a walk, reading, talking out loud to myself, listening to music, staring out the window, and dancing around my room. In these ways, my 13-year-old self is still helping me today.

I’ve grown up in a lot of ways, as expected, but I still find that no matter how far I get from that angsty teen girl, I will always, always have a very soft spot for her. She’s there when I do “Sugar We’re Going Down” at a karaoke bar, when I get too wrapped up in the tv show I’m watching that I can’t stop thinking about it, or when I fall deep into a new book. She’s the embodiment of pure, childish excitement and passion, and truthfully I wish I still held more of her with me today.

As I move through being 23, I’ll think about what’s stuck with me over the last 10 years and what I’d like to continue carrying. It’s a rough and awkward time for transitioning, but I wouldn’t miss this age for anything.

This is not my book, it belongs to a girl I went on a date with. We swapped books in the corner of a coffee shop over oat milk cortados. It has been 32 days since I last heard from her and I’m wondering how long I have to wait before the book just becomes mine.

It sits on my desk now, a reluctant prize, taunting me, “She might have ghosted you and taken your book, but at least you got me out of it.” In all fairness, it was a great read.

For those who don’t know, Just Kids is about Smith’s lifelong creative partner, Robert Mapplethorpe, and their dynamic relationship up until his death. It’s about two people who promised to stay together always, through everything life put them through. The irony is not lost on me.

I’m not sure why she stopped texting me, but I have my theories. Perhaps I talked too much about The Lord of the Rings and made too little eye contact. I talked too fast and kept forgetting to ask enough questions. My skin was bad that day, and my makeup didn’t sit how it usually sits. After the date, I texted her about what I made for lunch. I thought was intimate at the time, but it might have just been boring.

As these thoughts run through my head, I try to give myself the advice I give to all my friends who go through this situation: It just wasn’t the right fit. This thought is quickly replaced by, “I just didn’t perform well enough.”

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There is nothing unique that I can say about modern love. There is nothing that hasn’t already been said in a thousand books, podcasts, articles, and group text messages about the intricacies of dating in the 21st century.

Dead are the days of going from “dating” to “going steady” to “married with a lobotomy”. Instead, we’ve now got “the talking phase”, which is either preceded by a “meet-cute” or “dating app match” or, in the easiest of circumstances, meeting through a mutual friend. If you’ve surpassed the talking phase, you’re probably either “seeing each other” or “hooking up” depending on how much Catholic guilt you still have.

Eventually, though, this seems to transfigure into an amorphous “situationship” which is an ugly word for an undefined and loose connection between two people, which sounds potentially romantic, but I’ve learned is more so just an excuse to keep having sex with the same person without giving them flowers or celebrating their birthday. If you’re more traditional, however, you’ll gravitate toward the antiquated and sexless term “dating”.

Yes, I am terrified of this new lexicon of terminology. But I’m equally worried that by the time I work my way through the maze of “stages”, I’ll find out I didn’t even like the person to begin with.

I am genuinely worried that I will never find love again. Whether because I’m too critical, too impatient, or too frustratingly satisfied with living in solitude. And if I did find it again, would I even recognize it?

Love, romance, and relationships have taken a plethora of shapes throughout my life, but I am only starting to define them now.

If my parents had any love for each other, they must have lost it long before I was born. So I have this period in my life that is almost pre-romantic love, like a romantic dark age. And then I found books, which ushered in an age of romantic enlightenment.

At first, love was about salvation. In every dystopian YA novel I devoured in my youth, our protagonist is somehow saved by love. A boyfriend meant a provider and a guide, and offered her some kind of enlightenment or escape from society. That sounded pretty alright to me. A boyfriend is a savior.

In high school, love was about status. If a boy loved you, it said something about your character. That you’re pretty enough, normal enough, and did all the things right that you were supposed to be doing right. In an almost feudal nature, dating a boy from a higher social class than yourself even granted you access to new friends and a burgeoning reputation. Here, a boyfriend is a badge.

But as we grew into our college personas, love seemed more like a bear trap; a rusted and old mechanism dug into the bloodied leg of someone trying to flee. As an 18-year-old, I still wanted a boyfriend more than anything, but my desires were dampened ever so slightly by the sounds of girls who were actually in relationships.

“My boyfriend tracks my location”

“My boyfriend’s calling me because he’s mad I’m out right now”

“I can’t go, my boyfriend won’t let me”

“My boyfriend doesn’t like when I wear this dress”

However, the sad chorus only dismayed me slightly, for soon I would have a boyfriend of my own that didn’t like how I dressed when I left the dorms. A boyfriend is a stone tied to your ankle.

It was around then that love became about possession. It was still all those other things to me, especially status, but possession is the shape it took when I tried to pinpoint what it was that I felt for this person. I have him, which means that he’s mine, which means that I did it, I found love. A boyfriend is a trophy.

Then, in my twenties, love blossomed from the thorned stem of possession into connection. I met someone who made me laugh, and who I could make laugh, and for the first time in my life, love wasn’t about capturing something. It was about connecting with someone. A boyfriend is a partner.

As time passed, love transformed again, this time into comfort. Love meant I was safe, I was held, and I knew where I belonged. Love meant consistency. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t exciting, I was just happy that love didn’t twist into something scary, like I had watched happen with others. A partner is a cushion.

Eventually, I decided that comfort was not what I was looking for, and now I’m not sure what love looks like to me anymore.

Some days, when I look at those around me, a partner seems more like the stone around an ankle again, that love is a word used to bait the innocent into a trap, and a relationship is a very, very comfortable enclosure.

But most days it’s just a word with many meanings.

It’s here that I’d like to articulate that I’m only referring to traditional romantic love. I have found some of the most profound happiness in my friendships and family relationships. Love is an incredibly broad and simple term for such a vast and complicated concept, and I could write for the rest of my life about it.

In Just Kids, Patti Smith writes of her time visiting Robert on his deathbed, “I had nothing more to give him but love.”

After two decades of continuously swapping roles of artist and muse, of giving gifts, of supporting each other, of looking after each other, of knowing each other so well it was like the universe had created one for the other, all there was left to give was love, in its simplest form. There it is.

I’ll be sitting on this thought for a while. This is my soft spot for the week. And my book recommendation until further notice.

The good thing about books, according to my friend Sara, is that as we take stories from them, they hold onto stories from us.

Just Kids serves as a time capsule, preserving the person I’ve been the past few weeks. Because of this, I hope the girl who ghosted me never reaches out again. I hope I can see the book on my shelf in 20 years and remember how hard I thought about love. I hope I laugh at how I thought I knew everything. And I hope, in those 20 years, I can learn to talk just a little bit less about The Lord of the Rings on a first date.

There’s something truly and inherently embarrassing about promoting yourself. It’s not that I’m afraid someone will think my writing is bad (no one’s a worse critic than myself), it’s that I just don’t know if what I have to say is important enough to assume another person would want to read it, let alone take something away from it.

In our cursed digital age of social media and virality, self-promotion feels like it’s been cheapened. How am I any different than the mom of four posting about her toxin-free home journey? Or the rise-and-grind business owner posting about dropshipping? Or, god forbid, the thousands of people posting four times a day on TikTok in a sad attempt to go viral? Maybe the answer is: I’m not.

I think I spend a humiliating amount of time assuming I’m better than other people. I think secretly we all do. But at the end of the day, I’m closer to a TikToker that posts couples pranks than I am to Joan Didion, so I’ll accept this slice of humble pie.

All this to say, welcome to my Substack.

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It’s called Soft Spots, which is a concept I’ve been toying with for a while. Originally conceived as an audio format (read as: podcast, if we’re being fully honest), Soft Spots was meant to be a grouping of essays and stories under a single topic that was released monthly with an original backing track. Think This American Life, but all the writing is my own and the music is produced by me.

However, it turns out that making music is hard and takes time, and my rat brain is forever seeking immediate validation. Who would have thought?

I haven’t abandoned this idea completely, but I think it’s important to have a good foundation before taking on complicated projects. Thus the Soft Spots Substack is born.

The name Soft Spots is a phrase I found myself using whenever I had an emotion that I couldn’t quite shake. For example, after recently being left out of group plans, I thought, “This is a soft spot for me because it reminds me of how I felt growing up and being left out of a group.”

A soft spot is a memory or emotion or action that feels tender, like a bruise. So, I guess, this whole writing experiment is just about poking bruises and seeing what it feels like.

Mostly, I just want to create something. So much of what we do in our day to day is consumption-based. I wake up and scroll through Instagram, I order coffee and food that someone else makes, I shop online, I watch Youtube and Netflix and play Assassin’s Creed, and at the end of the day, I’m confused as to why I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything.

Creating is important. It’s the yang to consumption’s yin. Both are necessary, but you need to find balance. Or so I’ve heard.

So, thanks for letting me create something. Really.

And again, welcome to Soft Spots. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe.